Sexaholics Anonymous – Betrayedwife.net

One Step at a Time… Literally

Shortly after our DDay #2 – about a year ago – I was communicating online with another partner of a sex addict and she related that her husband had been active in SA for several years but had only completed Step 1 and Step 2 of the program. I was kind of baffled and couldn’t help wonder if she was being played or strung along. Why would it take him so long to work through the Steps? Why not make progress if he could?

Fast forward: As of April 9th, Handsome has 18 months of sobriety. He has attended SA for 13 months. The number of Steps he completed? Zero.

I was feeling like a hypocrite. (I know, I know… his recovery is his recovery, not mine… I do get it. And I know that 12 Step isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but if you pick that as your path to recovery shouldn’t you actually make the effort to work the Steps?) I stewed in silence wondering whether Handsome really had any interest in recovery. I pondered whether I was being played and strung along. I mostly kept these thoughts to myself, but every now and again I’d ask him whether he thought I was giving him 12 years to complete the 12 Steps. He always assured me that he was working on it.

This morning, Handsome completed Step 1 with his sponsor. I don’t really think there was ever any sincere doubt that he is powerless over his sexual compulsion and that his life had become unmanageable, but it took as long as it took for him to make the effort to complete the Step. Handsome reports that he feels tremendous relief to have completed Step 1. I can’t really relate, but I’m glad he feels good about it. He has planned with his sponsor to meet a few times over the coming weeks and complete Step 2 by the end of next month.

This has been a good couple of weeks for us. Not perfect, but peaceful and mostly happy. We are connecting pretty well and he’s making a lot of effort, both with me and with his recovery. That’s good. I know it can be fleeting at this stage, but I’ll gladly bask in it for as long as it lasts.

Nothingness

Handsome and I are going through a good phase at the moment. Life is hopeful. We are getting along well and he continues to work hard on his recovery. I refer to this as a phase though because I know that the winds of change can come swiftly in this stage of our collective addiction/ betrayal recovery.

I try very hard to stay on an even keel. I avoid obsessing. I’m not really actively checking up on Handsome. I’m done looking into his APs other than to check their criminal records to see if they’ve been arrested recently where he works or where we live and to Google certain pertinent info just to make sure that the supposedly parallel lines aren’t crossing. I know I can’t undo the horrors already done. That said, my spider senses are on high alert. Always. I’m hyper-vigilant, but I prefer to say that I’m just more attuned to my surroundings, to be diplomatic.

So, when Handsome and I have an incredible evening together and all of a sudden he becomes quiet and sullen and wipes a tear from his normally dry eyes, I naturally feel a question coming on.

“What’s up?” (I try to keep it light…)

“Nothing.”

With that one word, I feel like I’m set back a dozen steps. I go from rational to nut job in a nanosecond. Outwardly, you might notice no change save, perhaps, for the tick I’ve developed in my left hand since DDay. Inside my head, however, I’m thinking (cue the crazy sirens):

“What is it he feels too guilty to tell me?”

“What lie is he keeping?”

“Is he acting out again?”

“Did one of the ho bags reach out to him?”

“Is he miserable that he’s with me?”

“Here we go… he doesn’t want to tell me that I’m too fat for him.”

“Wait, what happened to sharing our feelings?”

“What happened to building emotional intimacy?”

“He’s throwing in the towel on that already???”

“Asshole.”

All of those thoughts go through my head in WAY less than the time it took you to read them.

It’s exhausting, and I never thought that way prior to DDay #1. Just one more gift from the Infidelity Fairy that keeps on giving.

The Tale of the Tampon

I wanted to write here about an incident that happened some time ago, but that I’ve been forced to revisit in the wake of DDay #1 and DDay #2. I have said that if you had told me before December 9, 2017 that my husband had a long-term physical affair, I would have thought you were crazy. That is true, but that’s not to say that I never had a period of doubt.

In the Fall of 2015, I had a work trip to LA for five days. It was a longer trip than usual by about two days, but it was across the country and I had two speaking engagements and a series of meetings and a few work events to attend. Handsome and the kids were at home. During those days, when Handsome was working, our kids were either in school or with our nanny at home. Our youngest was in kindergarten and our oldest was in 3rd grade. Handsome was home alone for several hours a day by himself while the kids were at school and the nanny was off at another job.

I got home late on a Sunday night and everyone was in asleep, so I just abandoned my luggage in our foyer and snuck into bed. The next morning was a jet-lagged blur of getting the kids dressed and off to school before I finally found myself with a few moments of peace in our bedroom. I was making the bed and I turned around and noticed… a packaged tampon resting on the window sill beside the bed. On my side of the bed. Aside from the fact that I haven’t needed a tampon in years (shout out to the Mirena inventor!! woot! woot!) it was neither my size nor my brand. It was unopened and appeared carefully placed there, at the edge of the window, closest to the head of the bed. It was, in fact, where you might put something if you wanted it close at hand but you didn’t want to put it on my very crowded nightstand.

This was post “Porngate” that I’ve written about here, and also post the first email incident with the Flame. I immediately assumed that Handsome had another woman in the house while I was gone. I took the tampon, found him in the basement watching ESPN, and flung it at his head while doing my best impersonation of a screaming banshee. I hurled accusations and he denied, denied, and denied. He seemed astounded, shocked. I wasn’t buying it. I did not believe him. I wanted to believe that he knew nothing about it, but he seemed to almost be trying too hard to convince me or, alternately, dismissive of the entire incident.

I later inquired of the nanny if the tampon might be hers (yep, that was an embarrassing conversation) since she was to have been the only other woman in the house in my absence. She was a lovely girl (completely and utterly unimpressed by Handsome so I wasn’t concerned that was an issue), but a bit of an airhead, and her response was along the lines of “I don’t think it’s mine, but I don’t know.” Now, the ladies out there likely understand that once you have a tampon you trust and rely on, that’s the one you are willing to go to three stores to find in your preferred brand/ size. It’s not something you switch up. I think she was trying to not get Handsome in trouble (even though I was the one paying her), but I was unconvinced.

Ultimately Handsome settled on the story that our cat, who likes to play with crinkly things, swiped it from the nanny’s bag and deposited the contraband neatly on my window sill. (Again, that pins ownership of said tampon on the nanny, and that is far from certain.) I never bought that story, although the cat was indeed in the midst of a streak of doing just those kinds of weird things. I would find the plastic wrap from a tissue box under our kitchen table, or a piece of foil on the stairs. The perfection of the placement though was always the nagging issue in my mind. It was tucked away on the sill, on a window the cat was rarely, if ever, on. Also, there were no teeth marks on it. None.

Handsome told me that he relayed the story to his buddies at work and lamented getting blamed for something he “didn’t do.” He laughed about it and acted as if I was crazy. The thing is, at that very moment I now know that he was in the midst of two emotional affairs and his physical affair with the Whore was in full swing. He may have been wrongly accused about the tampon (although I doubt it) but he was nonetheless guilty as sin at that moment. In retrospect I believe this was likely his best effort at gaslighting me.

Before my DDays I really wanted to believe that Handsome was truthful. I wanted to believe that my kleptomaniac cat just grabbed the wrong thing to play with and that it was all a big, bad coincidence. I never fully believed that – my logical brain wasn’t buying it – but I really wanted it to be true with all my heart.

Today, even after all of the disclosures and all of the therapy and the intensives, Handsome still insists that he has no idea how that tampon got there other than by way of the nanny or the cat. He says yes, he engaged in complete and utter shithead-fuckery, but that there was no other woman in our house while I was away on that trip. I want very much to believe that, but having been through what I’ve been through, I just don’t. I don’t think I will ever believe it.

I believe in my head and my heart, based on Handsome’s other behavior, that there was another woman in my house while I was away. I don’t know who it was, and I guess it doesn’t matter. In my mind, he slept with the Whore or some random anonymous skank in my house, in my bed, while I was off working. It’s basically the same thing he did last summer with Angel Baby (except they supposedly didn’t have intercourse, although I don’t believe that either). I’ve dealt with that to some degree, and I’m dealing with this by lumping it into the same pot. Do I wish that I could just believe him? Of course!!! He has 8 months of sexual sobriety under his belt. And for all I know he may very well be blameless as to this one instance and telling the truth about the tampon. But like the little boy who cried wolf he no longer gets the benefit of my blind faith and trust.

It’s his loss, but it sure seems like mine too.

Dispelling a Myth or Two About Sex Addiction (hint: it’s not always about intercourse)

I am not a mental health professional. Nonetheless, having lived with a man who has been diagnosed as a sex addict by not one but two medical professionals on opposite ends of our country (including one who is far from being fully on the sex addiction bandwagon – but that’s a whole other post), and having read as much sex addiction literature (scholarly and otherwise) as the internet and Amazon can provide, I feel like I may have something small to offer here. Maybe.

The World Health Organization’s recent decision to include compulsive sexual behavior as a mental health condition on its International Classification of Diseases list (the ICD-11) has brought the sex addiction deniers out of the woodwork. To be clear, whether you call it “sex addiction” or you call it “compulsive sexual behavior” is mere semantics. The nature of the conduct at issue is indistinguishable.

On DDay #2, I learned that at this time last Summer Handsome was juggling me PLUS four other women, PLUS he was involved in pic collecting, voyeurism, pornography, and a laundry list of other sexual behaviors. It was instantly clear to me that something was very, very wrong. This was more than just casual pleasure-seeking and random self-indulgence. Why? Because Handsome was clearly miserable, distraught, and depressed. He wasn’t just sad he got caught (although there was likely a bunch of that going on). He did these things compulsively and rather than bringing him pleasure, they were literally destroying him. His drinking had escalated. His anger management was abysmal. He was alienating our family. He jeopardized his job to the point that I am still amazed he managed to keep that job. He looked unwell. It was like he was being poisoned from the inside out. I see this in hindsight. At the time, the day-to-day destruction was almost imperceptible – kind of like how you might not notice a parent aging and declining if you see them every day.

Imagine that you are throwing a birthday party for a friend. All the guests arrive and you head to the kitchen to put candles on the cake and you find that your spouse has cut a piece of the cake and eaten it. You might think “Wow, what a jerk.” Maybe you could write it off as a misunderstanding or a bout of selfishness or poor judgment. You would be mad and perhaps hurt, but not alarmed. Now imagine that instead you walk into the kitchen to find that your spouse has eaten the entire cake, all of the appetizers, the entirety of the main course, and that he/ she had started eating their way through the refrigerator and freezer. You would instantly realize that something was terribly, terribly wrong and that help was needed. That’s exactly what I felt like on DDay #2.

In those early days I would read voraciously and clip out text that spoke to me or that I found really helpful to my understanding of what was going on… what I was dealing with. I wanted to understand what Handsome was feeling and experiencing during the time he did these things. I was also skeptical about the legitimacy of sex addiction and yet I intuitively knew that Handsome wasn’t exactly enjoying himself… that he seemed caught up in something he couldn’t break free of. He wasn’t living like a happy man. He was using others and being used by them and, on some deep, dark level, he knew that sad fact. It just took a few months of therapy to surface.

I wanted answers to my questions. How could he risk everything? Why did it continue even though it made him miserable? I found the following text on a now defunct blog written by the wife of a sex addict [note: I just had these lines copied into my notebook without citation, but thanks to Maggie for her comment below with the correct reference to the now inactive blog “Living with a Sex Addict.” http://livingwithasexaddict.com/ and the post “Sex Addiction as a Fantasy Addiction.”] The following paragraphs are about intercourse, but they could just as easily describe the pursuit of a voyeuristic encounter or sexting or pic collecting or the use of pornography. Handsome says that this is remarkably what it was like for him:

“…[s]ex addiction may not be exactly what it sounds like. He isn’t addicted to good sex or sex with beautiful women. This isn’t a case of him wanting “better” sex. I know this only because he wasn’t getting better sex when he acted out. He was getting terrible sex with whomever he could find or pay. The important thing for the addict is the fantasy that accompanies the act, rather than the act itself, which is often disappointing. Fantasy transports him from his real life. Sex blots out what is really happening inside him. And what is happening inside him is terrible, debilitating shame.

Why does the distinction between being addicted to sex and being addicted to sex fantasy matter? Perhaps it doesn’t. But it helps to understand the fantasy component because then it makes sense that he’d engage in sex even when his physical sex drive is low, even if he can’t get an erection while doing so, or even when he’s getting plenty of sex at home.

…The rituals that come before an episode of sexual “acting out” have been observed to be very similar to those used by narcotics addicts before taking a drug. A state of hyper-arrousal (not sexual arousal, as such, but a kind of awakened excitement of the addict’s entire being) precedes the event, and sex addicts enter a state they often refer to as “the bubble” in which they are completely consumed by the planning and execution of their next sexual encounter.

The addict then does everything he can to elongate the time that sex occupies in his mind, to stay in the fantasy. His experience of addiction begins with these first moments of anticipation. He may or may not have any specific partner in mind or any specific act, but this preamble to sex pulls him away from negative feelings about himself and his life at least for a while.

Once the act is completed (the fantasy being dashed ultimately by the awful reality) the addict despairs. First, because the act was so fruitless—he’s back where he started, the same as last time. The sex [if any] almost certainly wasn’t what he’d hoped for, and didn’t accomplish whatever he’d imagined it might (yet again). And now he’s opened the possibility that you will find out and the only real love in his life will be taken away. He regrets what he’s done. He’s deeply sorry; he has almost unbearable shame.

Even worse, he knows he is likely to do it all again.”

I would only add to this description to emphasize again that for many who engage in compulsive sexual behavior, if not perhaps most, actual intercourse is neither the goal nor the point, and not even necessarily desired. Handsome was addicted to sexual attention and fantasy. He got his hits from showering the OW with attention (texts, sexts) and to receiving attention in return. If that attention was sexual, all the better. Bonus points if it was explicit. The intercourse he did have with the Whore was short and unsatisfying, and even all the unprotected oral ultimately wasn’t worth continuing (for her at least). Would he have slept with the others if he could have? Maybe, but he also seems to have passed up multiple opportunities to do just that. Regardless, the end result would have been the same… unsatisfying, impersonal rutting followed by deep shame. On some level, I think Handsome knew that and so his developing addiction focused on attention, fantasy, and self-pleasure instead.

There are, without a doubt, serial philanderers and folks who simply love as much strange as they can possibly get. That doesn’t make them addicts. I don’t believe that they experience what is described above. For them, it is a pleasurable process and there is no shame because, well, they just don’t feel bad about what they’re doing. They enjoy themselves and find pleasure beyond the encounter in their actions. They aren’t embarrassed and, while they might not want to get caught, that’s due more to their concern about consequences than to any deep internal shame. That certainly doesn’t describe Handsome or the other men he has encountered in his recovery.

Did Handsome enjoy driving by the Whore’s house to see her flash her boobs at him? In that singular moment, yes. And then sometimes minutes later he would be screaming at himself in frustration because the hit had passed, the momentary high had gone, and the shame train came barreling into the station. He’d resume texting her and sexting to try to stave off that bad feeling for as long as he could. In those fleeting moments he felt wanted, or at least special enough for a trashy married mother of three to stand topless in the dirty window of her dilapidated house and play with her nipples for him and the neighborhood to see. Now, in hindsight and after months of therapy, he sees it for what it was: desperate, pathetic, and just like a heroin addict chasing the proverbial dragon no matter the costs.

While there was a part of Handsome that hated having to come (partially) clean on DDay #1, there is another part of him that felt abject relief. He was exhausted, literally, trying to keep all of the pins he was juggling up in the air. (With my dark sense of humor I occasionally joke that most guys can’t deal well with one woman, let alone FIVE, on a daily basis, so what guy in his right mind would even try.) A part of him wanted desperately to just stop doing what he was doing, but he lacked the fortitude to make the break on his own. As with other addictions, he would make a mental decision to stop, only to slide back down the slope into the compulsive behavior. Having Fire Dude “out” his affair with the Whore to me was the shove he needed to end everything. It was his NARCAN revival moment – a second chance at life. It still took him several more months to come clean with his disclosures and he made a half-hearted effort to cling to a few last vestiges (saying goodbye to Angel Baby, dragging his feet on the letter to the Flame, etc.), but he says that he has had zero contact – other than sending the no contact letter to the Flame – in almost 9 months and maintained sexual sobriety throughout that entire time, and I believe that to be true.

Sex addiction deniers spend a lot of time on the issue of withdrawal, but I think, again, that this misunderstands the nature of the addiction. Does Handsome miss the skanks? He says not and I don’t think he does. I believe he does, however, miss being fawned over throughout the day, each and every day. He misses that attention factory. He misses the constant “hits” throughout his day. How can I tell? He is more obviously emotionally needy. (Something I never, ever detected previously over our 15+ years together.) Early on we also had to focus a bit on gratuitous touching versus that which is timely, appropriate, and mutually pleasurable. There are clearly some gaps where the addictive, compulsive behavior used to reside, and we are working on filling those gaps with healthy, positive thoughts and behaviors. It is a work in progress.

Will Handsome’s world end if sex addiction/ sexually compulsive behavior doesn’t gain further traction as being “real” in the sphere beyond the WHO? No. Handsome is more than his diagnosis. He is making strides in his recovery. It is, however, an added challenge to conquer a problem when you start behind the 8-ball because others deny that your problem even exists.

Packing for Trigger City

At the end of this week I will put my kids and my mom and her dog in my car and make the 11+ hour drive to our vacation home in New England. Normally we leave closer to Father’s Day in June, but I made the decision pre-DDay to shift our schedule this summer so that my kids could do swim team and tennis camp. Handsome will be home for about two weeks by himself, until he comes to join us for the final two and a half weeks.

The triggers this Summer are plentiful. July 2nd of 2015 was the day he screwed the Whore in a no-tell motel while I was off having lunch with my elderly mom at the seaside resort where he and I had our wedding reception.

Last year at this time I was still in pre-DDay ignorant bliss. Now I know what was going on right under my nose, and while I was away, all unbeknownst to me.

As of the day our kids and I left for vacation last Summer, Handsome was involved (emotionally or physically) with four other women.
Three days after we left, he and Angel Baby had a 2-day sleepover at our house that included their field trip to the museum, lunch, and drinks.
He was in daily contact with The Flame.
He was in daily contact with the Whore and in between their sexting he made sure to remind her how I was going out of town for several weeks, that they should get together, and vividly describing all of the sex acts he wanted to perform on her.
He was in regular contact with the woman (The Janitor) he took out on a date two days after he returned to town from vacation.

Handsome joined us in New England for about 12 days last Summer. We did fun things as a family and had a great time. Then:

He had his date night with The Janitor at the high-end romantic restaurant two days after he returned home.
He tries, but ultimately fails, to set up another hotel meet-up with the Whore two days before I get home with the kids (this time offering up a hotel far from her home but right down the road from ours).
He remains in daily contact with all of the women.

To say that I’m uncomfortable leaving him by himself is an understatement, but I’m not his mom or a baby monitor. It’s up to him to stay sober. I’ve asked him to double up on his therapy appointments or meetings while I’m away and he has agreed. That’s great, but boredom, loneliness, and unstructured alone time are all problematic for him… which makes them problematic for me.

It does not help that our vacation home – which I owned since before he and I ever started dating and which was always my very hard earned safe haven and happy place – was the site of some of his compulsive behavior. The epic sexting that went on there (complete with photos and videos from our bedroom) during his “work weekends” is still repulsive and vile and pathetic. And there are other triggers and reminders all around me there. I have to turn my head when I drive by the church we got married in… a church where my dad used to put me on his shoulders and take me to puppet shows when I was a little girl and where I take my own kids now for the same events.

Our summer vacations in 2015, 2016, and 2017 are all tainted by his affairs. In particular, in 2016 we took our regular family vacation that included our extended families, and then we took a “secret” trip – just the four of us – and had an absolutely magical week laying on the beach, playing mini-golf, eating ice cream, and relaxing. There were no schedules to juggle, no elderly relatives to please, no pets to take care of, and it was wonderful. “Best secret vacation ever” is how we jokingly and lovingly referred to it. I now know he was texting and sexting the Whore, Angel Baby, and the Flame literally within hours of pulling into our driveway at home.

Could I sell the vacation house and just start spending summers elsewhere? Sure… if I want to give up nearly 50 years of memories with my parents, friends, and our family. I’m not game for that. The skanks and his addiction aren’t going to take any more from me. I’m trying to ensure that I can take all those things back.

It’s all quite overwhelming. I’m trying to stay grounded. I’m trying to practice self-care. I’m just worried that the next few weeks may all be a bit much for me.

Good Intentions Gone Awry

I am feeling terrible today… for my husband.

I vented here for a few months about Handsome’s apparent inability/ general delay in finding a sponsor at SA. Yes, he’s sober, but not working the steps. I would nudge him regularly about finding someone and he would assure me that he was trying and remind me that he wanted to find the “right” person. He was, I thought, perhaps waiting for a unicorn to fall into his lap. He had very specific and seemingly well thought out boxes he wanted the sponsor to tick:

sober for at least several years
has worked through all 12 steps
still together with his wife
speaks highly and respectfully of his wife/ women in general
makes intelligent/ good comments in meetings
smart and confident enough to call Handsome out if/ when needed
experience as a sponsor

March passes. Then April. Then most of May. And then Handsome finally identified his unicorn. I have a feeling it was akin to asking a girl to prom, but Handsome got his nerve up, asked him to be his sponsor, he said yes, and we were -I thought – in good shape. The guy ticked every single box and had been regularly attending the meeting Handsome thinks of as his “home” meeting. I very literally breathed a huge sigh of relief when Handsome shared the news.

The sponsor called Handsome a few days later, suggested reading material and a step book, all of which Handsome eagerly and dutifully obtained, and they had one other call a few days after that. And then… nothing. Crickets. Zip. Zilch. Nada. It’s as if the guy fell off the face of the Earth.

Handsome was initially worried (the first few days of no contact) that he had somehow committed some sort of faux pas. I don’t think he did. He would only call each day as requested and leave a message along the lines of “This is Handsome, please give me a call back when you get a chance.” Days later, we hypothesized that perhaps the guy was just incredibly busy with his professional job. After a few more days passed Handsome actually googled him to see if there were reports of his untimely demise. Nothing. It has now been three weeks since last contact.

Handsome is trying to brush this off, but I know he’s taking it personally. This might sound strange, but I’d actually feel better if he was outwardly angry about it because then, at least, he wouldn’t be shoving his feelings down (eg. how we got here in the first place). It is incredibly difficult for Handsome to put himself in a position where he has to rely on another person. He went out on a limb here, only to have it sawed off at the tree.

I’m angry on his behalf. If it turns out that his sponsor was in an accident, experienced a sudden grave illness, or was eaten by a bear, I’ll forgive him. Otherwise, even if he has relapsed, shame on him for not at least replying to Handsome to say “something has come up and I am terribly sorry but I cannot be your sponsor.” Who leaves someone hanging out there who is so relatively fresh to disclosure and seeking help through SA? It is, I think, a very shitty thing to do.

Some might say that turn about is fair play here for what Handsome did in the first instance, but I don’t see it that way. He has done just about everything I’ve asked him to do in our/ my recovery efforts. I see the work he is putting in daily. I see the huge changes for the better in his personality, outlook, and mindset. He is TRYING mightily, even if one or both of us gets frustrated from time to time. I know he was committed to starting his step work and to progressing through the steps. He had the best of intentions here, and it just sucks that someone else doesn’t seem to have taken it as seriously.

So, I’m going home to hug my husband today. I’m going to remind him that he is worthy of being loved and cared about and that he matters. And I’m going to suggest that perhaps he consider a zebra (or even a horse) instead of a unicorn.

Thinking about betrayal (and driving myself nuts)

I try mightily to be fair(ish) to Handsome when I write here. Yes, I often vent, but I aim for rigorous honesty and if it looks bad for him, that’s on him. I don’t need to portray his actions in a negative light because they were horrific enough all on their own. When good things happen, I try to recognize that too. For example, Handsome finally got a sponsor. He’ll have six months of sexual sobriety and three months of sobriety from alcohol this week. This coming weekend we are going to the couples intensive he arranged for us a few months ago and he’s doing the pre-session homework. He’s keeping up with the after-care from his intensive with Dr. M including journaling every day (which I never thought he’d do, but he actually says he likes it). All good things.

Occasionally though, things come up that I just have no idea how to process. Perhaps they are too overwhelming, or create too much confusion, or are too triggering. Or maybe they just make me ask myself, “What the actual fuck am I dealing with?” One example: during his intensive with Dr. M, Handsome was incredibly raw and overwhelmed. We were talking one night about his cheating in broad terms and I asked him out of the blue whether he had ever cheated on me during the 27 months I lived and worked on the other side of our state, when we were commuting back and forth to see each other. I had never had occasion to ask him that before, because it never occurred to me (before DDay #2) that he would have cheated all the way back then. Keep in mind, we were either married or engaged for 21 of those 27 months.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when someone asks me if I’ve done something awful and I haven’t, I answer immediately, emphatically, and without hesitation. When Handsome’s answer was “Welllllllll… (crickets chirping during long pause)… not exactly.” I knew the answer was just “yes.” His story is that we had a big fight, he didn’t think we could recover, we didn’t talk for “weeks” and he went to a local bar and he met a girl and he later took her out to dinner. During dinner he says he realized it was just absurd and not what he wanted, so he finished dinner, took her home, and that was the end of it. I didn’t want to sound like Ross and Rachel, but I grilled him on whether he was under the impression we were on a break or that we had broken up. No, he wasn’t. He acknowledged we had never broken up.

What do I make of this revelation now, years of marriage and two kids later? His story simply isn’t plausible for a variety of reasons. First, we have never, ever gone weeks without speaking. In fact, we’ve never gone more than 48 hours without speaking. Memories can be faulty, so I actually went back and reviewed my cell phone records from back then (I swear I’m not a hoarder…I have them only because at the time the phone was a plausible work expense, so they’re in my tax files). There are only a handful of times we didn’t speak each and every day. Next, I simply have zero recollection of this allegedly big fight. I went back through my calendars to see when this might have happened, and over the 6 months I lived there before we got engaged we saw each other regularly every two weeks if not weekly. We talked daily, sometimes several times a day. We took trips and vacations together. It just doesn’t add up. Plus, this was not a hook up. By his own admission, he chatted her up at the bar, got the girl’s number, called her, set up a date, and then took her on that date. That takes a few days, and we’d have been in touch in that time. In short, my conclusion is simply that he cheated. We hadn’t broken up and he took someone else out on a date. That’s cheating.

By my best guess, this occurred sometime in late January 2004. We had seen each other over the New Year holiday and then again over the long holiday weekend mid-month. Then we didn’t see each other again for three weeks (we spoke daily) until we took a long-planned vacation together to Punta Cana the week of Valentine’s Day. Why do I suspect that window? When we got to Punta Cana, Handsome was an asshole. I mean a miserable jerk face. He snapped at me so badly before we checked in that I thought about turning around and flying home alone. The vacation improved greatly over the week, but those initial few days were incredibly difficult. At the time, I attributed it to a dozen things: his hatred of flying, exhaustion from work, maybe I really was a bitch? Now, post DDay, it’s the same behavior I saw throughout his acting out… picking fights and blaming me to “justify” to himself whatever crap he was up to.

So, then I start to wonder… now that I know, what exactly do I do with the information? To me, this ties to my post a few weeks ago on betrayal and whether our choices would have been different if we, the betrayed, had the whole truth (click here for that). Would I have kept dating him if I knew he did this? Hard to say. Maybe not. Yes, I was in love with him, but I was also living hours away and had plenty of other non-cheating, educated, employed, single guy options at hand. I’m not entirely sure what I would have done. Would I have agreed to marry him? Even more doubtful, and certainly not so soon afterwards. I most definitely would have wanted him to do some serious work on himself first.

Just like now, he had choices then. He could have actually had the balls to break up with me before dipping his toe (or anything else) back into the dating pool. He could have admitted what he did at the time he did it. Or, better yet, he could have chosen to work through whatever disagreement he claims we had and stay faithful to his devoted girlfriend of three years that he kept talking to about marriage.

Many of my decisions that have flowed forth since then have been based on my ignorance. I used to confidently tell people that I actually thought our long-distance romance was helpful to us early on because we had to learn to communicate really well with each other. Unbeknownst to me, it also seems to have been when Handsome started honing his compartmentalization and deception skills. I had no idea.

So, what am I going to do? Likely nothing, other than ruminate on how long he has actually been betraying me. That’s the sad fact of it. I don’t see a point in driving myself more nuts over something that happened 14 years ago. I can dissociate myself from that. Compare and contrast that though with driving myself nuts over whether he’s been keeping secrets throughout our entire marriage, as opposed to just the last five years. (I say “just” now as if that number of years is de minimus, but it isn’t. It’s a hair under 40% of our marriage, to be precise.)

Does it matter? I don’t believe the answer makes his cheating better or worse depending on the answer. It’s all bad either way. Nonetheless, the more time passes the more I reconsider previous events that I thought I had processed and moved beyond. I’m not suggesting that Handsome is still overtly lying (of course, he very well might be). He is, however, a master at lies of omission. I am left to wonder what secrets he may still be holding on to for dear life… the tightly held mysteries of our marriage and the vestiges of his addiction.

Our weekly check-in follows a format from his intensive program, and one of the questions is “What is a lie or secret that you are keeping?” No matter how much thought or effort Handsome puts into the rest of the check-in, and it’s usually considerable, he inevitably glosses over this question. He has, on occasion, tried to skip it entirely. When he does address it, either the “secret” will be something hardly secret or the lie will be something along the lines of a white lie. (“Daughter asked if I liked her haircut and I said yes, but I really don’t care for it.”) It’s maddening. I’ve started to call him out on it, to hold him somewhat accountable for half-assing that part of the exercise. You would think that 5+ years of acting out would give him fodder to come up with legitimate, meaningful answers to that question, but he can’t (or won’t) as of yet.

I know he’s an addict. I know that secret keeping is as much a part of his addiction as what those secrets are about. There is probably very little more he could disclose that would shock me. We’ve been through a polygraph that he passed with flying colors. Certainly, what I can imagine in my head is likely worse than anything else that may have happened. (As I commented on another blog, I’ve told Handsome in all seriousness that if someone called me tomorrow and said “Hey, BW, I just saw Handsome fucking a monkey,” I would politely thank them for calling, hang up, and then start Googling intensive treatment programs for monkey fuckers.) That’s the tragic part here. I just want to know the totality of what I’m dealing with, process it, forgive, and move on. He wants to keep his secrets to save his pride and to protect himself from further shame. The two are fairly mutually exclusive, and so I continue to drive myself a little nuts over things that are totally outside my control.

Today is our 13th wedding anniversary

Yep… today is lucky #13. On my work calendar – which I must have filled out late last Fall but before DDay #1 – the date has pink and yellow highlighter all over it and “Our Anniversary!!!” scrawled across it as if it belongs to a love struck teenager rather than an actual, gainfully employed, responsible adult. (If, of course, said teenager still used a paper calendar…) It makes me sad. Then versus now.

How are we celebrating the day? We aren’t. I cannot cheer for under six months of sexual sobriety. I won’t buy a card for honoring your wedding vows recently. I do not yet wear my wedding rings. (He does. I’ve never seen him without it. Go figure…)

I’m not trying to be an asshole about the day or wallow in self-pity. Hey, I’m still here, trying very hard each day to work through things. That is, I suppose, my way of honoring our marriage. He’s still my person, despite the horror he brought to me and our kids (literally, to our home). I can’t, however, pretend for a day that the world hasn’t shifted off its axis and that we’re all good.

Instead, my son turns 9 in two days. I’m going to focus all of my energy on him and put out of my mind how his dad’s deceit traces all the way back to before he turned 3. I’ll ignore the previous anniversaries where I thought I had something to celebrate, or the kids’ birthdays where I’m smiling in the photos because I’m oblivious to my husband’s acting out. Don’t get me wrong. I’m truly grateful that we are both committed to healing and making our marriage work. I appreciate all the work Handsome has done and is doing in that regard. I’m happy we can celebrate our son’s birthday as a united tribe, together in our home, and I’m sure it will be lovely.

It just doesn’t mean that I’m not sad too.

On being betrayed

I was poking around the depths of the internet recently and I found an old, but still relevant, article on betrayal in the NY Times: https://nyti.ms/2k8oupp . As much as I dislike the level of discourse in most comment sections, the NY Times moderates and curates theirs pretty carefully. Two comments to the article hit really close to home:

From stuenan in Kansas:

Liars are also thieves. They steal time and possibilities. What life might you have led if you hadn’t believed all their lies? What opportunities did you miss out on because you made choices based on the lies you were told? What did you give up and sacrifice for someone you loved, believed in and trusted?

It’s hard not to feel that you have been preyed on in the worst way and that your life has been wasted.

and

From Amy in Chicago:

Discovering betrayal is like taking a hit from a baseball bat to the knees. It takes a lifetime to learn to walk upright again and look the world in the eye.

To me, both comments ring true in a very personal way. Yes, Handsome is a sex addict, but his addiction involved multiple forms of cheating and betrayal. I’m no different from any other betrayed spouse except my cheater now goes to 12-step meetings. Any infidelity is sufficient to cause these feelings, whether the betrayal is emotional, physical, or otherwise. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t even think it matters much if your spouse cheated five times or five hundred, or over the course of one week or one decade. While some may find consolation that what their spouse did wasn’t “as bad” as what another spouse did (or, conversely, believe that their misery is greater because of a longer duration or greater number of misdeeds) it’s a distinction without a difference.

If you are betrayed, you suffer. You hurt. You cry, rage, scream, and lash out. You question. You doubt. And then you suffer some more, usually for a very long time.

What life might I have led if I hadn’t believed all of Handsome’s lies? On my good days I think that if I had pressed harder in 2012 (after the Flame reared her ugly head the first time) maybe we wouldn’t be where we are today. Perhaps I should have believed less or doubted more. On my not so charitable days, I feel as though I was sold a bill of goods about Handsome from the very beginning and that had I been shown a truthful picture of him from the start, I’d be blissfully living a trigger-free life with someone else. I can’t imagine being with anyone else and the very thought of it makes me sad, but still…

What opportunities did I miss out on because I made choices based on the lies I was told? What did I give up and sacrifice for Handsome? I left an amazing job with fantastic benefits, dear friends, and a full, independent life in a big city to move back to where he and I met, because he said he’d love and honor me forever. And here we are, facing the fallout of that unfulfilled promise. I seem to have also sacrificed healthy portions of my self-esteem, dignity, and confidence to his lies as well.

Most days, I get by okay. Some days now, I actually do well. My mind only reels for portions of the day, not all of it. Nonetheless, Handsome’s betrayal has maimed me and inflicted a trauma of the type I’ve never had to deal with before: a Tonya Harding-esque bat to the knees for sure. So, when Handsome exited his therapy session with the Doc yesterday and started talking about forgiving himself? Well, forgive me, but my initial reaction was along the lines of “Now? So soon? That’s it? You’re told to magically let this years-long shit storm you created go after 6 months, but I get the joy of dealing with it, and you, forever?” Uh, no.

I should have seen this coming though. As the article says: “…it is often the person who lied or cheated who has the easier time. People who transgressed might feel self-loathing, regret or shame. But they have the possibility of change going forward, and their sense of their own narrative, problematic though it may be, is intact.” Yes, Handsome certainly knows his own story, while I grasp at straws to figure it out. He knew the life he was living, even if it was compartmentalized. My narrative, on the other hand? My life hasn’t been what I thought it was for a very long time.

I’m all in favor of Handsome not carrying shame with him every day for the rest of his life. Shame was a driver for his acting out. And yes, at an appropriate point he should forgive himself. To me, however, that point comes after he has (i) made a full accounting of his behavior and the harm he has caused, (ii) endeavored to make amends for that harm, and (iii) evidenced the commitment to never betray his family again by living a life of integrity day in and day out for longer than a red-hot minute. Once he does these things I will be prepared to forgive him as well. But he’s nowhere near that point, and neither am I. I’m still struggling to walk upright again and look the world in the eye.

Reclaiming Mother’s Day

I’ve sent Handsome away. Not permanently, mind you, but for a long weekend this weekend. “But it’s Mother’s Day,” you say? Yep. Exactly.

Last year over this weekend, Handsome was at our summer home, ostensibly for the purpose of getting it ready for the season for our family, but rampantly texting three other women the entire time. He was sexting one of those women – the Whore – as well, taking dick pics throughout the house and exchanging them with her for pictures of her dirty vajeen. There were videos too, if I recall correctly. (sigh…)

In the text messages on Mother’s Day specifically, he flattered each of the women, praising them as exemplary parents and shining examples of motherhood. That includes the Whore who, you may recall, was arrested and jailed for punching her young son in the face with a closed fist. Handsome knew that, but he fawned over her the same as the others. Angel Baby doesn’t have custody of her first illegitimate child, but she was praised as well.

What did I get last Mother’s Day? A five-minute phone call from him completely devoid of any praise or affection. And the gifts and cards from my awesome kiddos… that I had bought and paid for myself.

“But he’s so busy getting the house ready! You can’t expect him to chat forever.”

“He’s a little strapped for cash, but if you buy your own gifts at least you’ll get what you want.”

“You’re not his mom.”

Those were the things I told myself. And then I sucked up the hurt and enjoyed myself with my kids.

I have the specifics about last year because I was able to see the text messages. I have to assume that the prior two Mother’s Days during his acting out were more of the same. I have no reason to believe otherwise.

So, even though Handsome took this weekend off, I’m not inclined to celebrate with him. I don’t even want to see him, frankly. I’ll buy my own flowers, enjoy a great meal somewhere with my mom and kids, and try to demonstrate to myself that he is utterly unnecessary in order for me to enjoy this holiday. The whores will not ruin it for me and neither will he.

He is traveling to visit his father who lives several hundred miles away. (I didn’t want him here, but I did want someone keeping an eye on him.) I’m sure that on Sunday he will miss his own mother who passed away in 2012. Hopefully, when Handsome and his dad go out to eat on Sunday and he sees all the families celebrating together he’ll take a moment to process why he is excluded this year and why his wife can’t bear to look at him on that day. I’m sure it would be a comfort to him to be with me and the kids instead, but this weekend my self-care means having him be far, far away.

Loss of Privacy

In spite of the fact that I blog about my husband’s infidelity and sex addiction, I am actually a reasonably private person. I have maintained some degree of anonymity here, other than for those who have reached out to me privately with questions or those who I have reached out to on my own. I was taught early on in life that you don’t air your dirty laundry in public and that there are things you keep within your family circle. I was taught that this is true for both possibly good things (money, for example) or bad things (illness or scandal). I was taught that generally nobody cares to know your business and that those people who do generally have ulterior motives.

Handsome and I sat down today for our weekly check-in. I understand that there are schools of thought that the spouse shouldn’t ask much during these check-ins, but my personal opinion is that failing to do so defeats the purpose. My husband should not be talking at me, he should be talking with me about his addiction, its effect on me and on our family, and his recovery. I let him go through his check-in list, and then I ask a few questions.

Lying – more specifically, not lying (overtly or by omission) – is something that Handsome has to work on each day. He has spent the last several years lying to me daily. I have read that sex addicts are “relentless liars” and that was certainly true of Handsome. In the present, however, if Handsome is doing his recovery work properly he needs to (1) not lie, and (2) acknowledge any lies that are told. This means that some of our conversations are now more substantive than they were in the past. The “I don’t know/ remember” spiels are slowly getting replaced by answers.

Today, for example, in response to a question about what precisely he communicated with the Flame about every day for 3+ years, instead of feeding me the usual “nothing big, just day-to-day stuff” response, he said “Everything. Everything in our lives.” It turns out that he did indeed share every blasted detail with her. That includes everything our kids were doing, each of their illnesses, attitudes and academic highs and lows, as well as his health, my health, his job, my job (mostly how it impacted him), our travel planning and intimate details of that travel, and – of course – all about our married life. Mind you, he conveniently forgot to mention the Whore, Angel Baby, the woman he tried to date last summer, the porn, masturbation, Seeking Arrangements, or anything that might make him look bad to her, but everything else was fair game.

In sum, for the last 3+ years, my kids and I have had absolutely ZERO privacy. We didn’t know that we might as well have lived our lives on the front lawn of our house because every single thing we did or felt or experienced was being communicated to at least one person outside our family. I did not consent to giving up my privacy. It was taken from me and it was taken from each of my two children.

Things that should have never left the confines of our house were fodder for conversation with someone who is a stranger to me and a threat to my marriage. Arguments that I had with Handsome – if not prompted by her – were shaped, in part, from feedback he got from her. I wasn’t just dealing with his criticisms, I was unknowingly fending off hers as well. Our vacation plans weren’t just filtered through me for suitability, they were always run by her too, as were the kids’ extracurricular activities and decisions about their upbringing. Mind you, I have never met this woman. She has never met my kids (thank heavens) and she has never seen us together as a family. According to Handsome, he has only seen her in person three times in the last 30 years. In spite of that, she was apparently allowed and encouraged by Handsome to have opinions about us all, and he gave those opinions credence and sought her counsel… every.single.day. In the betrayal recovery world there is much discussion of walls and windows. The Flame did not only have windows into our life, there simply were no walls.

To be fair, I have a few friends and acquaintances, and I occasionally talk to those people about different aspects of my life, but never about anything that would be construed as a violation of trust if discovered and nothing that would cause embarrassment. The only person who has ever had that level of comprehensive detail about me or Handsome or our family is Handsome himself. Maybe the odd reason my marriage feels somehow more full and rich these days, in spite of the shit storm that has transpired, is that for the first time in forever it’s just the two of us. No interlopers, ghosts in the room, or extra people in the marriage. Together with our kids, we are a tribe, just trying to make it through the storm. We are a small tribe, for sure, but perhaps we can work together to build our family’s walls back up and regain our precious privacy.

Small steps

This coming week, Handsome will have 5 months of sexual sobriety under his belt. He will also pass two months of sobriety from alcohol. (He never relapsed with alcohol. He just stopped drinking completely a few months after he started his sexual sobriety.)

He has regularly attended SA meetings since the day after DDay #2 (when the addiction became obvious), and he attends weekly counseling without fail. He also flew completely across the country to attend an 8-day intensive program and he’s faithfully doing the after-care work required by that program. He started couples SA trauma therapy with me this past week, and he signed us up for an affair recovery couples weekend next month.

He sold the car that was the site of some of his misdeeds, and got rid of the mattress/ box spring that he slept on in my house with Angel Baby. He is making an effort to learn my triggers and to avoid them. He works daily to stay out of the “Man Box” and be a better husband and father.

He is not perfect. We still fight occasionally over the awful things he has done. He still procrastinates in his reading of recovery literature and in discussing some of his more problematic acting out. I know he wishes this would all just go away. (So do I, so we are aligned on that point.) I have lingering questions. He sometimes, but not always, has answers. He is still challenged to have emotional intimacy with others, including me.

Yet I struggle to think of a single thing that I have asked from him in our collective recovery that he has not done or tried to do. He is making effort. He is putting in the work.

We are not in the clear by any means, but I complain about him so much here that I feel I owe a bit of space to the small steps forward.

Pic collecting and eye stalking – what next?

(Apologies if this has posted twice… somehow it reverted to draft form…)

I’ve been gone from the blog for a bit as Handsome spent a chunk of the last two weeks in an intensive program in LA and I took the opportunity to try to have a few days where his SA was not the focus of my world. He’s back home now and I had my debriefing with the doctor who ran the intensive.

On the bright side, he said that Handsome was fully engaged in the intensive, put a lot of thought and effort into the homework, showed up every day on time and ready to participate, and he feels like Handsome’s prognosis is good if he continues to do his recovery work. Terrific, right? That’s what I had hoped to hear. No complaints there. I’m truly proud of Handsome for that because I know it was incredibly difficult for him and yet he went “all in” with the program.

The doctor ran me through a lot of information that Handsome had shared during the intensive and although there were a few childhood things I wasn’t aware of, the acting out and affair activity was essentially exactly as Handsome had disclosed to me… with two exceptions. The doctor was running through the list of Handsome’s acting out behaviors and I was almost tuning out because the list is long and hurtful, and then I heard “…pic collecting, blah blah blah, eye stalking, blah blah blah… .” Wait, what? I had to ask him to go back and read those two to me again. And then, because I am apparently the world’s most ill-informed spouse of a sex addict, I had to ask him to explain to me what those two things are.

Per Urban Dictionary:

Pic collector – A leery anonymous person who replies to your personal ad for the sole purpose of collecting your pics to inflate his or her poor ego. An encounter with a pic collector is always short and obnoxiously one-sided.

Eye stalking – The act of stalking with one’s eyes. [duh]

The eye stalking was not particularly surprising and, in the scheme of things, kind of low down on Handsome’s acting out totem pole. Troubling (and sad and pathetic) for sure, but I didn’t consider the omission of it from prior disclosures to be a crisis.

The “pic collecting” though is a bit of another story. Whose pics? Where were they from? Was he talking about the pics from the Whore? Those I knew about for sure, but were there others? I learned that this is one of those situations where Handsome didn’t overtly lie to me, but rather he left out a part of the story that makes him look bad.

Knowing that he had signed up for Seeking Arrangements and failed at that endeavor, I grilled him about his use of Craigslist and Backpage. He admitted to visiting both intermittently but insisted that it was for work (prostitution stings and the like). He and his colleagues would reply to ads from women and try to determine if they were hooking out of houses in town and, if so, they’d try to shut them down. That may be true – or not, time will tell – but what he failed to mention is that he would keep the pictures that he was sent in communicating with those women. I can guess what he did with them.

So, I went there… against my better judgment, I asked why he did this. His reply, which I think was honest, was “Because I wanted to look at real women.” That crushed me. Forced the air from my lungs. He said what he said, but what I hear in my head is “Because I wanted to look at real women other than you.” It’s not as if I was absent, gone away, missing. Nope. I was there in our house virtually every single day of our marriage, including the times when Handsome was indulging his addiction while I was struggling with a full-time job, two kids, an aging parent suffering from complex grief, and a checked out husband. Clothed, naked, whatever… he could have looked at me, but he made repeated decisions to look elsewhere.

Would I have been more real if I posted titty photos online? If I had time to troll for men on sites like Craigslist and Backpage? If anonymous sex was my thing? I don’t think so. I certainly feel pretty real each day when my alarm clock goes off and I get the kids clothed and fed and off to school and I head for my job, to return home ten or eleven hours later to wrap up the day and return the kids to bed, ensure our bills are paid, and check that my mom is okay. To me, that’s the definition of reality.

Therein lies the rub… as I’m discovering more and more, my sex addict husband’s reality is very different from what I consider to be actual reality. I don’t (or didn’t) exist in any real way in his land of pornography, masturbation, physical affairs, emotional affairs, voyeurism, sexting, pic collecting, eye stalking, etc. etc. There, I’m not his Wife who loves him and finds him handsome and sexy and who supports him no matter what and is just waiting for him to get through his midlife crisis, or get his head out of his ass, and be a good husband and father again. No. In that land, I’m simply the “Boss Lady” or the uncaring wife who denies him sex that he’s entitled to gosh darn it. (Because he’s such a great catch, of course… once you ignore the drinking, screaming, and cheating… whose panties wouldn’t just fall to the floor?) Forget that he was never, ever denied sex… that fact doesn’t fit his story.

I would love a break from reality. It would be glorious to stick my head in the sand or put on my noise cancelling headphones and drown out all the SA chatter around me with white noise. I can’t do that, however, and neither can Handsome if this marriage is going to work. He’s had at least a five-year break from reality. It’s time for him to join me in this delightful mess we call married life, both in the highs and lows of it, the fun and the sad, exciting and boring, but above all things, real. Hopefully he can gain (or re-gain) an interest in collecting pictures from our family’s happy life instead of those of random sad, broken strangers online.

Wednesday musings

A few brief thoughts for the week:

* Farewell Backpage! So long Craigslist personals! Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.

* No sponsor yet for Handsome at SA. (sigh) I don’t think he’s stalling exactly, but maybe the unicorn he is after just doesn’t exist.

* Handsome is going to be off soon to attend a long intensive program in LA with Dr. Omar Minwalla, who may just be my new hero. Google Dr. Minwalla if you aren’t yet familiar with him. Given that I do not identify as either a co-addict or co-dependent, I’m squarely in the trauma survivor (I hate to refer to myself as a victim) category when it comes to Handsome’s affairs and sex addiction. I really hope that this program proves to be incredibly helpful to Handsome in kick-starting his recovery. He’s not exactly excited about it – as he says “no, I’m not looking to have all of the awful and disgusting things I’ve done be the topic of conversation for an entire week” – but he does seem eager to get it underway and to see what he can learn from it. If it helps him to better handle the damage and pain he caused to me, all the better.

* Handsome says his therapy took a turn for the much harder and more challenging this week. Amen. Perhaps my talk with the Doc is bearing fruit.

* Oh, and I just saw that the woman that Handsome “dated” last summer got herself arrested AGAIN recently for harassment. I don’t think he could have scraped the bottom of the barrel for his acting out partners any more if he actively tried. Yuck. How ironic is it that in those moments of chasing the dragon of his addiction when he felt most wanted and desired he was engaging in behavior that is a complete and total turn off to the person who loves him most in the world?

Have a great week everyone!

Four months of sobriety for him – eye opening for me

Handsome and I are almost four months past DDay #1, but since that disclosure only revealed a portion of the story, it is more relevant to say that Handsome has been sexually sober for four months and he has been actively participating in SA for a little over a month. He has struggled to find a sponsor, but is hopeful that he’ll have one after his next meeting. I admit to some frustration at how long Handsome is taking to find a sponsor, but I recognize that – given the extraordinary difficulty he has opening up to people – he wants to find someone he feels comfortable with, who will challenge him when he needs it, who remains married, and who has similar views about his spouse. Those things are important to him and thus they are important to me, because I think Handsome can really do well in recovery with the right people on his team.

It is also true that Handsome has not had a drop of alcohol to drink in a month. He and I agree to disagree for now about the significance of this. He admits that he drank way too much, but insists he was not an alcoholic. To me, there’s a lot of denial in that belief, but I admit that he did quit drinking cold turkey without much of a glance back at it. At worst, I get some grumbling when he’s having a meal that would have historically been accompanied by a beer (or four). Yet alcohol played a role in almost every single physical encounter he had with his affair partners, whether it was “pre-gaming” to drown out his conscience ahead of time, or pounding beers afterwards to dull the guilt and shame. Alcohol certainly didn’t help his mood swings or anger issues either, and his health had suffered as well. I also find it to be no coincidence that there have been zero (nada! zilch!) issues with ED since he stopped drinking. (Hallelujah!!) I feel entitled to this version of my husband. We had agreed to reevaluate his abstinence from alcohol in June, but at this point I’m sticking to my guns on the “no drinking” thing for the foreseeable future. The thought of adding alcohol back into the picture seems incredibly premature, and fills me with dread. Could he have a (singular) craft beer with a burger or pizza in 6 months? A year? Maybe. But he has a lot of damage to repair first before I’d even be willing to consider it.

I know that I’m still a newbie in this process – both as a betrayed spouse and as the wife of a sex addict. Nonetheless, most days I feel like I’m making progress addressing both of these new, painful, and unwanted aspects of my life. There are days when I absolutely resent and abhor what Handsome has wrought upon me and our kids. Strike that – I resent and abhor what Handsome has wrought upon me and our kids EVERY day, but some days I’m much better at dealing with it than others. And there are issues that plague me. Those are fodder for other posts, but I can now function throughout an entire day at work, actually be productive, and not collapse at home afterwards. I still cry often, but it’s less than it used to be. I’m gaining my sense of peace back at home. (Physically disposing of the bed that Handsome slept on with Angel Baby did wonders for that.) My appetite is returning as is my sense of humor. These are small things, and they aren’t exactly all consistent yet, but it’s a big improvement after where I was following DDay #1.

I’m learning… both things I never thought I’d need to know, and things I never wanted to know. I can articulate the difference between the co-addict model and the trauma model in a few sentences. I’ve explored with Handsome what it means to lust and what exactly he lusts after. I’ve familiarized myself with the 12 steps and have read more betrayal recovery and SA literature than I would have thought imaginable. My detective skills are honed to near Sherlock Holmes-like perfection and my spider senses are on high alert. As my young son would say, my game is tight.

Most importantly, my eyes are open. I do not think that Handsome and I have an easy road ahead of us. To the contrary, I know it’s going to be a bumpy ride. I want him to be honest with me, but honesty can hurt. I want him to change, but even change for the better can be difficult, especially if I am changing too. That said, four months in I can see some hope and sunlight in our future and that alone seemed too much to hope for immediately after DDay #1. I booked a Thanksgiving trip today for our family. I’m planning ahead – months out. My eyes are open, but I have hope.