DEAR EMILY,
I have been married for 25 years to a man who is responsible, kind, a homebody and God-fearing. A month ago, I discovered accidentally that his ex-girlfriend in high school and college, who is also married now and live thousands of miles away, sent him a message in Facebook to be his friend. Being a gentleman, my husband accepted her invitation and they became friends. From then on, they kept exchanging messages. I was able to read them without my husband’s knowledge. The messages contain just updates on their lives the past 30 years—no hanky-panky except phrases from the girl like “take care of yourself,” “be safe when you travel.”
They’ve been exchanging messages for a while now. I find it wrong to be in touch with your ex considering you two had a past. I confronted my husband about this and he said he is just answering her messages as it will be rude not to.
I told him to stop this communication and threatened to e-mail this ex or her husband. She writes to all their classmates in only two sentences, but to my husband, she writes in paragraphs! He told me that I am overreacting! Am I? But why is he answering her now in another social networking account which I discovered recently? He said he did it so I would no longer get angry at him because he said, “What you do not know, won’t hurt you.” I took this badly as a betrayal of trust.
—Confused wife
Answer:
These exes, your husband and his old girlfriend, are clearly savoring the past and their lost youth. Hopefully, they’re just reminiscing and not rekindling, which is what you’re obviously feeling insecure about.
Give him a long leash and allow him to write her those kilometric letters. That he has transferred to another site without your knowledge and continues communicating with her only means he is still hungry to know more about her—and your man-to-man guarding of him has made him more creative in escaping your detection. Haven’t you learned anything at all from life—that the more you restrict people from doing something, the more they’d go berserk going for it? They’ll climb walls, send messages via couriers, crawl through tunnels, anything, just to be able to get their message through to the other side!
Didn’t you so eloquently describe him to be almost perfect? Why won’t you trust him anymore? And why have you started to demean yourself by threatening to write to this old girlfriend or her husband directly? Are you going to allow this green-eyed monster to destroy your marriage? Or else, put cracks in it? Nothing is happening—yet, and you’re already pushing your husband to act surreptitiously! This may just be a slight flirtation between middle-aged married people who probably are bored stiff with their mundane lives and Facebook has spiced it up.
Do something exciting with him for a change to disconnect them a bit! Make yourself alluring. Be nice and kind. Feed him gourmet dishes! Give him great sex! Find a hobby! Just stop snooping in his e-mails. Make him feel he married the right woman, and not someone who has morphed into a fish wife, catching straws in the wind as evidence of his indiscretion.
You’re better than that. Or are you?
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