Woman discovers husband's 'disturbing' second phone; plots EPIC revenge against him. AITA? MAJOR UPDATES.
When this woman finds her husband's secret phone and plans to get back at him, she asks Reddit:
I found a second phone that my husband has. I know everything. Now he is panicking. AITA?
I'm using a throwaway for this. I found the phone 3 months ago. The way i found out he was cheating was by accident. I had recently gotten a new phone because i dropped my old phone and the screen cracked so badly that i couldnt even use it at all. It was hard to get all my contacts so i decided to go on our phone account and just get the contacts from there.
My husband is the one who is in charge for paying for the phones so i never look at the account. I went on his computer and he had the password and log in automatically saved so it was easy. I got all my numbers but then i noticed that instead of just two lines on the account, there were three and another phone was listed that neither of us had.
Honestly at the time, i thought nothing of it and thought maybe it was a line for his grandmother because she only has a landline and she had mentioned a couple of times wanting to get a phone and he just forgot to mention it.
Cheating never even crossed my mind. I didnt even ask him about it and went on with my day. A few days later, i was hanging out with my best friend and she asked if i was able to get all my information back and i said yea and just mentioned that i even found out his grandmother had a phone and he didnt tell me but it wasnt a big deal.
I dont know what made her ask but she said are you sure its his grandmother's phone and i said, pretty sure. She asked me to double check and i wasnt going to do it but i was curious. I
called his mom first to say hi and asked her about his grandmother and if she had found a phone yet and his mom said no, that she decided she didnt really need it. I waited for him to go to work the next day and i looked at the account again.
I went to the phone, clicked view usage history and saw that the phone had only texted and called one number hundreds of times, with the history going back 5 months. I also noticed that the times of the calls and texts were only the times when he was at work, never at home.
When i saw that, i honestly tried to rationalize it because there is no way he would cheat on me. So i called my friend and told her what i saw and she bascially told me i needed to find the phone to confirm cheating first.
I looked for it all over the house for days and couldnt find it so i knew he must have it on him. I waited for him to go to sleep and searched his car and i found the phone.
His passcode was the same passcode on his regular phone and i found everything- text messages, pictures of her, pictures of them together, them saying i love you. She sends him a good morning video message every morning and he has kept every one. I was heartbroken and cried the whole night. My friend told me to take the phone, turn all the location trackers off, and then turn it off.
The morning he left, he was 30 mins late to work because he was looking for it but he couldnt ask me because he would have to reveal he had another phone. I kept asking him what he was looking for and he said a file for work.
He eventually left. I went to a park with my friend when he left and turned the phone on and put it on airplane mode and proceeded to go through everything.
Our whole marriage is a lie. He has pretended that he cares about me, that he loves me while building a relationship with this other woman who knows he is married. I cant even describe how i felt when i found everything out. I still havent confronted him about it and thats because Im planning to leave in a few months.
There is a benefit to being married to him that i would lose if i filed for divorce now but i wont need that benefit anymore in a couple of months.
He knows something is up because i put the phone back 4 days later underneath his car seat, the same seat he checked more than a few times when he was looking for it. I even charged the phone back to the same percentage that i found it at. I am playing it cool until I strike. I got that idea from my friend.
The day he found the phone, he came into the house and hovered over me the whole night and he was just really quiet. He hasnt asked me about it and i think he knows i know but asking would lead to more questions.
These past 3 months, my behavior has changed and we havent been intimate since i found out(i have rejected every advance) and he is panicking to the point that when I checked the account in the first month, the third phone line had been removed. He also changed the password a few days later.
He keeps asking me whats wrong and i say nothing. He never goes anywhere now and if he isnt at work, he is at home trying to spend time with me. He has recommended couples therapy because in his words, something has changed and i said we dont need it.
To be honest, I am finding a weird sadistic joy in seeing him panic because he ended our marriage and I think he should suffer through worrying until i leave him. I know that's pretty mean. AITA?
Before we give you OP's major updates, let's take a look at some of the top responses:
minombre writes:
NTA. Your friend is the MVP. She has some skills. Yeah, torture your husband, don't say anything. Keep refusing sex. Then, one morning while he is a work, have him served and ghost him.
Tell him all contact will be through your lawyer, and blindside him like he did to you. He doesn't deserve closure, or a chance to reply or make himself the victim. Just ghost him, that will hurt him more.
starrydusy writes:
NTA. Pls go see an attorney immediately. You need to be looking closely at the finances & getting bank statements & credit card statements. He probably moved his other phone number to a separate account.
I don’t think he’s sticking close to you right now b/c he’s broken things off w/AP. I think he’s working behind the scenes to minimize his exposure, financially & every other way, in the event of a divorce. He’s been so deceitful. Update us as things progress.
tinkthechi writes:
Look, YTA gently. I want to start by saying how sorry I am. I won't reiterate my story other than to say nearly the same thing happened with me except I found out after he died.
I'm sending you all the support I can via Reddit. This is going to be a long haul for you, it was more than three years after he died before I really started to live again. His faults and whatever else it is about him that caused this to happen are not your fault.
This is all on him. The "I love you" thing happened in my case as well and every time I thought about it afterward it felt like a gut punch. Then a very kind Redditor reached out to me via DM.
He had been the husband and had a girlfriend. He said they exchanged I love you, and behaved like a couple. He told me he was still with his wife she didn't know, and he would never forgive himself.
He also said they were just words to keep her around to keep the fantasy alive. Be kind to yourself. Try not to be vindictive. That will only further damage you.
crystaloallver writes:
NTA. Watch the joint bank account closely and 2-3 weeks before you plan to leave open a solo account just for you and change where your paycheck gets deposited. Use all new passwords, nothing he could even guess. Have the bank print the bank info from the joint account, then go pull half out to put in your solo account.
Do not leave him while he is home. Once he's at work, have your friend help you take everything that would equal half of the household possessions. Once you leave something, you won't be likely to get it back in one piece. Change all your passwords. Now, not later. Op Good Luck and stay strong!
serenityprayer7 writes:
Slight yta. I promise. Rip off the band-aid and be done. Languishing in this in-between pain and revenge thing will do you no good. Marriage is just a word. You were cheated on by your partner. You break up and move on. Don't let this word and legal papers slow down the process.
skorvia writes:
Well played, I hope you can be strong and not divorce until it suits you, stay strong, get an STD test and let him suffer in ignorance, but maybe he knows, therefore maybe he is making moves.
Keep an eye on the joint accounts, keep an eye on the transactions, make sure that when you get divorced you won't even want to have an AP again.
I hope you have saved the photos and videos that you found, because they can be good evidence of infidelity in front of a court or at least before the family, because cheaters almost always lie when asked why the marriage ended.
disgjoinedex writes:
NTA! My abusive soon-to-be-ex-husband showed up to the legal appointment with nothing but a pen. I work in auditing & regulatory compliance in the financial services industry. My job is literally to trace evidence. I laughed all the way to the bank -- literally -- as I've navigated the divorce process.
One of his examples of sheer ineptitude? During the first ten-ish days after we sold the house, for whatever reason, he refused to deposit his check from the sale of the house. Don't ask me why, I don't know why.
This meant he was walking around with a ~$25,000 check in his pocket for nearly two weeks....... not exactly the safest or most responsible thing to do. One of his excuses was that the bank branch closest to his job was permanently closed, and had been for a while. He had told me this via text message, so I have screenshots.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA. First of all, I work for the same bank, albeit on the corporate side. Second of all, I had JUST visited that same branch myself like a month earlier, so I knew for a fact they were open for business.
Third, they had just opened up for business like six months before that, so there's no way they'd be permanently shuttering their doors so quickly.
Fast forward two-ish months. We'd had mediation. I had my copy/side of the mediation agreement signed and notarized at my lawyer's office. For whatever reason, he doesn't seem to have an attorney of his own, even though he's had ample time to obtain one.
He agreed to sign the same copy of the mediation agreement, which had to be notarized, to reduce the amount of back-and-forth paperwork.
Knowing that banks provide notary services, on the day he finally signed and had notarized the mediation agreement, I conveniently had him meet me at the very bank branch he had claimed -- just weeks earlier -- was permanently closed. Except I didn't tell him that it was a bank branch, I simply emailed him, and told him: Please meet me at the following address.
Since I attended the notary appointment with him, I got to just sit there next to him, watching him sign paperwork inside of a business/branch that he claimed was permanently closed.
And now, OP's major updates (outlining her revenge):
Edit: i have everything. My friend was able to show me how to get all the texts, video messages, pictures of them together- I only took the ones where they were not nude because my friend said that taking nude pics of a person who hadnt given them to you could be an issue later on.
I also got the phone account usage before he locked me out of the account. She is keeping everything for me. In fact it was her idea to let him panic. I also already had an std test. Im on his insurance so i paid for it out of pocket and im fine.
Edit 2: So i spontaneously decided to make this post earlier because i was home and thinking and going over the revenge i have planned and my impending divorce. I ended up on the divorce subreddit and then found the cake eaters subreddit which was not a good choice because it made me so angry.
Him cheating on me was, i cant even find the words to describe how painful it is. In a way, me doing this to him is petty but when i started this, it was the only way to make him hurt like how he has hurt me. He absolutely destroyed me with this and i have been with help from my friend trying to heal slowly.
I dont know if i ever will. I dont care if he finds this post on here or other social media. He knows i know he cheated or he wouldnt be trying to prove to me he is where he says he is all the time. I'm done and thankfully, i have a friend who is helping me through this, including looking for lawyers.
He can be with whoever he wants. I dont care. The hurt is too much for me to ever care about him again, to love him again. Im only staying because i need something. I have a few more months left to go. I dont know if i will update because i have a long road ahead of me but thanks for the comments.