Disclaimer: I am on the spectrum and my wife is most likely ADHD. With me personally I have a compulsion to have as much information about a situation as possible or it makes me uncomfortable and/or obsessive in finding that missing information. This also might end up being a bit of a wall of text as I want to get as many details as possible.

A few years ago my wife(who I’ll refer to as A) met this guy(who I’ll refer to as B) while walking home on her way from the store and he offered to help carry her bags. At the time we had just moved to where we are now and she did not have any friends so she was eager to make them when she could. From then on they started talking and hanging out, I was weary at first but I set aside my feelings because I knew how much it meant to her to have friends.

A few weeks after that they drove up to a nearby city to pick some things up and it should’ve been a straight shot there and back. At the time we had location tracking apps on our phones to keep tabs on our teenage son after getting his first phone and going out and about with friends so both myself and A were able to see each others locations at all times as a result. On their way back from the city they pulled off to a random neighborhood for about half an hour without warning and when I tried to contact her she said the service wasn’t great. The reason I was given was that B had wanted to stop by a friends and drop some things off there as well. That felt odd but I let it pass.

At the time B had a GF(who I will refer to as C) and after a few more weeks we were all friends on FB. Shortly after this a friend of B who was living with him and C, but was getting kicked out for drug use, accused B of having sex with A ‘under a bush’ and in front of her(B’s) apartment. We didn’t live at an apartment so I dismissed it as a lie told to mess with B’s relationship. So I dismissed it.

Shortly after that C sent me screenshots from B’s phone that looked really bad depending on how you interpreted it. Convo goes as follows:

A: My husband is taking the car into the shop and is walking back so I have the room to myself for once.

B: Damn, wish I wasn’t at work

A: Me too

B: How long is it going to take?

A: I just looked at the app and he’s two blocks away.

B: On his way home?

A: Yeah but you can still talk to me, he wont be looking over my shoulder.

At the time I defended A from C, saying that yeah out of context it looked bad but that they probably just meant they wanted to hang out or something. Yet that was when I started to really feel weird about A’s friendship with B but I didn’t tell her she had to stop hanging out with him or talking with him. I did talk with A about it and she confirmed it just looked bad out of context.

From then on there were many instances where they would go out to run an errand of some kind together cause B couldn’t drive and I worked from home so A would help him out to grocery shop and go to the nearby reservation for cheap smokes. The times they would go for smokes, not every time but several, they would take the ‘scenic route’ without telling me and so it would take two to three times as long to complete said errand. There was also a time where she wanted to spend time apart from me and she told me she was going to hang out with B at a nearby large retail chain parking lot for a few hours, which they did and the tracking app confirmed that. I know location data with those things isn’t perfect but it appeared as though they were off in a far corner of the lot for the majority of the time.

At one point C accused B of having sex with A while I watched for no particular reason that I was aware of and I am very much not into that sort of thing at all. No explanation was ever given as to why that accusation was made.

The suspicions kept piling up until one day I put spyware on her phone, which I know was wrong but I knew something was going on that she wasn’t telling me about, I just had this gut feeling. In the past I have gotten her a hotel room so she could have a mom break, spend time completely alone and these were during times when nothing like this was going on so I made her that offer again after she expressed she had been feeling a lot of stress lately. A few days before that in the middle of the week, A and B were sitting on my front porch while I was working from home and I was looking at the data from the spyware app. While they were sitting there they sent the following:

B: I cant wait to get you in that bed this weekend

A: Me too

And so at that point I confronted them both about it. First I asked to see her phone and she gave it up and the messages had already been deleted so I brought her inside and pointed to the spyware browser page to show I had seen the messages.

She then proceeded to tell me how her and B had been sexting on and off for the last several months and that they had had sex. At that point B had already left so I called him on his phone and demanded the truth and told him that A had said they had had sex. B denied it up and down and even begged her to tell the truth. At which point A admitted that they did not.

Turns out she had cooked up this idea right around the time they first met to where they would sext and/or send messages that sounded like they had sex so that she could leave her phone open for me to look at and find these messages to then end our relationship because she wanted out but couldn’t make herself end it. The story she told him at the time, or what he said it was, was that they would do it so that I would ‘realize what I was missing’ and he said that he had told her that ‘if it caused issues that he would stop and not be friends with her’. At that time B was on probation and part of his probation requires a permanent address which happened to be with his GF C and if C found out about this she would most likely kick him out and he would be in violation of his probation. Just to add some more context here.

We argued for days and she told me she wanted our relationship to end. After several more days of talking, we decided to work it out and she chose to stay. We’ve talked several times about it since then and her story has never changed, yet I cannot make myself believe her. I’ve run our conversations through my head several hundred times, all the details that I know, and still I cant. For a little while I became obsessive over the information, I wanted to see the messages but she had deleted all of them, so I had tried to get that information from our cell carrier who wouldn’t give it to me without a court order.

Later on we were talking about it again and I told her about this obsessive need and the lengths I had gone to try and get them. This was over email and her response was:

'I regret not showing the messages now. I know the steps you took to try and get them. It was partly out of spite. It was also because I felt like you wouldn't believe me after reading them.'

There was also an instance, after we agreed to work it out, where I had told her I was no longer comfortable with them being alone together moving forward and she said she understood. So A, B, and C went out to grocery shop and then A was supposed to come home. Instead they dropped C off at home and went to the reservation to buy smokes without telling me. I tried calling A and messaging her but she ignored me and if my memory serves me correctly she was upset at how I reacted. Shortly after that she offered to cut contact with him and I said that would make me feel better if she did and she has not spoken to him since then that I am aware of.

I have since told her that I forgave her and that I am choosing to believe her yet I still cant bring myself to do it. I’ve even tried just telling myself that she is lying and they for sure had sex so that it would make it easier on me to get over but it doesn’t work because I don’t actually know that it’s true. I cant bring myself to say she did something I have no solid proof actually happened. Yet simultaneously I cant believe her no matter how hard I try. I want to actually be able to move past this and trust her and be happy with her. I can go months without thinking about it and then suddenly it comes to mind and I re-analyze it all over again several times.

My questions are:

How do I get myself to believe her and let go of the fact that I will never have all the information?

Did she actually have sex with him and if she did, how do I get her to confess?