Ralph Brewer reads a letter from David about his wife's secretive phone use, sudden fitness obsession, hidden debt and lawsuit, and emotional volatility. Brewer calls it financial infidelity combined with possible mental health issues, and tells David he doesn't need physical proof of cheating to leave. He advises consulting an attorney and therapy.
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Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person, real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. Hello everyone. We have a new Dear DSO entry on the website and you can submit your own story to dadstartingover.com/dear-dso and I will answer it here in video form. Met. This one comes from— he gives his real name, first and last. I'm going to change it. I'm going to say it comes from David. David says, am I being weird? I can keep this short. For some time, my wife is using her phone at all hours of the night until like 1 AM. She gets very angry when I inquire. She's secretive, and recently Do Not Disturb mode was activated. I don't recall it being like this previously. She's suddenly taken recent interest in working out. Sex, maybe the same day each week at the same time, upstairs in bed in the same position. I have suggested spicing things up. I found big toys in her drawer. The giant dildos then disappeared. I was told that she was sued by a credit card company in October and she didn't tell me. Showed her and she still denied it. A friend just told me that she borrowed upwards of $10,000 from him. I have proof that she has other credit cards unpaid. Her rationale is, I didn't know that we shared financial information. Also, she rages, shouting, throwing things around, and crying. We have a 5-year-old daughter, so I can't leave without evidence of physical cheating, right? Thank you for reading. Um, there's some kind of broken English here, so it makes me wonder if there's like a— this person's not in the US, I'm assuming. So I don't know the legalities of can you leave. I mean, there's all kinds of laws and all kinds of places all over the world, but my initial knee-jerk reaction David, is, yeah, of course you can leave without evidence of physical cheating. I mean, this woman has committed at least financial infidelity, it's called, you know, sneaking around and going into a lot of debt and getting sued for all this debt and everything else right away. That's a lot of people would say, that's enough. That's all I need to hear. Goodbye. But on top of that, we have all this other secret, not so good behavior, and then the raging and throwing things around and crying. And this person's going through something. The question is, do you, you know, put forth the effort to try and, quote, fix this or to get her to get help? I'm sure there's a lot of detail you're leaving out here. We're only hearing one side of the story. But taking whatever, whatever you say here at face value, it doesn't sound good. And yeah, if I was a betting man, there's probably somebody else in the picture. I mean, there's, there is a, I don't know the proper definition. It could be, if you were to put her in front of a psychologist, it could be she could be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder or something similar to that, which goes right along with all of this crazy erratic behavior, secrecy, fooling around, affairs, and all this other stuff. But whatever flavor of mental thing she has going on here, it all points to this person's pretty disturbed and they need help. And you don't really have to be the person to get them help or to help them. They have to be the person to raise their hand to say, "I'm going a little nuts here." and I'm about to blow up my life. Uh, what's frustrating for guys like you is that you think you need to be the one to fix this or take some kind of action or whatever. And from where I sit, um, the only action to take is to put your hands up and get the hell away from this person before they do something really stupid to ruin your life, like get you thrown in jail or something like that. So I would guess leave said situation, but maybe consult with an attorney first. Hey, hey, Mr. or Ms. Attorney, here's my situation. What do you think? Am I okay to leave said situation? I feel like I'm in danger physically because she's acting out and so forth, and there's all this other behavior going on. There's this financial infidelity and everything else. I have a feeling they're going to say, yes, dummy, leave. But, um, dude, that's up to you. Um, you have plenty of evidence to show that there's not so nice stuff going on here. So yes, get your ducks in a row, as we say, and start over and figure out what it is about you, as I often say, that caused you to stick around with somebody like this in the face of all this pretty awful behavior that you've outlined here. Why do you stick around? And why is it even a question of whether or not to stick around? I understand you have your vows and you're in love with the person and everything else, but there has to be a rational side of you that said this is bad. This all points to some not so good stuff. I better get the hell out of Dodge. But instead, I'm hearing you like, am I crazy here? Do I have to have physical evidence of cheating before I leave? So you're not sounding very rational yourself, David. So figure out what's going on there up in your head. Maybe talk to a therapist. All right, buddy. Best of luck to you.
