Husband doesn’t consider this an issue.
My husband and I have been together since we were 16 years old and we are now 35. We have three kids together and overall our real-life relationship is actually quite loving and stable. We get along well, we function well as a family, and I genuinely trust him with my life.
However, over the years I’ve occasionally discovered that he sometimes interacts with women online in ways that cross a line for me.
Recently I found messages where he had been talking to a woman online for several weeks. The conversations weren’t explicitly sexual, but he did present himself as single and open to “seeing where things go.” He also shared some casual photos from his daily life and asked for her social media. When I confronted him, he said he started messaging her because he disagreed with some of her posts in a forum and was basically just “messing around online” and didn’t think of it as serious.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen questionable online behavior. A couple of years ago I also saw a message where he complimented a woman’s body in a pretty inappropriate way. Years earlier there was an anonymous social media account where he and a friend would sometimes leave flirtatious comments on women’s posts and have full conversations. What hurts the most is that i never got to see how these convos panned out, not because he didn’t pursue them- but because the girls never showed enough interest to allow him to take it to the next step. So technically i dont know what would happen if a girl actually said “oh you sound hot ket’s meet”. I believe in my heart that he would def meet for coffee and then justify that it was just coffee. I dont believe he would do anything physical. He insists none of this was ever meant to lead to anything real and that he would never physically cheat.
To be clear, I actually do believe that he would never pursue anything in real life. He’s very committed to our family and our faith, and when I confront him he apologizes and acknowledges that the behavior is inappropriate. I am not looking for “divorce him” comments cuz i think alot of people here just say these platitudes without really thinking that through. If that’s your advice, justify it. Note also we are both educated and high-income earning professionals. I think it’s alot to do with two people who have been together from a young age and have built lives together, and are now wanting to explore fantasies, but maybe that’s just what I want to believe. He’s also excellent with my family, friends, etc. very kind and always takes care of every single thing. I have full freedom to do anything, and he is super appreciative of the things i do at home like cooking etc and spending time with the kids- also, he’s a great dad.
At the same time, it still hurts. I’ve told him before that these kinds of interactions bother me.
Lately my thinking has shifted a bit. Since we’ve been together our entire adult lives and he views these online interactions as meaningless fantasy or entertainment, I told him that maybe the only fair approach is that I’m also free to talk to people online in the same way — nothing real-life, just conversations, flirting, etc.
From my perspective, that at least puts us on equal footing and removes the secrecy.
But I’m honestly not sure if this is a healthy way to handle it or if I’m just reacting emotionally.
For context:
• We’ve been together almost 20 years
• We have three kids
• In everyday life we are loving and supportive partners
• There has been some distance in intimacy over the years, especially during pregnancies and postpartum periods
I’m curious how others would view this, I will be doing the same to him from now on cuz he considers this all “not cheating”, just “trolling”, and says it is fully meaningless. So i am now also looking for virtual time passes/dirty talking cuz he has normalized it as long as we are “coming home to eachother”.