Learned some things -- accidentally -- about my wife's previous sex life

[CrashDavis89]

I took six-month physicals starting three years prior to meeting my wife and have every year since. An STD screening is always part of the lab work.

Yes, she was tested three years after we were married, as part of the rountine bloodword for her pregnancy.

Everyone is healthy with no STD.

[misombra]

and do you know that she wasn't tested before you all were married?

it sounds like things are fine. just explain to her about your sensitivity to std's and that if she cheats just to please keep the germs away from you.

you can't stop her from cheating. you can't stop anybody from cheating. it's a risk people take.

it sounds like you want things to work, and what you read is freaking you out. you shouldn't read peoples journals. you will always find something you don't want to know. that's why she put it in there, because she didn't want anybody to know. probably because they would freak out and hold it against her.

[CrashDavis89]

and she told me as much.

In terms of reading the journal . . . it was in a box of mixed notebooks, papers, etc. from both of us. It is time for spring cleaning. I am between jobs and had time to go through the boxes. The journal was written in a notebook that was mixed in with a bunch of notebooks she had made that had diets and workout routines. Additionally, some of the journal entries included details on her workouts. These included charts. My wife is starting a new workout, she asked me to go through the notebooks and look for her workout info, stating "you know, honey, I do them up in charts . . . go through the ones with charts"; for the reasons stated above, the journal had charts. On a facing page to a workout chart was another chart, I checked that one too (it was labeled pros and cons . . . my wife, by the way, does pros and cons for everything, including workouts, so I read this chart to see if this workout had worked for her) . .but these pros and cons were about a guy she dated six months before me . . under cons was "has an STD" . . . the journal reading was not intentional (all this was explained in a prior post, BTW) but once a health consideration for me came into play, I didn't feel quite so bad about reading it.

[misombra]

well crash, unfortunately you can't change this. she's std free, and so are you. hopefully she's learned her lesson and continue on the right path. people are tempted, naturally. but it seems she's been a good wife and mother. is her father in her life, or was he when she was young? a lot of times girls that don't have their fathers around want male attention. it's definitely not something to be proud of, but it's part of her and something she'll have to deal with. if she's been good to you, and your child, i say time will heal this one.

[CrashDavis89]

definitely. Her parents have been married for 41 years, but her father was a bit distant and uncommunicative growing up.

As my wife tells it, she was overweight and unattractive until puberty, when the weight disappeared, she was blessed with natural female gifts and the male of the species began paying tremendous attention to her. She said that for whatever reason, she a) always worries too much about what people think and b) attaches too much self worth to her being sexually attrative/desirable to the opposite sex.

Now, there's no lack of attention on my part . . on average we have sex 4-5 times a week. If my son goes to his grandparents for a few days, maybe more. Of course, maybe I'm lousy in bed and she doesn't want to tell me and is looking for someone more skilled. I am being somewhat sarcastic with that last comment, but you never know . . .

[Gigabitch]

I want an answer to the question about whether you feel that she understands that she's done you an injustice. Does she think this is just something she got busted for and you're now going to put it behind you like it never happened or is she planning on doing the work she needs to do to rebuild trust?

Does she understand that forgiveness isn't absolution?

[CrashDavis89]

She says she is convinced I will never trust her, then in the next breath she says that we need to move forward,that that is all we can do, and that we need to put it behind us. Since the topic was broached when I didn't have the journal, after we discussed it in the car, she told me she hopes I destroyed it, she doesn't want to see it, and that as long as I keep bringing it up, we can't move forward.

I guess her answer for building trust is for me to say that we are moving forward, not mentioning anything about the journal and that I just have to believe when she says I can trust her.

[Gigabitch]

Yeah, my husband wanted to do that too. Fortunately, he came to realize that grinning sheepishly and saying, "My bad!" wasn't going to cut it.

What worked for us was transparency. No more ****ing lying about anything, ever, for any reason, and no sneakiness or weaselly behavior. He's done some personal work to root out the cause of weaselly behavior and stop it for good, which had been pretty successful.

In my opinion, your wife should do the same. She should commit to rooting out the cause of her weaselly behavior and make sure it doesn't threaten your marriage any more. How are you supposed to "move forward" if you know she has been thinking about cheating on you?

Gaaaah. I wish it was her posting on here rather than you. I've got some things to say to her about taking responsibility for her actions, past and future.

[CrashDavis89]

The fact is, even though I agreed we needed to move forward, the degree of dishonesty is eating away at me.

In addition to the STD issue, I think that she . . . for fear of hurting my feelings . . . has been dishonest about the quality of previous lovers. I'm sure some of them were very good, some better than me, but I am always wanting to improve our sex life so I ask her things she likes, wants to try,e tc. I think if it something she learned from another lover, she holds it back because she told me they were all mediocre at best.

I know from her journal that three months before we started dating, she had "mind-blowing sex" three time in about an 8-hour period at some guy's house on their second date. My wife and I were in our 30s when we married, so statistically, there's high liklihood that she had some good to great to mind-blowing sex before me. That part doesn't bother me; I want to know what about those experiences made it so great . . . I figure that can only improve the quality of our sex life. Her refusal to talk about it, because it forces her to revisit lying to me makes me trust her less. Further, if it is all related to her not wanting to hurt my feelings, or not wanting me to leave because I'm not as good as she says I am . .. better to know that and deal with it. But it's pretty hard to do when it is a one-way conversation. She won't discuss it with me and now says we need to just move on and forget couseling.

[Gigabitch]

Well, what did your ex-lovers have to say about it? Any feedback there?

[CrashDavis89]

I was married once before, and my ex-wife was very complimentary until we had been married four years . . .then we stopped having sex. It's a long story, but she pretty much withdrew from everything in our marriage. When were sexually active, she told me that I was very nicely endowed (but not 'freakishly huge' as she liked to say) and knew how to pay attention to all parts of a woman's body and react to the signals she was putting off as to where she was responding the most to touch and sensation.

The rest of the women were in college, and that's a mixed bag . . just depending on the circumsances, length of relationship, level of inebriation, etc.

I don't count the women I was with in high school.

[Gigabitch]

This sucks. Her insecurities are feeding yours. I feel for you, Crash.

[CrashDavis89]

I really don't know what to do . . . I'm confused about everything right now, and really filled with self doubt. Let me ask you this . .. do you think she disregards how her actions and reactions affect me because she doesn't respect me?

[Gigabitch]

No, I don't think it's anything to do with you, actually. It's about her, right? Everything is, I would imagine. Am I wrong?

[Sonrisa]

Giga is very quick to blame the OTHER person who has no chance to defend her/him self.