Submitted by sunmat02 t3_10mdgxa in relationship_advice
My girlfriend and I have been together for 7 years, living together for 6, in the UK.
For the past couple of years she would occasionally go on a night out in London (an hour and a half away from where we live) with a female coworker (whom I never met) to go see musicals. On these occasions they would usually take a train and stay at a hotel in London for the night, and she would come back the next day.
Tonight is one such a night. But for some reason this time I found myself opening the Find My app on our iPad, which turned out to be linked to her Apple account and also shows the location of her iPhone. It's hard to remember why I did that after the shock that it caused, my recollection is that I was curious which hotel she was staying at, as she had not told me, it was late and she had already gone to bed, so I thought this was an easy way to find out.
Well, you see it coming: she (at least her iPhone) isn't in London. She is in a hotel 3 miles away, in our city.
Now I can't sleep. I have repeated panick attacks. This puts in question all her previous nights out. I realize that even though my intention wasn't to doubt her, the fact that I got to know her real location this way makes me look really bad. I can't keep this for me, I need to have a discussion with her when she comes back, but I don't know how to best turn it so that it doesn't back fire on me. Any suggestions?
TL;DR: I found out by accident, via her iPhone location, that my girlfriend is not spending the night where she said she is. How do I bring this up in the most productive manner so it doesn't back fire?
UPDATE
I will disappoint those who wanted this to end in a messy breakup. This ends with us separating... sort of. But before I get to it, a bit of background: both my girlfriend and I are engineers, working from home. My girlfriend moved in with me when she was 26. Prior to that she was living with her parents, so she never lived alone. She is also a workaholic and always has been, so when she was at her parents, the parents would do all the chores and she would just work 16 hours a day, eat and sleep. When she moved in with me, I tried to bring her to have hobbies, disconnect from her work, but I also mostly enabled her workaholism by doing the large majority of the chores. This situation has killed all romance in our relationship. We no longer do anything together apart from eating and sleeping. We know this is a problem, we both suffer from it, and we have talked about it a bit in the past, without resolution. Over the past year she has been seeing a therapist (a woman that she has a zoom call with once a week) to try to solve her workaholism problem in hope to make her life and relationship better.
Now back to this morning: I texted her that I was taking the day off because I had panic attacks the whole night. She asked me what caused them, and I said it's really a face-to-face conversation. She got pretty scared and asked if I can still call and tell her over the phone. So I did. I said I saw her location on the iPad, and that she had not been in London as she claimed. Then I said "be honest with me, where are you right now?". She answered "in [our city]". I said "Can we continue this conversation when you get home?". She said "yes".
The first thing she said when she got home was "before you freak out, no I didn't cheat on you". We sat down and talked, she explained to me that, last week, her therapist suggested that her workaholism was caused by the fact that she never actually had to manage her life herself, she could just earn money and have the people around her do the rest, and that she should consider us moving into separate apartments for a little while, to make her see that work is not everything and how important her relationship is. The therapist also said to think about this solution ideally away from both home and work, because at home her answer was a straight "nope". So she booked a night in a hotel for some alone time and used as a cover the only thing that does actually get her out of the house overnight: nights out in London with her coworker. She wasn't surprised that I got suspicious, because she had not given any details about her hotel, the musical she would see, etc. contrary to all her previous nights out, and she had rushed out pretending she was late before I could ask questions. She said she had not told me about the real reason because she knew I was already under stress at work, so her plan was to figure out what she wanted to do on her own, then bring it up to me after my work deadlines, in a couple of weeks.
Now we are on the same page about the problem our relationship is facing. She is looking at apartments and we will restart dating (something we didn't get a chance to properly do at the beginning of our relationship because she lived too far away and with her parents). Best case scenario it does improve her workaholism, forcing her to spend quality time with me. Worst case scenario it does not and she will just have to face the fact that she should probably remain single, while providing me with an easier way out. I think the latter is probably what's going to happen: I don't see her moderating on work, it's just in her nature.
I looked through some more comments down and to answer quickly those who think she got her chance to set her story straight: you can imagine that what I'm summarizing is a 2h conversation with a lot of doubt and evidence. I am pretty convinced that she is being truthful. Besides, moving into a new apartment is not in her interest whatsoever, from any point of view: she will pay more, she will have to do the chores herself, and she doesn't know if she's going to loose me in the process. I made my point pretty clear that if she was cancelling dates for work meetings, we would be over for good.