I normally post on PS under a different name but wanted to remain anonymous for this one.
I am having some issues about DH being in contact with an ex-girlfriend and I’m not quite sure how to deal with it. Sorry this is really long but I hope the history gives some perspective.
Brief background (all before DH and I met) – Ex GF lives in another country but they met when she was living here a few years ago. They were friends while she lived here and for a couple of years afterwards but never dated because she had a boyfriend. When she broke up with the boyfriend, she intimated to DH that she had feelings for him. He went to see her twice over the course of a few months and they started a relationship over this time. He was contemplating moving there but on the second trip things obviously didn’t pan out and he came home. She had received an upsetting medical diagnosis around that time (not life threatening but certainly life altering) so was not in a good place. I think the relationship was in limbo for a while, not really on or off but they were still in contact.
DH and I met and started going out a few months after he got home from the second trip. He told me they had broken up when he left her country after the second trip and that they were in irregular contact. One day he asked me to send a message from his phone while we were driving and the last message on his phone was from her. I looked back and there were quite a few messages between them including one where she asked whether he was seeing anyone and he just replied “some girls have asked me out”. We hadn’t been going out that long but things had moved pretty quickly so I was a little put out but he assured me it was only because he didn’t want her to get upset when she was already depressed. (I know she was in a bad way from independent sources). I told him I was uncomfortable with it and didn’t think it was fair to lie to her even if it would upset her but I let it go. Over the next little while, he would tell her things he was doing and occasionally add my name to the list of people without explaining who I was. Eventually she worked it out and was quite upset but then sent him a message saying she knew it hadn’t worked out because she hadn’t been very nice to him and wished him the best. I know all of this because he told me about it and showed me “selected” bits of the correspondence. After that he lead me to believe they were in occasional contact only. I told him again that I was uncomfortable with it but I let it go. In my mind I still had some nagging doubts, mainly about the nature of their relationship and how things had ended (I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but he always just seemed a little bitter about it) and the level of ongoing contact.
Fast forward about a year and I was using his computer one night and found he had left his email account open. I am not proud of myself for this and don’t really know what possessed me to do it, but there was a folder with her name on it and I started looking through the emails. From the emails from around the time he came home, it wasn’t clear whether they were together or not because it wasn’t BF/GF style correspondence but there were general emails talking about whether they would see each other again, about her coming back here, talking about meeting up for holidays etc so there was obviously something unresolved. There was nothing romantic or inappropriate in the emails after the time that we started going out and they were pretty irregular towards the end but it was still much more contact between them than he had led me to believe. I got really angry about it but his view was that they hadn’t been in contact for ages, there was nothing inappropriate in the emails, they were just going back to the friendship they had before their short relationship and he couldn’t possibly be cheating on me because she lives overseas. My issue was not with the fact that I thought he was cheating (because physically it was not possible) but more that I didn’t think he had been honest with me about their relationship, when they broke up and the level of contact he had with her since then and that there were still some unresolved issues. He told me that he didn’t understand what the issue was but that he loved me and if it made me uncomfortable he would stop contacting her. So I told him I was uncomfortable and asked him to stop. He made a big show of deleting all the emails (not at my request) and that was that.
Fast forward about another year and we are now married. I opened his computer and skype was open and the last few messages were from her. I looked back through the history and they have been in regular contact (via written messages) over the last year, often with messages every couple of days or more. Again there is nothing romantic in the emails but I just feel this level of contact is inappropriate, especially since he knows I am not comfortable with it and has said he would stop. He even says in some of the messages to her that he couldn’t reply to messages because I am in the room and wouldn’t like it. He even told her he had sent a message from another source because I had gone through his emails. She now thinks I am crazy psycho wife (maybe she’s right?) (To put this in perspective, I’m not a jealous person and I’ve never felt the need to check anyone’s phone or email before and I feel no need to do it in relation to any other aspect of his life. I also have no issues with any of his other exes or any of his female friends.)
He says he loves me, that they are just friends and he is just trying to support her through a difficult time (she is taking an extended period off work to try to find whether there is any “cure” for her medical condition). Even if all of this is true, he doesn’t seem to understand why I feel this is a betrayal of my trust and shows a complete and deliberate disregard for my feelings. He won’t even acknowledge that he has lied to me about it or is doing anything wrong even though he is clearly trying to hide it from me. He tells me he will stop if I “really really” want him to. For me this just isn’t enough given the long history behind this but I don’t know where we go from here? Am I overreacting? What do I do?