I (36M) snooped and found out that my wife (33F) of three years has been living some kind of sad double life and is not who I thought she was.

A man discovers his wife is secretly battling severe depression and self-loathing after he snoops through her diary, initially suspecting infidelity. What he learns is far more devastating—hidden miscarriages, feelings of unworthiness, and a lack of trust in their marriage. Now, he’s desperate to help her without causing further damage. Read his emotional account below.

‘ I (36M) snooped and found out that my wife (33F) of three years has been living some kind of sad double life and is not who I thought she was.’

Since my wife and I got married three years ago, things have been…off. I know that people grow and change with time, but around our wedding, my wife changed drastically. She bleached her dark brown hair blonde right before the ceremony, and I honestly thought I was in the wrong church for a split second when she came down the aisle. We moved into our house right after the honeymoon, and she went into full domestic mode.

We’d shared cleaning duties before, but once we moved into the house, she became INSISTENT on doing everything before I could even get to it. Since this is our first house, I thought it was some kind of homeowner nesting thing, but it never stopped.

Her hair color is none of my business and I think most people would be happy not to have to clean, so I honestly didn’t really think much of either of those things at the time. The big thing has always been how closed off she got after the wedding. When we were dating, she’d tell me long rambling stories about her feelings and rant to me when she was upset and all that, and I liked hearing about what was going on inside her head. After the wedding, that stopped pretty abruptly.

If I ask her how her day is, she will only ever tell me that it was “fine!” or “super!” She doesn’t talk to me about her feelings anymore, ever, even when I explicitly ask “how do you feel about x?” She also stopped telling me about anything important that happened to her. About a year after we got married, her grandfather died. Did she tell me she’d lost her grandfather? No. She told me that she had to go to a conference for work on the other side of the country, which I thought nothing of.

On the second day she was gone, her older brother texted me to tell me that my in-laws had really missed seeing me at the funeral. When I called her to ask why in the ever loving hell she didn’t tell me, and then LIED about it, all she would say was “I didn’t want to trouble you. You have a lot on your plate”. After that, she went on a couple of “spontaneous family trips”.

She’s really, REALLY close to her family, so the first time she said she was going camping with her brother at their alma mater, I didn’t think a lot of it other than to be slightly disappointed and confused that I wasn’t invited, because her brother’s cool and the three of us go camping together a lot. But the second time, I started hearing alarm bells.

I’d like to say I’m a more secure man, reddit, but after the second “spontaneous family trip”, my wheels started spinning and I started to think that maybe she was cheating. This was a weird insecurity in the back of my mind for a while, since she wasn’t showing any other big signs of cheating (she wasn’t guarded about her phone and hadn’t changed her routine/appearance). A few weeks ago, she told me she was pregnant.

I was over the moon about it until I asked her how many weeks along she was, and she nonchalantly said “about 12 or 13”. She’d been pregnant for like three months before she even bothered to tell me! She’s not really showing at all, and she doesn’t usually drink, so I had been completely in the f**king dark. I honestly hadn’t even suspected.

That was kind of it for me. I was sure she was cheating, and that it wasn’t my kid. I thought there was no possible way that a woman would keep her pregnancy a secret from HER HUSBAND for three months. So I snooped. Yes, I know I was wrong, but I wanted proof that she’d been having an affair before I moved out. One of my best buddies from college is a divorce attorney, and when I asked him what I should do, he sent me the info for a key logger. I installed it on my wife’s laptop and was prepared for the worst.

Now, I feel like what I found is somehow worse than her cheating. I didn’t find any steamy messages, but I found out that she keeps a diary in a word document that she writes in every day. I know I should have just stopped once I knew she wasn’t cheating, but once I saw my name in her diary, I couldn’t stop. I read all of it. All seven separate documents, going back to way before we’d even met.

Turns out she’s not cheating. She’s depressed as f**k, hates herself, and has absolutely no trust in me. All of the stuff I’d been confused and bothered by has some kind of sad, self-loathing explanation. She hates having blond hair, but she writes “I know he’d divorce me if I went back to being a brunette, because wives are supposed to be blond” almost every week. The “wives are supposed to be” thing is tangled up in everything. She thinks wives are supposed to be quiet, which is why she doesn’t talk to me anymore.

She thinks wives are supposed to “make things easier for their husbands, not harder”, which is why she didn’t tell me when her grandfather died. It just goes on and on and on. She didn’t tell me when she got a huge promotion and a raise because “he’d leave me in a heartbeat if he knew I made more money than he does. Men can’t handle that”. It hurt to know that she thinks of me as some kind of one-dimensional 1950’s husband, and I’ve been wracking my brain to think of anything I could have done to make her think this way.

What I can’t handle is that she’d lied about the big stuff. I honestly don’t know if I can forgive her for not telling me about the miscarriages. The “spontaneous family trips” were actually her miscarrying two of our children, one at five weeks, the other at about 10. She went and stayed with her parents while she was recuperating, and her brother and sister came to support her. But not me.

I didn’t get to be there for her, because she thinks I would leave her immediately if I knew that she’d “killed” our children. She’s convinced that she caused both miscarriages because she smoked pot for a long time before we got married. For what it’s worth, it sounds like her family tried both times to get her to tell me, but she wouldn’t. She finally told me about this pregnancy because her parents threatened to tell me she didn’t.

I’m just absolutely f**king dumbfounded. I don’t even know what to think right now. I’m just so baffled because everything she says about me in her diary is insanely nice. She goes on for pages and pages about how much she loves me and how she thinks I’m her soul mate and how she would do anything for me. I just can’t understand why she thinks that I would leave her. Knowing that she’s spent the last three years walking on eggshells around me, convinced that I would leave her at the drop of a hat is just so…confusing and awful.

I feel like our marriage is some kind of lie. The woman I thought was self-confident and ready to take on the world is actually full of self-loathing and really, really, REALLY depressed. I don’t know her at all. She’s been suffering silently with depression long before we met. She has no faith in me, no trust. She thinks that every hug and kiss I give her and every “I love you” I say is a lie.

I just don’t know what to do. She obviously needs serious help, but I don’t know how to get it for her. I can’t tell her that I read her diary. If she has zero trust in me now, I can’t even imagine what she’d think if she knew if I read six years worth of her private thoughts. I feel like I need to get my in-laws on board somehow, but I don’t know what to say to them. I know I can’t ignore this, but I feel like any move is the wrong move. What do I do??

Tl;dr: thought wife was cheating so I snooped and read her diary. She’s actually insanely depressed, has secretly miscarried two of our children, and doesn’t trust me one iota. How do I get her help without making things worse?

Let’s dive into the reactions from Reddit:

[Reddit User] −  Counseling. Right now. She needs way more help than you or her family can give her.

CraazyMike −  I think I’d consider discussing everything you know with a professional, and see what they suggest the next step is.

goldt33f −  Woahhh, that is some really bad depression. She needs major, major therapy, and you both need couples counseling. She’s lying to you about very important things in your life and is internalizing a stereotype that wives should be like a 1950s housewife (why is she thinking this in the first place if that’s now how she was before marriage?). You need to tell her about what you’ve read and that she needs separate therapy and you both need counseling together.

Atd9856 −  Wow. This is way above reddit’s pay-grade. I agree with the other posters. She needs counseling ASAP, and it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to get into couples counseling. Good luck OP, hopefully she gets the help she needs.

itscalledtupperware −  “I know he’d divorce me if I went back to being a brunette, because wives are supposed to be blond”. There is a lot of good advice here about therapy and talking to her and such, but I would also encourage you to suggest she become a brunette again somewhere along the line. If she obsesses over it that much, maybe you telling her you want her to be that brunette she thinks she can’t be will be a small token of you loving and accepting her.

Imsolost123456789 −  She needs therapy. She needs serious, intensive therapy. And you both need counseling together. Her views on marriage and how to treat herself and you are incredibly unsettling and unhealthy. She needs professional help. Blaming herself for miscarrying, suppressing her emotions and self h**red are all heart-breaking. Please get her help. And yourself help. And your marriage help.

Chasmosaur −  Normally I’d say reading a diary is a bit of a violation, but in this case, I think it may have been necessary. Your wife is obviously very unhappy and skilled at hiding it, and there was no other way you were going to know.

I’m not sure how you go forward on this, though, because you’re right: if she doesn’t trust you now, finding out you read her diaries for the past several years is hardly going to help that. I’d say you should talk to your in-laws first, but let them know that you are primarily concerned about your wife’s/their daughter’s health and happiness.

I’m so sorry both you and your wife are going through this. I will say that sometimes, there is a huge cultural pressure to be a certain way once you become a wife. Whether it’s a general cultural perception, social media influence, or family expectations. It doesn’t have to come from your husband, so don’t beat yourself up over that if you really can’t see that you may have influenced those thoughts.

codayus −  Don’t beat yourself up over the snooping too much.
1. You knew something was badly off, and it was. You weren’t being paranoid.

2. Also, she’s the woman you love, whom you married, and who needs your help very very very badly right now. If you use the information you gained to control her, or to be abusive, or to exploit her fears, then sure, you’re the world’s biggest d**k. But if you use the information to help her…then…good? Your marriage vows probably said in sickness and in health, and she’s sure as f**k sick right now.

Being married does mean that your spouse gets to make some decisions on your behalf in some cases. And this is a crisis; sometimes you have to cut a corner or two.. Going forward:
1. You’re right, you can’t just tell her.
2. She needs serious professional help, very badly.

3. I think you need to get her family on board.
Basically, I think you should reach out to them behind her back, tell them the gist (they already know a lot of it), and then between you all you can collaborate to find a way to get her the professional help she needs.. Important stuff to keep in mind:

1. This isn’t really her “fault”, any more than having asthma is her fault. You probably feel a little hurt and betrayed that she didn’t turn to you for help with this problem, but in a very real sense, the core problem is that she *couldn’t* turn to you for help.
2. This is probably pretty urgent to fix. Especially if she’s pregnant. If she miscarries again it could do a lot of damage to her; if she carries to term she’s at serious risk of post-natal depression. Either way, lives are possibly at stake; she needs help.

3. This is fixable. May not be fast, probably won’t be easy, but modern medicine can do a lot.
4. Once the serious “holy s**t” stuff is sorted, couples counselling is probably called for. There’s a lot of rebuilding that needs to be done, once the two of you are capable of being on the same page.

C1awed −  I don’t think you have the room to lie to her here. She needs serious help, and I think she’s only going to get it if you’re very very honest with her. Tell her everything. From the beginning, just like you did here. Reinforce over and over how much you love her, then make an appointment with a therapist for her. I’d start with couples counseling, just so you can go with her and express your concerns – make sure she doesn’t gloss over things.

I’m also concerned that you don’t have *time* to be super gentle about it. If something happens – I hesitate to say “goes wrong” – during or after the pregnancy, something like post-partum depression, on top of her already crippling issues…. she may not be able to handle it at all. Pregnancy is so hard on a woman anyway, all her anxiety and depression may be magnified just by being pregnant. I assume she’s been going to her doctors regularly?

I wouldn’t get the inlaws involved… yet. If she starts going to treatment and improves, she’ll be happy you didn’t embarrass her to them. If she refuses treatment, you can get them involved as reinforcement.

MalformedPacket −  Christ on a crutch! Get her into therapy ASAP. Someone long ago fucked up her idea of marriage and is causing her to miss out on so much in life. Don’t even mention the diary. Put it to her as you feel like you are not doing something right as a husband and you want her to be happy. Tell her that the couples therapy is the only option since she will not open up to you. Once in therapy, paraphrase things from the diary just to lead the conversation. Leading with the diary will only cause her to retreat further.