He’s Back in My Bed, But I Still Don’t Trust Him

Reader’s Question

My husband and I married six weeks ago. About two weeks after we were married, I discovered an email he sent to an ex-girlfriend two weeks before our marriage. In the email he told her that she was the “one that got away,” and that if he was the one who caused the break up, he “really blew it.”

My husband denies that he still has feelings for this ex-girlfriend. He tells me that I am the love of his life, but I am having difficulty believing him. This is partly because I also just found out that he lied to me about his marital status when we got together. He told me that he was divorced when we met, but I have learned that his divorce did not really become final until February of this year. However, he was legally separated before we met.

My husband and I are both in our early fifties. We dated for almost two years before we married. When I learned of his lies, my first inclination was to get a divorce, because I felt like I had been misled into the marriage. My husband asked that we go to a counselor, and we went for two sessions. She told us he shouldn’t contact his exes, of course, and also that we should try to quit talking about the issue of his ex-girlfriend and his feelings for her for awhile. That would enable us to try and just be “us” again.

I have let my husband start sleeping in our bed again, but I have no desire to be intimate with him. I close my eyes and think of his being with me, but really wanting her. I’m having trouble believing anything he says. He seems to have trouble answering any of the tough questions I ask him honestly or straightforwardly. How can I ever really trust him?

I’m so shocked and saddened about all this, and I don’t know what to do or what to think. Can you give me any advice?

Psychologist’s Reply

Entering into a life partnership under any false pretenses is very risky business indeed. And two sessions with a counselor is certainly insufficient to address the rightful concerns you must have. A person in his fifties displaying some of the behavior your husband has displayed has some significant character defects. Traditional counseling and advice is not likely to be fruitful. Be sure your counselor has expertise diagnosing and treating disturbances of character. Taking “time out” from core issues to focus on each other might be good advice in other circumstances, but when it comes to significant betrayals of trust it’s more important that the betrayer display with convincing action the willingness to repair damage done. Don’t waste any time getting the right kind of help, either. Better to know now what kind of relationship you’re really in for as opposed to learning the hard way years later that you made a tragic mistake.

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