My Wife Had My Phone While I Was in Surgery. The Texts When I Woke Up Have Totally Freaked Me Out.

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I recently had a scheduled surgery. Not for anything life-threatening, but serious enough for general anesthetic, and nerve-wracking given potential consequences if it went wrong. Thankfully, it went fine. While I was under, my wife looked after my phone. She gave it back after the surgery.

I turned it on to find several obscene messages from an unknown number, including one that used a nickname for me not many people know, and another reading, “Loved Saturday and can’t wait for you to be in me again.”

I spent the previous Saturday with my brother, as I told my wife. I was freaked out by the messages and blocked the number, along with telling my wife about it. She suggested it was spam or a scam, but mainly focused on helping me recover. We didn’t pay it much attention with everything else going on.

A bit later, I got a text from my brother later asking, “How’s the wife?” I replied that this was a weird thing to say and did he mean to ask about my surgery. There was some back-and-forth, then finally, he called to demand to know why I was lying and if I hadn’t been “in trouble.” I asked if he’d sent the messages and he admitted yes, “as a prank,” expecting that my wife would snoop through my phone while I was out. I said that was a deranged thing to do and could have endangered my marriage. He said that was the idea. I knew he was never keen on my wife (he blames her for me kicking him out after a year of mooching on our couch after he left college), but this blows my mind. He actually got angry when he heard my wife saying she would never believe I was having an affair with someone who spelled as badly as he did, and I cut off when he insulted her.

This is the last straw for me. He is the baby of the family and relies on me and our parents doing everything for him, meaning he currently lives in their house since I kicked him out. I have told them what happened and said I’m done having a relationship with him until he apologizes to me and my wife, and commits to therapy for what I think are serious issues. While our parents were shocked when I showed them the messages, they think I should let it go given “he’s always had a weird sense of humor.” They think I’m over-reacting, as do other relatives who now know (my brother gossips). If my wife wasn’t the most level-headed woman on earth, I dread to think how this would have gone! I love her, I love our marriage, and I’m so angry he did this while I was in surgery. The problem now is that I risk seriously damaging my relationship with my parents, since I will not visit while he lives there and they have brought him up in every conversation since. Can you advise on how to handle this? This was an unhinged thing to do, right, and I’m not overreacting?

Lizzie O’Leary : Yes please, because it is one hundred percent something I would say.