Well, I finally did it! I finally confronted him! And while things got a little heated at first, in the end I think it went well and we made a lot of progress towards understanding each other. It turned out that the whole thing was ultimately just based on a simple misunderstanding of an incident that happened with my neighbor a couple of months ago. At the time, I didn’t think it was a big deal and I had forgotten all about it, but once he brought it up the whole thing made sense to me.
What happened was he was asking lots of inappropriate questions again, and I finally got so sick of it that I ‘cracked’ and bluntly confronted him about his snooping. He tried to talk his way out of it at first, but eventually he admitted to having our neighbor watching me and breaking into my phone. I got really angry then and demanded to know why he was acting this way, and did he really think that I would cheat on him. At that point he finally told me the real reason he was suspicious, and everything fit into place.
It all began when our neighbor told him he thought Dan and I were having an affair. He based this on what his wife told him. She had come over one day while Dan and I were doing a shoot in our daughter’s bedroom. We heard her her knock, but the door was unlocked and she ended up just letting herself in and looking for me. This was appropriate since we know each other quite well and she knows I trust her, but her timing was terrible. I was changing from one outfit to another, and when I heard her knocking I quickly wrapped a towel around myself and went out to answer the door. She knew that Dan was my photographer, but when she saw me like that she must have assumed the worst and told her husband, who then told my husband. It was then that my husband had our neighbor keeping tabs on me and shortly after that he broke into my phone.
At that point I got really emotional. I told him I could understand his suspicion in such a circumstance, but had he not snooped and just talked with me about it, I could have just explained what happened and this whole issue could have been avoided. But apparently he was in the same conundrum as I was - he didn’t want to be confrontational and was afraid of how I’d react. So I guess the lesson here is communication. Had we just talked this out in the first place things would have been entirely different.
I then asked him if he trusted me again and could things please go back to normal. He said he trusted me, but he preferred that I quit working with Dan and just go with a regular studio. I asked him why he was changing his mind if he trusted me. We’d already discussed this and we both already decided that a friend was better than a stranger, not only because I felt uncomfortable in such a situation, but because he did too.
He said he’d changed his mind after thinking about it some more, and he complained that at the time he had had a different idea about how it would go down. Some of the things he complained about were that he didn’t know we’d still be shooting 6 months later, that he thought it was going to be more like a few weeks. He also didn’t realize that Dan was going to be hanging out at the house all day afterwards, especially with no one else there. He also said that he wasn’t aware that some of the shoots would be so “provocative” as he put it, and he felt we had a misunderstanding there. We agreed that ‘sexy’ was ok, but definitely not ‘nude’ or ‘porn’ or ‘erotic’, and he felt that some of our shoots crossed the line. What seemed to bother him in particular was that he felt that I had violated the ‘no nude’ rule because in some of the pics I was either topless or my top was see-through. I felt he was being petty because lingerie tops are almost always see-through, and in every pic when I was actually topless I had my breasts covered with my hands, a pillow, or some other object. But apparently it really bothered him that Dan might have seen my breasts here and there for a second or two, and he seemed to really be bothered that I changed in the same room he was in even tho I always make sure he isn’t looking (Dan will even sometimes hold up a blanket in front of me to be safe).
I asked him why he felt this way when I’d done the same kind of pics years ago with photographers that neither of us knew anything about in the least, and wasn’t it better to have a trusted friend do them who I knew was already in a relationship with someone else? He said he changed his mind about that, and that he now felt that it was actually more “risky” to do pics like this with someone I already knew quite well. He felt there was a greater “potential” as he put it, for something to happen with a close friend in our own home, than if it was a stranger doing them in a regular studio.
He then kept asking me if I was “sure” that there was nothing between Dan and I. I told him that my feelings for them were entirely different. With Dan, I felt more like a sister around him, while with him I felt more like a woman. It was very clear and obvious for me. Then he kept asking me if Dan had ever “hit” on me and I told him the truth - never. After that, he kept asking me what I’d do if he ever did try anything, and I told him I’d “probably” slap him in the face and kick him out and never speak to him again. My mistake was to use the word “probably”, because then he kept asking me if I was “100% sure” about that, and even tho I kept saying ‘yes’ he kept pressing me that there was really “no way” anyone can ever be sure what one would do in a hypothetical situation. I admitted he was “technically” correct, but I told him it was completely irrelevant because Dan is in a relationship, and I knew Dan well enough to know he’s not a player.
At that point it was obvious to me that he simply didn’t trust Dan, and I felt that was mainly because he didn’t know him. I told him that and suggested that perhaps we should go out with Dan and his gf. At first he didn’t seem to like that idea, but I told him that I knew Dan was a good guy and a good friend who had only good intentions, and that if he just gave him a chance I was sure he’d agree with me. I also told him it wasn’t fair to judge people you don’t know. He eventually admitted I was right and told me to set something up.
So now we have plans to all go out together this Fri or Sat. I feel really good about it. Not only am I confident that my husband is going to trust Dan once he sees what a decent guy he is, but they have lots of common interests and I honestly feel that eventually they are going to become good friends. I’m also excited about meeting Dan’s gf and getting to know her. Of course, nothing is for sure, but now I think we really understand each other. Just talking it out and being open and honest about each other’s feelings was the key to all this imo, and I only wish I would have had the courage to have confronted him about this earlier.
I’ll come back and let you know all know how it goes this weekend.
And again, thx to everyone here, especially Ecurb, for their honest opinions. I may not have agreed with all of them, nor did I even like many of them, but they helped me to see the problem from various povs which eventually gave me the confidence I needed to finally confront my husband and work this out.
