Submitted by ThrowRA_12276 t3_zyr003 in relationship_advice
My husband has a female best friend that he has known since they were kids. They dated in 6th grade and then broke up but remained good friends all this time. For a while they didn’t really talk that much or see each other. In the past couple of years, I became more friendly with her and we started hanging out more. Just this year, the dynamic started to get kind of strange.
For some background info, my husband and I have been married for about 4 years now and we have one child and I am pregnant with my second. I know some of it is my hormones, but at the same time I feel like he expects me to always be on top of the house work while I am pregnant and a stay at home mom. I do my best, but between caring for a toddler and dealing with pregnancy pain and sickness, every now and then I get behind on tasks. I also have been feeling burnt out and lonely from being the primary caregiver and not having the energy or time to see friends and it’s been giving me serious FOMO. Because of this, sometimes I do get a little sad when he goes out with friends so often but I never stop him from doing anything he feels like doing. So the combination of these things has led us to fight more.
Anyway, one night he decided to go out for drinks with aforementioned female friend. He didn’t tell me until an hour or two before, but even so I was cool with him going, I just told him I wish I could go out too, but as long as he keeps me updated I would be fine. That night he didn’t really text me at all and it felt to me like he was ignoring me. I wasn’t expecting constant contact, but little messages saying he’s safe or letting me know when he would be coming back.
In the following days he was really distant towards me and I felt like something was up. I have never before had the urge to check his phone or anything like that, even though we know each others passwords. But something felt so off, so I looked.
I ended up finding out that he was venting to this woman about our marital issues. And I may have been more understanding if she was just validating his feelings, but instead she was saying very nasty things about me and he wasn’t defending me in the slightest. When I talked to them both about it I ended up forgiving them because I understand sometimes people say things in the heat of the moment and I try to be forgiving when I can.
Not a lot happened between that and what came next, but one day the girl “jokingly” said something about joining our marriage (like a polyamory sort of thing) and my husband seemed into the idea. I tried to give it a shot but when he told me he had strong feelings for her, I felt uncomfortable and backed out. we had all previously agreed that if it came to that, we would stop.
So we stopped, but then he has been acting extremely depressed ever since. We keep going back and forth about whether we should keep trying to make our marriage work, because he said his feelings didn’t magically go away even if he doesn’t act on them and he wants to continue being best friends with her. Whether it’s actually true or not, it feels to me like losing her is more important to him than losing me. He says he still loves me and wants to make things work, but he also seems so disconnected from me. Additionally, since this happened he has stayed overnight at her house twice, once because he was too tired and the other because we had a blizzard, which would be understandable to me if it weren’t for the fact he deliberately made the decision to go to her house late at night or in bad weather conditions. I’ve tried to be calm and cool about everything.
I don’t think he’s physically cheating on me but he definitely has feelings for her that he’s admitted to and the other day she shared screenshots on her Facebook of their messages and them saying “I love you” to each other and it felt like a direct attack at me.
I honestly don’t know where to go from here. Before this I felt like things were overall pretty good. My husband and I have a lot in common and we make a good parenting team. Our sex life was fine, we had shared interests that we enjoyed together. Now that all this has happened I don’t know what to do. I love him and I want to make things work, for us and for our children. At the same time, I don’t think he is willing to budge or compromise with his connection to this girl and I don’t want to keep going in circles. How can I stop this situation from going in circles?
TLDR: My husband told me he has feelings about his best female friend who has made me uncomfortable for a while, and now it is derailing our marriage.