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.