For Starters . . .

So, I don't actually know how to go about introducing myself on my anonymous-'cause-my-husband-has-a-porn-addiction blog. This is a first for me.  Usually when I blog it's with pictures of my adorable kids and updates on the funny things they say and do and the places we go and people we see and all that.  This is so different.  I'm putting this side of my life out there for the first time.  This never makes it on my family blog . . .

Maybe I should back up a bit.

I've been married for almost a decade.  I was twenty-five years old, married in the temple to my handsome return missionary husband.  About a year into our marriage I opened up my husband's email to send a resume for a job he was applying for . . . when I noticed an email that seemed odd to me.  It was emailed to him, from him, from another email address.  It was erotic fiction.  I was at work.  I was shocked, horrified, confused.  I had the perfect marriage --  we were so blissfully happy that few people were able to enter into our bubble of newly wedded bliss.  Sex was great -- we'd waited 'til we were married at 25, both of us, and were beyond pleased to find we were so incredibly intimately compatible.  Neither of us seemed to bring any 'good girl/boy' hang ups into our marriage, as some of my friends had talked about.  It was better than anything I'd ever expected.  We talked and cuddled and made love every night . . . life was perfect.  So, why would he be reading this trash?  What was missing in 'us' that had him looking to this?  I confronted him when he got home from work and he broke down and confessed to first being introduced to porn in fifth grade (FIFTH GRADE) and an ever increasing interest in it grew until in his later teens he had near constant access with internet and his older brother's porn stash.  He 'got it under control' long enough to get out on his two year LDS mission, and was shocked when it quickly resumed once he got home, escalating in frequency as he spent time on campus with a laptop and wi-fi.  He started and stopped often.  He trudged along through school, spending more time searching for pictures of naked women than studying, but fortunately for him has a fantastically brilliant mind he never seemed to recognize, and continued to do 'well enough', until he met me.  He'd been trying to 'stop' for a bit, realizing at 24, that life wasn't going anywhere.  His Mom was lecturing him and needing to 'get out there', when he heard a still, small voice (one he'd been shutting out for awhile) that said, "You should go hang out with HX."  Within weeks we were inseparable.  Within the year, we were married.  And we were happy.  So, so happy.  People commented all the time they'd never seen two happier people.  He was more than I even knew I wanted.  He's calm and even, while I'm more emotional and argumentative.  He's respectful and smart and kind and thoughtful and all my younger sisters went from wanting a popular jock as a husband to wanting someone just like J.  He was so in love with me, so doting and enamored that complete strangers would chuckle and comment, "Wow, he sure loves you!"  I had the perfect life.  And it felt like it came crashing down around me.  But you know what, despite dealing with some self-esteem issues, I was ready to forgive and move on.  Then it happened again, I found some pictures he emailed himself so he could 'check them out later'.  This time our Bishop suggested counseling.  The counselor was kind and sympathetic, assured me this wasn't about me 'not being enough', and I started my education on porn addiction and what it was all about.  My husband attended all the sessions, but never seemed to really 'try' like I wanted him to.  The journaling, the note-taking, the self-awareness, none of it was happening like it should.  But he was seemed so repentant and begging my forgiveness, and we moved forward, with that particular trial securely behind us.

Apparently my porn addiction education wasn't thorough enough yet.  I just didn't get it.

It popped up again.  We talked to a Bishop again.  'This time' we had it.

Every single time I was the one who found it (besides one or two token, "I looked at a Sports Illustrated edition, I'm so sorry!")  He'd tell me he was so sorry, that he was just so afraid of hurting me that he couldn't bring himself to tell me.  But he'd never lie to me to the face -- so keep asking him about it, if I asked him, he'd be unable to lie.

Not true.  I was lied to.  A lot.  While looking him in the eye.

That hurts so much worse than the porn.

This went on for a few years . . . once to twice a year I'd 'catch' some slip up or another.  He'd promise to do better.  Rinse and repeat.

We had three kids over this time.

Then February 2011, my baby had been in the hospital.  We came home with him still on oxygen.  I was nursing him in my arms when I happened to feel like I should look back through my husband's google history.  (It might help to point out here, J never looked at porn in our home.  Oddly enough, he has only masturbated a few times while we were married -- something he did rountinely with porn use before our marriage.  The way he describes it was, "once we got married and I realized the porn wasn't going away," since like a lot of men, he'd assumed that once he was having sex it'd magically disappear and be a problem of the past . . . he was shocked when he realized he'd found a perfectly compatible sexual partner and regular sex and it hadn't 'taken care of the problem', "I decided I could at least save orgasm as something that was only between us."  When he first told me that my reaction was something along the lines of, "Um, seriously dude.  You picked 'oogling OTHER WOMEN, NAKED' as the more acceptable practice in our marriage to masturbating . . . wrong answer."  I've since come to understand that, while I wish he would've given up both for our marriage, that him at least giving up half the equation was a big deal and has probably helped immensely with his addiction not growing faster than it already has.)  There it was.  One single search for the word 'breasts'.  From six months ago.  Right around the time I'd had our baby.  He'd lied.  Again.

I sat there crying, holding our baby hooked up to tubes, and possibly used the 'f' word.  I'm not proud of that, but it seemed appropriate at the time. :-)  I'd never 'reacted' badly to all my discoveries.  I'd cried a lot, but I tried to be loving and kind, not shaming or cruel.  But this was more than I could take.  I said quite a few not-so-nice things.  Called him some not-so-nice names.  He tried to back peddle, he tried to make an excuse or two, then his face fell, he started to cry and he confessed.

Really, really confessed.

The porn had always been there.  All those times I thought he'd 'slipped' up when I discovered some crumb here or there -- those were the few things that had fallen through his trying to cover his tracks.  He might have stopped for a few weeks, even months, but most of the time I thought it was under control, it hadn't been.  He'd usually just been spinning his wheels long enough to get me off his back, then he went back to it.  Sometimes he'd really wanted to get away from it, at least for awhile, but usually at least part of him was fully aware he wasn't really trying.  My world felt like it shattered.  I'd been so lied to.  By someone who loved me so much (and I had no doubt he loved me).  Purposefully manipulated and hidden from so that he could keep his dirty little secret part of his life without me causing any pesky cognitive dissonance.

He told me how much bigger the problem had always been.  The year he didn't get a raise.  That'd been because they'd caught on to his porn use (remember that whole 'never using it in the home -- his main outlet had been at work ever since he'd finished school).  They'd told him not once, but twice, that if they caught him again, he'd be fired.  

He told me though, that around the time of our third child's birth, about six months before this big blow up with me holding our sick baby, he'd decided he had to stop.  And he did.  And more surprisingly to him, so did the desire to look at it.  Except for one 'binge' around Christmas while working some overnight shifts, he'd barely felt the pull to look at it.  A dramatic, miraculous change of heart.  He knew he'd needed to confess, but hadn't wanted to ruin how good everything felt.  He was happy, feeling the Spirit more and more, feeling closer to me -- why spoil that with all that pesky honesty and confession.

We went to our awesome Bishop -- who J worked with a lot in his Church calling.  The two were close, and the Bishop was hard on J.  Which I appreciated.  Months of not taking the sacrament, using his priesthood and a full six months before even talking about getting his temple recommend back.  I was hurting -- and the Bishop made sure my husband understood that.  He counseled with me monthly, both of us monthly, and my husband weekly after their other meetings.  I hurt like I'd never hurt before -- I tried to piece together my life.  I couldn't detach the porn and the lies from every single happy memory.  All the way back to our actual marriage, I couldn't help but feel like it'd been one big lie.  The whole 'am I pretty enough? I'm too fat?  If I was better in bed?" none of it even really phased me anymore (although I'd be lying if I said they didn't pop into my head and make me cry from time to time).  But that I was so unworthy of the basic common decency of being told the truth.  It broke me in some very real ways.

It was hard, because while my husband was truly sorry for the damage he'd done, I was left as the one who was damaged.  One of our biggest problems was, oddly enough, that he'd gone so long without looking at porn.  He was feeling the best he had since his mission -- he felt untempted, he was as far removed from it as he'd ever been, and I was dealing with it like it had all happened (all seven years of it that affected our marriage) yesterday.  We slowly started to heal though.  I very unexpectedly ended up pregnant.  Adding the stress of another pregnancy and two kids 17 months apart to my already emotionally stressful life.  My well-meaning, but slightly perfectionist, mother started making comments about needing to get my act together.  Sure, I had been dealing with some really sick kids (the baby wasn't the only one who ended up in the hospital that RSV season, and he later needed surgery), but that was no reason to be living in a fog, not accomplishing anything.  I got to where I couldn't answer her phone calls.  And I'm close to my Mom.  Pretty soon I couldn't answer anyone's phone calls.  My Relief Society President released me from her presidency (I didn't ask her to, but I think she knew I needed to be -- she was aware of both the porn problem (through one of the single most 'God loves me and he's aware of me' moments I've ever experienced, which I'll have to write about later) and the stress of the pregnancy.)  I felt like a failure.  I found out later people, like my sisters, were talking and wondering if I was dealing with post-partum/ante-partum depression.  I'd never struggled with anything like that before, but I was definitely lost and depressed during this time (hindsight being 20/20 and all).  But things started to improve.  My pregnancy was rough, but my husband was as loving and doting as he'd ever been.  He walked in the door scooped up the kids, sent me upstairs for a nap and made dinner.  Every night.  We made some real strides in our relationship.

He was actively engaged in his Church calling, in parenting, in scripture study, in work, in prayer and in us.  He encouraged me to talk openly about the problem with my sister and sister-in-law, since he'd seen how bad I'd been struggling.  He knew this would mean they'd know his 'secret', but it was worth it if it would help me.  I finally had people I could talk to.  I wasn't so alone.  He was willing to sacrifice his privacy for my own good.  This would work out this time.  Right?   He didn't 'need' to go to meetings or counseling or anything though -- it was already 'gone', he hadn't really even felt the pull of it in months and months at this point.  It was all good. 

He came to me in October to tell me he'd 'slipped up'.  He'd been watching some YouTube videos at work of scantily clad women.  He was so sorry.  But he knew he had to tell me before it became a 'secret' and he lost control of it again.  I thanked him for his honesty.  We'd caught it this time.  He came to me.  Everything was going to be OK.

What I didn't know was that it'd actually happened two or three times.  It really had 'just' been some stupid YouTube videos, but as soon as he minimized it, even just a little, it was like he just let it walk back in to our lives.  (Addiction loves minimizing.  It feeds on it.) 

Over the next month or so, he started to seek out 'risque' images here and there.  Nothing nude.  "No big deal."  He didn't tell me about it.  This corresponded with us getting testier with each other.  I blamed the pregnancy.  He let me blame the pregnancy.  By Christmas time, he was finding ways around his work filters to watch videos of busty lesbians.  After our new baby boy was born at the first of the year, as soon as he was back at work, he was spending hours a day finding pictures and videos of women.  The floodgates were opened.  It was all back.  And he kept it all quiet.  It tapered out through February, and he went all of March, until the 30th, without looking at a single thing.  A six hour binge on the 30th, then nothing again.  Then on April 9th I got another one of those 'feelings'.  I got into his gmail account and checked out image searches.  From back in November there was one search for a scantily clad woman. (Some of co-dependency skills are a bit lacking -- seriously, the search was from like five months ago!)  One search, but I knew.  It was all back.

I thought back through the last couple months since the baby had been born.  I knew something was off.  I'd asked him, he'd assured me everything was fine.  Sex had been painful and uncomfortable much longer after this baby.  I knew something was wrong, but he just kept insisting that it must be taking longer for me to get back to normal after the baby's birth.  He'd be sweet and patient though.  Whenever I felt up to things.  I felt bad he was being so sweet and helpful around the house, and I couldn't seem to get back to where we'd been.  He let me blame me; the new baby; our strained relationship.  And he knew.  He KNEW what was really wrong, and he let me chalk it up to postpartum hormones and being overtaxed with a nursing baby.  But he KNEW it was him.

I was so angry and hurt I couldn't think straight.

When he got home from work, I asked him.  "Has there been any porn?"  He stared at me for a minute then asked, "What did you find?" 

"WRONG ANSWER," I fumed, and walked out of the room.  A minute later he followed and confessed.  It'd come back.  He hadn't wanted to tell me.  He spilled out the whole timeline I wrote about above.  I ran out of the house and threw myself on my sister's bed (with a 3 month old baby in tow) and sobbed for hours.  I came home and we talked.  I was so angry about him risking his job again (and again and again and again) that I told him he could start looking at it at home if he just promised to not look at it at work (I have since taken that back :-)  For days though, all I could think about was what if he lost his job and the house and everything . . . then I'd have no marriage AND we'd have to move in to my parents.  I've since calmed down a bit and am not living in a constant state of fear and anxiety).  I asked him flat out, what did he want?  Did he still want to be going to Church?  He told me, with tears in his eyes, it's all true and it's what he wants.  Did he want to get the porn out of his life?  As much as he wanted to say 'yes', a part of him knew the answer was 'no'.

It was the most painful thing I ever heard.  But it was honest.  Really, painfully honest.  And it gave me hope.

He's since been attending three meetings a week (two LDS meetings, one SA).  He's gone to the Bishop.  He lost the calling he loved (actually the Bishop, one of his best friends, informed him he was already being released, it was already in the works -- the Bishop could tell something was up, knew he was being lied to, and had already made the change.  This was so eye opening to J, to realize that he couldn't lie and hide it as well as he thought.)  He's journaling, we're talking, he suggested we take a 90-day hiatus from sex to give him a chance to 'sort things out' in his head that's so confused and pumped full of lust and porn and other unhealthy things that don't belong in our marriage.  (That was a big one for him.)  We're reconnecting.  We spend hours just talking.  I look forward to him coming home all day.  Neither of us can wait for the kids to go to sleep so we can just be together.  We're realizing just how far we'd drifted apart (something we both some how had just not noticed until now.) 

He's more humble than I've ever seen him.  Just as repentant, but frankly repentant has never gotten us anywhere, so I much prefer humble.  He's talking about it more.  He's being more honest.  It's painful sometimes to see what a hold this has on him, how much he wants it.  But the more he talks about it, the more honest he is, out loud, outside of his own head, the less of a hold it has.  I told him I think the point of meetings and therapy is the more you say it all out loud, the harder it is to lie about inside your head.  He'll start going to group therapy in another month or so (when the next one starts)

We have a long road ahead of us . . . but dare I say it . . . it finally feels like we're on the right road. 

But I realize there are no guarantees.  No matter what decisions J does or does not make.  Whatever choices he makes.  I have no control over that.  I am starting to separate myself from this whole mess.  I'm releasing fears and anxieties I'm just realizing I've lived with for so long.

I will be able to carve out a wonderful life for me and my children, no matter what my husband chooses.  And I will end up closer to my Heavenly Father than I've ever been before.  'Cause I needed to be humbled too.  I would've preferred another way to go about it, but God will work with whatever situation presents itself, and He is going to mine this one for all it's worth.  And I'm gonna end up a diamond.