Here we go, folks, yet another sorted tale of woe.
Speaking of yet another, here is yet another apology for the length of this post.
I (40'sM) found out that my GF (40'sF) of nearly 10 years has been cheating on me.
To some degree.
With the UPS guy?
GF and I have been together for over 9 years and living together for over 6. She has a son who I love as if he were my very own son.
For the first year and a half, our intimacy was gangbusters, if you'll pardon the expression. That was until 1/4 into our first year when I ran into some financial and emotional difficulties. We powered through it and were the stronger for it.
I really thought I had found someone that would stick by me through thick and thin. Someone I could really open up to and be myself, which is something I had trouble finding up until that point.
Yet, it was then, now mid-way into our second year, that our intimacy began the inevitable decline from the honeymoon phase. By year 3, sex had gone from several times per week to several times per month. As she was an amazing GF in every other possible way, I didn't let it get to me that much. Even when we were "like rabbits" she was never what I would call a sexual person. For one, she refused to do oral on me in any way, even though I was happy to do so to her.
When we had sex, I would usually initiate, something that, in hindsight, bothered me, but not enough to bring it up. As I said, she was so amazing to me in every other way (supportive, loving, kind, caring, great fun to be around) that I felt it evened things out.
We got along famously, I wouldn't have asked her to move in had we not!
Our arguments, when we had them, mostly concerned money, or, in our case, a constant lack of money, and the fact that she was always late, and in turn, making me late.
You know, normal couples stuff, right?
By year 5, our intimacy fell off a cliff. From once a month to several times per year......up until February of 2017.
That's when the sex stopped. We haven't had sex since early February of 2017.
Nearly FIVE YEARS.
I have tried everything, and I mean EVERYTHING to try and figure out why the sex suddenly stopped.
I'd bring it up.
I'd get upset about it.
I'd yell at her about it.
I'd get exhausted about it.
I'd ask her if it was me.
I'd ask her if it was another man.
I'd get suicidal about it.
No matter what attempt I made to express myself and discuss these issues, I was met with the same response: there was nothing wrong, there was no one else, she just has no interest in intimacy any longer, she could not explain why, and she has no interest in correcting it.
We continued as we were. More like roommates than anything else. I still loved her son as if he was my own. I was, and am, a financial idiot, so I was unable to move out on my own. I admit, part of that was laziness, but I let things continue. I shifted my focus to my health, which I had let slide. Now that I was over 45, I had to correct that, so I worked on that. Over the past 3 years I've lost nearly 120 pounds, gave up meat, and am healthier, and fitter, than I've been in 30 years. I shifted my focus to correcting my finances, and worked on my career, and focused on work and me.
We still got along, but the non-sexual great things about her also started to change:
For the past two years, she's been sleeping on the couch full time. Claims it's because I snore. I do snore, though less now that I'm thinner, but it's just one other thing I've given up fighting. I enjoy having my bed back to myself, and my 5 cats don't mind having the extra space either!
Within the past year, she suddenly had an issue with the fact that we were on "find my" on our iPhones as we were in an iCloud family. We always took advantage, in good ways, of the fact that we can keep track of when someone was out, on the way home, whatever. At one point within the past year she turned off her tracking, and, when confronted with it, reacted angrily. I don't need to know her every movement and she found it creepy. Creepy? After 7 years suddenly this is an issue? I never once stalked, asked why she was at a certain place, all we used it for was when one of us did the food shopping, we'd know when to help the other when they were pulling into the driveway. Things like that. Now, out of nowhere, this became an issue.
I began to suspect. I'd ask her, she'd deny it. Even so far as saying I was silly for even thinking I'd complicate things like that with someone else.
I'd let it go yet again. I really did try everything humanly possible to get through to her, so I at least had some comfort in that, fleeting though it might have been.
My focus was on my health and my finances. I wanted to afford this home on my own. It was my apartment before her, and I wished for it to be my own apartment again without her.
I focused on that.
All the other, non-sexual things that I adored about her also died out in 2021. She no longer told me she loved me, no longer was the caring, kind person I used to know. We were roommates, and distant ones at that. If I tried to hug her or tell her I loved her, she would almost recoil. If I told her I loved her, she would mumble a reply. If I so much as touch her shoulder, she would recoil like I just put a hot coal on her back. Even so far as to sometimes say "get off of me" and "don't touch me." It would always take me a second to recover from such a strong aversion to a mere hand on a shoulder of an attempt to hug.
My first hint of Mr. UPS (let's leave his name out) came over this past summer. As I am a techie and an avid reader of tech blogs and forums, I keep up with the latest in iOS. An innocent demonstration of the focus notification feature in iOS 15 on her phone to her, with her permission. With focus settings, you can set notifications to cease at certain times of the day or at certain locations and allow only certain apps, or messages from certain people, to keep you from being distracted while at work, etc. This was a feature she claimed to know nothing about, yet when I showed her how it worked on her phone, at her request, Mr. UPS was already in a focus group, one I was not in, btw. When I asked who he was, and why he was in a focus group that seemed already set up for while she was at work, she responded by claiming not to know "why her phone decided to do that." Mr. UPS was the delivery dude who has been delivering to the town she works in and has worked in for years, she explained. She's almost as techie as I am, and always installs the latest phone updates when they come out. The odds of her phone "simply choosing to add him to a focus group" without her knowing it was slim to none. C'mon.
This past fall I began a new job close to home that I could walk to for significantly more money. Great company, great people, endless possibilities, and room for advancement.
At about the same time, she decided that she preferred to run all the household errands without me instead of together, as we had always done. Friday night runs to the local supermarket together became hours-long excursions that would run from early Saturday morning to early in the afternoon at times. There were sudden trips to help her family member I wasn't needed to be on, and rushing out for work at 6:15 when she used to leave closer to 7:30 to her job, not 6 miles away.
All the cliches were there: quickly looking away or putting down from her phone if I walked by. Complete distance from me. We slept in separate rooms, we lived in separate rooms.
Any and all questions about whether she was seeing someone else were met with emphatic denials.
This ridiculously long preamble brings me to last night.
She came home, as she always does, from work with a few groceries in tow. Roughly 60 minutes later she ran out to go pick up her son from his GF's house. She always prided herself in being his personal UBER.
Walking by the couch to go to the bathroom I noticed that she......
Forgot her Apple Watch on the charger.
By good fortune, to me anyway, I had at one point happened to see her passcode to unlock her iPhone. She didn't notice that I saw what the 4 digits were, and I stored that little tidbit into my brain for safekeeping.
It came in handy last night.
Without any attempt to resist temptation, I grabbed that watch and unlocked it like my life depended on it, and opened the messenger app.
There he was. Mr. UPS.
Endless, and I mean endless messages about where they can quickly meet, how great it was to see him, calling him honey, sending heart emojis, intimate emojis, how he was the best thing to happen to her in 2021, and how she was looking forward to 2022 with him. How she needed to schedule a UPS pickup and couldn't wait to see his handsome face.
On and on, you get the picture.
I put the watch back on my charger, locked it, and confided in one of my oldest friends. The same friend who, when I confided in the total and complete end of our intimate life, replied with the following:
"Dude, you don't just stop. Humans don't work that way. You don't stop completely unless there is another source."
Turns out he was right.
So, here we are folks. Present time. I am sitting in my bedroom office, MacBook open, headphones plugged in, Bernard Herrmann playing, blogging, and journaling away gathering my thoughts to share with you, good people.
As it stands now, I do not intend to confront her with this knowledge. To do so would reveal how I came to learn this definitively in the first place. I only wish I had the common sense to have taken screenshots, difficult though that might be with an apple watch.
My emotions are mainly of.....relief? Relief in the knowledge that I know for sure. I am always the type of person who prefers to know definitely rather than having to guess. It's the guessing that drives me up a wall. Now that I know, for sure, that she has been cheating, has been lying, has been unfaithful, I can move on, and move on I shall.
The plan that has been formulated in my head since last night is to finally break up this dead relationship and ask her to leave this week. As her son is an adult, and we get along, I will leave the decision to move or stay up to him. I will not tell her I know about Mr. UPS, for reasons I've already explained.
I thank you for reading, for sticking with this, and for any and all comments you might have. I will answer them, and edit this, as best as I can if there is anything to add over the next few days.
Thank you!
Speaking of yet another, here is yet another apology for the length of this post.
I (40'sM) found out that my GF (40'sF) of nearly 10 years has been cheating on me.
To some degree.
With the UPS guy?
GF and I have been together for over 9 years and living together for over 6. She has a son who I love as if he were my very own son.
For the first year and a half, our intimacy was gangbusters, if you'll pardon the expression. That was until 1/4 into our first year when I ran into some financial and emotional difficulties. We powered through it and were the stronger for it.
I really thought I had found someone that would stick by me through thick and thin. Someone I could really open up to and be myself, which is something I had trouble finding up until that point.
Yet, it was then, now mid-way into our second year, that our intimacy began the inevitable decline from the honeymoon phase. By year 3, sex had gone from several times per week to several times per month. As she was an amazing GF in every other possible way, I didn't let it get to me that much. Even when we were "like rabbits" she was never what I would call a sexual person. For one, she refused to do oral on me in any way, even though I was happy to do so to her.
When we had sex, I would usually initiate, something that, in hindsight, bothered me, but not enough to bring it up. As I said, she was so amazing to me in every other way (supportive, loving, kind, caring, great fun to be around) that I felt it evened things out.
We got along famously, I wouldn't have asked her to move in had we not!
Our arguments, when we had them, mostly concerned money, or, in our case, a constant lack of money, and the fact that she was always late, and in turn, making me late.
You know, normal couples stuff, right?
By year 5, our intimacy fell off a cliff. From once a month to several times per year......up until February of 2017.
That's when the sex stopped. We haven't had sex since early February of 2017.
Nearly FIVE YEARS.
I have tried everything, and I mean EVERYTHING to try and figure out why the sex suddenly stopped.
I'd bring it up.
I'd get upset about it.
I'd yell at her about it.
I'd get exhausted about it.
I'd ask her if it was me.
I'd ask her if it was another man.
I'd get suicidal about it.
No matter what attempt I made to express myself and discuss these issues, I was met with the same response: there was nothing wrong, there was no one else, she just has no interest in intimacy any longer, she could not explain why, and she has no interest in correcting it.
We continued as we were. More like roommates than anything else. I still loved her son as if he was my own. I was, and am, a financial idiot, so I was unable to move out on my own. I admit, part of that was laziness, but I let things continue. I shifted my focus to my health, which I had let slide. Now that I was over 45, I had to correct that, so I worked on that. Over the past 3 years I've lost nearly 120 pounds, gave up meat, and am healthier, and fitter, than I've been in 30 years. I shifted my focus to correcting my finances, and worked on my career, and focused on work and me.
We still got along, but the non-sexual great things about her also started to change:
For the past two years, she's been sleeping on the couch full time. Claims it's because I snore. I do snore, though less now that I'm thinner, but it's just one other thing I've given up fighting. I enjoy having my bed back to myself, and my 5 cats don't mind having the extra space either!
Within the past year, she suddenly had an issue with the fact that we were on "find my" on our iPhones as we were in an iCloud family. We always took advantage, in good ways, of the fact that we can keep track of when someone was out, on the way home, whatever. At one point within the past year she turned off her tracking, and, when confronted with it, reacted angrily. I don't need to know her every movement and she found it creepy. Creepy? After 7 years suddenly this is an issue? I never once stalked, asked why she was at a certain place, all we used it for was when one of us did the food shopping, we'd know when to help the other when they were pulling into the driveway. Things like that. Now, out of nowhere, this became an issue.
I began to suspect. I'd ask her, she'd deny it. Even so far as saying I was silly for even thinking I'd complicate things like that with someone else.
I'd let it go yet again. I really did try everything humanly possible to get through to her, so I at least had some comfort in that, fleeting though it might have been.
My focus was on my health and my finances. I wanted to afford this home on my own. It was my apartment before her, and I wished for it to be my own apartment again without her.
I focused on that.
All the other, non-sexual things that I adored about her also died out in 2021. She no longer told me she loved me, no longer was the caring, kind person I used to know. We were roommates, and distant ones at that. If I tried to hug her or tell her I loved her, she would almost recoil. If I told her I loved her, she would mumble a reply. If I so much as touch her shoulder, she would recoil like I just put a hot coal on her back. Even so far as to sometimes say "get off of me" and "don't touch me." It would always take me a second to recover from such a strong aversion to a mere hand on a shoulder of an attempt to hug.
My first hint of Mr. UPS (let's leave his name out) came over this past summer. As I am a techie and an avid reader of tech blogs and forums, I keep up with the latest in iOS. An innocent demonstration of the focus notification feature in iOS 15 on her phone to her, with her permission. With focus settings, you can set notifications to cease at certain times of the day or at certain locations and allow only certain apps, or messages from certain people, to keep you from being distracted while at work, etc. This was a feature she claimed to know nothing about, yet when I showed her how it worked on her phone, at her request, Mr. UPS was already in a focus group, one I was not in, btw. When I asked who he was, and why he was in a focus group that seemed already set up for while she was at work, she responded by claiming not to know "why her phone decided to do that." Mr. UPS was the delivery dude who has been delivering to the town she works in and has worked in for years, she explained. She's almost as techie as I am, and always installs the latest phone updates when they come out. The odds of her phone "simply choosing to add him to a focus group" without her knowing it was slim to none. C'mon.
This past fall I began a new job close to home that I could walk to for significantly more money. Great company, great people, endless possibilities, and room for advancement.
At about the same time, she decided that she preferred to run all the household errands without me instead of together, as we had always done. Friday night runs to the local supermarket together became hours-long excursions that would run from early Saturday morning to early in the afternoon at times. There were sudden trips to help her family member I wasn't needed to be on, and rushing out for work at 6:15 when she used to leave closer to 7:30 to her job, not 6 miles away.
All the cliches were there: quickly looking away or putting down from her phone if I walked by. Complete distance from me. We slept in separate rooms, we lived in separate rooms.
Any and all questions about whether she was seeing someone else were met with emphatic denials.
This ridiculously long preamble brings me to last night.
She came home, as she always does, from work with a few groceries in tow. Roughly 60 minutes later she ran out to go pick up her son from his GF's house. She always prided herself in being his personal UBER.
Walking by the couch to go to the bathroom I noticed that she......
Forgot her Apple Watch on the charger.
By good fortune, to me anyway, I had at one point happened to see her passcode to unlock her iPhone. She didn't notice that I saw what the 4 digits were, and I stored that little tidbit into my brain for safekeeping.
It came in handy last night.
Without any attempt to resist temptation, I grabbed that watch and unlocked it like my life depended on it, and opened the messenger app.
There he was. Mr. UPS.
Endless, and I mean endless messages about where they can quickly meet, how great it was to see him, calling him honey, sending heart emojis, intimate emojis, how he was the best thing to happen to her in 2021, and how she was looking forward to 2022 with him. How she needed to schedule a UPS pickup and couldn't wait to see his handsome face.
On and on, you get the picture.
I put the watch back on my charger, locked it, and confided in one of my oldest friends. The same friend who, when I confided in the total and complete end of our intimate life, replied with the following:
"Dude, you don't just stop. Humans don't work that way. You don't stop completely unless there is another source."
Turns out he was right.
So, here we are folks. Present time. I am sitting in my bedroom office, MacBook open, headphones plugged in, Bernard Herrmann playing, blogging, and journaling away gathering my thoughts to share with you, good people.
As it stands now, I do not intend to confront her with this knowledge. To do so would reveal how I came to learn this definitively in the first place. I only wish I had the common sense to have taken screenshots, difficult though that might be with an apple watch.
My emotions are mainly of.....relief? Relief in the knowledge that I know for sure. I am always the type of person who prefers to know definitely rather than having to guess. It's the guessing that drives me up a wall. Now that I know, for sure, that she has been cheating, has been lying, has been unfaithful, I can move on, and move on I shall.
The plan that has been formulated in my head since last night is to finally break up this dead relationship and ask her to leave this week. As her son is an adult, and we get along, I will leave the decision to move or stay up to him. I will not tell her I know about Mr. UPS, for reasons I've already explained.
I thank you for reading, for sticking with this, and for any and all comments you might have. I will answer them, and edit this, as best as I can if there is anything to add over the next few days.
Thank you!
