My wife sent a man a message on Facebook telling him he was handsome. Apparently, he’s a content creator. When I confronted her about it, she said it wasn’t as though she was ever going to see him.
That was supposed to settle it. For me, it didn’t.
We’ve been through a lot, and trust isn’t something that comes easily between us. I’m not going to fill in that history with details that aren’t here, but it matters to how this landed. I didn’t receive this as one isolated compliment in a marriage where everything already felt secure.
What bothers me is that she reached out to him directly. She saw someone she found handsome and chose to tell him. I don’t know what she expected from that message, if anything. I do know that the explanation about never meeting him doesn’t answer why she wanted to send it.
From her reaction, she seems to think the lack of any real prospect of meeting makes the whole thing harmless. I can understand that this is how she sees it without suddenly feeling fine about it myself. The distance between them hasn’t made the message disappear for me.
Now she’s angry because I’m angry, and the conversation has become harder than the original discovery. I went into it upset about something she did. I’ve come away feeling as though my response is the problem we’re supposed to discuss.
I’ve been calling it gaslighting because I feel dismissed and pushed into questioning my own reaction. But that word doesn’t resolve the disagreement. We’re still in the same place: she says she did nothing wrong, and I’m still hurt by the message.
I’m not claiming that a compliment proves an affair or that I know what she intended. I’m asking whether I’m wrong to be mad about what actually happened. She keeps returning to the fact that she’ll never see him. I keep returning to the fact that she contacted him.
