My Husband Looks at Other Women and Says I'm Imagining It

About these entries. Nina and Tom are composites. They are not clients, they are not people, and they are not a couple — they are two constructed voices, built from a pattern I've seen often in twenty years of practice, written so it can be recognised from the inside. Nothing here is drawn from any individual's life, and no detail belongs to anyone.

Saturday. The mall, because we needed one thing and it turned into the whole afternoon, the way it does.

We're walking. He's telling me something about work. A woman comes the other way and he doesn't turn his head — he's got much better at not turning his head — and he keeps talking, and there's a beat where he isn't in the sentence any more and then he is again.

That's it. That's the whole thing. Half a second, maybe less. He didn't stop talking. He didn't stare. If you filmed it and played it back to a room full of people they'd tell me there was nothing there.

I spent the walk to the car deciding not to mention it.

That's the bit I want to write down, actually. Not the half second. The deciding. I did it the whole way to the car, and then in the car, and then while he was backing out, and by the time we hit the lights I'd got myself somewhere I could be normal about it. And I was normal about it. And we had quite a nice evening.

Here is what I know about that half second, and I know it the way you know things you can't prove.

I know when it's about to happen. There are rooms where I know before we're through the door. I can tell the difference between him being tired and him being somewhere else. I know the exact quality of the coming back, and there are two kinds — one where he just picks the sentence up, and one where he comes back a bit too warm, a bit too interested in me, for about a minute.

I never wanted to know any of that. I'd give it back tomorrow.

I have spent a long time being told this is anxiety.

And I've had anxiety. I know what mine does. It didn't do this. It didn't wait at the door of one particular room and leave me alone in every other room in my life, and it didn't get better at its job the longer it went on.

The first time I said it out loud I said it badly. I said something like, you were looking at her, and he said, who, and I said, you know who, and he said — genuinely puzzled, this is the thing, he wasn't performing — I didn't even see her.

And I believed him. That's what I want to get down. I believed him, because he plainly believed himself.

Which left two options. Either he was lying to my face with an ease I'd never seen in him about anything else in our whole life. Or I was making it up.

I went with making it up. For years. It was the kinder option, and it was the one that let us have a Saturday.

Since he stopped there's a new problem, which I didn't see coming.

Before, when I brought something up, I had nothing to point at, and that was hard. Now I have nothing to point at and he has stopped the one thing I could point at. He gave me the porn. He gave it up. So anything I raise now gets weighed against that, and it weighs nothing.

I can hear how it sounds. He quit, and she's still not happy.

I've started saying "I know this sounds crazy" before I say anything at all. I hear myself do it. It's a little tax I pay up front so he'll listen to the rest of the sentence, and it doesn't even work.

The last time I tried, I was careful. I waited two days so it wasn't in the moment. I didn't use the word looking. I said something about feeling like I was on my own in rooms that had other people in them.

He said he was sorry I felt like that.

He said it kindly. He wasn't dismissing me. I think he meant it.

I'm sorry you feel like that. I've thought about that sentence more than I've thought about any of the women.

Because there's nothing in it. There's nothing to argue with and nothing to hold. He agreed with me and I ended up further away than when I started, and I sat there afterwards trying to work out what I'd actually wanted him to say instead, and I couldn't come up with it.

I still can't. That's the bit I'd like somebody to explain to me. I said a true thing as carefully as I have ever said anything, and he was kind about it, and it went nowhere at all.

Attention — the layer she was reading

There is a version of this pattern with almost nothing to find. No messages, no meetings, no second phone. What is running instead is where his attention goes when nothing is happening.

Walking into a space and locating the most attractive woman in it. Comparing. Ranking. Building a brief private scene, seconds long, of being wanted — and then the next one, many times over in an ordinary day, in a checkout line or an airport or a room full of people.

It runs while he is holding her hand, and it leaves nothing behind.

So when he says he didn't see her, he is not necessarily lying. Something can run for a very long time without ever announcing itself as an event — which is what makes it survivable for the person doing it, and unprovable for the person living beside it.

Two things about her account are worth naming plainly.

The first is why her reading got better rather than worse. Generalised anxiety is usually described quite differently — less tied to particular conditions, less specific about who and when, and not becoming more accurate as time goes on. What she describes has a different shape.

A read that repeats, is specific to a moment and a person, and costs you something to keep believing, is not anxiety looking for a target. That is data.

Data is not a verdict. It does not establish what is happening in anybody's house, and this page cannot tell you that either. What it does is name the thing you have been talking yourself out of as information — something with a shape, worth writing down, rather than a mood you should be over by now.

The second is what the pattern is reaching for, because it is the part that does the most damage when it is misunderstood. Which particular woman it is tends not to matter. What is being reached for is the few seconds of feeling wanted, and then the next few seconds, and a structure built that way does not arrive anywhere.

She was not in a competition she lost. There was usually no competition and no winner in it. That does not make the wound smaller. It changes what the wound is about — and it was never a verdict on her.

On the other site, the other voice, the same ground: Why Do I Notice Every Woman in the Room? — the same layer described by a man who does not think there is anything in it to describe.

Earlier in this diary: He Stopped Watching Porn. So Why Hasn't Anything Changed?

If you want the shape of the whole thing: the free guide, Something Is Wrong and You Can't Explain It.

One thing to do with this

Not a programme. One thing.

Take one occasion — one, not a list — and ask three questions about it, and nothing else.

Did it repeat? Has the same read turned up again, in similar conditions?

Was it specific? Was it about a particular moment and a particular person, or was it a general fog of worry?

Did it cost you something to hold? Did believing it make your life harder rather than easier?

You do not need anybody to confirm the answers. You never did.

What this is, and what it isn't. This is education, not therapy, and not an assessment of you or your relationship. Nothing here is a diagnosis — I'm a social worker and psychotherapist, and diagnosis isn't mine to give.

If you're struggling right now, you don't have to sit with it alone. In Canada, the 9-8-8 Suicide Crisis Helpline is available 24/7 — call or text 9-8-8.