Just curious, did you ever really trust your ex? I mean, truly and unapologetically trust them?
...
I'd have to say
no.
While we were dating, she definitely did some things that affected my ability to trust her, and it never really recovered. She liked to let me know the attention she was getting from other guys, and was pretty shameless about it.
I put my foot down and told her it needed to stop if she expected this to become a long term relationship; I also did the same thing back to her a bit with some girls that liked me, and it turned out she didn't like
that one bit. I think she realized if she went too far, I could easily replace her with someone else, so for the last half of the time we were dating, the coy behavior on her part stopped, and she seemed committed.
During marriage, I never had any reason to suspect she was cheating/talking to other guys, other than the fact that she would frequently accuse
me of cheating, which made me wonder if she was just projecting. I would be a little surprised to learn she did (if indeed it was true). But honestly the lack of cheating/flirting/male attention for her during marriage didn't matter, because the open lying and other manipulative behavior she engaged in
was more than enough to ensure I never learned to trust her after marriage.
The other day I was cleaning out some old records and files, and found a note to myself where I wrote down some of her troubling behavior. I eventually started keeping a journal of how often we fought, because it was so disruptive and her behavior so manipulative that I would sometimes even forget what it was about. Anyways... we had just had a huge fight about her text bombing me at work, and agreed she wouldn't do it anymore. Then she did it again the very next day, and when I called her on it, claimed she didn't mean to send the texts, and was just "typing out thoughts" when our 2 year old son grabbed her phone and pushed send.
Riiiiiiiight...
So glad I'm no longer married to her!