A fictionalized account of uncertainty after concealed online contact.
In December, I asked my wife about messages with another man. She said they had been chatting and admitted that some conversations were flirtatious. She denied a physical affair.
I had noticed changes in her grooming and appearance, and I began fitting them into the explanation I feared. I also had questions about a health issue mentioned in an email. None of those observations could establish when, how, or whether a sexual encounter had happened. They were not substitutes for a medical assessment or an accurate account of the contact.
What I did know was that the conversations had been concealed and that “only chatting” did not describe how I felt about them. We had to discuss the messages themselves: their nature, duration, and relationship to what we had agreed.
I wanted certainty about every possibility. She wanted the absence of an admitted physical encounter to end the discussion. Those positions kept us talking past one another.
I could ask for a clear timeline without pretending that a hairstyle proved it. She could explain what had happened without treating the word “online” as an automatic exemption from our expectations.
I still did not know whether her account was complete. The uncertainty mattered. So did the choice about whether we could discuss it without replacing facts with insinuations.
The new year was approaching, but it would not supply a fresh start on its own. We needed a conversation that neither of us could settle with a convenient label.
