Mind Games / Semantics

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I hate mind games!! !! Can you help me figure this out?

My husband is friends with an ex-girlfriend (I am not worried about her). And she tried to contact him while he was out out town. I honestly and openly told him about it. And asked later if he had CONTACTED her. He told me no.

Later I found out he did and she emailed him back. So I asked him about it again this time I asked, did you EMAIL her? He said no. So I asked him did she EMAIL you? He said no.

I explained that i knew the truth that she had. But this was his explaination:

The first time i asked CONTACTED, he said that contact to him means back and forth continous conversation. Not just hi hope your having a nice life. He just left a message on her message board saying hi, which he says did not count as contact.

For the EMAIL question he said he thought i said CONTACT again, he said he was playing a video game and was not paying attention to me exactly, and then he said that their was nonthing relevant in the email it was just a hi how are you merry christmas and so he did not remember getting it.

What is going on here? I feel he lied to me about this. He said that he did not purposefully lie to me, he said it was just miscommunication in what the definition of CONTACT means between us.

Is he playing mind games with me, being sneaky? HELP.

I don't know your situation, so I see two possibilities:

1) Your husband is AS . Then his strict and limited and nitpicky definitions make perfect sense and I don't think he's lying to you in the sense of trying to make you believe something he knows is not true.

2) Your husband is NT. There are two subcases here:

a) He is lying because he's afraid you'll get mad if he says yes. He is lying about having lied because he's afraid you'll get mad if he says he lied.

b) He is using your AS against you by trying to "play your game" with nitpicky and precise word definitions, in order to do a).

Perhaps there are other options, but those are the two I see. How you deal with option 2 depends on what your relationship is like -- whether you generally trust him and love him and feel that he loves you and is trustworthy and so on.

My € 0.02

I am AS, I do not nitpick on words like this.

My husband is NT.

Dej, I think you might be worrying too much. Have you considered the possibility he lied about his ex-girlfriend to you because you get suspicious about things and he just wanted to avoid it?

I'd try to calm down. And trust your husband.

Last edited by Sophist on 06 Jan 2006, 2:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

No, not all with AS nitpick on precise definitions, but some do. At any rate, it sounds like that's not relevant here anyway, since your husband is NT.

He's probably just worried you'll get mad at him (case 2a above ) if he tells you he contacted his old girlfriend. Maybe he's had bad experiences with that in the past (not necessarily with you, I mean with old girlfriends who flew totally off the handle about that kind of thing or something). Do you think you should read anything more into it? (Honest question, I'm just curious, since I don't know if you two generally have a good relationship, and whether he plays "mind games" often or never has before, that kind of thing.)