I don’t have proof that he cheated. That’s where I need to start, because I’m not asking anyone to turn a handful of uncomfortable incidents into certainty. I’m trying to understand whether I had reasonable grounds to question his honesty during our committed relationship.
The first incident involved Tinder. He downloaded it, he said, to help a friend with a proposed double date. According to him, he didn’t get matches, exchange messages, or meet anyone. He also said he kept downloading and deleting the app.
I knew none of this at the time. When I eventually asked whether he’d downloaded dating apps while we were together, he initially said no. Then he acknowledged Tinder. I never got a particularly clear explanation for why he hadn’t mentioned it.
Then there were the unused Tampax Pearl tampons in his room. At first, he said he’d taken them from a gender-neutral public bathroom and saved them in case I needed them. I questioned why he had several and why they were stored there.
Later, he showed me a screenshot of a conversation in which he’d asked his ex-girlfriend whether she’d left tampons at his place. He said his first explanation had been based on his memory. I struggled to reconcile the two accounts.
I also found a hair elastic in his room. He didn’t know whose it was and suggested it might be mine. When I said it wasn’t, he offered other possibilities: his mother, sister, or aunt, all of whom had occasionally been in his room. I wasn’t convinced, but I couldn’t establish who owned it.
The sunglasses were in my car. He called sounding delighted, apparently because he’d been wondering where his glasses had gone. He described the exact pair: cheap or knockoff glasses with black frames and purple lenses, somewhat feminine in style. Then he said he thought they might actually be his sister’s.
It confused me that he seemed to recognize them so confidently before becoming uncertain about whose they were.
Any one of these things could have an innocent explanation. Relatives leave belongings behind. People forget where objects came from. But I keep coming back to the initial denial about Tinder and the different accounts of the tampons.
I’m especially interested in how men would read those two incidents. Taken together, do these sound like reasonable grounds for suspicion? Or had I already become distrustful enough to connect things that didn’t belong together?
