Hello Love Guru.
Let me start with, please do not disclose my name/email.
That aside, I fell in love with my now wife about 3.5 years ago now but she feels like I betrayed her. The problem I created for myself.
When my first girlfriend broke up with me by cheating on me the day she moved away she accepted everything. This was someone who I back then thought was the one and the relationship went on for 5 years. I was down in a very bad way!
I struggled to come out of it for a couple years and during that I found out that I enjoyed any attention given to me by any beautiful girl. Even if the attention was just temporary flirting.
During my single days, while I was struggling with money and keeping a good job I found a girl who I knew from back in the day and she started flirting with me on day 1 which made me smile a lot.
A few weeks after that was the first time I met my now wife and somehow, I knew very quickly that I wanted this beautiful and powerful woman be the one I marry.
What I did stupidly is I thought harmless flirting is a non-issue and continued (only flirting and met three times in six months for food and drinks).
FYI, this girl knew that I wasn't interested and this was just fun and that I had started to feel love for someone else -- there was no physical intimacy of any kind with this girl. We were just going out to dates once every two months and would talk on phone at times.
The moment I realised that things were moving fast with my now wife, I stopped everything and just focused on my wife.
The problem is, I never told my wife fearing she wouldn't understand as she has a very narrow view of a relationship between man and woman.
Then one day, three years later, my wife decided to check my old drive and found backup of my old phone with about 5-8 pictures of the previous girl and me sitting in a restaurant, taking selfies and laughing.
My wife after this reached the conclusion that I betrayed her. My wife knows there was no physical intimacy, she knows she was just a friend but she still feels that I have betrayed her.
Since then she has moved to her parent's house and she refuses to come back with me. She says that she has no faith in me anymore and that I might do this again. She says that I was happier with that girl than I am with my wife.
What do I do? I don't want to lose my wife.