SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

My ex-wife confessed to me, but she confessed lies. You know there was betrayal, that is about it. I caution you very strongly against accepting what she’s revealed as anything resembling the full story.

Hi Everyone, I don’t have a premium account here so I lack the ability to make direct replies. But I just wanted to thank all of you again, so much, from the bottom of my heart, for all of your candid observations, input, and advice. You all are really helping me, so many ways.

A few of you have brought up questions around the issue of the grocery cashier inappropriately accessing our business phone number from company records.

I want to let you all know that I did lodge a formal complaint with the data privacy department of the grocery store chain’s corporate office last week.

So far, all I have received is a generic intake telephone call from an intake specialist, confirming my contact details. The Specialist let me know the area district manager will have to review the case, and it will be up to 10 business days before I get a reply. In the meantime, I have asked my wife to not visit that grocery store, and I have location tracking on her that allows me to confirm that my request has not been violated.

Another issue is the matter of a polygraph test.
On careful consideration, and in weighing the very rational input many of you have provided here, I have decided to go ahead with this. I have not actually scheduled an appointment yet, but will do so as soon as I receive my wife’s detailed written timeline, which she is currently working on. I let her know to include absolutely everything in her written account.

Once again, I can’t thank all of you enough for taking time out of your busy lives to respond with extremely thoughtful, incisive, and intelligent observations and recommendations about ways to handle this.

My goal is indeed long-term reconciliation, but to agree with so many of you who’ve made the point, this cannot authentically be done, unless the full truth is on the table.

I have a pretty good instinct that everything possible between two people most likely did play out between my wife and her AP, and I am trying to spiritually prepare myself for a further severe shock, but I agree that at length it will be best to deal with all of this right now, and then try take that as a starting point from which to try to heal.

Sincerely, I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

We are here to help you through this journey.

Unfortunately we see, far too often, a very typical pattern of behavior from cheaters. And it is painful to try to point out that often there is more to affairs than just kissing. During the early days of learning about an affair is excruciatingly painful and as the betrayed, we understand that pain.

But we also see the lies the cheaters tell - and one if them is "we only kissed". Maybe in some cases it is true - but in others it’s not.

The goal is to learn the full story and go from there. This site is filled with people who find out about affairs decades later or who learn the full truth years later (it was more than one kiss and was actually a years long affair as an example). If you stay here long enough, you learn to spot the 🚩pretty quickly.

My position is that it’s not the affair that actually kills the marriage — it’s the behavior of the cheater after dday that causes everything to go south. Continued cheating. Trickling the truth over days or weeks or months or years. Blaming the betrayed for the affair. Trying to sweet it all under the rug. Refusing to discuss it.

Some suggestions on how to reach a place where you believe you have the truth:

Have a serious conversation – more of a monologue because you want YOUR side to be clear:
You want to reconcile. That is your deepest wish. However you have made two deep discoveries:
First of all, her actions have shaken the very foundation of what you though she was and is. That includes trust. The hour before you learned of the affair you would have trusted her with and for anything and everything. Now – you WANT to trust her but can’t. The only way you see to rebuild that trust is if a) she trusts you (as she displays by being truthful) and b) you can verify what she says. With time, blind trust is replaced by trust-but-verify, and with time the need to verify diminishes.
But for now… You cant trust her fully without verification. That is the work ahead for the first 20 days: Create a base where you start believing you can trust her.

Second: You realized that once she stared the affair you no longer "had" her. At best you shared her with OM. You don’t share your wife. She was lost to you the minute she decided to have the affair. You won’t accept reclaiming a part of her – it’s either all or nothing. Of two evils – losing her would be the lesser than still sharing her.
So, although you WANT to reconcile, WISH to reconcile and will do A LOT to reconcile… it’s totally dependent on you regaining a sense that she is totally yours. You have realized that there is something worse than not having her – because that’s where you are right now – so the threat of this ending in divorce is real.

This isn’t a masculine "possession" thing. It’s more that emotionally a couple "own" each other for emotional, physical and even spiritual needs. When I say "this is MY wife" I might also say "I am HER husband". It goes both ways.

On a general note about marriage: Once we take it as a given we risk not taking care of it. Like if you were tasked with carrying a rare bird’s egg across town you would take more care than if handed a golf-ball. We need to view our marriage as a "gift" from the partner, that can be taken away or broken if we don’t appreciate it and care for it. We can decide "never to divorce", but then we also need to have an action plan so neither reach a stage where we contemplate divorce.

Once you have gotten these two issues over to her (no trust, don’t share) the next stage is to offer an amnesty period.
You want to reconcile, but need the absolute truth to do so. NO MATTER WHAT she shares NOW and in the next days you commit to reconciliation for the next 60 days…
In other words: She shares now that she stops by to do porn-shoots and sniff crack-cocaine (or whatever) every Thursday mornings… You have 59 days to contemplate her truth, her reaction, her actions, your emotions and all that before formally filing (if that is your final decision). The key issue here is to get honesty.

Have her do a timeline. Read it and formulate your questions. Poke at the gaps. Poke at all things that aren’t clear. Get definitions (we made out = what does that mean? Touching, groping…). Get to the level of detail you need.
Try to be strategic: This isn’t something you can sit down after your favorite tv program and deal with in one 6 hour session. Maybe even organize time where you two are alone and have decided to spend the next 2 hours on this. Knowing that won’t suffice and maybe need 2 more hours a few days later.
Focus on factual issues. Emotional issues can muddy things up. Her reason why is something her IC will work out with her. Focus more on how, what and when.
If you can, detach… I have questioned rapists, and a key to that is to detach from the horrible things they did and focus on details and facts rather than the overriding emotions of what horrible people they are doing terrible things.

Mention early on the requirement for a poly, but don’t schedule it right away. Rather – tell her that once she states you have all the answers and you feel either like you have the answers or aren’t going to get the answers you schedule it.

Be very clear on one thing, both to her but especially yourself:
The poly has a purpose. It’s the watershed moment where she passes, and therefore YOU need to acknowledge that you have a base of truth to work from, or she fails where you have to acknowledge that she isn’t a candidate for reconciliation. If you aren’t going to acknowledge either, don’t bother with the poly.

As you are pushing for truth, I recommend that you be careful and deliberate about what you want/need to know. There should be no intentional secrets kept by your wife, but that doesn’t mean you need to know the play by play like a porno script. Unless you do. You should dictate what you want to know. You should know enough to satisfy your own mind, but you don’t necessarily know what that will take and it’s possible to overshoot and hear things that you wish you hadn’t. It’s ok to take your time, digest information and see how you are doing and reserve the right to ask more questions later if something is burning in your mind. This is a very shitty marathon, take it at your own pace.

Hi MD78,

Thanks for the update about the official complaint you have made about clerk accessing the records of your business phone number. It is not just a legal/data protection issue. Him doing that was a major factor in what followed.

the cashier, a young man, only 24 years old, started aggressively propositioning her...He then wrote down his phone number on the receipt and handed it to her and was begging her to give him a call later that day.

Although you have not said what your wife did with the receipt that he wrote his number on, it seems that she did not call the number, and very possibly would not have done. It was only when the guy used the business number that he got from the store's records that things went off the rails. Without that additional contact, things might have taken a very different course. And that is not making any excuses for your wife not giving him a strong 'no' when he did contact her.

You have had a lot of great advice here, and there are a lot of people wanting the best outcome for you.

[This message edited by M1965 at 4:43 PM, Friday, April 17th]

Sorry you are facing the fallout of her betrayal. Its so painful.

Youve already received tremendous tactical input. Probability is very high that you know a fraction of the truth. I cannot tell from your post whether or not your WW knows that you will require a poly, but if so, what was her reaction? If not, watch her reaction closely when you do reveal that requirement to her. It should be very telling.

Beyond that, take your time. Try to stay away from any long term projections or plans. They will shift from day to day anyway. For now, take care of you and your kids.

If the company that pos works for does not take appropriate action, I'd have an attorney draft a letter outlining your expectations after the legal consult advises what may be actionable legally. Bottom line, do everything possible to get this ahole fired.

I wish you well.

Hi everyone. Thanks again for all of your incredibly incisive and intelligent input.

I can’t even begin to tell you all just how much you’ve helped me re-frame this issue more appropriately in my mind so that I can adequately take proper actions and steps to protect my heart and mind, and to try to get some understanding as to what was likely going on for my wife when she engaged in disrespectful and harmful hidden cheating.

I want to report back some of the facts of my case, and unfortunately, things are getting more and more difficult for me.

I don’t know how this is going to end yet. In fact, I can’t really see past the next couple of weeks.

Any insight or recommendation you might have would be greatly valued.

My wife did write a detailed account of all of her dastardly dealings with her partner. It ended up being 16 pages long. There were a lot of horrible details in there about specific things that they were texting to one another. And I can’t really verify any of that, because she deleted all the messages on her personal phone and our business phone.
But she claims that she did the best she could to write them out of her memory. And I’ll tell, you some of them are really hurtful doozies. There was a lot of highly sexually-charged flirtatious banter, and very suggestive language used between them, which seemed to intensify in tone and frequency, the further down the road they went in their illicit relationship.

It was very difficult to get through the process of reading that, but I felt that I needed to have a better understanding. And I’m glad that I do understand that they got very very deep very very fast.
This helps me more appropriately grasp the level of disrespect and evil that was involved here.
It’s important for me to know this, and I know it now. If I hadn’t read her account, I wouldn’t be properly angry enough.

That being said, I have no way of knowing whether she actually included everything in her account or not. My instinct still says there are almost certainly many things that have been left out.

After we read through her account, I informed my wife that I want her to take a polygraph examination.

On receiving this news, she was cool as a cucumber, and didn’t so much as even bat an eye. She agreed to it on the spot.

But I did feel something a little bit odd from her when she replied, her face was sort of unmoving and deadpan, there was almost no reaction at all, which felt strange to me in the context of revealing such a momentous request….maybe I sensed some energy shifting just under her surface, sort of, but this is as of yet only conjecture on my part.

Something in me STILL does NOT believe her story of "we only kissed" and "I’ve already told you everything". And I won’t begin to believe her, unless she passes the polygraph with flying colors.

It just makes no sense to me that she would keep a boyfriend on the side for close to 3 months with zero other sexual activity going on. As in…this feels almost impossible to me. These are both adults (even if he is a ‘young adult’ 20 years younger than her, which, actually, would likely make him MORE inclined to cheat with my wife, ugh, since most men at 24 years old would probably have sex with practically anything that moves, and certainly THIS guy would).

Her polygraph exam is coming up at the end of next week. We will see.

I was dealt another serious blow this week, however: The grocery store chain is totally disregarding my complaint for breach of customer privacy, and employee misconduct.

Their district manager called me and stated that the one text message that I have that the guy sent to our business phone (that my wife forgot to delete) isn’t strong enough proof to fire him.
I objected, stating that this message is clearly inappropriate and of a sexually flirtatious nature and why would his employee ever send this to our business phone. The manager claims the AP stated that my wife was the one propositioning HIM, and he only replied to her. If you saw the one text message I have from the guy, you’d know that’s a lie, it reads "you are so gorgeous, you just stopped me in my tracks when I saw you in the store. Someday I will convince you I’m not like all these other younger guys. I WILL convince you".
Ugh, can you believe that shit. And this is being sent to a business phone number.
And this crooked manager is covering for the guy, saying it’s not good enough proof.

The district manager also wrongly claimed that they don’t keep any customer data in their records so there’s no way he could’ve gotten ahold of our business number. This is not true. I corrected him and explained that that every time we make a purchase from the store we have to provide our business name, business phone number, and signature on the tax exempt business receipt. The cashier then puts it in a folder, which is kept under the desk at the cash register with the other tax exempt customers’ data. This district manager didn’t even know about that whole procedure, and after I explained it to him, he said he now has to go back and do more research on this.

I also gave him the exact date and time, and the make and model of our car, so they could look at the security cameras to see when this guy was getting in our family vehicle with my wife and "making out" with her (which she continues to claim was all that ever happened between them). The district manager said they don’t have cameras outside of their store so they have no way to corroborate this.
I am almost sure he is lying, because how can a large corporate chain grocery store not have cameras outside their building in this day and age?

Basically, I can see the way this is going, this district manager is simply going to do everything he can to cover his store’s ass, he doesn’t care about Justice, he doesn’t care that his employee inappropriately accessed our data and used it to harm our family. And yes, I know my wife very much participated in this affair as well, but this guy’s aggressive texting at our business line is what pulled her in initially, hook line and sinker. My issue is that he got our customer data off of the store’s records and he should never have done that. If he was not texting my wife at our business, there’s a good chance that she would never have interacted with him, and maybe this whole ugly affair would’ve never happened. But the fact that he even got our number that way is just too creepy and disgusting to me.

My wife deleted all of his other messages off of our business phone, but she did tell me in her written account that in his first text message to our shop phone, he actually wrote out that he had gotten our number off the tax exempt sales slip, so I’m going to work with the cell phone company to try to recover the deleted text messages that have been deleted to see if there’s a way I can get that initial message that basically proves, as sent directly by him, that he inappropriately accessed our number from the store’s records.

If I’m able to get ahold of that text message and present it to the district manager, and he still does nothing with it, then, probably my only other option is to hire an attorney and launch a lawsuit for data privacy and employee misconduct reasons.

Guys, request: does anyone here have any resources or information on how deleted text messages can be recovered? In my research, it seems like it’s incredibly expensive to do a forensic recovery off of a phone, and I don’t know of any available software product that really does this with Apple iPhones. If you guys know of a specific service, or a specific software product, that does this very well, please recommend it to me, so I can investigate.

As if getting the bad news that the district manager is not going to do anything about my complaint wasn’t bad enough, it got even worse when I went to my wife to tell her the story about this.

I stopped by our business later that day, and asked her to come out and talk to me, and when she sat in the vehicle with me, we spoke, and I let her know about the case and the district manager’s dismissive handling, and how upset I am about it.

I was hoping she would say something like "wow, I’m so sorry they’re not doing the right thing, what can I do to help, yes, we should absolutely get the text message records recovered, etc.."

Instead, she got angry, scowled at me, and quickly exited the vehicle, saying "I gotta go back to work".

That night she came home and was super frustrated with me, saying that she thinks it’s a huge mistake for me to have lodged this complaint with the corporate office.

She’s worried that people in the community will find out about her affair, and that word will get out, and that people in the community will avoid our business because of the shame associated with the affair. She also accused me of trying to do harm to her partner in an unhealthy way, instead of moving forward and trying to forget about everything with him, and instead building a new level of trust between the two of us.

I replied that I cannot authentically start to heal, unless as a first step I pursue all I can do on this policy investigation against this guy for inappropriately contacting our business. I made the point that it was so inappropriate that he got our number out of the store’s records, and used that to inappropriately text our shop and get her initially suckered into participating in the affair. I told her I cannot authentically heal knowing that from now on I might look back and realize I did nothing to make this guy atone for the evil that he wilfully brought into our family, and for all I know he may still be doing that to other married women who come by his cash register on a daily basis….how long will it be until some other family suffers the same harm from him that we did?

Not only my does wife strongly disagree with me on this, she was extremely rude and condescending about it, eventually storming out of the conversation angrily.

This all went down a couple of days ago. Since that time, my wife has been like a bizarre yo-yo, sometimes saying that she thinks it’s actually good that I filed the case, sometimes regressing and continuing to disagree with me, begging me to call it off. This back and forth is crazy and I don’t know what the hell is going on with her.

I really don’t know what to do now. I feel abandoned by her. I feel a deep need to press forward, because some justice should be done here. But also, because we can’t shop at our local store (we are rural, and the next closest location is 90 minutes’ drive away, not feasible) now we can’t get a lot of the products that we need, including the foods and produce to which my children have become accustomed all through their young lives, because I WILL NOT allow them to go back to that store while that guy is still employed there.

My children have been asking my wife questions as to why we can’t shop there anymore, and she keeps making up fake excuses like "we’re short on time", etc., but I don’t know how long they’re gonna keep believing that.

Not only that, but we need the products they sell for so many items from our menu in our shop. It’s going to have a huge negative affect on our business if we have to shop at other stores instead of this one, because this one has the best products, best availability, and best prices by far compared to all the others. We will have no choice but to jack up our prices in our shop, which is going to piss off a lot of our customers.

Basically, having this guy still working at the store harms everyone.

The only solution I can see is to press forward and try to have this guy removed from his job, that way my family can utilize the store again, and that way hopefully he will think twice before he propositions another married woman, and creates more destruction in a family, the way that he did with ours.

The polygraph examination is next week. My wife continues to steadfastly maintain her story that she and her partner "only kissed". I’m trying to prepare myself for the shock I feel likely to receive. I have imagined it already many times in my mind, so I hope that if that bad news indeed comes out, I won’t have a breakdown or something. I don’t think I will, I will just feel disgusted and horrified all over again. But I kind of know it’s coming this time, and that will help me spiritually prepare.

What I am dreading is that if she fails the test, she still may still stonewall me and insist that she only kissed this guy, and at that point, I will have to make a more difficult decision about what we can do to reconcile…. or not.

It has struck me that my wife literally might not be capable of divulging the truth, no matter what happens. she’s probably so terrified of letting the real truth out there that she would take it all the way to her grave, and never tell a soul what really ever happened, Polygraph examination or not.

But I have to press forward and see what happens with this.

Sorry if my message above seemed angry. I’m really angry right now, because of my wife’s terrible way of handling the news of the fact that I opened the policy complaint. she’s putting me ‘between a rock and a hard place’ and I feel totally abandoned. I feel like I simply must press forward to try to get some justice, but my wife doesn’t approve of me doing it, and she’s returned to rude and disrespectful behavior. Over the past few weeks since disclosure, she has tried hard to be kind and caring and attentive, which felt really good, but now it feels like all of that was just a "honeymoon period", and now that I’m pressing for the investigation to continue, her kindness has all but gone up in smoke.

She continues to make frequent overtures that the only way for us to go forward it is for me to drop the investigation and not take it any further. Something feels very very wrong with all of this. I feel a strong instinct that there is evil afoot here and I need to keep going forward and investigating and see what I can do to eradicate it. If I don’t at least try hard to make something happen, I don’t think I can ever heal, and truly go forward into the future. Just sweeping what this guy did to my family under the rug would torture me forever, so onward I will go!

Ps…. I apologize for the length of this, and for my clumsy compositional structure, I’m pretty emotional right now, and just trying to get this out, if you made it this far, I thank you so much for your patience.

Wow, thank you for the update. You absolutely have every right to be angry at the store and your wife. She is grasping for some level of control in my opinion. Her tell you the only way for reconciliation to work is for you to drop complaint an move on .....WHAT NERVE of her.....that is reverse of what should be happening. She should be the one begging you, saying she will do anything for the chance to reconcile.

It essentially is her protecting him, protecting her image, or both. And both are bad....not empathizing with you. Great job on getting polygraph. I have heard so many stories of parking lot confessions. I hope she is telling the truth to you. But you are wise to protect your heart.

You said this grocery store is a chain? I suggest going to the next level of management and outline the situation. Do it in writing and by phone. You are right, an attorney may live this case and you could possibly sue for damages.

Regarding shopping at the store ....here is a solution. You can actually have Door Dash or similar do your shopping. It is a bit of upcharge, but I know this is true because my son did some door dashing and he would shop for people

Regarding phone messages. I do think you can recover them. I know there are people on here who will have more information on this topic.

In closing, do not let her try to control and bully you. That is the last thing she should be doing. Set form boundaries. Keep on progressing, you are doing great.

"I feel a strong instinct that there is evil afoot here..." You're right.

She expects no real consequences for her lovefest. Moreover, few adults would limit days of intimate involvement to mere kissing.

Polygraph will likely prove the point. I'm glad you're prepared.

You have been heard! Vent away! This is a great place to let loose at the terrible unfairness of it all. You are among people who have felt exactly what you are feeling. Here is my take: your WW is lashing out right now because she is worried about protecting her reputation from the public notoriety and shame that follows from revealing her infidelity, more than worrying about your needs, and the fact that other women could have their privacy invaded by the AP in the same way. She needs to overcome her own shame and guilt. She needs to own her shit and take full responsibility. Often this takes time but you should pursue what you feel you need to do.

As for finding justice. There is none in my opinion. Infidelity is inherently unfair to the BS, and you can never truly get justice. That being said, the AP’s actions in invading your personal business records held by the grocery store chain to be used to pursue an illicit relationship with your WW is the real violation the employer should address. If you come across as an angry BH upset that his WW had an A with one of their employees, wanting to get the employee fired, the grocery is less likely to care. A’s happen all the time and it’s a personal issue, blah, blah, blah. The real issue is that the grocery store holds your personal information in trust. One of its employees abused this trust and invaded your privacy with the intent to destroy your M. How can any business doing business with the grocery trust that their personal information kept by the grocery is secure if the grocery fails to take corrective action. That should be an issue the grocery is concerned about, especially if word gets out that its employees abuse personal information held by the grocery. Hmmmm…I wonder if the district manager would want that information to get out to its customers? I’m not suggesting that you threaten the district manager, but the facts speak for themselves, and you know how word can spread these days on the internet and sm.

Understand that you can only control you. You can’t force the grocery to fire the AP. You can’t control your WW’s reactions to your need for justice. You only control you. Always value yourself. Do get IC if available to help with your emotions. Has your WW read How To Help Your Spouse Heal From Your Affair, by McDonald? It’s a good, short read. Keep posting and vent when you feel the need. Good luck.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 2:55 AM, Thursday, April 23rd]

I’m following you closely because you are in the middle of something that will make you feel like you’re going crazy 🤪. We’ve all been there and many of us have suffered through your exact situation.

The self preservation of the cheater 😡
The "we only kissed" routine
The lack of accountability by the store manager

I think you are taking the appropriate steps. Demanding the polygraph test is the right move. Asking for the timeline is another way to understand the extent of the Affair.

Beyond that there is not much more you can do.

Maybe professional counseling for yourself. It will help you heal and provide you w/ much needed support through this journey.

It is a bit of a surprise that the district manager would prefer to lose a customer than a checkout clerk. I agree with Fareast’s take on this though - there’s only so much you can do. I would not spend money on lawyers pursuing this myself. It’s good that the manager is looking into the process you described, and I would suggest you figure out how much you spend in his store per month or year (or whatever’s more impressive) and mention that when you let him know that you’re uncomfortable patronizing the store if they’re going to permit employees access your information and contacting you for personal reasons.

All that said, I’d want you to consider whether severely hurting your own business is really the right move. I totally agree that your WW can never see that guy again. But I’d explore other ways to get the supplies before going down a path that’s going to have a huge negative impact on your business. The AP may have severely damaged your marriage; don’t let him ruin your livelihood as well.

The AP may never face any real consequences for what he did. Accepting that is just another bite of the shit sandwich you’ve been fed. He’s a bad actor, but let’s keep the main focus on your WW. She didn’t get "suckered". She’s a grown woman, and she made her choices.

All that said, I’m impressed that she sat down and tried to recreate all those text messages from memory. That’s got to show you something. Her anger at the complaint / investigation is misplaced, though. No one in your community is going to find out about her A from that.

Agreeing to a polygraph immediately and then backtracking later is a pretty tried and true story in the Cheaters Handbook. Trust your read.

Your wife defending her AP is unacceptable. It is not too much to expect that she should be fully on your team.

You are correct that you are very possibly going to need to make a choice about your own future while your wife continues to deny what you suspect. That is a terrible position to be in, but she put you there. I recommend that you do not recommit your life to a lying cheater out of misplaced pity. She needs to be fully honest and then patient and consistent to give you time to develop confidence that you have truth. Appeals to "drop it" are a very bad sign.

My guess is she wants you to drop the investigation because she is truly the one who chased him. I'm not sure I buy that he got her number via those dodgy means.

If you get an investigation off the ground, the AP maybe able to prove this in order to save his job. Then she's caught in a lie.

Hopefully this all comes out in the lie detector test. Feel like the walls will be closing in on her. No way it was just a kiss. All the lies will hopefully fall away. Then and only then can you make an informed choice on how you wish to move forward.

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 11:49 AM, Thursday, April 23rd]

I’m going to come at this a little sideways. These were two adults in a consenting relationship. The fact that she was married and a customer does not matter because no one was coerced. That’s why you’re not getting anywhere with the grocery store. It was not done in the building and it was not a crime. To you it’s devastating. To the guy it is one more notch on his bed post. Your wife was caught between the pleasure she got from attention from a younger man and the guilt she felt as your wife. Now she’s moved on to anger that’s written about in that mysterious cheaters manual we all refer to.
Here is what you need to accept about human nature. Guilt has a shelf life. Your wife is tired of feeling guilty so she’s going to be angry at you for bringing it up. That’s why it’s so difficult for bs to get past the pain because the person causing it has put up a huge brick wall.

All the lies will hopefully fall away. Then and only then can you make an informed choice on how you wish to move forward.

Not trying to pick at anyone, but I have to say that I disagree with this statement if it is interpreted in a certain way (the Dr may not have meant it in this way). You are not trapped until your wife chooses to stop lying. You can leave any time you decide it is in your best interest. I divorced, I have very little confidence that I ever got a full telling of what happened, but the defensiveness and continuous bullshit broke me down till divorce was the right choice for me.

You have to take ownership for your own life, you can’t place your autonomy in her hands. Maybe you thought you could before in how you saw marriage, but she betrayed that and cannot be trusted like that right now. You have to chart your course, even with as awful as your options look in the short term.

Hi MD,

Many Thanks for the update. I had been wondering how you are doing, and I am sure that many others here were also concerned for your well-being.

I am sorry that your wife has reacted the way she has, but as others have commented, it is all about a loss of control, and dealing with the idea that there may be consequences for her of her actions. That you are not just going to roll over and take it. And there is no reason why you should, even if that is inconvenient for her and her AP.

There are lots of things to think about in your update, but a very important one that you should do immediately is to secure all of the evidence that you have, like the timeline, the message from the AP, and anything else you may have. Put it somewhere that your wife cannot access it and destroy it. That may sound dramatic, but it needs to be done.

You ask about programs/apps available to recover deleted messages on mobile phones. There are several out there, but their use would require you to be able to understand whether they have got everything possible to get, and for you to interpret the results. To be honest, in a situation like this, I think it would be better for you to take both phones to a digital data recovery specialist. Someone who is used to looking for hidden data.

Check the internet to see what private investigators are available in your area, and discuss what you need with them. Yes, there will be a cost, but it is more likely that they will find hidden and deleted material than you trying to work with an app you have never used before.

If you do engage a private investigator to check the phones, it may also be worth getting them to do a background check on the grocery store clerk. If he has a record for anything questionable, it may be grounds for a lawyer to challenge the company about how robust its background checks are when it hires public-facing staff. Do not inform your wife about this investigative work.

It would be worth changing password on your phone and laptop, without telling your wife, and if she asks why you have done that, you will know that she has been trying to access them.

On a ‘charitable’ note, it was positive that your wife confessed to the affair, and wrote a fairly comprehensive timeline. Everyone here knows how hard it must have been for you to read through it, and our hearts go out to you. As I said earlier, you need to put that timeline somewhere safe before it disappears unexpectedly. In terms of putting electronic evidence somewhere safe, a cheap and simple option is to open a gmail email account, and mail copies there.

Did the timeline include absolutely everything? Well, there is no way of knowing, though the polygraph may provide more insight. It sounds like you got a lot more than many betrayed spouses get, but the inclusion of so much hurtful detail might be brutal honesty, or it might mask the fact that other information was omitted. As betrayed spouses, we just never know, but any independent verification can help.

Your wife’s impassive response to your request for a polygraph may well have been surprise, shock, or fear. By telling her, you were informing her that her timeline was not going to be the end of it. She may have been thinking, "Sh*t – what now?" There have been cases here where a wayward spouse has made a big show of welcoming a polygraph as a way to prove themselves, then tried to discredit polygraphs or refuse to take one, or, if they agree, make what is known here as a ‘parking lot confession’ when outside the center where the test is to take place.

You wrote:

Something in me STILL does NOT believe her story of "we only kissed" and "I’ve already told you everything". And I won’t begin to believe her, unless she passes the polygraph with flying colors.

It does seem counter-intuitive – putting it politely – that the highly sexualized messaging did not manifest itself in anything apart from chaste kissing ‘outside the family vehicle’. Why write messages like this if there was no intention to enact them when physically together? That is something that your wife needs to explain, even if her explanation sounds totally implausible.

Re. the grocery store, I Googled this:

In the US, if the employee of a business accessed a client's information e.g. phone number, email address, or home address, would that constitute a breach of data protection law?

This was the answer:

Yes, in the US, an employee accessing a client's personal information (phone number, email, address) without authorization or a legitimate business purpose generally constitutes a data breach under various state and federal privacy laws. Such actions can violate company policies, lead to employee liability, and incur serious penalties for the business.

Key Aspects of Employee Data Access Violations

-Unauthorized Access & Misuse: If an employee accesses data outside the scope of their assigned duties or for personal gain, this is "unauthorized access".

-Definition of Personal Information: Information that directly identifies an individual—such as phone numbers, home addresses, email addresses, and SSNs—is classified as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and protected.

-Legal Framework: While there is no single federal law, the FTC regulates unfair practices. Furthermore, states have enacted strict breach notification laws covering unauthorized access.

-Employer Liability: Businesses are generally "vicariously liable" for data breaches caused by employees acting during their employment, forcing companies to implement strict access controls and policies.

-Consequences: Misusing client information can result in termination, civil lawsuits, and criminal prosecution for the employee (source: Information Commissioner’s Office).

-For employees, accessing this data without a valid work-related reason, especially for personal gain or before leaving a job, is a serious violation of both company policy and legal regulations.

If you wish to pursue this - and I can understand why you feel the district manager’s attitude is totally inappropriate, because it is – then you should contact a lawyer and get them to send a letter to the chain’s head office, describing what you were told in the phone call, and requesting that all future communication is in writing, and addressed to your lawyer. No more unrecorded phone calls; they allow for too much future deniability.

You wrote:

The district manager also wrongly claimed that they don’t keep any customer data in their records so there’s no way he could’ve gotten ahold of our business number. This is not true. I corrected him and explained that that every time we make a purchase from the store we have to provide our business name, business phone number, and signature on the tax exempt business receipt. The cashier then puts it in a folder, which is kept under the desk at the cash register with the other tax exempt customers’ data. This district manager didn’t even know about that whole procedure, and after I explained it to him, he said he now has to go back and do more research on this.

Well, you have proof positive that the manager who spoke to you was speaking out of his behind. That process/procedure is something your lawyer can ask the store to document, and they need to answer to whether they are taking enough precautions to protect the information. If any bozo on a cash register can access it, I would suggest they are not. I work in data, and a hard copy folder, kept under a desk, is no data protection at all. What if somebody stole that folder? That is a shocking level of sloppiness when it comes to protecting information.

I would also get the lawyer to ask whether the chain approves of male staff actively sexually propositioning married female customers in front of their children, and whether that fits the image of their business that they would like to project. How safe are women and children from sexual predation when on their company property?

The way that checkout clerk propositioned your wife – a stranger – in front of her children suggests he more like a stalker than some horny young guy chancing his arm in a nightclub. Why are they continuing to employ a member of staff who behaves that way? Does that behaviour meet company standards?

You wrote:

The district manager said they don’t have cameras outside of their store so they have no way to corroborate this.

If you do get a lawyer to look into this, get the lawyer to accompany you to the store to take pictures and provide independent witness information about whether or not there are external cameras. If there are internal cameras, are there any – with audio recording? – covering the checkouts? Most stores have those, to make sure people on the checkouts are not pocketing money.

You wrote:

I stopped by our business later that day, and asked her to come out and talk to me, and when she sat in the vehicle with me, we spoke, and I let her know about the case and the district manager’s dismissive handling, and how upset I am about it. I was hoping she would say something like "wow, I’m so sorry they’re not doing the right thing, what can I do to help, yes, we should absolutely get the text message records recovered, etc.."

Instead, she got angry, scowled at me, and quickly exited the vehicle, saying "I gotta go back to work".

That night she came home and was super frustrated with me, saying that she thinks it’s a huge mistake for me to have lodged this complaint with the corporate office. She’s worried that people in the community will find out about her affair, and that word will get out, and that people in the community will avoid our business because of the shame associated with the affair. She also accused me of trying to do harm to her partner in an unhealthy way, instead of moving forward and trying to forget about everything with him, and instead building a new level of trust between the two of us.

I think your wife was angry about loss of control of the situation, angry that she may face some consequences of her actions, and trying to protect her AP, whether out of affection, or fear that if he starts defending himself, he may reveal things to you that she would rather you do not know about.

If knowledge of the affair could be so damaging to the business, why did she embark on it in the first place? According to her, she and the AP kissed ‘outside the car’, where anyone could have seen her, a married mother of two and presumably a known local business owner, cheating in public. Why wasn’t she worried about being spotted while doing that, or sitting in the cafe she says she drove the AP to for a chat? A question for her could be, "Why drive to a café to talk when you could have talked in his apartment without the risk of any customers seeing you out with a man other than your husband?"

The thing about you trying to do harm to her ‘partner’ in an unhealthy way is just breathtaking. Sorry, but who is she to lecture anyone about healthy behaviour after what she has done? She is trying to control you by guilting you out of holding that piece of crap accountable instead of rugsweeping, rolling over, and doing nothing.

The thing about it being your responsibility to do nothing and rugsweep, forgetting what the AP and your wife did – how very convenient for both of them! – to build a new level of trust between the two of you is equally breathtaking. It’s bullshit. It is not your responsibility to build trust, it is hers. You did not betray anyone. She did. You are 100% as trustworthy as you have always been. You have no trust-building to do. That work is entirely on her, after her egregious betrayal of your trust. It does not require you to roll over, play dead, and take whatever crap has been done to you.

If your wife does not agree with the course you are taking, so be it. She needs to think long and hard about the likely impact of her insulting you or fighting you on the potential for the marriage to survive. Your wife is yo-yoing because she knows she is caught between a rock and a hard place now she has lost control of the situation. The only way forward to save the marriage is not you pretending nothing happened and doing nothing, but your wife abandoning any attempt to control the outcome, being open and honest, and committing to you and whatever you need to enable your healing.

Stick to your guns, MD. You are doing the right thing.

I am sorry that the store in question was so integral to the business. That is not your fault. None of this is your fault. There is a crude old saying, "Don’t sh*t where you eat". It’s something your wife should have thought about before doing what she did.

Sorry if my message above seemed angry. I’m really angry right now, because of my wife’s terrible way of handling the news of the fact that I opened the policy complaint. she’s putting me ‘between a rock and a hard place’ and I feel totally abandoned. I feel like I simply must press forward to try to get some justice, but my wife doesn’t approve of me doing it, and she’s returned to rude and disrespectful behavior. Over the past few weeks since disclosure, she has tried hard to be kind and caring and attentive, which felt really good, but now it feels like all of that was just a "honeymoon period", and now that I’m pressing for the investigation to continue, her kindness has all but gone up in smoke.

She continues to make frequent overtures that the only way for us to go forward it is for me to drop the investigation and not take it any further. Something feels very very wrong with all of this. I feel a strong instinct that there is evil afoot here and I need to keep going forward and investigating and see what I can do to eradicate it. If I don’t at least try hard to make something happen, I don’t think I can ever heal, and truly go forward into the future. Just sweeping what this guy did to my family under the rug would torture me forever, so onward I will go!

It sounds like your wife has been trying several different angles to try and control you, and by controlling you, to control the outcome. The fact that it has not worked, and that you are sticking to your guns, is undoubtedly the reason she the initial kindness has vanished. It failed to pacify you, so it has been dropped.

The fact that she is so desperate for you to drop the investigation is the very reason why you must not drop it. As I said earlier, stick to your guns, MD. You are on the right track, as painful as it may be.

Our thoughts are with you. You have many brothers and sisters here.

EDITED TO ADD: This is important. If the district manager tries to phone you again, ask him to put his responses to all of your points in writing and mail them to you. He can tell you anything during a phone call, and later deny he said any of it. GET EVERYTHING FROM THEM IN WRITING. That, in itself, will give him pause for thought!

[This message edited by M1965 at 10:49 PM, Thursday, April 23rd]

I’m going to come at this a little sideways. These were two adults in a consenting relationship. The fact that she was married and a customer does not matter because no one was coerced. That’s why you’re not getting anywhere with the grocery store.

If (Big If) her story were true that he used his work computer to garner access to her number for personal reasons, in the UK you'd be sacked so fast your head would spin. Not sure on US law but GDPR would literally make this a criminal offense across Europe.

@InkHulk you are entirely correct and I agree with your response.

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 4:13 PM, Thursday, April 23rd]

If misuse of customer info is illegal in your state, suggesting a complaint to local law enforcement might make the district manager rethink his approach.

Have you considered how you will respond to a failed polygraph? I suspect a poly is premature unless you're ready to file for D if your W fails. If you are ready to file if she fails, my reco is to let her know now, so she has as much time as possible to realize it's truth or D.

I'm sorry you have to deal with this.