He lied and now everything is a mess :(

[NessyNessy]

I've been in a relationship with my fiance for 3 years now and we have a 14 month old child together. When we met he'd not long come out of a relationship and told me he'd been with the girl for a couple of years and she'd manipulated him into moving in together by giving up her job to move to where he lived (they lived a couple of hours apart). He said he'd been lonely when they first met and had felt trapped when she'd moved and the end was inevitable.

We had a long conversation about it because I was worried he may be on the rebound and I didn't want to get caught up in anything that wasn't properly finished in his head.

The relationship to begin with was wonderful. He was forever telling me how he'd never thought he'd meet someone like me, he'd never been in love before etc etc and he proposed quite quickly and I accepted. I was pretty much swept off my feet and he seemed everything I had ever looked for. We got on so well and we just 'clicked' in ever way. We decided to throw caution to the wind in terms of contraception because we were planning on marriage and neither of us were getting any younger and I fell pregnant straight away but since I've had our daughter everything has fallen apart.

He had a phone call from his ex girlfriend a month after I gave birth. I saw it ring and him cancel it and when I checked his phone he'd deleted her number and the call list. I found a copy of his phone list on his computer and called her and she told me she was returning a missed call from him. He promised me faithfully that he hadn't contacted her but why would she lie?

Being post natal and all over the place emotionally I had all sorts flying through my head and decided (I know I shouldn't and I so wish I hadn't) to reassure myself in any way I could that he was over her and wasn't going behind my back trying to contact her.

He left his emails logged in one day accidentally when he was at work and I found email after email from him to her telling her how much he loved her and couldn't bear to be apart from her. All the things he said to me about missing me stupidly when he was at work and that he'd never missed anyone in his life, he'd said it all to her for the THREE AND A HALF YEARS they were together. There are emails with him arranging romantic weekends away, telling his friends about their amazing holidays and the fantastic sex (he said their relationship was platonic, and I stupidly believed him, I never thought he'd have any reason to lie). The worst email was sent a couple of months before I met him when he wrote pages of email telling how amazing she was and how much he cared about her and would love her always and forever and was struggling to come to terms with her decision to end things - in his version to me, and he'd laughed when I'd asked him, he couldn't be on the rebound because he'd ended it with her.

All the emails were before I met him so none of them were 'unfaithful' but they have all completely destroyed this perfect relationship and the feelings that he made me think we were feeling for the first time together. I've had relationships before but I've never met anyone that I've been interested enough in. I've always been the one to end things and I've never felt content until I met him.

I confronted him and he told me it was all false because she was mentally delicate and he'd sent the 'worst' email because she was threatening to kill herself if he didn't come back to her. I've wanted so much to believe him, I'd put my whole life and every bit of emotion into us and our daughter and so I've tried for months to rationalise it but it's completely destroying me. I cry myself to sleep at night, I've lost all my self esteem and my relationship is in tatters. Every time he tells me he loves me or that I look beautiful or tries to be sexual, all I can hear in my head is his words in all those emails.

I've completely lost contact with all of my friends because I don't know how to explain this change in me to them.

All I really really want is for none of it to be true but on days like today I know that it all is and that he's lied to me and that I don't know how I can ever trust him to be honest about how he felt, or about anything at all.

I've spoken to him over and over again about it and he starts off being understanding but ends up angry and telling me I'm jealous and he can't live explaining his past over and over. I've begged him not to tell me what I want to hear and to be honest about me but he keeps telling me he has. I want to believe him that all of it isn't true but I'm a logical person with black and white evidence in front of me screaming at me that it isn't (he's deleted everything since so I can't re-read any of it but it's indelibly stuck in my mind)

I don't know how to forget all those things and I don't know if I should forget. He tells me that even if it were all true, it's in his past but that doesn't help. I rushed into the engagement and the baby because it felt so right and he told me I was as special to him as he was to me but now I just feel like an idiot for ever believing he could feel like that about me. How will I ever know if he's been on the rebound the whole time or cope with knowing the details of everything he said and did with her? I wish I'd never looked at the emails. Please help. I've got no-one to talk to

[whereishe]

Honestly, I wouldn't put too much weight into e-mails from before you met. Did you ever date someone, probably while young, who you thought you were "in love" with and that they were "the one" and you couldn't imagine yourself ever "loving" again when you broke up? And then after the fact, you realized with new perspective, that wasn't really the case?

 

It's quite possible he was looking at his relationship with her through rose-colored glases as it was happening and the things he told you were very honest after-the-fact revelations, especially if things between the two of you were as good as you said, a "I didn't realize what love is until I met you" kind of thing. Not to say that's the solid truth, but you have to explore all avenues if you want to say someone is lying to you, because that's a pretty serious accusation to make.

 

I'd question more the idea that he potentially lied to his ex about his feelings when she was hypothetically in an emotionally frail state for the sake of placating her. If that's the kind of person he lies to and you're reacting weakly to this, he may be less likely to be fully honest with you about feelings. Not because he has bad intentions, but because he's afraid of hurting you. If you're strong-hearted and show yourself to be the understanding, calm has-her-stuff-together mother of his child that he "thought he'd never meet," things will be in a much better position for honest communication.