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I am struggling with the difference between suspecting something at the time and then much later having evidence or information that changes the whole timeline. For me the later knowing has landed in a completely different and much more devastating wayas it is not just confirming an old suspicion - it is the way later truth can change the meaning of things you lived through at the time and make old memories and decisions feel very different.

Has anyone else experienced that - where later evidence changed the whole picture and made everything hit much harder. I am not looking for graphic details just how others made sense of that in their own mind... Thank you.

Iny my experience your gut instinct about suspicions is usually correct. Maybe it's not exactly what you imagined it to be, maybe your mental thoughts made it much worse or maybe what you winded up discovering is much worse than you could've imagined; but your gut instinct around suspicions is correct. Where there is smoke, there usually is fire. When you call out your suspicions is usually when the trickle truth charade begins. "Yeah it was just a couple of inappropriate texts with a coworker." It's the most evil form of gaslighting, where you think you're going crazy because you know there has to be more than a couple of flirty texts.

Has anyone else experienced that - where later evidence changed the whole picture and made everything hit much harder.

100% yes. The trickling of the truth and the blatant lies to my face hit harder than the affair. I truly thought I was going insane for getting upset over my gut instinct with no real concrete evidence. Until the deck of cards collapsed on her story and the truth was forced out. Because in these scenarios, there's the horrible instance of infidelity you would never imagine your spouse to take part in; and then there's your spouse who becomes a pathological liar seemingly overnight.

it is the way later truth can change the meaning of things you lived through at the time and make old memories and decisions feel very different.

I let this same exact thought process bother me for awhile. The affair happened during Thanksgiving and the Holidays. We were up late having drinks and wrapping the kids presents; a true great moment for parents. Meanwhile the affair was happening, she was probably texting him when I got up to refill the drinks or get more scotch tape. That bothered me for awhile, but I've let that intrusive thought pass. Those "good" moments still existed in parallel. Once you let the intrusive "what if" or "was that moment we had even real" thoughts escape your brain you will find yourself a little more at peace.

The Wayward Spouse is lying for a few reasons:
-They don't want to hurt you with the truth. (But then the truth comes out later and is much more painful because of the lies.
-Related to the first point; they're act is up and they realize their affair is over and they will do anything to keep the stable relationship they have. Unveiling the truth gives you ammo to divorce and they now realize their fantasy love land was nothing more than that...fantasy.
-Ashamed of their actions and would rather take it to the grave than allow it to surface.

You will get through this.

The trickling of the truth and the blatant lies to my face hit harder than the affair.

Thank you for this I think that is such a big part of what makes later knowing land so differently because it is not only the betrayal itself but the realisation that your reality was being managed at the same time.
I have had some of that experience myself where later evidence changed the timeline in a way that made earlier instincts - memories and decisions feel very different and much more devastating.
What you said about old moments looking different through that lens really stayed with me as am still trying to make sense of that part in my own mind.
I also appreciated what you said about those good moments still having existed in parallel even if that feels difficult to hold right now...Thank you again for your honesty.

There is a highly paid NY attorney who has handled divorces with rich and richer. He said when you come to him with suspicions your spouse is cheating they almost always are. So does a PI. It sounds like your suspicions were vague and the truth is worse and the lying even worse than that. A trip to an attorney will be money well spent. Protecting yourself financially, whether male ore female, is always a smart decision.
If you are filled with anxiety and terror of the unknown, see a dr for temp meds to help you through this awful time.

It sounds like your suspicions were vague and the truth is worse and the lying even worse than that.

Thank you for this and think that is such a big part of what makes later knowing hit so hard - when the truth turns out to be worse but the lying around it is worse still.
I also appreciate the practical reminder to protect yourself alongside trying to process it all - thank you again.

All so true. I suspected for 20 years. I just couldn't believe husband and a "friend" could do that. Then "friend" tried to start it up again, dropping hints to me. I confronted husband and he eventually fessed up to the years ago affair.

We are still together but looking back on those years before does make you view the past differently.

It was been a struggle, I didnt think I could ever trust anyone again. I know my husband can look me right in the eye and lie, he was good at it. I know a woman can pretend to be a friend while screwing your husband.

It does change everything but you can survive it.

I look at like suspecting you have a terminal disease. You might even pretty sure you have it, but maaayyybe not. Once you hear the official diagnosis and know for certain tho, that's when your world comes crumbling down and reality really kicks your ass.

We are still together but looking back on those years before does make you view the past differently.

trustedgthis really put into words the part I have been trying to get at as later truth does not just hurt when it arrives it changes the way whole stretches of the past look and feel when you turn back towards them.
In my own situation where some of the facts and timeline shifted much later - that has been one of the hardest parts to sit with as well.
What you said about knowing someone can look you in the eye and lie and that another person can wear the face of a friend while doing harm behind your back felt painfully true too.
I am really sorry you have had to carry that.

Once you hear the official diagnosis and know for certain tho, that's when your world comes crumbling down and reality really kicks your ass.

Pogre yes this is exactly it. Suspicion can be frightening enough but the full knowing lands in a completely different way because it removes the last space for doubt and makes reality hit all at once.
That is very much the distinction I was trying to get at - brutal comparison, but a very ccurate one.

I'm 7 months in and it's been trickle truths nearly every month since discovery. Discovery was just knowing there were phone calls, and that's when the gaslighting started - we're just friends, it's work related, well yes I admit I started having feelings but that's it, he lives 4 states away.

yes, we did send some photos back and forth but nothing dirty.

I'm no longer attracted to you and he makes me feel things I've never felt. I think I found my soul mate.

yes, we did things over facetime but it was never physical

No I don't know why snapchat and whatsapp are showing up on my screentime

*I moved out for 30 days after that one *

Ok, all social media accounts are cut off, there's no contact at all

I find email messages two months later that prove the affair turned physical, and he has videos of her doing things to him
He said he knows she wants him to leave his wife so they can be together but he can't do that

She lies and says she never said that but yes they did get physical.

I find out that they were together for almost 2 years and had sex countless times over that period.

I just found out last week that even though they cut it off, she's still been re-reading old messages and looking at old photos.

The difference between suspecting and knowing?
Suspecting is the sense of imminent danger but not knowing why
Knowing is the dagger being plunged into your heart over and over and over again every time they hide the truth from you

Re-reading my post is actually pretty painful but in a distant sort of way. I have had seven months to work on myself and realize how genuinely screwed up my wife has become since the affair.

She literally rewrote our marriage history and had me convinced I was a horrible husband, when I wasn't at all. (we were both horrible at communication and never had very deep conversations but I was always loving, supportive and caring. I could have been more attentive, but lessons learned I guess).

I know now that my reality was not wrong, it was something she had to create to justify what she was/is doing.

You might think that this marriage is over and done but it's actually not. We're working through it, I'm praying non-stop, and God is changing her heart, slowly but surely.

I don't really know where we will wind up if I'm being honest. We've been married 26 years and this is the hardest thing that's even happened in my life and there are times when I don't feel I can take it anymore but I refuse to give up hope. I have set boundaries and I've stopped being the victim.

To bring it back full circle - EVERY single time I thought something was off, it was. TRUST your gut, don't accuse until you know for sure but pray for God to reveal the truth and He will.

Suspecting is the sense of imminent danger but not knowing why
Knowing is the dagger being plunged into your heart over and over and over again every time they hide the truth from you

jeremy99 that is such a powerful way of putting it and I really understand what you mean.

For me the hardest part has been the way each later truth changes the meaning of what came before. It is not just finding out one fact. It is the whole reality shifting again and then having to go back through memories, conversations and instincts with a completely different lens.

I know now that my reality was not wrong, it was something she had to create to justify what she was/is doing.

I feel that is such a huge piece of it. The damage is not only the betrayal itself but being made to doubt your own reading of reality while the other person protects the version they need to survive what they are doing and yes - I agree about gut instinctas evrry time I felt something was off it usually was - maybe not always in the exact way I imagined but the feeling itself was telling me something important.

I am sorry you have had so many layers of truth come out- that repeated reopening is brutal..

Love is a projection of the best you have directed towards an important person, your family or friend or in this case your partner.

It doesn’t demand anything in return, besides sincerity. And sincerity isn’t something that needs effort to be, it’s just the baseline of being true.

So love is one of the very few things in our life that is selfless. Is just freely given to someone and all that asks is to be respected, you have to do nothing when you receive genuine love.

It’s an anomaly of a feeling because even if it is not reciprocated you still accept it, as long as it is respected and met with sincerity.

And the whole thing makes you happy when the recipient of your love just is open to receive it.
When is reciprocal is simply one of the best if not the most, fulfilling emotion you can experience.

It’s an anomaly because it is something we invest energy into without any expectation, in nature everything that exists or we do has the goal to preserve or gain us more energy, is survival. But love it’s a lot of energy. So we reserve it to those people we fully trust or made integral part of our life, they become an extension of what makes "you" you. You protect them because they are what gives meaning to life, a purpose beyond survival.

What does take effort is to lie, to abuse, to cheat.
It takes a lot of energy to cheat and lie and there is an expectation: exploiting.

Lies and deception keeps you intentionally locked into keeping your investment into the betraying partner, to provide them with emotional energy and safety to build up upon the abuse they are intentionally inflicting. Is not just lacking reciprocal value now, but dehumanizes you into an emotional resource to be abused and exploited intentionally for the "benefit " of a chemical lie.

A stepping stone for a broken ego, for insecurity, to be abused at leisure and maintained as long as you resist the damage they are intentionally crafting, knowing full well that it will break you and turn everything into and around you in to emotional ash, still they invest into lies and deception because your pain and investment are the lymph that they need to suck dry to realize their betrayal.

Is different from a rejection of love, that painful as it is, is understandable and not traumatic (pain hurts but is ok, trauma is worse, wicked and evil).

Deception is driven by purpose, a purpose that is selfish exploitation of a selfless feeling, intentional disrespect and disregard of your humanity, planned and executed performance of the sacrificial destruction of your entire identity on the altar of ego and dopamine.

It’s abuse, plain and simple, perpetrated with knowledge and intention, you are no longer a human being in this situation, you deserve no empathy or care, you exist to fuel the excitement and chemical happiness with your own destruction, because the spice in the betrayal is added by precisely that "illicit" excitement, you are the necessary ingredient to make the cheating tasty and not just bland. The safety net and the "idiot" that can be manipulated by hand in any shape or form.

Better yet: the bill, will be fully on you, you will bare the consequences of the arson and rape of your soul, it is a life sentence for a crime you didn’t commit.

Think how much more normal is to say your partner "you know what? Is just not working out for me, we should go separate ways. I need to find someone who fulfills me and it’s not you". Harsh for who receives this. But there is respect. Humanity. Painful but in itself it is an act of love, because you value your partner or ex partner emotional investment enough to be sincere. And while it hurts, it’s honest. When the pain passes this is something you can appreciate and remember positively, it doesn’t kill love it accepts it is no longer reciprocated and files it under fond memories.

And the pain of a broken heart is just about nothing compared with the pain of betrayal. Is like a paper cut vs being slowly skinned alive.

One is heartbreak is sad but is natural. The second is existential, is intentional sexual and emotional abuse, it’s not just hurt, it is trauma.

We are not even in the same ballpark.

Why this distinction?

You know all this stuff instinctively. We sing about love because it is a deep part of what makes us human, hardly you can give anything more precious to someone. You are giving yourself, that’s not a thing, that is all you are.

The reason why you are so fiercely protective of the people you love, sometimes even putting them before you.

And you just do it because you believe that they accept and respect what you give them. With sincerity.
It’s deep because you are sincere, so you are deeply attuned to who you love. Instinctively.

So when you are betrayed, when you stop being a person, a living, feeling being, and you become a dehumanized resource to fuel a dirty clandestine affair, the spice to make it more sexually and emotionally exciting as "forbidden" to turn what would be a bland transactional relationship between two broken individuals seeking fantasy validation for their ego, you feel it immediately.

You may deny it but you feel it.
And the reaction is dread. You feel and you begin to fear, you can sense you are already being cast into the abyss by the person you held the closest, but that is so vile, so twisted, so painfully evil and ungranted that your mind denies it is possible at all.

Because there is not a single good reason for your partner to do it.
You love them, they are good, you know it, they would never do something that vile and evil to you.
Even if they stopped loving you they were a,ways sincere (that’s why you love them after all right?) they would tell you and if the bond is broken you’ll accept to let them go and find happiness, so why would they ever do something so cruel to you right?

Denial plus gaslighting, lies and manipulation. That is what plays against you.
Yes your gut knows, your instincts scream, very fiber of your being is trying to warn you that you’re falling in the abyss, you didn’t slip, you have been pushed in, intentionally.

It’s your own love fighting against your instincts to deny what you can sense.
The deck is stacked against you, your cheater knows it, that’s why their lies are so tailored to dig deeper into your denial, and they work for a while, even when they are so stupid and weak that nobody in their centered mind would buy that bullshit for a second.

Because as the cheater betrays to fulfill a fantasy, you second their lies to avoid the horror that you know is there but refuse to see.

You know it will destroy you. They know it will destroy you (and don’t care). So your last desperate self preservation instinct is trying to protect your psyche from the truth.

Is the beginning of the dissociation that the trauma will teach you so well later on.

So yes, of course when you unavoidably find out the truth, it will change everything it was, because you can’t do anything more to avoid accepting what was done to you.

And while the damage spreads and demolishes everything in its wake, the corruption will also spread, possibly tainting everything that has been even before the betrayal. Even if there were some real and pure memories of the relationship before the infidelity, it is very possible if not likely that they will be tainted and corrupted when you finally realize the truth.

Infidelity is like a cancer, it spreads devours and destroys everything and any memory or relationship that was in contact with it, before durin and very likely after.

Is you trying to make sense of the evil you suffered but you cannot make sense of it, because theirs is none.

Truth is you have been destroyed by a caprice, a selfish fantasy and a whim. That puts your entire existence into a different perspective, that is why is so reality shattering.

And you have no idea of this because only people who have been betrayed can understand the extent of this devastation. And not every time, it takes healing just to begin to make sense of just a part of it.

So yeas, it’s normal.

Don’t worry though, it’s also just the perception from trauma.

When you finally climb over the abyss and out, you will look back and realize that even if it felt bottomless while you fell, is just a puddle of stinky mud. You are good and you’re going to be good.

Want to see the true abyss?
Well you are in luck, look at the one where your wayward is rolling in, that is going to be bottomless because they started to dig it and they will likely keep digging it for the rest of their life.

That’s something you would never want to go in. It’s of their making and is way harder they will find a way out of it, because there are reason they threw you in one and they started digging in the mud.

And the reason being them, and being the villain is a different kind of beast from the one who devoured your heart.

BackfromtheStorm this was a lot to take in, but I do understand the heart of what you are saying.

It’s your own love fighting against your instincts to deny what you can sense.

that explains a lot of the confusion between suspecting and knowing as it is not that the instinct was absent. It was there - but love, trust, history and the need to believe the person you love would not do that can all work against what your body already knows.

So yes, of course when you unavoidably find out the truth, it will change everything it was, because you can’t do anything more to avoid accepting what was done to you.

now that is exactly the part I have been trying to name - later truth does not just add information it changes the meaning of memories conversations instincts and even the version of yourself who lived through it without knowing.

I also appreciate the reminder that the abyss is not mine to own forever as right now it can feel reality-shattering but I do know the betrayal says more about the person who chose deception than the person who loved sincerely...

Girl I get it.

It’s part of the process we all been through that hell. I feel you.

Think about it: there is a reason why we blame ourselves for their infidelity, the. Later the affair partners, and only later we start to address accountability and anger towards the real main villain: our betrayer.

Because you loved them.
You’re assigning blame to yourself or other external actors and circumstances is the last coping mechanism that your nervous system tries to protect the person who you love from being exposed as trash.

Because it’s too important of an emotion you gave and the thought it wasn’t real is harder to bear than your own pain. It put in question your deepest Inner self.

Is the attachment wound, what makes us social mammals and not reptiles.
You have this feeling since you were in your mother’s belly before being born.

That’s rooted so deeply it is hard to put it into question.

But the medal has two faces:

The betrayed partner lives the ugly one first. That’s the horror show you are in right now. But there is the other side too. The one that will make you so much stronger later than you won’t be scared of the ugly side ever again ( and you won’t get any more of those ugly coins from other people too, because you can spot that shit from miles away).

While the betrayer also has a two sided coin. One with a cheap dopamine high that’s pretty shitty in the end. And once they get to the other side they will find out just how scary that is, way worse than the face you are confronting now.

Because their flip side has nothing. Just an empty void where there’s a nihilistic vacuum. Alone, cold and doomed. Can try to fill it with a curtain of lies and fantasy, but the cold and empty will still be forever present beyond the veil, unfillable and isolating, patiently waiting to consume them completely.

If there’s a hell, that is a great candidate.

This is why is so much harder for the wayward to heal.
The void is their own making and what they chose doesn’t fill it, it makes it deeper and cuts away the hand that was trying to pull them out. Your hand.

The mud sucks, but it will dry out.

Some cultures call it karma.
Just wait and see.

But put your life first, if he chose the void let him sink, you can’t help him, only he can.

Being sucked in that is not worthy for anyone.

BackfromtheStorm I do understand what you are saying

Because it’s too important of an emotion you gave and the thought it wasn’t real is harder to bear than your own pain.

as that explains a lot of why the mind first tries to look everywhere else for reasons. Yourself/the other person/the circumstances/the timing - anything except fully facing that the person you loved and trusted made choices that caused that level of damage.

Because you loved them.

this is the bit sometimes missed as it is not weakness or stupidity - it is attachment, history, loyalty and love all trying to protect the reality you thought you were living in and this is probably the stage I am at now, moving out of blaming myself or trying to make it make sense through other people or circumstances and placing responsibility where it actually belongs.

The choice to lie, hide and betray was not mine...yes I am trying to put my own life and healing first now and whilst that does not mean the feelings disappear - what it does mean I am no longer willing to carry blame that was never mine.