'I caught my husband in a lie about talking to his ex wife. Am I overreacting?' UPDATED
"Am I overreacting? My husband talked to his ex and lied about it."
He has a kid with his ex-wife and they text, mostly about money for child support. He recently left for a work call and came back telling me that his daughter called while he was out and told him this crazy story about someone she was incidentally hanging out with who is now in a lot of trouble with the law.
A week later, we’re coming back home from a visit with my family and his daughter calls. She asks him if he heard the “crazy story”. He pauses and then says yeah, and she replies by saying “oh, I guess she’s telling everyone,” meaning her mother.
He gets off the phone with her pretty quickly after that, explaining that he’s driving (even though she’s on speaker and he never seemed to have a problem doing it before). I wait a beat after they hang up and say that I don’t want to make a big deal out of it, but I have to ask why does it seem like he lied to me about where he heard this wild thing that happened.
He hesitates and says that he heard it from both of them, so I ask why it seems like his kid- who has no memory issues- doesn’t seem to remember that. He says he doesn’t know.
I may have jumped the gun a bit by following it up with asking if there’s anything else he’s lying about and if he visited his ex, but I feel like it’s not a crazy leap when he apparently doesn’t feel like he can tell me he heard some gossip from her that had some relation to their kid.
He turned the focus of the whole thing to my “questioning his loyalty,” and how it feels “disrespectful,” but how hard would it have been to not lie about something so insignificant if it is indeed nothing to worry about?
I mean, he looked visibly upset that I heard his kid ask if he’d heard the tale and was so quick to end the call…am I overreacting? Should I be worried? I’ve caught him in other weird lies before (not about the ex, but weird online stuff), too, and I think I’m tired of just letting it go…Should I, though?
What do you think? Is she overreacting? This is what commenters had to say:
BeautifulTerm3753 said:
NOR, you saw it in live action. He lied. He is now turning it on you. Which is disgraceful. It’s his defensive behavior that makes this look suspicious and there is more to the story. If he heard the story from his ex, cool fine but why make into something else, then lie. Trust your gut.
iluvcats17 said:
Look at his phone. And if you went to stay with a liar go see a marriage therapist together to see if the marriage can be salvaged with honesty.
Interesting-Sock3794 said:
NTA if his daughter had been the one to tell him the crazy story then he would've said, of course I've heard the story, you silly goose, you are the one who told me! But he didn't. He lied to you the other day about who he was talking to. If it were nothing or not a big deal, why bother? He and his ex have a child together, it should be expected that they would speak regularly for their daughter's sake.
OP responded:
That’s what has me worried. It seems like such a pointless fact to change, but I guess maybe I need to consider that he has interpreted my opinions about his ex as meaning I’ll get upset if he talks to her?
We both know what she’s like- I was friends with her before, which is an even longer story- and some stuff has come up recently where she is very much the villain, so I’m really even more confused because of that, unless he decided to also “play nice” by talking to her on the phone in the hopes she’d relent in other ways about other things. That’s why I had to pose this here, though. It’s rattled me.
Britneyismyhomegirl said:
It’s not strange that he would talk to his ex and she would pass on information regarding the child. It is strange that he would lie about it. Do you get upset with him if they talk on the phone?
OP responded:
No because as far as I have ever known, they don’t. Without going into detail about the story he was told, I can totally understand why she would call him directly to tell him about it, and all I can think now is that he assumed for some reason that I’d be more interested in the fact that she called than the absolutely crazy thing she told him about…it just doesn’t make sense, hence my posing it here.
That was kind of the last straw. I don’t know how often he lies to me about little things like that, now, and lying is genuinely one of my biggest bugaboos, which he of course knows…
She later shared this update:
We have talked again and I expressed to him that I felt uncomfortable with his initial reaction and we need to work on things regarding his trying to gaslight me.
He apologized and told me that he really doesn’t know why he said his daughter told him that story as opposed to the truth, but that it probably is something to do with how she used to bar him from speaking to other women and just wasn’t thinking about the fact that I’m “nothing like her.”
I’m accepting this but told him our communication needs work and he agreed. Thank you all for the consideration, I truly appreciate anyone taking time out of their day to help a stranger do some thinking. 🫶