Tag: honesty

Financial Infidelity – Show Me the Money

This is a tough post for me to write, and I apologize in advance for the length. My reasonably blue-collared upbringing impressed upon me the decidedly blue-blooded notion that you don’t discuss money with people outside your household. Ever. Nonetheless, it plays a big role in my story with Handsome and I’m guessing that I’m not the only betrayed spouse who feels this way.

Before the Spring of 2012 (when Handsome’s acting out really commenced) Handsome and I would bicker, but rarely fight over anything other than politics. Maybe we’d feud over a scheduling/ child care issue, but these were fleeting matters, and quickly smoothed over. Starting in 2012, however, Handsome suddenly started to pick fights about our finances.

A touch of background: Handsome and I work full time (plus) and our jobs permit us a comfortable, culturally rich life. We have a lovely home and a summer home and retirement savings and we take nice vacations. We carefully pick and choose what we spend our money on and we are generally in agreement. We aren’t buying the $14 organic peanut butter at the grocery store, but we have taken our kids to Europe and South America. Our kids are a big source of spending (activities, camps, babysitter, etc.). Collectively, I don’t think that we live beyond our means, but we don’t live below them either. There is no great big pot of money left at month end, and a major unexpected expense (like a big home or car repair, for example) can still sting.

I’ve written here before about how Handsome and I divide our finances. I bear the vast majority of our expenses, but my income is significantly higher. The idea has always been that we each bear our proportionate share of expenses and neither of us should be penniless throughout the month. Imagine my surprise when I would be having a discussion with Handsome about paying for something relatively minor and he would suddenly start SCREAMING at me about how he has “no money” and “can’t live like this anymore.” When these outbursts started in 2012, I just started bearing a greater portion of the financial obligations, both to try to help him out (was the division unfair or overly burdensome to him? I didn’t know…) and to avoid the conflict. The outbursts continued, and they got more frequent.

By our first DDay, I had been subjected to these screaming tirades about money every few months for the better part of five years. Tirades from a man who, when he needed to replace a Ford Escape that was aging into a money pit in 2015, called me one day out of the blue because he found a new Land Rover he wanted to buy that very day. He wanted to get me to agree – sight unseen – to the purchase of a car that didn’t meet our needs (we had discussed getting something with a third row) and which I sincerely doubted he could afford to maintain. That proved to be true. He couldn’t afford the dealer maintenance. (I now know he bought the car when his physical affair with the Whore was at its pinnacle, in an apparent pathetic attempt to impress a woman who has neither a car nor a driver’s license and spends the vast majority of every single day on her cat pee- stained couch.)

In the back of my mind I always kind of wondered – why is he always broke? If anything his monthly expenses decreased while his income increased, so what’s the issue? He was so very highly agitated about it though, that I figured it wasn’t worth the battle to get into it with him. For the past few years I mostly bought my own Mother’s Day and birthday gifts for our kids to give me so that they could feel like they were actually participating in the celebration. I almost solely and exclusively bought our kids’ birthday and Christmas gifts because he plead poverty.

In the wake of both of my DDays I’ve come to learn where his money was going. Several hundred dollars a month went to buy beer. Then there was the porn he purchased, the expense of his burner phone, the fancy meals he squired the skanks to, the hotel room for the Whore, and all of the cash he showered on them. Hundreds of dollars out the door each month. By my general estimation, he blew at least $16,000 on his acting out from 2012 through 2017. All the while he would stand in our house and scream at me till he was red in the face about not having money.

For Christmas in 2016, Handsome told me that he was “short on cash” so he couldn’t buy any of our kids’ gifts. He seemed sincerely remorseful about it and I just did what I always do and handled everything. Our kids had an awesome holiday. He has since admitted that he found Angel Baby “outside on the street at work, crying in the rain” (note: that bitch needs to get an umbrella because in his tales of woe she’s always outside in a downpour) and that he gave her “a couple hundred dollars” to buy Christmas gifts for her kids. There are no words that I can think of to adequately articulate my white-hot rage at that scenario… her brood and her opening gifts purchased through my husband’s largesse when he didn’t spend a dime on his own kids.

I know that Handsome’s screaming fits are what Dr. M considers “intimate partner abuse.” They were uncalled for, offensive, and yes, abusive. I am still terribly scarred by them. Handsome complaining about money is an extreme trigger for me. To put it into perspective, as of today I have as great a physiological response to his financial infidelity as I do to his physical infidelity. Any hint of a complaint from him about money is enough to send me spiraling into nausea and misery.

This past weekend – over the holiday – our hot water tank decided to die a quick and untimely death. You say “no big deal BW, they’re cheap.” Well, not ours. We apparently have the Ferrari of hot water heaters and replacing it is a several thousand dollar expense. We replaced the condenser for our AC just a few weeks ago for another few grand. This, of course, led to a dreaded discussion about where all of this cash was to come from and Handsome said “well, I’ve been saying for years that we really need a slush fund for these kinds of things.” Yes, Handsome, you asshole, you have been saying that and we certainly do. All or any fraction of the $16,000 you spent on your acting out would have made a lovely pot of cash to rely on for these things. Or the tens of thousands of dollars we’ve spent just this year on your SA recovery or our betrayal recovery.  Yes indeed. That would be quite helpful now, wouldn’t it?

I went there. The place I normally bite my tongue and avoid like the plague. I pointed these facts out to him. His initial response?  Deflect with anger. Blame me for bringing it up. Act as though the problem isn’t that these things occurred, but that I dare mention them. Shortly thereafter, the shame appeared, but I fear that this too is an addict’s manipulative tool. Pout and sulk enough that I feel badly for raising the issue. Make me never want to raise it again. Here’s the new thing though… it doesn’t work on me any more. If he apologizes to me sincerely for creating this predicament and stops acting like he had nothing to do with the situation, I’ll show empathy. We’ll figure it out together. Otherwise? I love a hot shower as much as the next girl, but I’ll freeze my tushie off on principle. The burden to fix what he broke cannot fall on me alone. I didn’t put us in this position and I’m tired of coming to the rescue.

The CSAT Returns

I’m not certain that I have ever looked so forward to seeing another woman as I did to seeing our Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT) yesterday upon her return from maternity leave.  We were able to meet with her only once prior to her leave, and I was confident I could get by till she returned, but it was tougher than I thought.

It has been three and a half months since we last met with her. In normal people years that isn’t a very long time, but when you’re well within your first year post DDay, it seems like a lifetime. There were new disclosures to face, accountability and boundary issues to navigate, and although progress was definitely made there remains a lot of individual and couples work to be done. In short, we need her. I need her.

As torture goes, it was a good session.

She asked me how Handsome’s sexual acting out and the partners he chose made me feel, and asked me to tell Handsome. My main answer? Diminished. I feel like everything about me and my life is “less than” because of what he did.  I am looked at with pity by those who know what he did whereas I used to be viewed as a person of strength. Dealing with the betrayal trauma has negatively impacted me as a mother and as a daughter. It has impacted my work. I have withdrawn socially. At least for the last 5 years I did not have the marriage I thought I had. I could go on.

I’m accustomed now to thinking through these thoughts and to writing about them here, but this was the first time that I actually got to express them to Handsome where he was a captive audience.

We talked briefly about Angel Baby and the CSAT asked Handsome about his relationship with her and whether it was sexual. He said it wasn’t. Since I’m sitting RIGHT THERE though, I was able to turn to him and say “… but you’ve admitted you wanted to have sex with her. You actually slept with her in a bed in our house and supposedly had an erection…?” He then fessed up and acknowledged that yes, in the end, it got sexual even if (he maintains) they never had sex.

This is going to be a different therapy experience for him. He doesn’t just get to tell his version of events without challenge. He can still minimize and deflect the way sex addicts love to do on things I don’t know about, but on anything else he cannot hide.  I think I’m going to find this to be very refreshing.

Nothingness

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

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

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

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

“Nothing.”

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

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

“What lie is he keeping?”

“Is he acting out again?”

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

“Is he miserable that he’s with me?”

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

“Wait, what happened to sharing our feelings?”

“What happened to building emotional intimacy?”

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

“Asshole.”

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

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

Beep beep’m beep beep… Nah…

https://youtu.be/M7qNlocNIf8

I’m back from my month away from home. Sadly, it wasn’t all vacation as I worked remotely for three of the weeks, but a good time nonetheless. Handsome made it for almost three of the weeks and was brilliant for about the first 12-14 days. Then the wheels started to get wobbly on his bus. I started to see the anger, venting, and frustration that were all too commonplace with the old Handsome. I’ve generally only had glimpses of that at home since April, but this was like a trip back in time. My response? No more cajoling him, trying to de-escalate him or placate him. I’m done with that. I simply told him that I wasn’t having it. No way am I going back to where that’s what I have to deal with every day. I think he got the picture because he made noticeable effort after that.

We arrived home to find that he had been scheduled for 56 hours of overtime this week. You read that correctly. That’s 56 hours of work in addition to his regular 40 hour week. To put it simply, I have issues with him and overtime. It’s a trigger for me. During the prior three years he would take every overtime he possibly could because it gave him an extra 8 hours a day to act out, and he’d get angry to the point of hostility with me if there was a family related reason why he couldn’t take an offered shift.  Post DDays, he threw himself into work as an alternative to his sex addition, leading to his workaholism and the triggers it caused me becoming a source of contention. At present, our deal is that he can take overtime as long as it works for us (with our kids, activities, etc.) and it isn’t on his long weekends off or days off. He tried mightily to chuck that deal out the window this week, but I held my ground and he’s working “only” the 32 OT hours (plus his regular 40) that worked for us. He’s grumbling about it, but we’re sticking with our deal.

I was chugging along just fine till he called to tell me that he finally had a run-in with one of his skanks. I say “finally” because three of the skanks live where he works, and he hadn’t seen or run into any of them since early December. It was simply bound to happen sooner or later.

He was approaching an intersection with a 4-way stop, and saw Angel Baby in her car at one of the stop signs. He says he turned onto a side street and she took off through the intersection after him honking her horn repeatedly and flashing her lights and tailgating him, trying to get him to stop or to pull over. She continued this for a couple of blocks. He ignored her and just turned off the street calmly and deliberately at the next possible intersection. Then he called me.

I knew that call would come eventually – and I’m really grateful both that he followed through with what we previously discussed he should do in such circumstances, and that he called me right away. Nonetheless, I got cold chills up my spine and my stomach turned in knots. She still wants to have contact with my husband, even though he told her it would never happen again and was unwelcome and even though I expressed the same thing to her. Frankly, that scares the crap out of me. I’m sure she has by now convinced her crazy-ass self that he just didn’t see her car or hear her repeated honking. She has likely told herself that he certainly would have stopped if he  knew it was her… because he absolutely would have done that before (and likely taken her out for an expensive meal and given her a wad of cash). I warned him that I believe he’ll hear from her again in the not too distant future. He is convinced that she gets the picture, but if she did she wouldn’t have tried to chase him down like she was auditioning for Angel Baby Driver. I’m well served to not underestimate the level of her devious intent… or her plain old stupidity.

The Tale of the Tampon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avoidance – A Close Cousin of Denial?

Even though things are generally going well, I am still aware each day of the need to take care of myself in every way possible. A part of that self-care is taking measures to protect myself and my children in the event that Handsome relapses. I see no signs of this happening, but a few months of good behavior doesn’t wash away several years of horrors, nor can I predict the future based on his present intent. I don’t doubt his present intent not to act out again, but then I didn’t doubt his intent when he said our marriage vows either.

Absent a crystal ball, the best that I can do is ensure that I’ve taken the steps necessary to anticipate and to address the possibility of future problems. Fortunately, for the most part our finances have always been separate. We have one joint account, but it rarely has anything in it unless we need it to for a particular reason. We do, however, have assets, and I need to protect those not only for me but for the benefit of our children. Our son and daughter are the only two kids either of us is ever supposed to have. Everything that is ours is intended to be theirs and theirs alone should some harm befall us. Handsome and I agree on that. While I can ensure that I don’t have more children, I cannot really ensure that Handsome doesn’t get some trashy, holster-sniffing tweaker chick pregnant. He still insists that the Whore was the only AP he had intercourse with and that he used protection, but who knows? I’m not betting the proverbial farm on it. (She is actually pregnant and due next month and Fire Dude has no idea if it is his or not.) More specifically, I’m not betting my kids’ futures and college funds on it or on his ability to stay sexually sober.

I have asked for two things: a post-nuptial agreement and for him to get a vasectomy. Given what Handsome did, who he did it with, and how long his behavior went on during our marriage, I don’t feel as though either of these requests are unreasonable. Uncomfortable, sure, but not unreasonable. I pondered both things for months before I broached them with Handsome. He’s pretty miserable about both asks.

He raises all of the issues you’d expect a guy to raise about the vasectomy. (“It’s surgery!! On my balls!! What if it goes wrong???”) I can’t help but feel like he should have thought about that before he screwed the Whore and crawled into bed with Angel Baby in my f’ing house. It is literally the only way that I can ensure that I don’t open my door one day to find some ho bag standing there with a kid that looks like my husband. My family’s assets will not be used to pay child support for the spawn of his compulsive behavior, nor will my kids see their current standard of living diminished as that money goes out the door. Not happening. Not on my watch.

As to the post-nup, he’s absolutely indignant about it. If we divorce generally (not arising out of any new infidelity), we each walk away with what we came with, anything we inherit from our families, and our pensions. We split anything we accrued together. If, however, we divorce because of future infidelity (not what has already transpired), in addition to walking away with their own stuff the betrayed spouse also gets half of the betrayer’s pension. That infidelity clause (not allowed in every state, by the way, but allowed in mine) was originally specifically directed at him. In the petty move of the century, he whined that it needed to apply to me (the faithful spouse who didn’t kick his ass to the curb after all the shit he did) as well. Fine. The change was made. I know I’m not a cheater. I’m confident in my core values.

He is avoiding both issues like the plague. I think he believes that if he drags his feet enough, I’ll forget or I’ll decide they aren’t really necessary. That’s not happening. I’m happy to wait till next month to bring them up with the CSAT, but I will also continue to raise them each week in our check-in. I am nothing if not persistent.

I absolutely understand why avoiding difficult things is preferable to facing them head on. I get that. But I also think that avoidance is closely tied to denial. If Handsome had never acted on his sexual compulsions, there would be little need for either ask. But the reality – that he created by his own conduct – is that I sincerely believe that both things are necessary to protect me and our kids from his possible future behavior based upon his actual behavior in the very recent past. To take the position that this is somehow overkill is to deny that undeniable behavior.

We cannot even say that bad behavior on his part is unlikely in the future, because if I have learned anything these last few months it is that the behavior of a sex addict cannot be predicted. I know what his present intent is, and I believe him completely when he says that he doesn’t want to ever act out again. Nonetheless I, for one, would rather be safe than sorry.

He’s doing everything he should be… and it’s still hard for me

A few days ago, I was feeling overwhelmed. During our last check-in Handsome disclosed both something that he had been holding back and one thing he says he just remembered last week. I appreciate and respect the effort (late though it may be) for transparency, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still painful.

He had, apparently for months, been holding back that the relationship he had with the woman he took out on a date last summer was more involved than he had led me to believe. I haven’t even given her a nickname here because I was initially led to believe it was of such short duration and insignificant that it didn’t merit further discussion as compared to his other APs. He minimized it. (Minimization is a part of Handsome’s Compulsive – Abusive Sexual – Relational Disorder (CASRD) according to Dr. M.) While they did only have one restaurant date, he was at her house once, briefly (no sexual contact), and she was in his car one night (touched her breasts), and he apparently made out with her multiple times outside her house, in the town where he works… while he was in uniform and working. (Because, apparently, risking your job and getting disease at the same time is… sexy???) This just squeaked through his polygraph because his answer to a single question about her was accurate. The question simply wasn’t comprehensive enough.

The new thing he says he just remembered is that last June when Angel Baby stayed at our house for two nights while I was away, on one of the days they got up and went for lunch at a trendy restaurant near my office, then to a museum, then to a nice restaurant for a drink before he drove her home. To exacerbate this issue, he had originally told me a sob story about picking Angel Baby up in the rain because she was standing on the street crying with nowhere to go. Allegedly it was her temporary homelessness that led him to bring her to our house. (A pathetic excuse and by no means justification, but that had been his story.) After learning of their “field trip” I checked his financial records and pinned down the precise day. It was three days after I left to take our kids to summer camp. Moreover, there was no rain where we live that week. None. (Thank heavens for the internet.) I was/ am less upset about the detail he was revealing (the field trip) than I was/ am about the dismantling of the already bullshit excuse for how she could have possibly ended up in our home in the first place. He insists that what he told me originally is what he actually remembers. Maybe. Who knows? In my mind though he has lost the benefit of the doubt. Plus, it is objectively impossible and untrue. Given the timing – his first two days off after I departed with the kids – my belief is that he premeditated to get her to our house. He denies this. He may even believe it to be true. I do not.

The following days have been tense, to say the least. I struggle with being appreciative of the transparency yet not hiding the fact that I’m crushed, yet again. Over the weekend we talked one day while the kids were off at activities and he made the mistake of telling me that it’s “hard” for him to admit to bad things when life seems to be going well between us. I proceeded to then explain to him that if he thought telling the truth was “hard” he should walk a mile in my shoes, and then I lit into him with a diatribe about all the things that are hard that I deal with every moment of every day because of what he did.

I then sent him this message a day later:

“I know that over the last weekend you were, I think, surprised to hear me express some of the very specific reasons why I am so sad and continue to find this all so very overwhelming and hard. It occurs to me that you are surprised because I don’t ever actually share these thoughts with you. You get bits and pieces of my anger, confusion, and hurt, but I seem to have adopted your method of stuffing things down inside and trying to keep my chin up.  Long term, that doesn’t do us any good. So, in no particular order and without any suggestion that this list is complete, here is a list of ten things that I am finding excruciatingly hard and challenging at the moment. Perhaps we could talk through each of them together?

  1. It is hard to know that there were so many (yes, 3 or 4 is “many” in this circumstance) other women that you wanted to sleep with when you chose not to sleep with me.
  2. It is hard to know that you communicated so much with these women when your kids and I could often barely get a few kind words from you.
  3. It is hard to know that you maintained a wholly separate life that your family was neither welcome in nor acknowledged in, except with complaints.
  4. It is hard to pay witness to your over-familiarity with these women, when you lack anywhere near that level of familiarity with your own family and things related to your family.
  5. It is hard to hear you talk about not wanting to hurt their feelings when my feelings were utterly irrelevant.
  6. It is hard to kiss you without wondering who taught you to kiss the way you do now when it was not the way you kissed me for years.
  7. It is hard to have sex with you without wondering where you learned all of the completely new things that you started doing last year and which were never part of your previous repertoire.
  8. It is hard not to feel that you gave the best of yourself to these women in desperate attempts to woo and impress them, and you didn’t care when you had nothing left for your family (emotionally, physically, financially).
  9. It is hard to know that you were spontaneous and kind and took initiative with certain of the other women when I have longed throughout most of our relationship for you to do that with me.
  10. It is hard to know that these women all believed that you picked them over me.”

Those ten struggles are probably the best status report that I could give for myself at the moment. It’s not a pretty picture. I would love to be “better than” or “above” this, but today I am not. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Moving Beyond the Affairs

Like Olaf of Frozen fame, I love warm hugs. From the front, from behind… wherever. I think a good hug is like a tactile reminder of comfort and security and, in the right circumstances, of love.

I got lots of hugs this past weekend. Some great, some I’m still chuckling about. More on that later.

Handsome and I headed off to the Healing From Affairs intensive weekend put on by Anne and Brian Bercht from Beyond Affairs. I was really tense in the days leading up the intensive, and I wasn’t sleeping well at all. Handsome signed us up for the intensive back in January after DDay #1, and we had a couple of phone sessions with Brian over the last few months. In those sessions I found Brian to be a down to earth, frank, no-nonsense guy to talk to, and I wasn’t put off by his history as the betrayer in his marriage to Anne. They appear, by all public measures, to have healed both individually and as a couple. Given where I’m at right now, I laud them for that. It’s inspiring.

There were 20 couples in attendance and my only shock was that so very many of the couples were in their late 50’s and 60’s and measured their marriages in numerous decades and grandchildren. There appears to be no expiration date on infidelity. Among the betrayed spouses, the collective group faced physical and emotional affairs (some, only one such affair, others a few, and several faced many), porn addiction, use of paid sex workers, and a myriad of other horrors. Two of the betrayed spouses were men. One commonality? People can be freaking resilient. While there were spouses there all along the “stay or go” continuum, and at various points away from discovery, not a single one was operating from a position of helplessness.

This was a full weekend of activity, with each night running past 10:00PM. As with any program like this, there were parts I wasn’t crazy about (for example, sex addiction gets short shrift but is at least acknowledged and discussed). For me, the most impactful part of the weekend was a talk that Brian gave where he literally walked the group through each step of his affair, showing how it started innocently enough and then, over time, how his boundary of what was acceptable versus not acceptable moved to accommodate where he was at the moment (cognitive dissonance), and ultimately how he ended up far on the other side of his own boundary and felt “stuck” there. It was deeply personal, raw, and was a much more articulate way of explaining what Handsome has struggled to explain to me. Most importantly, Brian didn’t try to justify or to normalize how he got from one side of his boundary to the other or to make excuses for it, he just told his story.

We also did a vulnerability assessment (for the 18 months prior to the start of the affairs) and Handsome and I broke the scale apparently. On a scale of about 0-168, with 0-10 being low risk of an affair, I think our score was 125 or so. Ouch. While our current vulnerability level is quite low, based on the assessment there are definitely things we need to be mindful of over time. I think it’s something that we’ll do from time to time just to stay on course as a couple.

I left feeling really glad that we went. It was an expense we didn’t need, but it taught us several new tools we can use and it opened each of our eyes to new things and it certainly increased the level of empathy we have for one another (and I had been thinking that we were doing okay on that front, but we are doing even better now).

Now, those hugs…

I’m not a “let’s hold hands and sing Kumbaya” person. I’m just not. I can do it if I’m compelled to, but that touchy-feely thing with strangers just isn’t me. There are a number of times during the intensive when music is used to communicate a concept. On the last full night of the intensive, just before closing the day out, they played a song (it was some 80’s hair band anthem Handsome and I found terribly corny, but the lyrics were on point for the night) and the couples were encouraged, if they were comfortable doing so, to hug one another deeply. Fine. Handsome and I are enjoying the hug with my hands around his neck/ shoulders and his hands (I count them…one, two…) around my waist, and I’m enjoying the moment and then… hey, wait! One, two… three? I felt a new arm on me. Again, I count Handsome’s hands in my head and I’m thinking WTF!, but before I could start throwing elbows I quickly realize that it’s just Anne joining us in a surprise group hug. Handsome apparently had the same reaction I did, and I think Anne is likely oblivious to how close she came to getting pummeled. 🙂 We’re still chuckling about that one…

Thinking about betrayal (and driving myself nuts)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Today is our 13th wedding anniversary

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

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

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

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

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

On being betrayed

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

From stuenan in Kansas:

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

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

and

From Amy in Chicago:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Reclaiming Mother’s Day (Part 2)

Mother’s Day flowers

Just a quick update. In short, Handsome did go away to visit his dad and I had a pretty terrific weekend with the kids.  The flowers? My 8-year-old son came shopping and helped me pick them out and we made arrangements for me and for my mom.

On Sunday I had a hearty breakfast of berries and cookies in bed (better than it sounds because there was no syrup to clean off the cat… or the steps… or the carpet…). In the evening we went to a great new steakhouse downtown for dinner.  I love seeing my kids dressed up. I love seeing them in anything really, but when they’re all shiny and clean it just rocks.

Handsome wasn’t great about observing the boundaries of the day, but I had my phone off so it didn’t matter.  He called twice and texted me once and then tried to text the kids (“Tell Mom I said… .”). Whatever.  I had the wonderful day I wanted and he was utterly uninvolved.

Back to reality today as Handsome returns home and there are a few things we need to deal with from last week.  I’ll write about those later. But for now I’m still basking in the glow of a terrific weekend. Thanks to everyone for the kind words of encouragement. I needed that support and I needed this weekend to myself.

Reclaiming Mother’s Day

So very true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re not his mom.”

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

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

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

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

Loss of Privacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was Any of it Real?

 This is my mom.  She is 85 beautiful years old, and she enjoys a good pomegranate martini from time to time. I loved this picture of her from July of 2015. We had a fantastic day together that included lunch at the restaurant where Handsome and I had our wedding reception. The sky was clear and blue, and the martinis were delicious. We shared our memories of my wedding day and we both had fun.

Unbeknownst to me, several hundred miles away, also on that day at the exact time this photograph was taken, Handsome was screwing the Whore in a no-tell motel.

To say the least, it is now difficult to view the picture quite the same way. The experience, the memory itself, feels tainted.

Just a few short days later, Handsome joined the rest of us for our family vacation with nary a word about his indiscretions and misdeeds.

Here we are on a kid-friendly fishing trip. We look happy, don’t we? (Handsome is, I assure you, smiling under that heart.) The kids are happy for sure, but what about Handsome? What about me? Was it “real” if only one person in the picture had the whole story?

Was Handsome actually enjoying himself with his family? He says he was, but can that really be true? His betrayals continued for two and a half more years. They continued through children’s birthdays, wedding anniversaries, trips to Europe, vacations in New England and Florida, attending the Kentucky Derby each year,  school plays and concerts, and during child-free couple’s weekends away. In short, he acted out through everything in our lives during those years, both the important and the mundane. Was he ever actually happy with me? With us?

I was happy on that day  – really happy in fact – based on the information I had at hand. I thought I had the greatest family in the world. If I had known what Handsome was doing with some other woman’s skanky vajeen a week earlier I wouldn’t have been happy or smiling. If I had known that he was lusting for the Whore and the Flame, I would have been in tears, my heart broken to pieces. So was my experience that day authentic or not?

At the moment, this debate is my biggest hurdle to overcome on my path to healing.  I am stuck on the issue. It is incredibly difficult for me to stop feeling like the last several years of my life have all been a lie. I feel like each incredible memory is false – because they were created under false pretenses – and thus inauthentic or a sham. Everything seems damaged by the stain of Handsome’s infidelity. I feel the loss of that time, those experiences, that happiness “in the moment,” and those memories very profoundly. I am a deeply sentimental person by nature and those losses are gutting me.

A well-intentioned gentleman told me that I just have to change my mindset and “get over” this struggle and accept that my experiences were indeed wonderful and authentic in each moment and that they are thus untainted now. I want nothing, nothing in this world, more than for this awfulness to be erased from my mind. If I could make believe that what Handsome did never occurred, I would, in a heartbeat. But it did happen and I know about it and here we are.

If anyone out there has some words of wisdom on this point, I  welcome your thoughts. I think it’s going to take a village to get me unstuck on this. I’m sure that I do indeed need to change my outlook or viewpoint, but I’m not sure how to do that in a way that doesn’t scream “denial.” I’m doing really well in a lot of areas of my recovery, but this is a killer for me. I liked my life pre DDay. Writing off years of that time seems like a fatal blow.

A shout out for raising the authenticity issue few weeks ago, and finally compelling me to write this down (it’s been lingering in my mind for months), to both Cad Confessional and The Queen Is In

Pic collecting and eye stalking – what next?

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

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

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

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

Per Urban Dictionary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday musings

A few brief thoughts for the week:

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

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

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

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

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

Have a great week everyone!

Four months of sobriety for him – eye opening for me

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

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

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

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

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

The mini-vacation that was anything but a vacation

This week is Spring Break for our two kiddos. While work is a bit nutty at the moment, we are lucky enough to live within about an hour’s drive from some fun, small ski resorts. I don’t ski, but Handsome and the kids took lessons in January and I thought it would be great for them to get a last shot at the slopes for the season and spend two nights away as a family.  My plan was to do work while they were off skiing and then we could swim or do other activities together.

The kids were jazzed about skiing and snowboarding and I was excited to be away with them as well. On both of our last trips I was less than a month out from DDay #1 (in one case, only two days away), and I was definitely not functioning well. I did everything imaginable to ensure both that they wouldn’t see me weep and that I didn’t take my anger and sadness out on them, but I’m sure there was bleed-over.  I wanted to make that up to them somehow and I really enjoy these short get-aways. Handsome, however, seemed “off” from the very start. I was wary about how the trip would go, but I was hopeful he would prove my fears to be unfounded.

We have been arguing off and on about Angel Baby and the Flame for the better part of two weeks. He sees no deeper meaning in his relationships with them, whereas I see nothing but red flags. If I’m waiting for him to fall to the floor at my feet and weep over the impropriety of those relationships, it just isn’t happening.  Not yet, at least. (To be clear, he has apologized for his recent involvement with them, but sees no issue with the fact that both relationships took root when the women were older adolescents.) I was hopeful that after my conversation with the Doc, they would spend some time discussing both women in their next therapy session which occurred just before we left on our trip. That didn’t happen, so those open sores appeared to be festering as we got on the road. They did, however, apparently cover some ground initiated by the Doc about Handsome’s upbringing and the impact of having two alcoholic parents, so that was at least a step in the right direction.

Handsome was on edge throughout the entire trip. He seemed alternately angry, resentful, frustrated, and just plain miserable.  My kids and I tried really hard to just ignore it – like we have always done with “Daddy’s moods” – but that only goes so far, and my kids mirror a lot of his conduct. If he’s petulant or combative, so are they.  If he’s happy and joyful and appreciating a moment, so are they. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough of the latter on this trip.

In the wake of both DDays, I surmised that – especially in the last year – a lot of Handsome’s asshole-ish behavior on trips was because he was away from his drug. No sexting, no voyeurism, no calls, etc. No hits. Those cold- turkey breaks had to be tough and he just couldn’t get enough of a rush or that same high from spending time with his wife and kids. Fine, I guess, but what’s the big problem now? Why is this crappy behavior back so suddenly? He’s been sober for almost four months. For the most part he has been a consistently kinder, gentler, more thoughtful version of himself since DDay #1. Is the rubber finally hitting the road with his recovery? Is the reality that all of his acting out behaviors must be gone forever finally hitting home?

I made it through the trip and my kids had a blast in spite of their moody dad and uncooperative weather. I just wish that I could say the same. I’m tired – literally exhausted – of trying to work double time to ensure that Handsome doesn’t spoil things for our kids. I’d love a vacation, or just a day or two away, where I could actually freely relax and enjoy myself too. I haven’t had that in a very, very long time. (I had hoped that would be our long-planned trip to Europe in December, but DDay #1 absolutely destroyed that vacation.) Perhaps that’s a bit aspirational for moms in general, but it seems positively unrealistic for me at the moment unless I leave Handsome at home. Unfortunately, I don’t see how I can do that given where he is/ is not in his recovery and given that a good bit of his acting out occurred when I was traveling. We are drawing closer to summer vacation which is when I would usually take the kids to our summer home for a few weeks.  The very thought of that fills me with dread this year. I used to look forward to the trip with great anticipation.  I know now that Handsome did too, because he acted out the entire time I was away and started plotting his misdeeds months in advance. I don’t want him there if it’s just going to be more of his crappy, moody behavior, but I also can’t stomach worrying about what he is or is not doing by himself. Perhaps this is a year we just stay home. But how much of everyone else’s lives does he get to ruin because he can’t control himself? How many good things does he get to take away because of his addiction?

When the shrink gets trickle truth too

Handsome has been in therapy – for the first time ever – since early January… so, for three months. I know that he lied to the therapist to some degree for the majority of the first two of those months as they had their own DDay #2 shortly after Handsome’s second DDay with me. Over the last two weeks I started to feel that perhaps I was being fed more “addict-ese” than sincerity. I cannot put my finger on what triggered this feeling, but perhaps it tied to Handsome’s self-assured stance after the polygraph. Whatever it is, my spider senses are now always on alert. I trust my gut.

I told Handsome that I wanted an update from his therapist. After some initial confusion over what I actually wanted, Handsome agreed and I was able to speak to his shrink yesterday. I’m really glad that we had that call. It is true that Handsome has made some great strides in terms of his anger management and in trying to be more open and communicative. It is also true, however, that he skipped over major issues with the Doc.  Like, oh, for example, how he spent tons and tons of time at work plotting voyeuristic drive-bys of the Whore’s house so that he could see her flash her boobs at him. Every. Fucking. Day. For. Years. And sometimes more than once a day.  Or how he didn’t just share a bed in my house with Angel Baby last July, but how he spooned with her and got an erection with this supposed “mentee” that he’s known since she was a kid. And, and, and….

You get the idea. He has told the Doc some, but by no means all, of his dirty laundry. Just like he cherry picks what he tells me, he’s cherry picking what he tells the Doc. I’m not necessarily surprised by the picking and choosing, but I am surprised that he’s leaving out some awful stuff that he has disclosed to me already. Why fess up to me and hide things from the Doc? Perhaps he wants to unburden his conscience but not actually deal with the issues. That seems cruel to me. Telling me awful secrets that I cannot ever un-hear, and then doing nothing to address them.

Fortunately, the Doc now gets that he’s only being told a partial story and he and I are in agreement about a few key issues. Like Handsome getting his act together with SA and getting a sponsor. He didn’t tell me that I’m a nut job and the cause of all of my husband’s problems (yep, I worried about that). I think Handsome’s next appointment may be a bit different than what he’s accustomed to. I believe he’s used to walking in there and blathering for 50 minutes. He might find himself challenged to dig a little deeper next time.