Help with relationship

I am looking to get opinion to see if I am thinking straight. My wife and I are both in the medical field. We have been faithful to each other but have had our ups and downs but we have always been intimate.

My wife has our own practice which has been very demanding. In the last 6 months she has been obsessed with her practice (sleeping at odd hours, staying up all night catching up on clinic work etc etc.). Her office manager who has been our friend has been managing the practice for over 3 years without any problems. Most of the things were under his control in the clinic. Approximately 7 months ago I noticed that his phones calls and messages increased. I was not comfortable with this and suspected that he may have started liking my wife. I shared this with my wife and also politely spoke with the other guy asking him to stay away from the clinic and to keep everything professional via email etc. They both got the message. I also blocked his number through our phone service.

Since then my wife has been giving me the impression that the office manager has been working remotely and that is hardly in touch with him. I would occasionally see messages from him which would result in us fighting over this off and on but then she would convince me that there is nothing and that I am overreacting.

1 month ago I discovered that they have been talking over the phone 45-50 minutes per day (2-6 times per day, occasionally in the middle of the night) for the past 4-5 months. I also discovered 3 months of messages between them from 2 different numbers (Office manager’s regular number and his google voice number). All the messages from him regular number were about work. The messages he was sending through google voice number were usually late at night and weekends including “are you up” , “call me now”, “calling you”, “ I will give you the password to a work website when i see you”, “ I will not let you run your clinic if I don't see you”. My wife rarely replied back and the only messages she sent out were basically about work or telling him that “she cannot come out tonight because her husband is on a look out”, “do not call call or message today as my husband is becoming paranoid”,” cannot talk tonight, will aim for tomorrow night”. As per my wife her phone conversations were strictly about work and maybe talk about kids off an on. She also informed me that the office managers’s inappropriate advances was more pronounced in the last 3 months and it was approximately once a week. Message and phone logs also suggest that.

After confronting my wife she broke down and started crying. She was apologetic that she had been talking to this guy behind my back but she insists that she has no feelings for this guy and she did not have any emotional or physical relationship with him. Her story is that she had to get her clinic running and he was the person who had everything under his control and since she was trying to get her clinic going she did not have a choice but to talk to him. As per her explanation because there was so much going on in the clinic every day they had to talk 30-35 minutes per day and sometime if she was up in the middle of the night to get answers about the clinic. As per my wife, the office manager started calling her obsessively ( sometimes 40 times per night) but she would not answer those calls. Occasionally, she would answer those calls but then he would talk about work. She also informed me that he would occasionally ask her to come to the gym to meet him although he never said anything romantic or suggested anything directly to her. My wife states that she never met him at the gym and she was brushing off his in appropriate behavior as it was not every day and the office manager would profusely apologize for his behavior the following day and then things would go back to normal. Despite the inappropriate behavior, my wife would talk to him the following day about work and apparently tell him off about his behavior. As per my wife he was not getting anything or anywhere with her and that he still had to do his work and she was not going to let his inappropriate behavior affect her.

I have confronted the office manager who has been very apologetic and gives me a similar story. Although I am convinced that they did not have an affair in the clinic, I cannot forgive or forget 1) Why would my wife continue talking to this guy when I explicitly informed her multiple times on how I felt about the whole thing 2) If she had to talk to him to get the clinic running why did she not shut him down once he started with his inappropriate behavior, why did she not come to me? 3) This whole story seems like using the work as an excuse to talk. I find it hard to believe that they had to chat 45 minutes every day to address work issues. Part of me believes that she was enjoying talking to him and she is not telling me the whole truth.

She realizes and admits that her not shutting this down immediately and not coming to me was her mistake. She tells me that she thought she could handle him herself. According to my wife, her messages were politely delaying tactics and telling him to “stop since husband on the lookout” since he was not overtly saying anything to her. There is no evidence of any romantic exchanges from either side.

Since this happened I have spoken to my wife and the office manager multiple times (individually and together). There has been no contact between them and their stories stays the same. He admits that he started liking her and then became reckless in his behavior.

This whole drama has disrupted our family completely. I feel betrayed and “cheated” but at the same time I know it was not an affair in the classic sense. I cannot come to terms with what happened. Unfortunately, my wife has a history of compulsive lying- she tells me that this is because she is afraid of my temper. I trust my wife that she would not physically cheat on me but because of her lying behavior I cannot trust her completely.

This episode made her realize that her clinic is not everything and that she needs to give more time to her family. We have two young kids (< 8 years) and I love them to bits and just the thought of separation from them is unbearable. At the present time, I am keeping all options open including individual or couple counseling, separation, divorce. I have become obsessed with this whole thing and keep digging info to see if I am missing something. My family members tell me that I am overthinking and that I need to trust my wife and let this go.

I am writing to you to see if anyone has been in a similar situation. Any advice would be helpful.

Conflicted Husband