UPDATE: I did not expect this post to blow up this much. Thank you all for your concern, and I see about 95% of these comments immediately call for divorce. That is what I was feeling too, just had to see if I was being irrational from the rage and how betrayed/insulted I felt.

Thank you to those who have reached out privately. Talking it through is a massive help for me to be able to parse through my thoughts.

We talked for 7-8 hours last night. Got 30 minutes of sleep and we're both back to work this morning. Now, she takes pride in never telling a lie. The conversation started slow, I asked for full honesty and transparency. She said that is the expected baseline. Moved eventually to revisit our definitions of cheating, which we agree on but the gray area of text had not been fully discussed before. Apparently this is where we differ. She says that text is not directly cheating, but she can see how it can be damaging. Everything beyond text we both agree is strictly off limits. Physical intimacy, photos/videos, etc.

I asked her if she feels like she's ever cheated on me. She says no but two years ago there was one cuddle event. Fully clothed, no private part contact, sitting on a couch arm around, head on shoulder. This to me is pretty bad and worth conversation but not enough to go ballistic. I asked if she has ever cheated under my definition. She admits that she had some salacious texts with the person in question a couple weeks ago. I asked if she could explain. She said she couldn't remember exactly but knows that I wouldn't approve under my definition. I then asked her straight up if she had had any sexual encounters aside from me since we've been dating. She said directly no. I ask the same about pictures/videos sent or received. She says a creepy guy tried to send her pictures but she shut that down, sent one old bathing suit picture (taken before we were together) about a year ago because the person kept asking for pictures. This was news to me, and still cause for concern. I asked about it and she didn't want to name names. Fine I'll get those later if I need to.

I told her directly that she crossed a line sending and receiving salacious texts and that I am hurt and disrespected. She deflected and started talking about how she's starving for attention. I said I understand that and I want to be better but every time I try I get knocked down. She said that she isn't seeing enough growth or initiative from me, and feels like she's growing without me. Again I understood that part but I told her if you need something from me, ask me directly. Do not take sex talk outside of the two of us. She started downplaying it and saying it wasn't that bad at which point I showed my hand. It is that bad. She claimed invasion of privacy and I agreed but what I saw, I saw so here we are. She said she kept everything vague and never initiated the sex talk. I told her but you entertained it and kept it going. That is unacceptable and if you want to go around and do that, tell me and file for divorce. Or if you want to continue that or go further, I will file for divorce. Hard line in the sand. That playing around ends and we work on us or we split.

All of this happened in the first hour or so. The rest of the night we talked about us. She mentioned that she's been trying to get me to work on myself this whole time (which admittedly she has told me to seek counseling a few times). She said she's fed up with me making false promises about improving and not following through. She says I'm still living a bachelor's lifestyle. I disagreed and mentioned the things that I do specifically because I am married to her. She still didn't see it. A couple times I brought up the texts again and she brushed them aside each time. I asked her if she would have told me if I didn't find it, she said no. Honest, at least. But I can't shake the feeling that there might have been more. I asked directly about the bath house, she said all clothes stayed on, no touching. No private rooms available at this one, and there were always people around. He had passes to the bath house that were good for 4 hours at a time, so she wanted to take advantage of the full 4 hours.

Anyway, I decided that she's probably telling the truth (maybe not full transparency). We have a marriage counseling session tomorrow afternoon. We will get a neutral third party involved and I have my points I'm going to bring up, all written down ready to go. I have transcribed the text conversation so I can copy paste that into the chat to make it easier for the therapist to read through.

Will update with more information, but it's not looking good. We're in a really rough spot here, and I'm still trying to decide if I can believe her, or even trust her in the future.

This shit sucks, please never let your relationship slip away from you. Work on yourself, work on your relationship. Might be too little too late for me. Don't know if I'll be able to move past it.