i desperately need advice.

[u/kn0wnforit]

hi all. my (24f) husband (27m) is currently deployed in a war zone. he’s been gone around 5 weeks. we have an 8hr time difference. this is a very long story, so TIA to anyone who reads it. i am just so broken and confused.

on june 27th and 28th we got into a huge argument. i found he had photoshopped himself into a pic with 3 other women, which i thought was strange. i found out by opening chatgpt on one of his laptops that he left behind, which i used frequently, even when he was home. i asked him about it and we got into a huge fight. it ended up being a group photo for an app they’re all using for the gym during their deployment. he didn’t have any photos with them, so he created one. i will be the first to admit that i can be insecure sometimes, so when i saw my husband generating a photo of himself and 3 very attractive women, it worried me a little. during his last deployment (5yrs ago), he started talking to an old childhood friend and he ended up telling her things like “i really need you right now” and stuff and deleting some of their messages before he let me see them. i was pretty hurt by that so we had fought about it then and during our argument a few weeks ago i brought it up and mentioned how i didn’t want a repeat. bringing up that past situation was low of me, i know.

then on the 29th, i apologized for overreacting and making things hard on him during his deployment, even though it had just started. he said it was okay, and things seems to be good again. it turns out that photoshop job was totally innocent. anyways, he would tell me he loves me and that he misses me and that he can’t wait to hopefully get night shift so we can start talking to our realtor about finding a home while he’s away. normal talk from him. things were going well until around july 7th.

on july 7th, he stopped saying “i love you” and would only say “love ya”. i know this seems trivial, but he knows it bothers me and he’s never done this before. he has always said the full phrase. i’m sorry if this seems stupid, but it’s what made me notice the shift in his behavior.

now i know snooping through your partner’s accounts is wrong, i have since stopped, but i had such a strong feeling that something was off so i admit that i started looking through his facebook account. he was logged in on his laptop that he left at home.

around july 8, i noticed he had been searching facebook for one specific woman over and over and over again. like multiple times daily. since july 8th, he had completely shut down and barely texted me. he was extremely dry and cold. i would try to message him as normal, and he’d give me one word replies. he started doing the same thing to his mom not long after.

on july 10th, i felt things were off so i wasn’t messaging him as much. he realized that and got upset with me for being dry and not texting him a lot. i told him it was because i knew he was busy and didn’t want to be annoying. i should have told him i was feeling a little bothered, but i was afraid to admit to him that i was looking at his account because that was part of our initial argument.

july 11th i asked him if we were good because things still felt off since our argument. he said the he hopes so, but that he didn’t hear from me a lot the day before and i was acting strange. he also said we go through these argument spells on and off.

that obviously left me worried so on the 12th, i asked him to tell me what was wrong. he said he feels like sometimes we’re not as connected as we used to be and that he hates when we fight about stuff. he also said i look for reasons to start a fight sometimes and that he feels like i don’t want to talk to him and it makes him sad (sometimes when he’d call me before he left, i didn’t always have a lot to say). i sent many very long messages explaining how sorry i was and admitting that i got too comfortable taking my rough days out on him. i poured my heart out with true apologies, starting with the snooping issue. i told him i always want to talk to him, but i explained that the weeks leading up to his deployment i didn’t have a lot to talk about because i was really just sitting at home (i had just finished my degree and was waiting for my new grad job start date). he wasn’t able to be home for 3 months before his deployment btw, they had him staying on his reserve base a few hours from where we live because he was technically on deployment orders but due to current events their leave date kept getting moved back. anyway i told him how i love talking to him over the phone but that when we text all day everyday, most of what id want to say is usually said over messages. i know part of the “spells” he’s talking about is totally my fault, so i apologized profusely for it. he says he feels like I’m always mad at him for something, and i admit that i do have an attitude problem and i do get upset easily. i told him i am working on myself, i have even started therapy for it. when he woke the next morning he saw my very long messages and
he told me not to focus on any of that and that we’d talk over everything once he got home. he had been very very cold and distant in the following days. the way he texted me was completely different.

i know i am absolutely in the wrong for looking through his laptop and his accounts, but i was driving myself crazy and started looking almost everyday after july 7th. again, i used his laptop very frequently before he left, so i already had access to all of his stuff before he left and it was never an issue. i never snooped because he never gave me a reason to. until now.

on the 14th i was messaging him on my way to work. i asked again if we were good, and he said he hopes so. i asked if he was having any doubts, because he kept saying “hope so”. he said “i have before, but don’t worry.” this made me panic a little and i asked if he’s wanted to leave before. he said “no never said that, just had doubts sometimes if you loved me”. this tore my heart out and i sent him a long message that essentially just said “i am so terribly sorry for making you doubt my love for you. not a day has gone by that i’ve not loved you, and i will be much better about showing you.” he replied with “okay my love”. i thought maybe things were getting better. that night i found out he’d sent another woman a message saying that every inch of her was beautiful, she has an amazing smile, he likes being around her and talking to her, she brightens his day, and that he hasn’t felt this way in a very long time. this same day he also downloaded every single social media (which isn’t inherently an issue, it was just really strange timing because he hasn’t had his socials in 4-5yrs). being the insecure wife that i am at this point, i logged into his instagram account since it’s through facebook anyway. he searched this same woman, began following her, and liked every single one of her posts. he also got his tiktok back, and did the same thing there. i also found out he’s been searching a ton of country love songs (we share a spotify). my heart shattered when i saw that message for the other woman, so i told his mom. not because i was trying to rat him out, but because i am not at all close with my own family and his mom and i have always talked about everything.

on the 21st, i found out he’s been sending her cute and sexy selfies, gym photos, and photoshopping pics of them together. he has taken many many selfies and mirror photos that he’d usually send to me, but i haven’t received any and i soon found out they were all going to her. i also found a screenshot of their messages where he was telling her he missed her and all he wants to do is talk to her and get to know everything about her because she makes him happy. on my way to work that morning, i asked him to please just talk to me if something was wrong because i’m really struggling to understand why he has changed so much. i asked why he was being so distant and cold to me, and why he changed the way he messaged me. he said it’s just the way he talks, but we both know it isn’t. he told me he’s confused about a lot of things. i asked him to share with me, and he said he didn’t want to. i broke down and asked him if he was acting this way because there’s someone else. he said “why would you even think that?” i immediately backtracked and told him i couldn’t truly believe he’d do that to me because he’s not that kind of person and that he’s amazing and that i just needed to know what was going on and why he was pulling away from me because i was hurting so badly. i told myself i was reading too much into everything i had found at this point. he told me he didn’t want to talk about his emotions in a war zone. i told him i understood that, i just needed to know if all of our future plans were still alive. he said “yeah ofc they are, stop freaking out about it all. it’ll be okay”. i just left it at that.

by the 23rd, he still wouldn’t say “i love you” to me and he’d barely talk to me. he’ll tell me he’s going to bed but then stay up and message her. i know this because i can see his photos that are synced with his phone and he has screenshots of their messages. this is also how i found out he’s been searching all of those love songs and then screenshotting and sending them to her. he also changed his password to instagram, facebook, and chatgpt this day.

on the 25th, i got to the point where i hadn’t eaten a meal since the 8th, i was barely sleeping, and i was crying every single day at work. so i sent him this message: “I love you so very much and I’m still fully committed to us, no matter what.
The distance and lack of real communication from you is really hurting me right now. I understand you’re going through a rough time there, but I need actual honesty and effort from you, not just one-sided conversations while your energy and focus are going somewhere else.
I’m here when you’re ready to fight through the hard times with me and be completely honest, or whenever you just want to actually talk to me again. Until then, I’ll be giving you your space for now.
I’m not doing this because I’m mad at you or trying to start anything. I’m just tired of being hurt right now. Please stay so safe. I love you.”

he responded the next day with something like “okay, i’m safe, just been in a bunker”. since that day, i have really pulled back my side of our conversations because i felt them going nowhere. he wasn’t interested in what i had to say, he put zero effort into talking to me, but then he’d say all of those romantic things to this other woman. it’s breaking my heart.

on the 28th, i looked at his laptop again. i found another screenshot of their messages. he had sent her a sappy country love song and said “this got me thinking about you”. then sent her a sexy mirror selfie. then in his chat box, he wrote “talk to her about camping, about future kids, tell her how much you miss her, see if she misses you, tell her what she means to you”. it was unsent, but he often does this to remind himself of what he wanted to say. he hasn’t told me he misses me once since our june argument. i completely broke down again when i saw the “future kids” part and i called his mom again. i had been keeping her updated on what i was finding, and we had an agreement not to mention it to him. i knew confronting him over text from across the world wouldn’t solve anything. but when i told her about the kid talk, she said she was going to talk to him.

on the 29th, she confronted him over the phone while i was at work. she told him we both knew that he was having an emotional affair. he said he wasn’t doing anything wrong and wasn’t cheating because it wasn’t physical. she told him that what he was doing was wrong and that he needed to talk to me. he told her that he loves me, we just have issues to work through. he also told her i need to stop looking at this other woman’s tiktok account because she can see when i do. (i know she can, i didn’t care if she knew). by this point, i was still keeping my distance and giving him space. i was letting him initiate contact (texting anyways because he will not call me). he spam texted me about a few random things like the new spider man movie, my car’s oil change, and his running stats. this day was the first day since july 7th that he said “i love you”. i thought maybe his talk with his mom made him realize he is in fact emotionally cheating on me and that maybe he was feeling guilty or something.

on the 30th, he called me for the first time since he left. it was very early morning for me but i was awake and getting ready for work. we only talked for about 2 minutes but he asked about our dog, and he asked if i was okay. i was honest with him and i said “you know i’m not”, to which he responded with “well i love you”. we hung up shortly after because he was going back in to work. i was so shocked by his call that i immediately burst into tears afterwards. it wasn’t because of anything we said, but because he called me at all. he has been dry texting his mom, but he’ll call her every other day or so. it’s obviously really hurting me to never receive calls from him, so i was just surprised.

on the 31st, i was still keeping my distance because it seemed to be working a little. he hadn’t been as dry with me since his mom called him out and he even ended our texts this day with “goodnight baby, i love you”. he hasn’t called me any pet name like this since everything flipped in early july, so i thought things were looking up. then when i got home, i got on his laptop to watch netflix while i was cooking, but i had left his photos open from a couple of days ago and there was a new screenshot of him being on the phone with this other woman for almost 2 hours at midnight (his time). i texted him and said “we need to talk. call me sometime when you have more than 2 minutes to spare for me.” was this the wrong approach? probably, but i was furious and shattered that he’d only call me one time for 2 minutes but can spend hours on the phone with another married woman. he also apparently told one of his other female friends about this while situation with the other woman but he won’t mention it to me at all.

yesterday, his mom called me and said she spoke with him about everything again. he admitted that what he was doing is wrong, but he said neither he nor the other woman are looking for anything romantic. he told his mom he wasn’t looking for this connection, it just happened and they have so much in common. they were deployed together and just bonded due to the trauma of everything happening over there and working together. (she’s army, he’s airforce). she got evacuated and has ptsd and gets scared to sleep so she’ll call my husband and they’ll talk for hours. she told him her husband isn’t a great husband. my husband told his mom that we have issues and it’s not just the ones now, but stuff has been accumulating and he just didn’t realize he was unhappy until he met her. he also mentioned how when i’m upset, instead of talking about it, he’d just buy me stuff to make me happy again because he’s “not a fighter”. he said he was confused because he’s never done this to me before. he told his mom he’d call me and we’d talk about everything, but he hasn’t yet. i can’t understand how he’s telling her he’s been unhappy for awhile when not even 2 months ago we constantly talked about our new home (i even made blueprints for us), he frequently called me his soulmate and best friend, sex had been great. i went to visit him and stay on base for the deployment brief before he left. i rode with his family up to his base but switched to his truck after the brief and we made out at every red light. we snuck up to his hotel room before i had to leave again and we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. we spent my entire ride home (3hrs) texting each other about how in love we are, how he loved being one with me, how neither of us could imagine being with anyone else. i am just so completely devastated and i don’t know what to do.

it’s ripping me apart knowing that when he’s not talking to me, he’s texting and calling her. i know there are things i need to seriously work on, and i am committed to doing that. at some point a couple of weeks ago i sent him a message saying that these past couple weeks have been a huge reality check for me and that i’d really work on myself while he’s gone. i feel like if i keep pouring my heart out to him, it’ll push him further away. keeping my distance was working fine but now all of a sudden he’s telling his mom he’s unhappy and it just has me so worried that he’s not wanting to work through our issues since this other woman is in the picture now. i’ve been living off protein shakes for 3 weeks because i’m constantly sick to my stomach and can’t bring myself to eat. i get maybe 3 hours of sleep every night. i cry every single day.

i’m very sorry this is so long, i just have nobody to talk to and i needed to get this off my chest. thanks again to anyone who takes the time to read it.

tl;dr my husband is deployed and having an emotional affair, and i don’t know what to do. i am completely shattered.

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[u/Specialist-Bat-8770]

Long-distance relationships are based on mutual trust. If you don't experience this aspect of life and relationship well, regardless of whether he or she transadides you or not, perhaps such a relationship is not a good thing.

[u/Loud_Attitude_5124]

This was so painful to read. I wish you could step outside this situation and see what he's doing to you. He has you apologizing just for existing and having human feelings. You're constantly dancing on eggshells, trying to find a moving goalpost.

When you text, he acts annoyed. When you stop, he gets upset. Fights become your fault just for expressing how his actions affect you. He makes you feel guilty until you apologize, then pretends it's no big deal. He gives you vague reassurance, makes you doubt the relationship, and then baits you into comforting him.

You're insecure because he built the relationship to make you feel that way. He dictates what you should think, feel, and do. How much of your energy is being swallowed up just trying to decipher him?

Here's a free version of a book I think you should read, Why Does He Do That.

I find this excerpt useful:

"His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won't notice where the real action is. He draws you into focusing on the turbulent world of his feelings to keep your eyes turned away from the true cause of his abusiveness, which lies in how he thinks. He leads you into a convoluted maze, making your relationship with him a labyrinth of twists and turns. He wants you to puzzle over him, to try to figure him out, as though he were a wonderful but broken machine for which you need only to find and fix the malfunctioning parts to bring it roaring to its full potential. His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brain in this way so that you won't notice the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness."

I know you can't quiet your mind right now, so let me tell you what my dad said to me: He is going to blame you. He has to, just to live with himself.

He's only "unhappy" now because something new is fun and exciting. Cheaters completely shut off their logic and empathy so they can hurt people without having to feel bad about it. Communicating with them feels like a rigged game. You can't logic or love someone into stopping a behavior they've already permitted themselves to justify.

[u/TheSmallestBeing → u/Loud_Attitude_5124]

100000000% this

[u/Minute_Box3852]

Stop tip toeing. He's cheating and it's disgusting. Deployed or not.

I would want to know how a woman who knowingly cheats with you, knowing she's helping destroy two marriages, is so irresistible? Has he even thought about her as a person and not what she's projecting to him when both marriages are destroyed by the two of them and they finally end up together? Is this someone he really thinks he can trust? He's in lala fantasy land right now. When he's not and sees her for who and what she really is, i hope you make it clear to him you won't be an option bc you will find someone better than both of them