so many red flags but I too didn't want to believe them and trusted my wife with my life.

cell phone- always on it and never left her side. Only time she didn't have it was when I tried to call her.

Face book- posted so many inappropriate pictures and was always checking her inbox. There was no pictures of me on her facebook page.

Stressing about money-it cost a lot of money to travel and pay for her trips and hotels to meet her men.

always angry at me-start fights to validate how horrible I treated her

Lost weight- she started working out more and more and always kept herself groomed, nails done, hair done, new clothes. now she gained about 60 lbs, doesn't groom herself like she did before and i guess she figures i dont' deserve her to look good like she did while having her affairs.

Used her friends as excuses-it seemed like all of her friends needed her help and she had to help out and was gone alot to help her freinds deal with marriage problems, life, kids, medical emergencies.

Work- she all of the sudden had to travel out of town for training, seminars, classes, conferences.

Drugs-my wife was taking adheral for ADHD and i thought that was really affecting her mood swings and she used that excuse for her irritability.

Wedding ring- that was the cleanest ring you would ever see because she always left it in her cleaning solution container. She forgot to take it out alot and she said she was affraid she would lose it because it was lose on her finger.

Now i just look back and think WHAT A FOOL i was for not believing my wife would do these things.

Where do I begin?

Personal grooming was suddenly important. He started showering multiple times per day and chewing gum so his breath was always minty fresh. It was suddenly important to keep his hair cut nicely. He reverted to wearing contact lenses instead of glasses.

He was constantly sending and receiving text messages.

He started going to happy hour after work on Fridays and I was no longer welcome.

He wasn't interested in sex (with me) and was not above getting up and walking away during the middle of it.

He suddenly disagreed with everything I said. He rolled his eyes whenever I spoke.

He uninvited me from the company Christmas party.

He no longer wanted to be seen with me in public as if I were a dirty secret.

This is a really good topic! Whatafool replies were very interesting.

Well lets see, my H had a lot of red flags,

sex- he wanted to have it all the time in new positions

rushing out- he would come home from work and quickly shower and rush back out

best friend- he was always using his best friend as an excuse, like whatafool said, my H all of a sudden needed to help his friend with their family issues

Like missy, he didn't want me to go anywhere with him anymore.

money- he never had any.... thats because he was spending it all on hookers.

Mom's house- he all of a sudden had to be at his Mom's house every hour of the day claiming her was doing things for her around the house.

Cell phone- he never answered his cell while he was missing.... he would come home and say he didn't hear it or his best friend was on it or he left it at is Mom's.

Missing-He would go missing for hours

I think the new undies and not tidey whities anymore and after being out of town all week and coming home on weekends after 25 yrs of marriage he says we were never suppose to be together I'm like """WHAT .....my daughter saying at 28yr old says dad is looking at 17 yr olds....staring in front of me............... I think dad is screwing around he is acting so weird as he moved me and my son 3 hours away and only came up on weekends ................

Oh hell, my gut was my biggest sign I ignored. I never questioned, or concerned myself, with any woman before, but the OW (who was his coworker and a family friend) rubbed me the wrong way a few times. I missed the flag of him vehemently denying anything was going on, and how immediately offended and protective he would get over her. I had blind faith in him, and that was my biggest missed sign.

I know better now, and it served to be a huge lesson in positive, personal growth for me.

became obsessed with how he looked, spent forever fixing his hair, wanting it cut differently, etc.

starting fights on purpose with me, then saying he was going to one of his buddies' houses, then coming home insanely late and blackout drunk, after not answering calls or texts for hours; even once told me he bought a 6'er, drove to a buddies, "but the lights were off so i didnt want to bother them" so he supposedly drank all 6 in his friend's driveway in the car, then passed out. so that's why no one could verify his whereabouts, but also why he didnt come home. yes folks, i bought that one at the time..

telling me "if i wanted to end the relationship, i wouldn't come home." well-played, a-hole. i know now, many cheaters don't "want to end the relationship" but that doesnt stop them from cheating, no no that just means they're gonna lie so they can have both.

rushed out in a blizzard to "play a show" with his band, even though every business in town, including the Pediatric Clinic i work at had already closed for the next day. i thought "he's gonna be so mad when no one comes out in the blizzard to hear his band." i was a moron. he just wanted to get out of the house to bang some chick, then fed me lines all night about how he'd be delayed getting home (incidentally, when he did finally come home that night, blackout drunk, is when i finally discovered the affairs due to texts from 2 different women in his phone.)

Facebook, always adding tons of random people he'd never met, mostly slutty looking women, and using the excuse "you can't invite people to like your band from your band's page; so i'm friending them to tell them to go "like" the band, that's all"

tons more but that's enough of a novel for now.

If anyone's read my book, they know them. In short:

1. First big sign was after 28.5 years of marriage of having sex no more than 2 times a month on average, she suddenly wanted it every day, often more than once a day. That actually lasted for more than a year past dday.

2. She started talking about this guy at one of her business clients who was adorable. She had his picture on her phone. A month after he left, discovered his picture was her phone's wall paper, and she quickly shifted it to my picture when she noticed I saw it, and was embarrassed.

3. She initially talked about flirting with him as a game, then she stopped talking about him at all and never said she had stopped flirting.

4. At the beginning of the affairs, he taste in music changed radically. It went from oldies to more modern artist who tended to have highly sexualized songs. One of her favorites was Butterfly by Jason Maraz (sp?).

5. Her TV viewing habits changed. She watched certain reality shows religiously. Suddenly, she didn't care about them. I considered that a good thing, actually.

6. She seemed to have become obsessed with sexual things. She referred to her "bad girl" and "good girl" selves. Became interested in sex toys when she'd never been. Started cussing when she'd never done so before. In short, her whole personality changed almost overnight.

7. When she started staying up until 2 in the morning on a regular bases to use the computer. Prior to that, she'd be doing good to keep her eyes open long enough to stay up until midnight. She had never shown any interest in much online activity prior to that. I never wondered what had so engrossed her on the computer that she had the energy and drive to stay up that late for the first time in the years since I'd known her.

8. When she started going to the gym, and mentioned making a new guy friend. Then stopped talking about him. She tended to wear sexier clothes to the gym and less modest bathing suits than she ever had before.

The red flag that broke the camel's back was seeing that she'd been texting pics to guys I didn't know. And when I asked her about them, she became deathly silent. I didn't think she was having a full physical affair, so still didn't expect that, but began to suspect she may be spending all that time online sex chatting. That's when I started to investigate and discovered it went much, much deeper.

Now, even the hint of a red flag causes a reaction.

I think in order for me to see the red flags I would have to know something was going on.

Then, I really didnt see much, now looking back I can kind of see them but they were subtle.

They seem to have worked out their talk schedule early from the start. She is married also, so obviously she told him when she could talk. My husband used his personal cell for work also so it was really hard to track what was going on with his phone. He was issued a work phone but he was already using his cell so he didnt use it much.

He brought hair dye. Now, this is not a red flag really because he goes through stages of is gray bothering him. This girl was around 12 years younger than him. He didnt dye it all just covered some of the gray.

If I had organized the calls on the phone bill I probably would have picked up on them but Im sure he would have said it was work related and I would have believed him because there are several calls/text to co-workers and more than one or two to males and females daily. My husband talks on the phone A LOT. Not just to co-worker but to family members and friends. So I would have had to know what I was looking for.

He did not hold on to his phone, he left it lying around and like I said I checked it periodically and found nothing. He was deleting those messages as soon as they were done chatting. From looking at the bill there were no messages at odd hours of the night or early morning. They did most of their talking during work hours, after work and when my kids were at activities and stuff like that so he had to communicate with her their schedules also.

He was not on the internet a lot, did not really get on Facebook (they were not friends on Facebook either) much, they were actually pretty careful and it was a fluke that I found out. They were see each other during work time not sure how often. He can come and go as he pleases so he had to go to her most of the time. He did not go out on weekends and was home at a decent hour. There were a few times he as about 15 mins or so late and said it was traffic but I see by the phone records that he was talking to her so it could have been traffic or he was just circling around so they could talk. Like I said before he had no probably bragging about me at work and me coming there wasnt a problem either. He wore his ring no need to hide that she knew he was married. Our sex life was the same about 2-3 times per week.

So, I would have missed it no matter what, scary.

The red flags I ignored because I trusted him implicitly started with him talking a lot about a particular woman at work. So much so that I woke up one morning having dreamed that he was having an affair and that I had said she could have him as I didn't want "soiled goods"

I noticed that he changed the window on the computer every time that I came into the room. (He was chatting to her on Lync.)

He spent a lot of time on his mobile phone whereas before he had hardly used it at all. It was always PIN locked and he carried it with him everywhere.

He started finding excuses to be absent for several hours most weekends. Some plausible, some less so, but I never queried them out loud.

He changed the address on his company VISA card so that the bills went to his work address instead of the home address.

He became aggressively critical of my clothes, habits etc. (the OW has almost the opposite personality as me) almost having me in tears in front of our (adult) kids on a couple of occasions and at that time I very rarely cried, boy has that changed!

Finally he became much more interested in sex and we went from making love maybe once a week/fortnight to every day. That bit I did enjoy...

My gut had been screaming at me for months but I wouldn't let myself believe what I had started to suspect. I won't ignore red flags again that is for sure.

Thanks everyone for the comments. I don't think I will get fooled again don't know guess it is possible but my senses are a lot sharper and I pay much closer attention for Red Flags now, I think it would be very hard for them to get past me again.

His hours have always been irregular. He always had training trips that took him out of town for up to a week. There was never a question of me going with him because I was anchored at home with our child in school. He'd always been involved with martial arts so "working out" was not a noticeable departure from past behaviors. The only difference there, was that it was with "the guys" from work. He started spending a bit more on eating out, but work activities had shifted so that he was out of the office more and working with a task force. Once he asked me to gather some pictures of him so he could put them on his Facebook site. He has friends in other states hes not seen for years, so I thought he was sending pics to them. He actually was responding to a request from her for pictures of him. Nothing really jumped out at me, it was all plausible and I had no obvious red flags. Once he called to say that he had locked his keys in his car at the Gym. I offered to bring him a spare, thinking that he was just a few miles away, and he said that he had already sent for a lock smith and not to bother. When I got the receipt for the work, I filed it away, never even noticing that the address for the service call was not the address for the Gym where he told me he had been working out. He didn't even have a membership there. I later discovered that she had started a couples membership for the two of them and was paying for it herself in order to hide it from me. Had I gone through his Gym bag I would have found the paper work for that and seen that she listed her address as being the same as his. I didn't do any checking of anything, I trusted him completely. My daughter once jokingly said that one would think he had a woman on the side because he was more focused on working out than he had been. We both laughed, ha ha ha , what a silly idea. When I tripped over AP's e-mails to him I was gob smacked. I never thought my H was a good liar, but his deceit was masterful. Trust will make you blind. I will never trust anyone that completely again.

Red flags were every where!!!! However, during the time I had trusted him fully and never gave any of his actions a second thought. Now I will never trust him again.

At the time I did not realize that his cell phone was always with him and never left out in the open.

He would always volunteer to run to the store at any time of the evening and did not want anyone to come with him. Normally, he never liked to leave the house without having me or the kids come with him.

He was supposed to be restoring my grandparents' home in another state, so he was gone weeks at a time throughout the month. It turned out he barely touched my grandparents' home and instead worked on the Thing's house instead. My friends had questioned me why he was gone so much but I quickly defended him. I truly thought at the time that I was supporting my husband's ambitions of fixing and flipping homes as a business and his start was with my grandparents' home. Wow, what a fool I was. 3 years later the house is still not restored. UGH!!!!

He was very defensive and our arguments were very vile.

He bought the Thing a Christmas card and explained that he did so because he claimed she had never received one before. However, he has never bought a card on his own for anyone. I am the one who buys all the cards for his family and mine. He has never bought a card for his own daughter.

I could go on forever. Writing this now is just bringing up so many other things that I just did not give any thought to. It also reminds me how much I trusted and believed his lies. I definitely did not think he was capable of doing any of it to me. I, like so many, thought I was special to him.

I obsessed a great deal on the missed red flags. It's quite normal to do so because we want to see what me missed (subconsciously)....so we don't experience the pain again.

It can be another form of self punishment. In essence we are calling ourselves foolish for missing it. Don't get caught up in this self flagellation.

The empty feeling and sense that the relationship was a shell.

I even used to watch him drive off and have this image in my head of him being off to see his "real wife." It was something I couldn't entirely shake.

Just wanted to get this thread back in the light and see if any new members have any input. Thanks everyone.