(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.