Baffled by an iPhone "Contacts" issue....

My wife got a new iPhone in mid-December.  The other day, my iPhone contacts started showing up on her phone.  If you read the Apple forums, the usual culprit is sharing an Apple ID - we both use separate IDs and always have.  

After troubleshooting, I've figured out that my contacts only show up on her phone when you select her "Gmail Contacts" to appear.

What's baffling me:

- no idea why my iPhone contacts would ever be synced to her Gmail

- logging in to her Gmail and checking her contacts....none of mine appear.

- logged in to her iCloud account and none of my contacts are in her list.

- deleted her Gmail account, re-booted and re-installed....they still show up.

Has anyone ever experienced this?

I have a completely different, but equally annoying issue.  I sync my iPhone with my Outlook account and have been doing it for years.  Over the past year or so, on occasion, when looking for a contact in Outlook, it's not there, but if I check my iPhone, low and behold, it's there.  I then need to send the contact to my email, so that I can add it back to my contact list.  

What's further baffling is that when I do this, the original contact and the new one come up in a side by side window, asking me what one I want to use.

Weird stuff.

The iCloud/Sync features of Apple are the main reason I abandoned ship a few years (and reluctantly came back). It basically takes over your stuff and then figuring out the reason why is pretty tricky. Should have stuck with the Droid X