Please help me; I am hurting and have been for a while and my wife does not consider my feelings important. She has not actually cheated on me, but my feelings are though as if she had. This all happened a couple months ago.

My wife recently gave birth and started selling her surplus breastmilk for some income. She began selling to a man, single, age in the high 20s; we are both in our low 20s. I felt very uneasy about this, and she did as well, but I gave my consent because she was desperate for some independence and I love my wife and don't want to see her miserable. They would meet in a public location and exchange breastmilk bags for money.

I started seeing a couple of the texts they had exchanged. Their conversations were overly friendly, too friendly for me to feel comfortable with, and definitely more than a business relationship. My wife knew I had seem some of her texts, and didn’t resist aggressively, but I could tell she was very annoyed that I was interested in the dialogue between them. They exchanged things about each of their personal lives to each other. My wife would stay up late at night in bed texting him while I lay next to her, asleep. I am a full-time student, leave in the morning when it’s dark, get back from school when it’s dark, get 4-5 hours (max) of sleep each night; so I am always tired. I felt very uncomfortable about all this friendly texting, but my wife is not very tolerant of my feelings when I don’t like something. It’s always the story of I am the one who is too controlling, fight breaks out; I just don’t have the energy for that all the time so we go to bed angry with each other. It wasn’t until later that I found out she was frequently staying up until 3 a.m. texting him! About very personal things, sometimes sexual things (see below), while her own husband - who is gone all day working hard and trying to excel in school - was sleeping right beside her!

The overly friendly texts continued. He started offering to buy her stuff. He even suggested to take her out shopping, just the two of them! This my wife did tell me, asking if it was okay with me (it was clearly totally okay with her, which disturbed me all the more), and I was incredibly disturbed at his offer, but managed to hold my composure. Remarkably, I managed to convince her to decline him taking her shopping. Still, she shared things with him about her day that she would normally share with me (which stopped or severely declined).

He even called her one time and they spoke on the phone while I was there. It was about her declining him taking her shopping. She started getting all emotional and crying because she was embarrassed to decline his offer, and because she wanted to accept it. Now how do you think I felt, my wife becoming emotionally involved with another man, on the phone while I was there, and having to take care of the baby! One time they got in an argument through texting, and she would hole herself up in our room and close the door, for hours, texting him, very emotionally involved in the texting, like each and every reply of his directly affected her mood and happiness level. And I am the bad guy, because my disagreement with the nature of their relationship causes that I am a controlling husband who doesn’t understand! How do you think I felt, how utterly emasculated I felt, having to stand there taking care of the baby and say “well honey, what are you guys arguing about?”. I shouldn’t have to say that!! I am her ****ing husband! And I was to stand by like a ****ing woman friend of hers, watching while they argued like a couple. This was yet another deep wound.

A couple weeks went by, and I happened to check her phone. I was horrified by what I saw.

There were tons of texts – TONS of them. Way too many for a business-only relationship. They were overly friendly/flirtatious with each other. He called her a sweet girl multiple times, and she said he was a sweet guy as well. There was TONS of this – him wishing he had such an amazing girl as her, her saying he’s such a sweet guy and couldn’t figure out why some lucky girl hasn’t snatched him up forever. (her words verbatim)

Then the texts got more personal. He started asking “do your breasts just… drip [when you pump]?”; this is incredibly graphic and deeply hurt and angered me. It clearly showed he had nothing but lustful thoughts for her. She’d reply “more like spray” and was totally okay with answering his questions even though they were way too personal. He even hinted at wanting to suck her milk directly from her breasts a few times. She of course said no but didn’t do anything to stop him from continuing to prod. He said she should jump in his truck and pump with him there. He said “it’s not like that, it’s not about watching you, I just want to see what you do”. To my complete horror the next text was “well alright.”. I couldn’t believe it! I think this is what hurt me the most, to see my wife so easily swayed by this stranger into doing something totally inappropriate and betraying to me!

She didn’t end up doing that, simply because they didn’t arrive at the meet up point at the same time, but she did pump in her car while he was maybe 20 feet away in his car. This was late at night, it was dark out, in a location she was unfamiliar with. Anyway, then of course he got to drink the warm fresh milk – he might as well have drunk it straight from her!

I told my wife how I felt, and she expressed regret, and told me she would stop selling to him, but never once said she was sorry. Now that I think back on it, I can’t remember why wife ever saying sorry for anything in our entire marriage for things that were genuinely her fault.

That was all a month or two ago. If I brought this up now wanting to clear my feelings, it’d only anger her saying I don’t let things go. We’ve had other talks since then about various things, like the raising of our child, talks in which it was clearly evident she did not value my opinion in the least and had her mind set.

But I really, really hurt inside. If I let all this just sit inside me I feel it will destroy me, and our marriage. Please help.