I wrote a whole post yesterday about how Handsome is really turning the corner. I clicked “post” and the WordPress gremlins chewed it up and banished it to the ether. It simply vanished. Sigh.
It was a long, stressful day at work yesterday and all of my plans to simplify things for myself over the next week seem to have been thwarted one by one. I was frazzled and in a crap mood when I got home. Handsome was at work, but he left me this lovely note on top of the book I’m reading on my nightstand (the perfect place for me to find it). It turned my mood around completely.
I am happy that he loves me too.
It’s a long holiday weekend here in the US and I hope that everyone has a chance to relax for a day or two.
“Who are you and what have you done with my husband?”
I’ve been thinking this often lately. I’m going to poke fate right in the eyeball here. I almost hate to write this post because memorializing the happy occurrence of something I’ve been hoping for these last 17 months seems to be not just tempting but actually taunting fate. That’s all thanks to the effects of my betrayal trauma and PTSD. Nonetheless, I suppose that if I’m being duped or suckered or made a fool of, this blogging community and all of my supports will again lift me back on my feet. For now, please do a small, conservative but jubilant, happy dance with me.
Handsome 1.0 appears to have been replaced with Handsome 2.0. He FINALLY seems to have had the necessary shift within his heart for his recovery – and our healing together – to really take off. That place where I really hoped he’d be a year ago? Where he assured me he was a year (and longer) ago? Yeah… just getting there now. Better late than never.
How did this come to light? First, he hasn’t really felt any of the resentment he so feared after signing our post-nup. That surprised him (and me). In doing some self-examination and trying to figure out why that’s the case, he concluded that if I ever actually need to use and enforce that document that (1) he probably deserves whatever befalls him and, more importantly (2) that I would be deserving of and entitled to anything I would receive as a result and he would want me to have it. Those are two things he has not been capable of recognizing until now because he had struggled to truly believe that the issue isn’t my response to his behavior, but his behavior itself. He has, since seeing Dr. M, been able to talk a good game in this regard, but his actions indicated he never really believed it in his gut before. For example, he often viewed my boundaries as punishment rather than as a means to establish safety. That appears to be changing.
Second, I have written here of Handsome’s fraught relationship with alcohol. To be clear, he was never drunk in front of our kids or drinking at work or anything like that, but he would have at least three or four beers at some point every single day. Every. Single. Day. I learned after DDay that what I thought were 3 or maybe 4 beers a day bloomed to 8-10 beers a day during his peak acting out. He would drink, alone in our basement, while he watched tv or porn or sexted his harem. At a minimum, he and I agree that he has abused alcohol during our marriage. (He disputes that he is an alcoholic and I’m tired of arguing over the label as long as he agrees he abused it.) We also agree that his excessive drinking impacted his acting out and his anger management issues. After two failed attempts at maintaining a year of sobriety from alcohol, he is now 5 months into that renewed commitment. My issue is that he fully intends to drink again once that year is up. He has made no secret of that. I have made no secret of my fear should that actually come to pass. And it is, very literally, fear. I’ve realized that a tremendous amount of my PTSD is rooted in his beer-fueled angry outbursts. As recently as two months ago, discussion on the topic would result in him being furious and me in tears. Handsome is a foreign and craft beer fanatic. (In Prague? It must be Pilsner Urquell time. In Lancaster PA? Let’s try something from Lancaster Dispensing Company!) I believe he viewed my insistence on his sobriety from alcohol, not as a protective measure for me and our kids, but rather as an effort to control him by taking away something he loves.
Now? In planning my 50th birthday trip later in the year, Handsome disclosed that he was nervous about doing a few things on my agenda (Warsaw, Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest) knowing that he couldn’t have a beer. In past years he loved walking around the European Christmas markets with a beer in one hand and a pretzel or sausage in the other. We had actually had that discussion months ago and at that time Handsome wanted/ expected me to say “hey, it’s okay if you have a beer here and there.” I didn’t say that. I don’t feel that way. This time, because I want a trip completely unmarred by his drama, I sighed and suggested that I would look for a different destination for the trip. Handsome 2.0 insisted that I didn’t need to because it is more important to him that I have the birthday trip I want than that he be able to have a beer.
My reaction? I initially thought, quite frankly, that he was blowing smoke up my tush and that he’ll get there and expect to drink. So, I pressed the envelope. I told him that I fear that he believes that he can resume drinking the day after his year is up and that my opinion is that there is a lot of prior consideration involved, including consultation with his shrink, his SA sponsor, our CSAT… and me.. before he should touch a drop of alcohol. I told him that even if everyone is on board with him “trying” to drink in some form of moderation, his drinking may look different from what it did before. Maybe it doesn’t occur in front of our kids. Maybe there is no beer kept in our home. Maybe it only occurs on date nights or on days that don’t end in “y.” You get the picture. He paused and thoughtfully said that he hopes that I can get to the point where I give him a chance to prove to me that he can manage a beer or two a month but, at the end of the day, I’m more important than a drink. If it’s me or the beer he just won’t drink any more. I started to cry. I told him that I wasn’t trying to control him, but that the thought of him drinking literally terrifies me because of how it impacted me and the kids before. He said that he knows that I’m not trying to control him and, for the first time, he actually meant it. He told me later how great it felt to say that and to know it was true.
This is going to sound ridiculous, but up to this conversation I questioned whether my husband really loved our kids and me more than beer. Seriously. He was always so unwilling to even consider limiting or eliminating drinking, regardless of the impact on me or the kids. Being able to believe that he prioritizes us over his ability to enjoy a drink is a big thing for me. (I think that one day Handsome will be appalled that I ever had that doubt, or that he ever could have led me to that doubt. But for today? This is huge.)
Handsome seems to have finally realized that my boundaries and concerns about certain things (future use of alcohol, what kinds of interactions he can have with women, etc) are not an effort to control him, but rather a real, legitimate means to protect me and our kids and to keep our family together. I think Handsome 2.0 is deeply ashamed and sad to know that I feel we need that protection, but he gets it now. He is hurt but recognizes that it is his own behavior that causes us to need protection in the first instance.
There are other great signs too. He is throwing himself into working through his SA steps. He is making calls to his list of supports. He is being more present for me. He is still working on expressing empathy like an adult, but he’s much better at it than even a few months ago. I shared with him my trigger about the Kentucky Derby and he responded with much more empathy than I expected. His response seemed a little canned, maybe a little too SA “when they complain about x, you say y” ish, but I could tell that he tried. He told our CSAT that it’s really hard for him, in the moment, to think through the steps of what he’s supposed to say and that trying to personalize it to the specific issue is harder still. Yes, my 56-year-old husband is having to learn a step by step process for making a sincere apology. But he’s trying. Handsome 2.0 has realized that “I’m sorry” is meaningless to me. He is making effort to do better.
Mind you, there is still work to be done. Lots and lots of work. But the possibility of successfully crawling out of the pit we fell into 17 months ago seems a little more realistic today than it did before. That calls for a little happy dance.
Here in the US we are about to start the biggest week in horse racing in the lead up days to the Kentucky Derby. The Derby itself is called the most thrilling two minutes in sports for a reason, and the event is pure spectacle.
I have loved thoroughbred horse racing since I was a little girl, often watching the races on TV with my dad. We would place imaginary bets and cheer on our favorites. I don’t have a clear memory of Affirmed winning the Triple Crown in 1978 – but in 1979, Spectacular Bid was the first of many horses I’d watch capture the Derby and Preakness, only to fall short of the Triple Crown at Belmont. Attending the Derby was on my bucket list for a long, long time.
Back in late 2011 things were going well for our family. We had moved into our new home. I had switched firms earlier in the year and, in doing so, I managed to nearly double my salary and exponentially increase my daily flexibility. Life was so good that it felt almost surreal. As a bit of a splurge, I bought a box of seats for the 2012 Kentucky Oaks (the Friday before the Derby when the fillies race) and the Derby itself. I found a hotel room reasonably near Churchill Downs, and got our nanny to agree to watch the kids for a few days. The race itself was about 8 months away, but I was incredibly excited.
Of course, if I was going, I was going all-in. Dresses, hats, boxed lunches… you name it. I spent months getting my sartorial game on, and Handsome did too. We found him the most beautiful Ralph Lauren spearmint colored sport coat (classy and a bit over the top… perfect) for Derby day and got him a new classic navy blue sport coat, dashing pink shirt, and a beautiful pair of linen pants for the Oaks.
We secured great dinner reservations in Louisville and made arrangements to connect with friends. We turned the two days of racing into a long weekend get-away and spent countless hours preparing and looking forward to the first weekend in May.
That weekend was not without rain, but it was spectacular nonetheless. I hit the trifecta on the Oaks and the exacta on the Derby. We laughed and enjoyed each other’s company. When I think back on that trip, the first image that comes to mind is Handsome in that green jacket, and the resulting smile that brings me reminds me how much I was in love with him then. I felt like that whole period was the beginning of the wonderful rest of our lives, with stability, happiness, and financial security.
We shared our box with some young newlyweds and the wife told me repeatedly how she thought we were amazing as a couple. I thought so too.
I now know that Handsome was a few months into his first emotional affair with the Flame at that point. He was apparently texting or emailing her throughout the weekend, including when he went to the betting windows to place our bets between races. I would later learn that every sartorial choice I thought we enjoyed making together had also been run by the Flame for her approval. (Since her social media highlights photos of her full-figured frame in threadbare leggings decorated with pumpkins I’m not certain what expertise she has, but evidently he felt it was greater than mine.) Our travel arrangements were apparently also fodder for discussion with her. I had no idea.
I was so incredibly happy to be there WITH HIM, but apparently being there with me wasn’t enough to keep him from feeling a need for her. That’s an ongoing theme with Handsome: actually being loved by me or our kids has not been enough to make him feel loved. He looks elsewhere for validation and affirmation of his self-worth. I wrote down a quote once that seems to capture this phenomenon: “The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment.” That was (is?) Handsome. That particular Derby weekend he seemed to have everything a man could want, a truly enviable life, and yet he still had a void inside him that led him to look for “more” elsewhere. Handsome is working on that, but I wish he realized back then what already had before he went and ruined it.
I’ll watch the Oaks and the Derby this year from home. I’ll hit the OTB parlor ahead of time and I’ll bet on my picks and cheer them on with my kids. I’ll sing along to “My Old Kentucky Home” when it’s played before the Derby. At the same time, in the pit of my gut I’ll be trying to fend off a mass of melancholy feelings as I’m reminded of that very first Derby trip. Maybe Handsome feels the same?
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.
Just when I thought I had a few things figured out, my husband went and surprised me. I was prepared to write a post about how nothing particularly positive was going on for us. I was prepared to tell you about the lack of progress we are making on addressing the subjective things on my list of needs, because we weren’t making any such progress. And then… like pulling a rabbit from a hat… my husband surprised me.
About a year ago I told Handsome that I wanted a post-nup with an infidelity clause. My feeling was/ is that I’m bearing all the risk in staying with him and that he needed to share some of that risk too. (You may disagree, but that’s how I feel.) He always said that he understood why I wanted the post-nup and that he didn’t think it was unreasonable, and then he’d kick the can down the road a few more months. That cycle continued over the last year. When we worked on our CSAT’s assignment of developing the list of my needs, it was on my list. Handsome had it on his list of my needs too and I was happy to see it there. When push came to shove though he said that even though he understood why I needed it and that it wasn’t unreasonable and would help our healing, he couldn’t ever see himself signing it. For me it has always been a deal breaker. It was devastating to hear him admit – after an entire year – that he’d never sign it. Add my recent HPV test result to that mix and I was living in angry, sad, confused misery. I started to secretly take some very small steps towards separation.
I understood fully that I was watching Handsome’s oppositional defiant disorder traits rear their ugly heads. I wanted him to do x, therefore he would do y and take pictures… even if it meant burning his life to the ground. He acknowledged that to be true in what had to be a very painful session for him with our CSAT. He admitted that he feared that signing it was “giving up too much control.” (Control of what? He couldn’t say. Most likely he actually meant protection from consequences.) He told her that he really wanted to sign the post-nup because he knew how important it was to me, but he was sure if he did it would eat him alive with resentment later. She booted him to his own therapist to work through that resentment. We stopped talking about the post-nup, or any of my needs really, in our sessions.
Life continued as normal – kids, date nights, appointments, and arranging schedules. To me, it all felt a little hollow. I am trying to plan a family trip for my 50th birthday later this year and it was hard to get enthusiastic about it because in my mind I was wondering whether our family would be intact. (Am I booking a trip for 5 or just 4?)
And then… something shifted. I don’t know what. Handsome called me out of the blue and (i) gave me the most sincere sounding apology I have heard from him in a very long time and (ii) told me that he was ready to sign the post-nup. He thanked me for “giving him the space he needed” the last few weeks to get to that decision, and told me that even though he has done a crappy job of showing it, he wants to prove to me that he’s 100% committed to me and our family and our healing.
To put this into perspective, last Spring I also told Handsome that I wanted him to have a vasectomy so that I did not have to worry about my children having some skank’s kids as their half siblings. (Actually, I was probably even more blunt than that.) With 15-20 other sexual partners during our marriage, that possibility was not out of the realm of reason. As alarmed (terrified? mortified?) as he was at the prospect of having work done on “the boys” he jumped right on that (comparatively) and had the surgery months ago. Signing this document though? Nope. No way, no how. His agreement to finally do this is HUGE.
It wasn’t 100% unicorns and rainbows between agreeing to sign and signing. To complete the document I needed some financial information from him that I didn’t have readily available. When I asked him for it his reaction seemed to indicate that there is simmering resentment present even now. It was hurtful in that moment, but I told him so and I explained why. And yet I also understand that his willingness to do something for me that makes him uncomfortable (and/ or a bit salty and resentful) evidences a different outlook than he had for years. He is putting someone else – in this case, me – above himself. In this instance he put my comfort ahead of his own.
For me, this is a sign that he’s finally willing to put something on the line as it relates to his future sobriety. It’s not a guarantee that he’ll stay sober. There is no such thing. It also doesn’t mean that we’re suddenly “all good.” It is, however, an assurance for me that he is going to bear some of that risk right alongside me. It means that he isn’t prioritizing his feelings over mine. I no longer feel as though I’m over rough seas, walking the plank on my own.
To the extent my last post made it seem like I’m handling things with aplomb, I am not. In addition to being sullen and petulant, for the past two weeks Handsome has also been extraordinarily contrary. I am seemingly incapable of providing a correct answer or opinion to save my life. Everything I have done for the last two weeks has been wrong, apparently. This, combined with the HPV and my mom’s health issues, has taken a toll on me.
One week ago, Handsome and I had the worst fight we have ever had, hands down. I had taken my mom to the doctor that morning and it was a miserably unfortunate appointment. There was not an ounce of good news to be had. I drove her home and stopped to check in with Handsome. He saw me walk in the door and immediately returned to fixing his lunch without a single word to me. I asked if he wanted to talk (no kids around) and he basically said that he didn’t think there was anything to discuss. In hindsight, I should have seen the futility of continuing and I should have walked away.
I didn’t do that, of course, so we ended up in one of those fights where I ask repeatedly why he’s giving up and throwing our family away and he says that he doesn’t know what I want from him. It was ugly. Again, I should have walked away. I didn’t. I was convinced that if I just found the right mix of words and said them in the right order that he would “get it” and … well, you can imagine the foolishness and futility of that endeavor.
And then the argument shifted… almost imperceptibly at first. Rather than the vacant stare and shrugged shoulders and “whatevers” I started to hear statements filled with deep resentment. Things about how I’m trying to change him as a person and he doesn’t like who I’m trying to turn him into. (Um, yeah, you’ve been a selfish liar and a philandering addict and I’d very much like you to have integrity and empathy… my bad, as I thought that’s what you wanted too.) Statements about how not everything that happens to me is his fault (well, the HPV certainly is, asshole). Rants about how there is no point in him calling any of his SA or intensive support people because no one is going to tell him how to feel.
I asked him if he was more interested in protecting himself and his pride than he is in preserving his family. He looked at me with the dead-eyes stare that I’m sure you’ve all seen, gave a little, insolent shrug of his shoulders, and said “I guess so, maybe.”
I am utterly humiliated to say it, but I completely snapped. I lost it on him. If I could put my hand on it, I threw it at him… medicine bottles, a tape measure, the tv remote, his Kindle and phone. He made the mistake of passing by our son’s lacrosse stick, so I grabbed that and nailed him on the arm and shoulder with it before I fell into a sobbing, snotty heap in our foyer.
I cried because he’s biting off his nose to spite his face. I cried because he’s going to hurt our kids and he doesn’t seem bothered. I cried because they are truly innocent victims in all of this. I cried because everyone loves him but he doesn’t love himself. I cried because everything has gone to hell since I shared my HPV result with him. (why?) I cried because he has acted like the HPV is some burden I’m unjustly inflicting on him. I cried because he has broken me.
I never throw things. I think it’s ridiculously childish. I don’t tolerate my kids throwing things. I don’t hit people. Ever. I don’t recall ever hitting another human being in my life. (I don’t even like to point at people for goodness sakes.) And yet I hit him, beating on his arm with my fists. Did he intentionally provoke me? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think it’s more likely that he just grossly overestimated my ability to hold my crap together in the face of all of his insolence, and the other stress and drama.
I left the house to create some space and returned later and I apologized profusely for my behavior. I owned what I did completely. I did not blame him for causing me to snap. He said he deserved it and probably more. (Far be it for me to suggest that, but since he mentioned it… ) And in the days since then? More of the same detached, disinterested, woe-is-me behavior. He did call his sponsor that day. It didn’t seem to help. He had a chance to go to his preferred SA meeting on the weekend. He chose not to go. No journaling. No phone calls to his SA buddies.
Five days later, at our CSAT session yesterday, late into the hour, he referred to me as an abuser. Technically I did abuse him that day, even if it lasted for mere seconds. (If the shoe was on the other foot there would no doubt be comments suggesting that I get a protection from abuse order or get him into anger management counseling and the like.) He told the CSAT that I injured him. I don’t actually believe that to be true – he has absolutely no bruising or other visible signs of injury on his arms or shoulder (the only places struck by me or anything I threw at him that found its mark). He said that I didn’t apologize “enough.” He may indeed feel that way, but I did apologize profusely and sincerely and with great remorse. I gave him the kind of apology that I always hoped to receive from him. Unfortunately, he didn’t choose to hear it. As I have long suspected, he is not willing to show me the kind of grace that I have been showing him for the last 15 months.
I believe that an apology has three important parts: acknowledge what happened, express sincere empathy and remorse, and make some kind of reparation or atonement. With his own apologies, Handsome struggles with the second step and never manages to get to the third step. Ever. I am trying to make my way through those steps, not solely for him, but because they are important to me. They are important to my own integrity. That behavior is not who I am. (Or is it now? Have I really been damaged and changed that much? My god that’s sad if it’s true.) It is certainly not who I want to be. As easy as it would be to blame him, the years of Handsome’s acting out and deceit and manipulation don’t justify what I did. Explain it, perhaps, but not justify it.
Last evening was blessedly better as he seemed to be trying to get himself back on track. I noticed that he had taken his journals to work (where he normally writes in them) and he had called someone from SA. In a quiet moment I apologized to him, again. He cried and told me how sorry he is that I have to deal with whatever the HPV is going to throw my way. He assured me that we would deal with it together. I hope that is true. He made it to a meeting and came home visibly more grounded.
Was this a “rock bottom” event for us as a couple? I think so. I certainly cannot see myself – cannot allow myself – to sink any further. I cannot wallow in a miserable place. I need to rise, to be the person I was/ am/ want to be so that I can be the mom/ daughter/ friend … and wife… that I know I can be.
For all the decades I have gone to the gynecologist and dutifully gotten my PAP and HPV tests, everything has always been negative. Last year, after our first DDay, I promptly scheduled an appointment with my doctor for every STD/ STI test imaginable. All were negative. She performed my annual PAP test but said that she wanted to wait until this year to do an HPV test as my last negative HPV test had been within the last 5 years. At the time, of course, we did not know that Handsome had more than just one affair partner, and that he had acted out in massage parlors and with prostitutes, as well as with a laundry list of other skanks and randos. We did not know how high my risk actually was.
I returned for my annual exam two weeks ago. This year, my PAP was negative, but my HPV test came back positive. More specifically, I tested positive for HPV-16, one of the more virulent strains associated with the development of various forms of cancer. My doctor is lovely and kind and gave me every shred of information she could impart (how my body may clear the virus on its own – although the likelihood of that apparently decreases with age; how we can test aggressively to stay on top of any changes; and how it’s a good thing that we are flagging the issue early; etc.). The logical side of my brain is good. I have a nasty but not unexpected problem, and there is a proactive plan of action in place with a caring and trusted medical professional. The emotional side of my brain, however, is a complete and utter mess.
If I can just vent for a moment… how is it remotely fair that Handsome had really expensive orgasms, and I get an aggressive virus? How did he seriously not know that condoms aren’t magic shields? Did he not read any of the literature when he took our daughter for her HPV vaccination a few years ago? He had to sign a consent form. Did he seriously have her vaccinated for something he knew nothing about? In what way was this outcome unlikely or unpredictable based on his behavior? I am really f’ing hurt, sad, crushed, dismayed, and enraged that he put me in this position. (Insert deep, cleansing breaths here…)
But that’s not the half of it. When I tearfully shared the news with Handsome, he looked stunned and crushed (as he should). And then he opened his mouth. What came out? Not “oh, God, what can I do?” or “you must be so upset, and I am so sorry.” Nope. He turned around and walked away from me and said under his breath to himself “I can’t take any more of this.” Seriously.
He did, shortly thereafter, come back to me and hug me and very briefly say he was sorry. And then…? Nothing. I have been living with him in complete shut down mode for the last two weeks. He is sulking and pouting and barely able to hold a conversation with me. He has stopped making his SA calls. I haven’t seen him journal. He has been to one and only one SA meeting.
At the same time this is going on, I have been dealing with very bad news about my elderly mom’s health. She has a pituitary brain tumor for which the course of action is to ensure it doesn’t grow or bleed. That has been going fine except that she just recently developed atrial fibrillation, the treatment for which includes blood thinning agents to prevent clotting. That treatment is completely counter to the treatment for her tumor. She is receiving the best medical care available, but hers is a difficult situation and there are no good or easy choices. Virtually any treatment option she chooses comes with high risk for one condition or the other. I feel as though I am watching her rapidly decline on a daily basis.
So, when I absolutely need my husband to show up and be there for me, he’s off in some bizarre woe-is-me Victimville, moping about and avoiding all of his recovery resources. If I put on my empathy hat, I can imagine that me testing positive for HPV is hugely painful for Handsome. I can guess that he sees it as a reminder of how dirty his actions were and how careless and irresponsible he was and – perhaps most troubling for him – as evidence of how he not only failed to protect me, but he actually exposed me to harm. That all has to be terrible for him. Fine.
I can put myself in his shoes, but he still needs to dig out his big boy pants and spend a day on my side of the equation. I am stuck living with the consequences of his actions. Those consequences may have been unintended, but they were far from unpredictable.
I went quiet earlier in the month for a bit because we packed up the kiddos and my 86-year-old mom and flew to Florida to visit a very famous mouse. You may recall that when Handsome and I tried this as a grown up get-away weekend last September, it all went to hell in a hand basket. This time went much better, even with Valentine’s Day tossed into the mix just to amp up the stress.
The first two days of the 11-day trip were not great. (I think I told Handsome that they sucked ass, to be blunt.) Handsome was tired and irritable and I started to worry that I was going to have a repeat of September on my hands in front of my mom and kids. And then, somehow, things turned a corner and got better. Very much better, in fact. There were a few stressors (my daughter is a challenging tween, my mom is a challenging senior, and my son’s relationship with Handsome is still strained… and then there’s me with all my betrayal trauma baggage), but we had fun and packed as much as we could into each day and night.
Last year I had forbidden any celebration of Valentine’s Day except with regard to our kids. This year, I leaned into it a bit. Finding a suitable card was tough, but I found a good one for Handsome and he picked a lovely one for me. He also gifted me a cute bracelet that pays homage to my favorite Magic Kingdom ride – the Haunted Mansion (everyone in my family hates that ride and I have loved it forever). We had lunch with the princesses in Cinderella’s Castle and then dinner in the California Grille on top of our resort overlooking the Magic Kingdom. It was a pretty perfect day.
We rounded out the trip with a few sunny days of rest and relaxation in Vero Beach and, thanks both to the willingness of our kids to eat pizza and watch movies and the unfortunate flu that wiped out my mom for a few days, we were able to have dinner together, alone, twice. That was a nice treat. My husband was his non-addict self and I was reminded why I fell in love with him in the first place.
I got really sad about two days before we flew home because much of the trip seemed like the best parts of my pre-DDay life. (Because, let’s be honest, ignorance can indeed be blissful.) Knowing that I was coming home to meetings and CSAT visits and unresolved disclosures and other dilemmas (our nanny of 5 years tendered her notice, and hiring a new one is a daunting experience when your husband is a sex addict), all just made me unbelievably sad. It sharply marked the difference between life “before” versus life “after” disclosure.
We were sitting at the beautiful pool, on a gorgeous day, our kids were being kids and having a blast, and Handsome asked why I looked sad. I debated my answer. I could lie or downplay what I was thinking. That seemed counter-productive. So I told him the truth: “Because this moment right now is incredibly awesome and yet it highlights for me how much I hate my new life at home.” He didn’t ask me why. (I’m sure he thinks he knows.) He did tell me that he was sorry and express some empathy. That, I suppose, is progress in and of itself.
Handsome has slept poorly every night since we got home. At our CSAT appointment yesterday, he blamed it on my statement about hating my life. He said that makes him think there is no hope and it makes him think of running away. Handsome starts researching houses to buy when he gets in these woe-is-me moods, seemingly forgetting that we’d need to divorce before he could buy a house and that he’ll not be able to afford to maintain his current lifestyle if that happens so he’s looking waaaay over his actual budget. That “poor discouraged me” victimization crap drives me insane. CrazyKat wrote eloquently about it this week on her blog. It is indeed destructive and cowardly. It also highlights the difference in thought processes between my brain and his.
Let’s switch scenarios. Assume for a moment that I ran him over with my car. There he is, the person I say I love most in life, bleeding out in need of aid. Personally, I would be elbows deep in the gore trying to save him, ease his pain, and comfort him. After he received treatment, I would be fully dedicated to assisting him with rehabilitation or taking him to appointments, or doing whatever else is necessary for him to heal. I wouldn’t have to be asked (much less begged or cajoled). I would just do it because I love him and it is the right and decent thing to do, to try to make things right when you cause harm. I cannot even imagine running from the scene, but that is exactly what Handsome’s house hunting mode equates to. One response is pure childish selfishness, and the other is not.
I shouldn’t have to tell him that a thoughtful response to my truth would be to reflect on his efforts to heal the marriage to date and consider how he might more actively support our healing as a couple. It shouldn’t have to be spelled out for him that maybe whatever efforts he was making on the vacation – which had been truly terrific aside from the initial bumps – need to continue at home. I would think those things are obvious. Apparently not. I did ask him to read Kat’s blog post. The irony of the timing of her post, coupled with the similarity of our experiences, was not lost on him. That too is probably a bit of progress, but I’m not sure it balances out the BS that Kat describes so well. Nonetheless, I’m chalking up the vacation as a success, even if it shed light on some serious work to be done in the coming cold winter days at home.
I have suspected over the last 14 months that terrible news is having more of an impact on me than I’d care to admit. I hear it and it mostly just washes over me, and yet I seem to live in a perpetual state of just waiting for the other shoe to drop. I sense that I have grown more fearful and apprehensive generally. I was not, I don’t believe, a fearful or apprehensive person prior to DDay #1. Quite the opposite, in fact. I spent months traveling alone in a third world country as a young single woman without much of a care. A few weeks ago I had to pop an Ativan just to board a plane to attend a work meeting an hour-long flight away. I believed this unfortunate development was just the residue of trauma, but based on an article I read, it seems there may be something more to the story.
“When you experience stressful events, whether personal (waiting for a medical diagnosis) or public (political turmoil), a physiological change is triggered that can cause you to take in any sort of warning and become fixated on what might go wrong.”
Yep, that’s me in a nutshell. And what triggers this reaction, you ask? Dopamine. After living with an addict and now reading this article I’m beginning to think of dopamine as the root of all evil. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain that affects many things; most significantly, pleasure. When our brain is working normally, we receive a positive reward in the form of pleasure from dopamine induced by things like normal eating, drinking, and sex. Of course, humans like these dopamine bursts so if we find ways to increase our happiness and pleasure – like more eating, drinking, and sex – and some of us go to extremes to keep the hits coming. Just as dopamine feeds our pleasure response, apparently it also feeds fear and dread. So that very thing which fueled my husband’s addiction also makes me fearful. Awesome. Betrayal and infidelity are truly the gifts that keep on giving.
The article makes complete sense to me. Hyper-vigilance isn’t just obsessively checking up on your spouse or cyber-stalking. It can also be the plain act of sensing danger where you wouldn’t have considered it before.
After Handsome returned from his intensive I learned that he gave his phone number to many people he met there, including one woman. She was one of about 8 people he ate meals with each day. To say that was an error on his part is an understatement. It should never have happened. When she asked for his number he should have politely wished her well but declined. Nonetheless, I’m mindful that Handsome has long had female friends and colleagues who appear to have been legitimately “just friends.” That never troubled me before. In fact, I thought it was healthy. Now, where women and my husband are concerned I sense overwhelming danger.
You might say “well, yes, but that’s based on your betrayal experience” and that is completely true. It is also true, however, that for all I know this woman was 70 years old and covered with warts. He never said. I didn’t ask because it doesn’t matter. If she’s female, she goes into the “threat” category. I am, indeed, fixated on everything that might go wrong. I dread the other shoe dropping.
I’m glad this “neural engineering” as the article calls it, helped our ancestors to survive. Perhaps it is even helping me to survive the onslaught of other women and my husband’s addiction. I only know for sure that it is exhausting to anticipate danger everywhere. While I am glad that I am no longer living in ignorance, I have to admit that I do miss the bliss.
Our CSAT has given me some homework for next week, and I would like to request your help. We had a good and very productive – but highly emotional – session with her yesterday. In advance of our next session, I am supposed to create a list of needs that I consider to be baseline needs from Handsome in order for me to stay in our marriage.
Here is what I have so far, ranging from the subjective to the more quantifiable/ provable:
truth (Stop lying!)
fidelity/ loyalty
respect
integrity
empathy/ compassion
exclusive love
intimacy (emotional and physical)
healthy selflessness (demonstrate that you can be self-sacrificing – not a martyr – for the benefit of others without the expectation of something in return)
give me your first and your best
sobriety (sexual/ alcohol)
full disclosure
financial and other transparency
complete and abide by an updated circle chart
post-nuptial agreement
annual STD testing
ongoing weekly attendance at individual therapy
ongoing weekly attendance at SA meetings
participation in group therapy if available
ongoing weekly CSAT appointments
stop engaging in other behavior that’s harmful to the marriage (e.g. deflection, minimizing, workaholism)
dedicated time to talk about the marriage/ check-in
dedicated quality time (i) as a couple and (ii) with family
This is where you come in, dear readers. I’ve pondered this list till I’m bleary-eyed. What am I missing? No matter where you are on your journey, and no matter whether your spouse cheated once or is an addict, please let me know in the comments what you think I’m missing – even if it might be aspirational. What would you ask for? Similarly, if there is something on the list you think shouldn’t be there, let me know that as well.
I should note that Handsome is doing a lot of this already. The list of what he isn’t doing is fairly small. There are, however, significant things on that list.
As always, I look forward to and appreciate your thoughts.
I decided, just prior to Christmas, that I was done pulling punches with Handsome. I was in crisis mode – and thus we were in crisis mode – and I needed him to understand how bad I thought it actually was (particularly after he lied, again,about breaking his sobriety from alcohol, again). It appears that he received and understood the message. Just in case, I reiterated it with our CSAT and she has drilled into him that he is seriously at risk for blowing the most meaningful relationship he’s ever had. His individual therapist has done the same. I cannot say that it will matter in the long run, but I am confident that he cannot say that he didn’t know/ understand/ realize that I have reached my breaking point.
I say that honestly, but the interesting thing is that I’m reasonably sure that I’m at peace where I’m at. Yes, if he screws up again he’ll be working on his recovery in a bed-sit far from his kids and me, but I know that’s on him and not me. Yes, things could still end up in flames. Again, I feel as though he has been given every freaking opportunity possible to succeed. If he fails, it’s not on me. I have not given up… not at all. I’m just placing the burden of his recovery where it belongs: on Handsome.
One thing that he shared with me recently is that he feels like his recovery is in fits and spurts because he struggles to avoid getting burnt out or bored after a bit (this is the adult ADHD in effect). We realized that, to a degree, things were more productive when we were task oriented. You would think that would be easy for him since he is supposed to be working the 12 steps. He asked for other things to be added to the mix.
One of the tasks that we were supposed to do for our couples retreat last year was a marriage timeline. We did cursory ones at the retreat and, to put it mildly, they were quite different. Handsome’s was more or less a straight line along the “highly satisfied” axis, while mine started to look like a roller coaster starting in about 2012 when his acting out started (unbeknownst to me). I think we were each stunned to see the other’s graph. I couldn’t figure out how/ why he would cheat – relapse into his sex addiction, really – if he was so “highly satisfied” and he seemingly had no idea that I was truly unhappy so often during the time he was acting out. We clearly needed a more careful discussion to really share what was going on with each of us. We finally had that chance. That’s my actual timeline at the top of this post. I’d love to tell you that the discussion went well. I can’t. It didn’t (but it turns out okay in the end).
Prior to 2012, the only big dip in my satisfaction with our marriage came when I found out that I was pregnant with my son. (It really wasn’t a slide to that point as the timeline seems to indicate… that’s just a function of the milestones mapped out. It was a sudden drop.) It wasn’t that I didn’t want another child… it was simply that I had just figured how to balance one small child with a full-time job and the rest of life and I found myself suddenly overwhelmed trying to figure out how to keep it all together with the addition of a second child. Handsome seemed to think it was no big deal, and I felt like he ditched me to figure it out on my own. It was not until our son acquired a deadly bacterial infection two days after he was born that Handsome and I immediately re-connected as a team and started to get ourselves back on solid ground. We stayed there until The Flame made her first appearance three years later in mid-2012 (that’s the gigantic 2nd dip you see).
Since then, the roller coaster of our marriage – to me at least – is evident from my chart. Some things are obvious: I am not happy or satisfied in my marriage if I am being cheated on (like his initial emotional affair with The Flame) and lied to. Others are less obvious: times when I was unhappy because he was so detached from me, our kids, and the marriage in general because (I know now, but didn’t then) he was really far down the rabbit hole of his addiction.
I asked Handsome to re-do his timeline thinking that perhaps he was just delusional at the couples retreat and, indeed, his chart looks very different now. He insists he was almost always “somewhere between happy and very happy” in the marriage but his new chart is like a roller coaster during his acting out too.
Data analytics aren’t my thing, but after Handsome started acting out in 2012, the majority of his “happy” periods correspond with vacations and family events. It’s when we were home (and he was acting out daily) that he’s reporting that he was unhappy in the marriage. Coincidence? I think not. He recalls that at certain points we were bickering a lot and he was upset about any number of things but, as our CSAT pointed out, he has only just recently had the epiphany that some of my behavior was driven in large part by his crappy addiction-driven behavior. To use her analogy, he can’t complain about the taste of the water when he’s the one peeing in the well.
I’d love to be able to say that we completed this exercise and hugged it out, but that didn’t happen. I asked why he had indicated that he was “very unhappy” in our marriage when his mother died. Simply stated, he recalled being alone at her funeral. Nope. I handed off our 2 tiny kids (a herculean endeavor that’s a story in itself) to an army of sitters/ nannies… and got on a plane and flew to him and was there for 3 days, all the services, and the 11 hour car ride home. Over time, he just wrote me out of the experience in his mind. Sadly, I’m sure that historical re-write was one of his mental justifications for his acting out. I’m sure he whined about it to his APs. I can picture it… “she’s so mean she didn’t even bother to come to my mom’s funeral… .” In that moment, I got slapped in the face with exactly how deep his illness goes. I am not perfect, but when I KNOW I stepped up and was every bit the wife and partner I was supposed to be? Knowing that he had erased me from the entirety of the experience of the death of his mom? It made me feel every bit as “irrelevant” as he told his APs I was.
So, where’s the happy ending? We talked through this process with the CSAT yesterday. She walked him slowly through a number of things where Handsome’s reality and actual reality differ. She told him that moving forward in life he is going to have to question every negative “season” from that period of time and decide whether the memory is real or not. He’ll have to assess what role, if any, his addiction played in his perceived experience (was he peeing in the well or not?). Since our 2nd DDay Handsome has always acknowledged that he’s an addict, but I’m not sure that he even recognized the extent of his illness and how it truly corrupted his brain. This session was probably the first time that I saw that light bulb go off for him. As pissed as I am that he erased me from such a life altering event, I’m sympathetic to the fact that it surely couldn’t have been pleasant for him to think he was abandoned by me when his mom died. It breaks my heart that his almost sole memory of those days is of standing in the cemetery at her graveside with no one else around. There’s a lot his therapist could unravel in that one memory. (Did he view his mom’s death as abandonment and switch us somehow? Was this really the driver behind his relapse?)
We did end up in each other’s arms at the end of the session, because he realized that yes, I was there for him then, just as I’ve always been there for him. He realized that while his addiction may have been telling him that I didn’t love him, surely I did and still do because otherwise I’d have left a year ago, if not earlier. He realized that the negative narrative he told himself to justify his addictive behavior simply wasn’t real. Now, we can move forward and focus on reality.
A Happy New Year to you all! I offer a big, hearty “thank you” to everyone who read and commented on my Week of Brutal Honesty posts before the holidays. It was very cathartic to me to write those posts and to participate in the comments, and I hope it was for others as well.
So here we are, rolling into 2019. Handsome’s primary focus at the moment is eliminating his compulsive lying. To a “normal” brain, it sounds fairly ridiculous, but addicts are relentless liars. Handsome’s compulsive lying likely started in his childhood and escalated in his high school years when he first started living a kind of secret life. (His parents would think he was at school all day when he would actually leave and go hang out at the town library for hours on end. He was dying to learn, but hated school for a variety of reasons.) It certainly set the stage for the decades of addiction-driven secrets and lies that followed.
His assignment is essentially to do two things: (i) not lie, and (ii) journal about every time he thinks about lying, whether big or small, and explore his motivations behind why he was going to or did lie. If he lies he is supposed to fess up and correct the lie immediately. (I am fully aware of the irony in relying on an expert liar to admit to his lies, but it is what it is.)
I was working on some recovery materials this past weekend and one of the topics involved trickle truth and the damage and trauma it causes. As is often the case, this got me thinking very specifically about Handsome’s disclosures. In short, it occurs to me that the use of trickle truth – staggering his disclosures and lying by repeatedly stating that he had told me “everything” – was likely highly effective for him.
To be clear, I am not saying that there were no negative consequences of the trickle truth. I am instead suggesting that – on balance – the negative consequences of the trickle truth for him were likely less severe than the consequences of telling me everything honestly from the beginning. Handsome’s initial disclosure was that he had one physical affair. In those initial, highly charged days after disclosure, I was making a decision to stay or to leave the relationship based on, I thought, his extra-marital involvement with one person. If I had any inkling that there were at least five other long-term emotional and physical affair partners, plus all the pros and online randos, my initial analysis would have been very different. I tend to think that I would have simply thrown him out and filed for divorce.
It’s almost as if to stay in the marriage I had to ease into the concept of being the wife of a sex addict just as he had to ease into the disclosure of his acting out and acknowledgement of his addiction.
With that said, I do believe that we reached a point – probably about 2 months after our 2nd DDay (when his addiction truly came to light) – after which additional disclosures became nothing but destructive. After that point we had both put considerable time, effort, and money into healing separately and together… we were staying together if we both did the work… so further trickle truth just undermined the new foundation we were trying to build.
I’m not suggesting for a moment that trickle truth is a good thing. There are power dynamics and certainly selfishness and self-preservation at play when one is asked to tell the whole truth and they do not do so. It is also unquestionable in my mind that trickle truth exacerbates betrayal trauma. Instead, I think I’ve just come to the conclusion that trickle truth from a cheater is to be expected. It often works, to a degree, for them.
Perhaps I handled it all wrong with Handsome. Perhaps the mantra shouldn’t have been “tell me the truth or I’m throwing you out” but rather “move out until you can prove to my satisfaction that you have told me the truth.” Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, that would have been the smarter move.
This is the fifth and final post in my week of soul cleansing. You can find the first four posts here, here, here, and here. If you’ve hung in there with me all week, thank you. Getting these things off my chest has been cathartic and I appreciate all of the comments.
I keep waiting for Handsome to do a number of things: express empathy appropriately and when needed, get his head out of his alternate reality, and demonstrate a feeling of urgency about his recovery (including addressing his integrity and intimacy issues). So far, I’m mostly still waiting.
I had intended this post to be broadly about the issue of staying versus going and how I continue to struggle with that decision. And then… well, then this past Monday happened. Two things occurred on Monday that have amped up my sadness and apathy about Handsome’s recovery. Note that I didn’t say “anger.” I find myself slowly shifting away from anger and disappointment and into apathy.
Over the weekend I was going through our bathroom closet looking for a particular product I needed and I came across not one, but two boxes of condoms. The first box, a 40 pack (must have been wishful thinking), I recall purchasing myself after our son was born in 2009. He was born in May and I had to wait until September of that year to get an IUD. Thus, the condoms. Handsome hates condoms with the fire of 1,000 suns, and I think we used no more than 3 or 4 of them. After I got the IUD, we had no need for condoms and the box sat in the back of the closet collecting dust. Imagine my surprise at finding a second box of condoms with a much later 2016 expiration date (which would mean they were purchased in roughly 2012 or 2013). It was a 12 pack. Six were left. Handsome and I have not used condoms together since September of 2009.
My truth = Handsome bought the condoms to act out and have sex with his APs.
His “truth” = “I’ve never seen those before, but they must have been for us.”
Mind you, the issue isn’t actually the condoms. I know he had sex with other women, of course. (And a part of me would be glad/ relieved if he actually did use condoms with them because even though he insists he did, he hates them so much that I tend to doubt that.) The issue is the distorted thinking and/ or the lie. He knows he bought them. Even if he doesn’t remember buying them he at least knows that I did not buy them and that we did not use them together. And yet he can’t bring himself to own that reality.
After that discussion on Monday, Handsome headed off to his weekly therapy appointment. He generally calls me afterwards and I wanted to ask him to stop and pick up milk at the grocery store. When 20+ minutes had passed, I checked “Find Friends” on my phone to see if he was still at the doc’s and saw that he was apparently parked at a beer distributor between his doc and home. I didn’t freak out. Find Friends is often less than precise. I called him and asked him where he was. He told me that he was several miles away in a different town. Find Friends is not that inaccurate. I said nothing further. I can’t make him get a grip on his integrity. I can’t force him to tell the truth.
And that brings us to today. He admitted in our session with the CSAT that he drove from his therapist’s office to the beer distributor and bought and drank a beer on Monday. Handsome will still lie to protect himself. He will still gaslight me even when it’s obvious that I know the truth and I’m not buying his BS. I’m not sure what happened in his therapy session, but it clearly stressed him and rather than using any of the tools in his toolbox to deal with it he resorted to drinking. Again.
And me? I believe he is engaging in self-sabotage. It’s as if Handsome thinks he can’t recover so he is going to ensure that he won’t recover. It’s sad. He does so well on some things and on other things he is just floundering, but I’m the collateral damage. I’m going to enforce my boundaries. He needs to get himself to another multi-day intensive program of some kind within the next month. He needs to ramp up his meeting attendance and make daily calls to his sponsor and SA buddies. He can, as always, choose not to do these things, but then he needs to find an apartment to live in.
Boundaries and consequences are great, but my patience is wearing very thin. The goodwill I have for him is diminishing with each lie, with each incident of acting out (not sexually that I know of, but he’s clearly acting out in other ways). I’m not getting mad. I’m sliding into apathy. Our CSAT told him today that if I’m not mad he should be terribly afraid because it means that I’m finding my life jacket and putting it on and getting ready to jump ship. If he can right the ship, I’ll stay on board, but I’m not going to be dragged down with him. I love him more than he can imagine, but the clock is truly ticking. I cannot endure this for much longer. That’s the brutally honest truth here: I wanted deeply to move into 2019 with renewed hope and faith and energy, but I see that I’m still dealing with the same BS I was dealing with a year ago. I don’t think that I can do it for one more year, and that breaks my heart. 💔
This is the fourth post in my week of soul cleansing. You can find the first three posts here, here, and here.
There really is no easy way to diplomatically address this, so I’m just going to dive right in. There are girls/ women who date broken and damaged men because they either like the drama involved in trying to get them to change, or they enjoy the project of trying to spiff them up, or they think it’s the best they can hope for in a relationship. That has never been me. With one particular exception (it was a brief, 6 month bad-boy phase right after college) I’ve dated guys who were squared away. I’ve never liked drama. I dated men who seemed to have confidence and were secure in who they were and what they wanted out of life. Some of them were selfish assholes, to be sure, but they were far from secretive or apologetic about their lives or their goals and dreams.
I had one long-term (10 year) relationship prior to Handsome and he was not a project in any way, shape, or form. Neither he, nor any of the men I dated, were into porn or escorts or massage parlors. They openly mocked the men who utilized such services. They referred to the women involved as dirty, skanky, trashy and a host of less printable names. Mind you, none of these guys were chaste. Every one of them was completely into sex, sometimes overwhelmingly so, with their own unique takes on kink. Every single one of them was reasonably adventurous, but they wanted that adventure with someone “clean.” That matched well with my sexual background and experience.
I came into my relationship with Handsome fully believing that men who paid for sex or sat in their basements self-pleasuring to porn were losers. Who pays for sex when you just go out and find someone you like and get it on?
If guys who watch porn and pay for sex are losers, what is my husband?
🙄
I struggle with this. Handsome has been a sex addict for decades… long before he met me. His pattern is to start a new relationship sober, and then after several years fall back into a phase of acting out until he walks away from the relationship (he tries to leave first so he isn’t dumped). Our CSAT calls this the “rinse and repeat” cycle. If I knew the truth about Handsome, I never would have dated him. I certainly never would have married him. And yet here we are. I find myself married to a man I deeply love, but now struggle to respect.
That’s a tough spot to be in. I used to look at him with admiration. Now, all too often I see him through glasses colored by sadness and pity, generally with a dose of resentment thrown in as well. When he would walk into a room pre-DDay, even when I was tired, or ticked, or hungry for that matter, I would smile and get a warm fuzzy feeling. Now, I often look away. There is still love there, but it has a lot of hurt and disgust piled on top of it.
And yet this result was very predictable. Nothing in my background would suggest to Handsome that I wouldn’t be violently disgusted by his behavior. His boss is (allegedly) a complete male whore and Handsome and I used to talk about his antics disparagingly all the time and discuss how sorry we felt for his wife. More than half of that time Handsome was doing the same or worse things. (Transference, perhaps?)
Handsome certainly knew that when I found out that he’d been going down on the town syphilitic whore, it would turn my stomach for him to do that to me. He had to realize that knowing that he came inside women who were basically smashed by a steady train of paying guys all day long, having him inside me would be a lot less meaningful or fun or intimate. He must have known that the knowledge that he trolled for anonymous pussy online – and that he’d essentially fuck anything – means that whatever he says to me about wanting me is kind of a moot point. Why wouldn’t he want me after what he’s been fucking?
Of all of the issues I’m covering this week, this may be the one that is most difficult to overcome. Handsome has to work – hard – to regain my esteem and respect. So far, a year in, his record is lackluster. Yes, he has made strides, but then he undoes everything with a giant helping of lies or trickle truth or gas lighting. That can’t continue forever.
I want desperately to rebuild trust and respect for him, but only Handsome controls whether or not that is possible. I want to look at him and be proud of all of the hard work that he is doing to heal himself and us. I have had that at fleeting times throughout the last year, and then it vanishes when he undermines and self-sabotages his own hard work. I’m willing to do everything I can to help him, but he also needs to help himself.
Tomorrow – A Week of Brutal Honesty – #5 – Handsome’s Clock is Ticking
This is the third post in my week of soul cleansing. You can find the first two posts here and here.
I’ve been pondering this post for a long time, but frankly it just seemed way too awkward – and revealing – to write. I was on a support group call a few days ago and someone had a very similar experience, so I’m thinking that perhaps I’m not as alone in this as I thought. So, if this makes sense to even one betrayed spouse out there, just know that you aren’t the only one.
I am not a physically aggressive person. I don’t think that I have ever actually struck another human in anger… ever, even as a kid. I did throw a bottle of water at Handsome’s head at some point in the last few months, and it seemed to shock the hell out of him – which is probably indicative of how out of character that kind of thing is for me.
Based on that, it might surprise you to know that I’m reasonably certain that I seriously considered killing him the night he first disclosed his infidelity to me. I feel really weird just writing that sentence out, but it happened. After dumping his initial disclosure of lies on me, Handsome headed downstairs to sleep in our basement. I wept initially, and then… well, then I got mad, (like really, really mad), that he had done such a thing, to me, to our family, and that he only came clean because the Whore’s husband was going to out him. I was seething hot with rage.
Rage is probably the most relatable word that I can use, but it was really far beyond that. I felt with absolute clarity the depths to which he had betrayed and harmed me. I did not want revenge. I wanted him to no longer exist. The maelstrom of fury inside of me was truly like nothing I had ever felt before.
We are not gun nuts, but he is in law enforcement and my dad was an accomplished skeet shooter, so we have guns in our home. For the record I’m all in favor of gun control and background checks and closing the gun show purchase loophole and… well, generally anything that the NRA opposes. Nonetheless, I know how to shoot.
And yes, I thought seriously about where the guns are in our house, where the ammo is, whether he might be expecting my rage or if he actually managed to fall asleep now that his guilty conscience was relieved (ha! if I only knew how far from the truth that was at the time)…. and then one thought popped into my mind. I pictured our kids and how that would be the loss of both parents for them, since I knew I wasn’t going to get away with anything. I recall being absolutely fully aware that I’d go to jail. We had just had an absolutely terrific day with the kids and I couldn’t imagine them without either parent, losing their home, moving to their godmother’s, having to give up their friends and their school and their pets because of me or their asshole cheater-father. I wasn’t going to cause that.
This was not, to be honest, as linear an argument in my head as this makes it seem. I sat with these thoughts running through my head for longer than I care to admit. I did not ever touch a weapon that night (nor since then), but I had run through about every scenario I could think of in my mind. In the end, it wasn’t my great love of my husband that saved him that night. In that white-hot fury I truly did not give a shit about him. He was saved by my great love of our kids and my own moral compass.
I used to think that crimes of passion were some BS concept that defense attorneys used to get their clients off. That’s likely true in some cases, but if I could be driven to seriously evaluate the pros and cons of homicide, then I’m reasonably certain that just about anyone can. I’m pretty even keeled (or, more precisely, I was before DDay). I don’t have anger management issues, and I’m very often more pushover than powerhouse at home. I’m also a pretty law and order kind of girl. Today though? If I were on a jury and a betrayed spouse had whacked their mate in an incident worthy of 48 Hours, I get it. I can empathize. I would sign on the “not guilty by reason of temporary insanity” line in a heartbeat. I’m not talking about someone who plots and schemes for weeks, but in that heat of the moment after discovery or disclosure? I know that crazy pain and the crazier thinking that goes along with it. I’ve been there. I’m not saying that it’s right or that it makes sense (and, in fact, that’s precisely why it’s so crazy… because it makes no sense). I’m just saying that I understand.
Tomorrow: A Week of Brutal Honesty – #4 – L is for Loser
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)
Let me assure you that nothing bad has happened (recently, that is), I haven’t lost my marbles, and I’m not out for pity or sympathy. I use this blog to share my experiences and feelings and there are some very specific ones that, to date, I’ve been too embarrassed/ hesitant/ insecure/shy/reluctant/ whatever to share.
I don’t want to carry this baggage into 2019, however, so I’m going to pound them out over the course of this week by posting one per day. I just need to get them off my chest and toss them out into the ether and move into the New Year without the burden of these thoughts. If something resonates, great, or maybe it will just be me cleansing my soul, but that’s fine too.
Today’s topic: sex with my sex addict husband.
My experience, like many on this journey, is likely really different from what others experienced. I can only speak to us. You might think that sex with a guy who had numerous sex partners, including pros, and who watched more than his fair share of porn, would be awesome. He must have learned something, right?? In our relationship, throughout the entirety of our relationship, it was rarely so. Were we having sex? Yes, but not usually a lot. Was it fulfilling? Not usually for me.
Pre-DDay, Handsome was quite selfish in bed. I see this very clearly now. I didn’t then. I was always just so happy for the attention when it came my way. In bed, I fell into that trap where I was so focused on trying to please him that I became irrelevant to the process. Foreplay was minimal, intercourse was usually brief, and when he was done, it was over for both of us. By DDay #1, I couldn’t even remember the last time he brought me to orgasm, but it would not be an exaggeration to say that it had probably been a few years. I always told myself that our relationship was about more than sex and that I could deal with barely adequate sex since I had an otherwise great husband [insert laugh track here…]. It makes sense, and it’s foolish, all at the same time.
Two other factors certainly didn’t help: his ED and his compulsive masturbation. It’s hard to have anything left in the tank if you’re engaging in daily solo play and you have ED. I can honestly say that I never, ever did anything other than try to be supportive about the ED. I told him often that it wasn’t a big deal and not to worry. I am, however, really f-ing resentful that he could somehow manage to get it up for the harem of whores while he couldn’t manage that most times with me. That simply sucks. He claims that he very often couldn’t perform with them either and that that’s why he preferred oral to straight sex, but I doubt that’s the case. He wasn’t spending $200-300 a pop for blow jobs. If he was, he’s a bigger fool than I think.
There was a third factor too: his drinking. On a daily basis I’m sure it didn’t help his ED, but it otherwise didn’t come into play. Date nights or special occasions where he drank a lot were a different story. I detest sloppy drunks. I’ve felt that way ever since college. I find that slobbery, stupid drunk stage just intolerable. Handsome seemed to think it was cute (not!). On nights when most couples would have carried the fun of the evening into bed, I’d spend an extra 3-4 minutes in the bathroom until he fell asleep/ passed out. I’m incredibly happy that I haven’t had to deal with that dynamic for a year.
Finally, even when we were having sex he often seemed disconnected. He was there physically, but his mind was clearly elsewhere. Was he fantasizing about someone else? Maybe. Probably. I’ll never know for sure. I just know that he wasn’t connecting in any real way with me most of the time.
Why do I struggle mightily with this? None of his APs or paid pros are anything like me. He deliberately chose them and lusted after them and somehow managed to perform with them. I’m sad, and yes resentful/ bitter/ angry/ hurt, that he could perform with them and not me. I feel like I played the chump for years, trying to be a good wife, putting up with a crappy vanilla sex life, all the while he’s getting his rocks off unbeknownst to me. (As an illustration of how clueless I was, about a month before DDay #1 I started to research doctors that might be able to help him with what I guessed was low-T or general mid-life funk, because that’s the level our sex life was at. He had four (4!!) active affair partners at the time.)
With some caveats that I’ll address in another post this week, the good news is that things are generally better post-DDay. It took a few months, but the selfishness is mostly gone. He is more connected and attentive. He has remembered that I have a clitoris and that it can be fun to pay attention to it. He’s not drinking, so that eliminates the sloppy drunk issue. Sex is no longer just about him. I occasionally wonder if he’s really present with me or if he’s elsewhere in his mind, but I’m guessing that’s normal and just another gift of the betrayal trauma (the gift that keeps on giving).
Tomorrow: A Week of Brutal Honesty – #2 – Regrets – I have a few (but maybe not what you think)
Looking back at my session last week with our CSAT, it was pretty hard-core. We talked about Handsome’s lack of real progress in his recovery, how a physical separation might be necessary, how long I was willing to be patient for that recovery that may never come, how a separation might trigger a relapse, etc. etc. It was fairly doom and gloom. She met with Handsome yesterday, individually, for what I surmised would be something of a “Come to Jesus” meeting. She flat-out told me that if Handsome couldn’t find that turning point/ change of heart that he needs to move into real recovery, there would be little she could truly do for us as a couple other than helping to moderate the temperature of the relationship.
Imagine my surprise when Handsome returned from the session yesterday and reported that it went “great.” Did they talk about his lack of progress? Not in so many words. She recommended an intensive program in January for him. Did she raise the possibility of a physical separation? Nope. She told him that I’m at the end of my rope, but that’s no surprise to him. I’ve told him that point-blank at home and in our sessions. She had asked me in some detail about how long my patience would last and when a separation might make sense. She also told me she would need to share that with him. Did she? Nope. WTAF???? I lose sleep for a week and virtually none of what we discussed is actually raised with him?
I like and respect our CSAT, but I was ticked. I felt let down that she soft-sold her points, to the extent she made them at all. I felt like that played into his “you blow things out of proportion” victim mode (he did not say that, but he did question why I was so highly agitated after last week since there was “nothing really wrong”). I felt more than a bit misled. One of three things seemed to have happened:
Handsome was minimizing and downplaying the session; or
She had her own change of heart on how to deal with him in the last week; or
For some reason she felt the need to scare the crap out of me last week.
I’m no shrinking violet, so I went to our couples session today fully prepared to ask what, exactly, happened either over the course of the previous seven days or what I was completely missing. I warned Handsome in advance that I was ticked because I wanted him to understand that I wasn’t mad at him. He knows me well enough to know that I would be frank in conveying my surprise at what I perceived as a turn of events.
So, today, I put my fancy suit for an after work cocktail party and as I’m driving to the CSAT’s office I’m rehearsing what I’m going to say (both because I’m a dork and I get unusually rattled in there). I decided to go with “I was kind of surprised yesterday when Handsome came home from your session and said that it went great. It doesn’t sound like many of the issues you and I discussed last week were covered…” and leave it open-ended. I couldn’t tell if she was surprised that Handsome shared his session with me or that I shared our doom and gloom session with him yesterday (See, we do communicate!! lol), but I think she was a bit unprepared for that. Handsome sat there during the start of the session like:
I jumped right in. I was calm, but collected. It turns out that what transpired was a mix of #1 and #2 and general soft peddling on her part. Handsome did, to some extent, minimize parts of their conversation. That said, she reconsidered some of her statements to me in the intervening days, so he didn’t exactly get the full impression of her concern. And she admittedly walked back her comments about essentially firing us if Handsome doesn’t make progress. I walked her through those again, in front of Handsome, so he could hear her concern – as it was told to me – from her. I think that was helpful because it showed him that I had not blown the comments out of proportion and that yes, she is looking for him to have a sincere and meaningful change of heart, and that we cannot heal without it.
Building off of that, I added that even though I love Handsome with all my heart, this faux recovery (love that term, Maggie) or dry drunk state, just isn’t good enough for me and that I believe the next step may very well be a separation so that Handsome can focus on his recovery. I needed Handsome to hear that from me, and I wanted the CSAT to hear me say it too, in no uncertain terms. Interestingly, after that, today was the first time that I saw what I think was real, honest vulnerability from Handsome in months.
It seems that there is something to this detachment thing after all.
Apparently Handsome spent his individual therapy session this week talking about the difficulty he has showing me he loves me in the wake of our 3 – count ’em, three – disclosure days.
Well… duh.
I think we come at this from very different perspectives. First, to put it diplomatically, Handsome’s social/ emotional skills are stunted. Blame it on his family of origin (I do). Second, he is dumbfounded that it is hard for me to believe that he loves me simply because he now very often says he does and he has ramped up the thoughtfulness and kind gestures. To me, that’s all truly lovely, but insufficient.
At 10:00PM on December 9th last year, I knew without a doubt that he loved me. By 11:00PM…? Not so much. And we all know now that initial disclosure was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Almost a year later, I do believe Handsome loves me (though I admittedly waffle on whether it is romantic love), but I also believe his interest in self-preservation is even stronger. I can’t exactly say that he loves himself more, because it’s clear to me that his compulsive behavior arises from self-loathing. Nonetheless, if it’s between him or me, he picks himself. Each and every time.
Forget (if you can, and I cannot) the individual aspects of the five (5!) simultaneous, long-term affair partners and the 20+ encounters with paid sex workers. How about the fact that condoms do not prevent all STDs and STIs? How about depriving me of the knowledge of this high risk sex life for at least three years, thus ensuring that I couldn’t protect myself? Imagine sleeping next to someone you say you love, knowing your behavior could literally kill them, and yet continuing to engage in that behavior without a care in the world? (Or, maybe you care… but not enough to give them a heads up or anything.)
Is that loving? I think not. It’s beyond selfish. As a lawyer I would label it “deliberate indifference” (reckless disregard for the consequences of one’s own actions or omissions).
To me, that’s the hurdle that Handsome has to overcome. I’m not hung up on the idea that he gave a crap about any of these women. I don’t think he did, with the possible exception of the Flame, and he appears to now see her for the homewrecker she is. I even believe that he loves me in his own way. I just believe that he prioritizes himself over me. His behavior over time (including now with his staggered disclosures) evidences that when there’s a choice between him or me, he almost always sacrifices me to save himself.
When you come at the issue of how he should go about showing me he loves me from that perspective, it’s very different from the norm. Hugs and snuggles aren’t going to cut it.
Step 1 – Stop lying (even by omission).
Step 2- Stop engaging in other behavior that is harmful to the marriage (we can call this the “just quit being a dick” step).
Step 3 – Display appropriate empathy and compassion.
Step 4 – Prove that you can be self-sacrificing for the benefit of others (not to the point of martyrdom, but just recognizing that the world doesn’t revolve around you… a point most other adults already understand). Do this without the expectation of anything in return.
Step 5 – Repeat steps 1-4 daily.
Step 6 – Do what normal people do to express love (this is where the thoughtfulness, consideration, and romance comes in).
Note that there is nothing in this list that is really about his recovery. That’s for him. While it’s helpful to him and that trickles down to be helpful to me, at the end of the day it is for him. His new emphasis on thoughtful gestures, neck kisses, hand holding and saying “I love you” is wonderful, but talk is cheap after what I’ve been through. If I am important to Handsome, he needs to prove it, every day, with meaningful actions (see steps 1-5).
*** I’ll be mostly offline for a week for our holiday trip, but I wish my blogging friends in the States a very happy and safe Thanksgiving!! And a good, safe week to all of my blogging friends outside the US as well!
Patience may be a virtue, but I don’t have any to speak of, at least not when it comes to Handsome’s lies and secret keeping. I received a very insightful comment from Joshua Shea to my last post. To paraphrase him, his question was “So your husband is still withholding. What are you gonna do about it?” Fair point.
For the reasons I explained in reply, my hands were a bit tied, but I told Handsome that he needed to make calls to his sponsor and SA contacts every day before our Thanksgiving vacation, and attend three meetings this week and one meeting next week before we hit the road. That is way more than he normally does, and I knew the calls would take him far outside his comfort zone. He agreed.
Nonetheless, the very fact that he was still keeping secrets (even if they would be included in the big therapeutic disclosure planned for early January), burned – and burdened – me deeply. As I asked him: “How am I supposed to tolerate hugging you or being physically or emotionally intimate with you when the knife is still sticking out of my back and you are twisting it every day?” He was frustrated. He thought we had both freely agreed to hold everything until January. Indeed, I had agreed, but (1) I had been blindsided at the CSAT’s office by the development that what remained secret was “big” and (2) I didn’t feel as though I had the agency in that moment to insist that I hear it then. After pondering it endlessly I decided to go back to my long-held position that whatever Handsome has disclosed to someone else he sure as hell had better disclose to me. Why was I agreeing to have that anvil hanging over my head until January… or later? No thanks.
For the record, I don’t believe that our CSAT intended to put this stress upon me. I think that her suggestion of the therapeutic disclosure at this time of year was well intentioned but missed the mark, and that Handsome should have been encouraged to disclose what he had to disclose to me, and it could then be rolled together with his prior disclosures and addressed again in some organized and orderly fashion in January. I also think that she believes that I am stronger than I really am. I put on a good public show, but inside? Some days it’s like a cyclone inside my head.
So, what was all the hoopla about? He was withholding one additional physical affair (if you can call it an affair… he claims to not know her last name and claims he only knew her by “Katie”), and the use of escorts and a local massage parlor. All of this allegedly occurred from 2015 forward -the same period as all the other mayhem.
How do I feel? Some combination of hurt beyond belief and numb. There are so many things about this that I only believe with difficulty. I am dismayed that he so compromised his morals and values that he committed illegal acts. I am dismayed that he is an embarrassment to his job and that he is no better or different from the people he arrests. I am dismayed that he would ever EVER scream at me about money when this is how he saw fit to spend it. I am dismayed that he put my health at risk without a care. (He is in dire need of a very basic 6th grade lesson on how HPV and other diseases are spread and how a condom isn’t a magical shield.)
The flip side, of course, is that as disgusting and repulsive as I find this behavior, the escorts and massage parlors were business transactions. Nothing more. It’s not as if these women liked him. Based on the hooker/ prostitute/ escort blogs I’ve read they were likely (1) high, (2) revolted by him, (3) completely faking it, and (4) terrified. I find it pathetic that he’d be turned on by that, but at least he wasn’t talking with and texting them daily. There were no real relationships. He claims to not even know the physical affair partner’s last name – despite texting with her for the better part of 3 years and screwing her at least twice. It was just cock + scabby cum dumpster = release. The very reasons that made it so difficult for him to admit these things are, ironically, the very things that make them somewhat manageable to my brain.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that if he only had sex with pros that this would all be a cake walk. Far from it. I’m simply saying that in the scheme of what my husband did, this is not the most damaging disclosure to me. His emotional affair with the Flame (and the related lies and secrets) is far more painful to me… less disgusting and vile, for sure, but much more painful.
At the end of the day, my husband has to live with what he did. I have lived through our marriage with honesty and integrity. Handsome is my last first-kiss. I am likely not even in the 5 most recent first-kisses for him. I’m probably not in the 20 most recent first-fucks. That’s on him. I do not need to worry that anything that I have done may harm his health or well-being. He has to wonder what might pop up on his STD tests or mine in the future (since HPV can go latent). At least since 2015 he has not been the person I thought I married, for sure, but I loved him with every fiber of my being and I was present and committed. I did not waste time or opportunities. He has to account for his years in his addict bubble. It has taken months (and months) but I’m good with me. I honored my marriage vows and my husband. I will not bear his shame.
Do I think I finally know everything? Nah. I’ve been around this block before. There are a few details I could still call bullshit on, but we’ll see how it all parses out in the therapeutic disclosure he’s working on. My gut tells me that he’s nearing the end of what he’s keeping inside, but maybe I’m just sensing that he’s as exhausted with this process as I am.
