My point is, the wife can’t know whether the hooker her husband fucked was “clean” or not, since he won’t discuss it. So setting aside that question: I’m comfortable calling him a loser, regardless of how it went down.

You could add rapist on top if indeed the hooker was a sex slave.

Hi there, thank you for the responses. My husband lived in Australia as a student for 6 years then moved back to his home country. I met him after his time in Australia. So did not know anything of it. He was a student an international student at that in his early 20s. I found out about him visiting brothels by coming across some of his old Facebook messages on his phone. I’m trying to justify the actions and I’m trying to be reasonable but he is very ashamed of it and is very uncomfortable talking about it. Should I push the topic still? In Australia brothels are legal. But I’m thinking more about the fact that it’s still prostitution and we have a daughter together and I just can’t look at him the same way.

Juliecatherine. I was more curious than really looking for anything. My husband doesn’t talk much about his past. I mean he comes from a great family and I know he’s a great man, but it seems that his past is something he doesn’t want to talk about especially anything relating to his time in Australia. And since we just started living together these past 2 months and have been married for a year I wanted to know him more as a person. We honestly got married early due to pressure from our families and then being apart from each other didn’t give us the time we needed to really find out about each other and get to know each other more so I’m taking the opportunity now but my husband is a quiet non talkative person so I’m at a lost on what to do.

I guess I’m more scared that if I push the topic he would be unhappy and then our marriage would really suffer. I’ve had trust issue from a previous relationship of 6 years where I was constantly cheated on. I guess in my head I justified snooping by wanting to know more about him who he was before we met and married. I feel like I might be opening a can of worms and then not knowing how to deal with the repercussions for the sake of our children

You absolutely have to talk about this. You snooped because your husband doesn’t talk to you, and you don’t feel like you know him well enough. It’s not right, but it’s human. And you found out something that makes you look at him differently (I would feel the same). You can’t live your life trying to keep your husband free from worry at the expense of your own peace of mind.

Definitely talk to a counselor. You can’t un-know what you found out—but to be honest, it doesn’t sound like this marriage was heading towards success at this rate, anyway. Get a professional to help.

And there’s more to it than that. If the LW is snooping in her current relationship, because she is still hobbled by the cheating in her last relationship, then she wasn’t ready for a new relationship and definitely not ready for marriage. If you are going to make your husband pay for the cheating sins of your ex, then your marriage is as good as dead. I say this, because the big reason you gave for snooping was your ex’s constant cheating. You didn’t suggest you had observed or sensed anything shady about your husband.

I’m not as skeeved out by the brothel as the bulk of the posters have been. Your husband, as a youngish foreign student and before he met you, visited a legal brothel in a nation which I think can be counted upon to regulate its brothels, just as I would expect to be the case in Las Vegas. I think skipping right to sex trafficking is a huge stretch. In response to many, many letters here, the bulk of the responses are, and I think this is correct, that no woman owes her bf/husband the details of her sexual history before they met and that her ‘number’ is none of his business.

Well, the same principle applies to men. She isn’t entitled to the details of his prior sexual experiences. It is not as though he cheated on her and she deserves answers to any questions which might help her move forward. She presumably had a chance to ask him whatever she wanted to ask before agreeing to marry him and was sufficiently satisfied with the answers to marry. Now she has violated his privacy by deciding to snoop, found something that freaks her out, and demands a full discussion.

Honestly, I don’t know what she expects him to say. He went to a legal brothel. She knows that; he admits it. Although I’ve never visited a brothel, I know that they exist only because a lot of men have used their services. A foreign student in a strange land, without a relationship and at an age of raging hormones is among the primary frequenter of brothels. She either can live with this or she can’t, but seriously, exactly what do you expect him to tell her?

Yes they should get tested for STDs, but the risk probably isn’t much different than if he had been very into the hookup culture at his university. Do you know where the greatest concentration of STDs is in America? It’s at a very large senior-citizen community called The Villages, in FL, and they have a gigantic hookup culture.