Dear Annie: Husband wants to wipe the slate clean

Dear Annie: I thought my husband and I had a great marriage – until I looked on his phone and found text messages to another woman. I was crushed. I asked him about it, and he said that it was nothing and that there were only a few messages. When I checked our cellphone details, I was completely devastated to find that it had been going on for almost a year and there were almost 2,000 text messages during the past six months. When I talked to him about this and all the lies he had told me, he said he had lost his way and he was sorry and didn’t want to lose me.

We started counseling, but he doesn’t want to discuss the details of the text messages and did a factory reset on his phone so I can’t see the messages. He said it was not a sexual affair, but his actions just don’t convince me it was just text messages. Now he thinks we are fine and our marriage will go on, but I can’t stop myself from thinking about what he may have done that I don’t know about.

How can I ever trust him again? I don’t know whether I can, because he told me so many lies. This was going on for almost a year. How can I believe that it wasn’t sexual? I am trying to act as if we are OK, but inside I feel as if I am dying. Please help me to think this through. I need to figure out whether I should stay or go. I need some good advice. – Lost in Love

Dear Lost in Love: I’m so sorry for the hurt you must be feeling. Your husband can’t simply reset your marriage as he did his phone. It seems he expects that as long as he apologizes and stops talking to this woman, everything should go back to the way it was before he decided to have an affair. And it was an affair – if not a physical one, then an emotional one. Tell him that if you’re ever going to move past this, you need complete candidness and vulnerability from him. No more obfuscating the truth, changing the subject or destroying the evidence. Anything short of that would be placing a Band-Aid on a deep puncture wound, and the marriage would never heal.