This is the second post in my week of soul cleansing. You can find the first post here.
My best friend is one of the few people I have told about what is going on with Handsome. She is supportive of me, for sure, and also of the marriage (if Handsome does the work needed). She is also frank with me in a way that only a best friend can be. She asked me if I regret marrying Handsome in the first place. Hmmm…..
Do I regret marrying him? No. I don’t. I made the choice to marry him based on what I thought to be true. The lies only recently came to light. I can’t undo 14 years of marriage (and 2 awesome kids), but if he wants to continue in this relationship he needs to double down on his efforts to rebuild what he has carelessly and selfishly destroyed. He can’t just float through and be occasionally nicer to me and think it will fix everything. He needs to figure out how to show empathy without pouting. He needs to be able to articulate how he is going to work to make things better, and then he needs to follow through and do those things.
That said, I do have other regrets:
I regret the way that I handled Round 1 with the Flame back in 2012. Here was my husband, in daily inappropriate communication with another woman and, after I found out and pitched a hissy fit, I took him at his word that it was over and done with and that we were all good. I believed him when he said he was sorry. (He wasn’t sorry. He thought that I had over reacted. He had no intention of not communicating with her ever again.) I believed him when he assured me that he wouldn’t humiliate me that way again. (Ha! Little did I know…) I was upset enough to leave him over the incident. I told him that very bluntly, but I don’t think he ever believed it. Still, I didn’t insist on counseling or take any other protective steps. That was stupid on my part.
I regret how I handled Handsome’s drinking. After this episode with the Flame, Handsome’s drinking escalated for a time. He had always had a few beers (2-3) but this is when it got really bad, seemingly out of nowhere. It was taking a toll on our family and on Handsome’s health. I grew so worried about him that I actually reached out to his dad and asked him to come stay with us and talk to Handsome about his drinking. Handsome’s dad has been sober for a few decades and still attends AA. I thought he might be helpful. He was useless. First, Handsome didn’t drink in front of his dad the entire time his dad was at our house (heaven forbid that daddy see him drink 8-10+ beers a night). His dad left thinking I was just a crazy wing nut. I also know now that Handsome’s dad is likely a key component in his family of origin issues. He is squarely in the man-box, and is seemingly incapable of empathy let alone much self-awareness. He probably couldn’t have helped if he had wanted to and my sense now is that he could never admit that his golden child is also an alcoholic (like him, and Handsome’s mom, and Handsome’s brother…). Again, I would have been better off to insist on marriage or family counseling and see if the drinking could have been addressed there.
I regret the way that I handled Porngate. When Handsome finally stopped gas lighting me and came clean, I should have insisted on counseling of some kind. I didn’t. Again, I believed him when he said he was sorry and that it was “just for fun” and that it was over. (Yep. I was such a freaking idiot!) If it was no big deal he would have owned it and brushed it off. He didn’t. Today, I kick myself for not seeing (1) that a pattern of acting out behavior was emerging, and (2) that Handsome was escalating, and (3) that he was lying through his teeth. Perhaps more importantly, I was crushed to find out about all the porn. Handsome never had to deal with that devastation. He never addressed how it impacted me. I just had to push it down inside, and he marched on and started engaging in increasingly outrageous behavior about a month later. What followed was by no means my fault, but I do feel as though I missed an opportunity to possibly prevent things from blowing up in such epic fashion. If he had help earlier, maybe his addiction could have been identified and addressed before it got so terribly out of hand.
Finally, I regret not trusting my gut more and not speaking up for myself. I’ve written about that here on multiple occasions, and it continues to be true. I did not know about Handsome’s affair with the Whore (or all the others) prior to DDay #1, but there were things that gave me a great sense of unease and I just tamped that feeling down and ignored that gut warning. I’ll never do that again. I trust my gut now. If something seems wrong, it probably is, and Handsome no longer gets the benefit of any doubt. Quite the opposite, in fact. Moving forward I am highly likely to always side with my truth (or my sense of it) over his. That’s his fault, of course, and perhaps it will change with proven integrity over time, but we aren’t anywhere near that yet when staggered disclosures continue to occur.
Tomorrow: A Week of Brutal Honesty – #3 – A Crime of Passion (a.k.a. Why I’ll never get picked for a jury)
Your story is so different to mine, and so alikeas well. I think most people who have sailed the ocean of infidelity will relate to that!
It was only whilst writing my blog/book that I realised, all those years later, how angry I was with myself, for not listening to myself, when everything was screaming at me.
I have always said I decided what the truth was in the end and I believeed that, and still do. I believed the worse and rebuilt from there.
Stay strong. My only comment be careful where empathy is not there.
Moisy
I’m right with you on the issue of truth. When his makes zero sense, I go with my gut. I had always given him the benefit of the doubt before and that proved to be absolutely foolish on my part.
I think my husband wants to be empathetic. He seems to try, but it’s as if he truly has no idea how. It’s maddening because to me that seems like Being Human 101, and I feel as if I received empathy before he started acting out during our marriage. It’s as if his addiction broke him. That makes me sad for both of us.
xo
I understand and can absolutely empathize with your regrets – sames.
We do need to forgive ourselves for these regrets in wanting to believe the men we were supposed to trust, and who were supposed to protect us. Yes, we do have to own not listening to our guts and ignoring those huge red flags (and the tampon the cat put on the window sill…don’t worry, I have my fair share of “hmmm” stories). We need to forgive ourselves for not knowing what we didn’t know.
But now? Now if he blinks differently I’m already in FBI mode.
Fool me once – shame on him. Fool me twice – shame on me.
One thing this whole experience has taught me is that there’s nothing “bitchy” about enforcing your boundaries of what you will and will not accept. I used to always enforce them but would feel some guilt afterwards wondering if I were perhaps being a bit too harsh. Part of that comes from having grown up in Tony Soprano Land in northern NJ where “real men” went to strip clubs and “real women” cooked pasta and gravy on Sundays and their husbands referred to them collectively as “the girls” no matter how old they were.
After this whole disaster Mr P decided that he didn’t want to be one of those men anymore and he took up cooking and is in love with Hobby Lobby. And now he’s starting to learn to enforce HIS boundaries when his Neanderthal father gives him shit about the new man he’s become. There’s bound to be some snarky repartee on Christmas.
Blessedly I had my holiday dose of my FIL at Thanksgiving, so I’m free and clear for Christmas. Ha! I would love to be a fly on the wall at your holiday celebration though. 🙂
I hope that Mr. P can brush it all aside. It’s great that he now (1) has boundaries of his own and (2) that he enforces them. That’s really something to be proud of in my book.
I have listened to many partners of SAs beat themselves up for not “listening to their intuition” or “ignoring all those red flags.” I did that in the beginning. I have a very different opinion now. I’ve come to believe this perspective comes from the old codependent model that basically says the partner “had to know” and because of extreme codependency or FOO issues didn’t act on this knowledge. With 20-20 hindsight I can look back on a few things and say, “Aha, there was a red flag.” However, not having the big picture, it was easy for my husband to deceive me. His lies were lies of omission. When asked about his day, he would give a rundown but leave out the part of getting a bj from a hooker at lunch time. I trusted him. Why not? He was truthful about everything except his addiction. He was home every night. Rarely traveled for business. Acted like he was crazy about me. When I first learned about his secret life I couldn’t figure out when he did all this. It turns out SAs can be very creative in finding opportunities. If something seemed a little off or didn’t make sense, I surely never thought, “Hmmmm, I wonder if he’s fucking prostittues?” My CSAT told me that the movement from the codependent model to the trauma model in the sex addiction field came about as CSATs began to work with partners and realize these partners really did not know. That’s why we’re so traumatized in the beginning.
That’s a pretty smart analysis. I can recall talking to my best friend after Porngate and being asked whether I thought he was physically cheating. My response? “No way. He doesn’t have time. He’s always either at work or dealing with the kids.” Based on that sincere belief, I let the issue of the porn drop. It absolutely never occurred to me that he would be cheating while he was at work. Like you, I also never pondered “Hmmmm, I wonder if he’s fucking prostitutes or trolling the internet for anonymous sex or frequenting massage parlors?” Those things were far outside the scope of my imagination.
You’re so articulate Maggie, I really learn so much from your experience. You make me feel not so alone, thank you xo
Thank you. ❤️
We didn’t know what we didn’t know. At least that’s what I tell myself. Sure, in hindsight, we can see the flags and recognize that our gut really was trying to tell us something. But it’s like you said, why on earth would we even begin to imagine what was off when it was so far beyond what we knew?! I try to extend myself grace. My regret is letting my sexless marriage go on for so very long without digging further into the truth of why it was sexless….. Although, it really wasn’t sexless if my husband was engaging in porn and compulsive masturbation daily, was it?! He was having sex just as he wanted it. And yet somehow I was foolish enough to believe he was asexual. Or wanted to believe it, I guess. Anyway, I can have regrets from my past behaviour or lack of, but now, going forward, I have no excuses. Now I know my gut works, and even if I don’t know what it is telling me, I know I have to find out. That is on me.
I too thought my husband had become asexual in his mid-life. There I was, researching doctors to help him with low-T or his ED or whatever else was ailing him, and I couldn’t have imagined that he just wasn’t having sex with me. Stupid, stupid, stupid. So, I feel foolish because of that, but like you I now trust my gut. My gut gets the benefit of the doubt long before Handsome does these days.
xo