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*adine
writes: Trust!I have been with my partner for 8 years and am pregnant with our second child. He does like to extend the truth in certain harmless ways and I knew when he was and overlooked it. He is now starting to go overboard and I know of a few lies that he has told me that is affecting us financially. My problem is the way I found out is by reading his e-mails. He is aware that I have a trust problem and I have tried to get the truth out of him but the lies just change and the truth never comes out. This needs to be sorted out or else we won't last. Do I tell him that I have read his e-mails? And what is the best way to approach this? Reply to this Question
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reader, communicatrix +, writes (15 June 2005):
 At the wise old age of 43, I've found that without extraordinary effort in the opposite direction, people become more so as they age rather than less. He's obviously gotten very adept at some corollary skills like evasion and blame-shifting, which makes your trust problem worse, which makes you take more and more extraordinary measures to ferret out the truth, which lands you in the predicament you're in.
Yes, you must bring this out in the open. And that means everyone has to come clean, starting with you. Don't try to excuse your behavior. You need to be consistent, and sneaking around is a kind of lying just like lying outright.
I think the best way to handle it is plain and simply: explain that you read the emails, that you know it was wrong and you're terribly sorry, but right now you need to discuss the content of them because it affects the family. He'll probably be mad--partly because of shame and partly because hey, people get mad if you invade their privacy--but if you are really honest and open and don't go off the rails by trying to justify your behavior, you stand a good chance of having a forthright discussion.
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