My husband is the love of my life. We became best friends in college and we didn’t develop our romantic relationship for several years. By the time I fell in love with him, I trusted and admired him more than anyone I had ever met. I just could not wait to marry this man.
Though I had known him for years, I was entirely unaware that he had a history of compulsive pornography use. I continued to be unaware for the first nearly eight years of our marriage. I mean I had absolutely no idea. He had given up porn entirely during our courtship but had resumed his habit shortly after we married.
Finally, after literally hundreds of attempts to give up his habit, he came to believe that the next step he needed to take was to inform me. One night he sat me down and told me that he had developed a pornography habit as a teenager and that he had never been able to conquer it completely. I was absolutely stunned. I had never once considered this as a possibility. My husband told me that he had never directly lied to me about it, and that he had always promised himself that he would honestly answer a direct question from me on the topic. But I would have never asked unless I had found undeniable proof, because I just had never thought it was possible.
The next week was the hardest one of my life. I felt like my entire life was different than what I had thought it was. My marriage was not what I had thought, and my husband was certainly not the man that I had believed him to be, at least not entirely. I felt like I was being tossed in the surf and that I needed to breathe but that I had no idea which direction I needed to swim to get air. I repeatedly found myself dry heaving over the toilet.
My life gradually began to reemerge. Slowly, so so slowly, we have found resources and support that are helping us to heal. It has been almost nine years and we are making it, but there has been so much uncertainty for most of those years. I wish I could say that the trauma inflicted on me ended the week that he told me of his addiction but that is far from the truth. It has taken him many of those years to find a way to stay away from pornography. He was completely unable to get there on his own. Sexaholics Anonymous has been the key to his sobriety.
And it has taken me many years to realize the effects his addiction has had on me, and even more years to find the help I have needed to begin to feel better. S-Anon has been vital to my emotional recovery.
In all the years since the day of his disclosure, my husband has been committed to being honest with me. He has voluntarily disclosed all of his relapses to me within about a day of their occurrence. I can feel confident that I know where we stand, because he will tell me. I feel like there are two components to the harm done to the spouse of a porn addict: the actual betrayal, and the deception. Since he came clean to me, the deception has not been a part of our relationship, and I feel sure that that is the only reason we still have a marriage.
My husband recently took his 18-month sobriety date as the opportunity to make his 9th Step amends to me. He sat me down and apologized for all the ways he can think of that he has hurt me in our entire 17-year marriage. It was a wonderful landmark moment for us that showed us how far we have come. I feel like the luckiest woman in the world.
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