https://np.reddit.com/r/survivinginfidelity/comments/dridc1/husband_confessed_to_cheating_after_mental/

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Here's a copy of the post:

" Husband confessed to cheating after mental breakdown and walking out of home

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tl:dr: Husband disappeared from work and home without telling anyone after a mental breakdown, then he finally confessed at the hospital that he was cheating on me with a coworker the past 4 months.

Warning: this is going to be a long post. I found out about the cheating in the most dramatic way, and I'm at a loss on how to move on and I just need to talk.

About three weeks ago, I got a call from the police on my way home from work. It turned out that my husband's boss contacted them to do a welfare check on him as he had disappeared from work in the middle of the day and failed to show up for a meeting that afternoon. They were unable to find him at home as well. Long story short, I eventually managed to track him down using a feature of his phone, and found out that he was at a hotel in Quebec. Local police was alerted and they brought him to a hospital in Quebec. Me and his parents flew to Quebec the next morning to go to the hospital to see him. When we got to the hospital, we realized that he was not verbally speaking to anybody. He was sending me and his parents text messages to ask for simple demands like food or his computer, but apart from that, he did not speak a work to anyone. Eventually he managed to speak to a doctor at the hospital about what happened verbally in private, as they required him to speak in order to release him, and he really hated that hospital. And tbh I don't blame him, it was a horrible experience, no one checked on him the entire time he was there, and he was never able to speak to a psychiatrist like promised.

Anyway we finally managed to bring him home after a week and admitted him at a mental hospital locally. This was supposed to be the best mental hospital in the country. But unfortunately, it was Columbus weekend, so he was there for three days before he was able to speak to a psychiatrist. He made it very clear to me that he would not be able to verbally talk to me at all until he had spoken to a psychiatrist first. So when he finally spoke to a psychiatrist a week and a half after he walked out, he started to speak to me about simple errands like bringing him clothes/books/dinner verbally. I was relieved at first, but then I was still worried since he was still not telling me why he had a mental breakdown.

We also had a busy schedule coming up: we had a gathering planned with some friends that weekend, and he was scheduled to go on another work trip to Europe (he actually just returned from a work trip from Europe 2 days before he walked out...), and we also had a big trip planned to go to another country for a friend's wedding at the end of the year. He seemed to want to follow through with all these plans: he booked all the tickets for the wedding trip while he was still not speaking to me in Quebec, and he also got a tickets for a show in Europe for when he would be there in November. And I suggested to him that this might not give him much time to recover, maybe we could at least skip the gathering with friends, but he insisted that he would like to go. Meanwhile, I felt I was on the verge of breaking down myself, I didn't know what was wrong and I was scared that I did something horrible and I might accidentally trigger him without knowing. Finally, he decided that he could tell his dad what happened, so his dad went to the hospital alone one day to see him and he told him what happened. But I was still in the dark, and somehow his dad knowing while I still didn't know made it way worse. I felt like we were strangers and not a team anymore, since I was being let in to help.

Eventually I raised my concerns with him, and he said that his social worker/doctor had been pressing him to do a 'family session' during which he would tell me what happened. So I went to the hospital and sure enough, he confessed to me that he was cheating on me for 4 months. In a way I was grateful that this happened with his social worker and nurse present, I felt their presence reassuring in a way. If I were to find out alone with him, I didn't know how I would have reacted. Still I felt like the world crashed on me, I never thought he would cheat on me.

The other woman is based in the European office. My husband takes a trip to Europe about every 1.5 - 2 months. She is in her mid Thirties and just got married in September (we are both in our late twenties, but married for 6 years, we married young...I'll talk about that later in the post) The way the affair started was also a little sickening: We went on a trip in Europe together in March, and he brought me to the European office for a brief visit during the trip. And this woman was one of the people I met that day. She told my husband that she thought she was way prettier than me when she met me, so she decided to sleep with my husband and make him leave me. And of course, she finally made her move 3 months later. She bought him drinks one night after work when other people left, and got him very drunk. Then she started making out with him and he didn't resist...It's ironic because she did not leave any impression on me. I did not think about her until he told me that he cheated on he with her. And all I remember is a short woman in her thirties to forties with bright red lipstick. I know this is very shallow, but part of the emotional roller coaster I have been on after finding out is to do with my self-esteem. I would tell myself one day that I know for sure that I'm way better than her, and he was stupid. And doubt myself the next day that maybe I'm not as good as I think I am, and that's why he never resisted her advances.

Anyway my husband kept seeing her every time he would go to Europe for work. He claimed that they would meet up in the hotel room for sex for a few times while he was there, and it would usually start with her asking him if he wanted to see her that night, and he would always say yes. Then she got married in early September, and they saw each other again on his last business trip which was in late September/early October. After he flew back home, she texted him that she wanted to break it off. And then he created a fake email under my name, and sent her husband an email telling him about the affair while pretending to be me. She found out, so she started sending messages to the fake email address thinking it was me, and also started sending him angry messages too. And apparently she also called my husband with her own husband on the phone, since her husband wanted proof that the affair was real, and she was hoping my husband would lie for her. But of course he didn't. I found out about this later in the hospital. I knew nothing about it that weekend. When he came home that weekend, I noticed that he looked exhausted and really unkempt. I asked him if he were ok, but he said he's fine, just jet lagged and overworked. So I did not want to press it further to allow him to recover. Then on Monday, she was still sending him angry messages on work slack, and he also had a big important meeting with a client coming up on Wednesday, so he decided that he couldn't take it anymore and he walked out. His boss called the police after noticing he's missing and the other woman forwarded an email that he sent to her pretending to be me. Apparently in this message, he wrote while pretending to be me that this woman ruined his life and now he wanted to kill himself. I asked him if he really wanted to kill himself, he said no. He only wrote that to piss off that woman, but who knows...

My husband also says that this affair was strictly sexual. He said he only kept seeing her because of the sexual attention he was getting. He insisted that he did not have feelings for her or wanted to be with her. But when he told me at the hospital that day, I asked him if he still had lingering feelings for her, and he was just crying and couldn't answer. That made me really doubt that there was no feeling. And last night I decided to check his slack, and I saw that suspiciously all his chat history with her are from that Monday when he disappeared. There was no chat messages from earlier even though they have been coworkers for a year now. Anyway, I saw that she quoted one of the messages he sent earlier in one of her chats, and I saw that he wrote: I just think we could have made each other very happy. And she replied and said no we can't, I don't even love you. I asked him about this, and he said he doesn't remember, and he insisted again that there was no feelings, and he probably said that about sex, and he was annoyed that I was angry over this with no context. Since that message was a quoted message, I could not see the conversation when he said that. I find it hard to accept that explanation.

I have to say that things were not going too smooth between us since late last year. Late last year I was in a job that I did not like due to a toxic boss and limited career opportunities at the small company I was working at. I eventually decided to switch job and started a new company this summer. But while this was going on, I was very busy with my own work and job search. I did not pay as much attention to him. And his work is also always very busy. So we were putting less and less effort in the relationship. And to add on to that, we have always had some communication issues. My husband has the tendency of stonewalling people when he is extremely upset. When he is angry or upset with me, he would simply refuse to talk to me. And eventually when he felt a little better, he would start texting me, and then talk to me. This has been extremely upsetting for me since I want him to just tell me what is going on. I have spoken to him in the past about this issue, but we did not take this seriously enough. And it of course backfired now. From talking to his family, I realized that this behavior started when he was a teenager.

He also has trouble with intimacy sometimes. He has always been uncomfortable bringing up anything sex related, even to me. And the reason why he said he cheated was because the sex was better. I have to agree with him that our sex was terrible. But that was because we stopped putting in effort, and I always felt this distance from him. We married in our early twenties after college. When we first met, I wasn't sure if I wanted to be with him. I had to admit that I was an asshole back then. I thought he was sweet and nice but also not as attractive/cool as my past boyfriends, and I gave him shit about this the first month we were together. He, on the other hand, did not have much experience with girls. He was shy and a little nerdy. And I think he had self esteem issues when he was with me. I wish I could go back time and not be such an asshole, but I was young and shallow, I will always regret that. I fell in love with him the more time we spent together and I stopped being a jerk to him.

But as time goes on, he started to become more of a jerk to me sometimes. He had trouble with expressing affection sometimes. And this honestly is partly my fault...but he stopped wanting to kiss me at some point in our relationship. None of us could remember exactly when this started. But I think this happened when I would tease him and ask him to kiss me in public, and he would feel really shy and refuse to do that. And I found his shyness amusing at the time, so I would keep asking him to kiss me and he would refuse. And somehow that got stuck. Again, another thing I would not do if I had the foresight.

Another thing he would be mean sometimes is my appearance. Occasionally my skin would get a breakout on my face, he would always come over and point at me and say Huge breakout. I tried to brush it off since I know he's just teasing, I have to say it still made me feel like shit. I have always been a very skinny person. But earlier this year, I gained a little weight. And whenever I was changing in our bedroom, he would come over and pinch my waist and say chunky. Mind you, I was never that big, at my heaviest I was 130 lb for a 5 feet 6 inches tall person, and I have since lost 10 lbs. But this had a serious effect on my self esteem. I'm always on a diet and I got to all kinds of fitness classes, and I still feel fat. I know I'm not rationally, but it's something I can't shake off. It's funny because he's actually on the bigger side. I tried to ask him to start being a bit more active and eat healthier in the past, but I stopped doing that after we had a fight late last year. After that fight, he had a talk with me and told me that it hurts his self esteem when me and his family point out that he needs to lose weight. So I stopped bringing up his weight. And the last year, he has been particularly bad, and I think subconsciously he lost some sex appeal to me. This didn't help since we were already not putting effort into our relationship.

Last weekend he bought me makeup and perfume. He said it's because I used to wear makeup when we first met, and makeup reminded him of the good ole days. And the other woman wore a lot of makeup, and he said he subconsciously liked that because of that too. And he wanted me to wear perfume because he wanted to have a scent that always reminds him of me. But I'm not really convinced, he admitted that the other woman wore a lot of perfume, but he said this scent is totally different from hers. And that he's not trying to turn me into her or anything....

We started seeing a marriage counselor last week, and we are actually going to one later today. But I'm not even sure what I want to do anymore. I wanted to save my marriage at first, we do have good times together. But I can't get over the fact that he cheated on me like this. He has shown a lot of remorse since we talked to each other that Friday at the hospital. But it concerns me that he admitted that he still couldn't see things clearly until he spoke to me. I don't want to always have to point out the obvious to him. And I don't understand how his judgement was still so clouded after having had sessions with his psychiatrist at the hospital. And the last thing is, I feel our relationship is never the same after it's shattered like this. You know how a glass will always show cracks after it's glued back from shattered pieces? I feel like that's us right now. And I don't know if I want this.

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