That is at the heart of the situation. The rest is acting out. That feeling of self-loathing is reinforced not only by the act itself but also that he betrayed you, for only a very bad person would do these things to someone that loved him.
You should not be the Sex Police. It’s not your job to monitor his behavior. You either trust him or you don’t. If you can’t trust him then you shouldn’t have him on the scene. That sounds very hard and hard hearted, I know, but why should you spend the rest of your life constantly checking up on him? That’s just insane. That’s not a good marriage, that’s hell on earth.
I guess I was an outlier as my ordeal played out when I was a single man. My current gf knows all about everything in my past, however. I’ve never been married, no kids (I’m 38).
The truth is, he doesn’t know how the problem started. This all is making up plausible-sounding stories after the fact.
Many sex addicts may have porn in common, but that doesn’t prove that porn started it. They also have in common: eating breakfast most mornings, weird messed-up families, and mothers with brown hair. That’s just because lots of people have those things in common.
When two things look related, it’s easy to assume that the first one caused the second one. It’s not a good assumption.
AND addicts are just as likely to grab on to that assumption as anyone else is. That still doesn’t make it true. People make up stories after the fact, to make their own lives make sense to them. They don’t care if the assumptions are true, they just desperately want the events of their life to make sense and not look like random noise. Also, when you ask an addict questions about the addiction, they will desperately make up logical answers for things just to please you and to make the questions go away. Again in that case, all that matters is to sound logical and to give the appearance of making sense. The truth may remain unknown.
You aren’t going to be able to monitor your husband’s phone and social media use, complete with surprise polygraph tests. If that’s what you require to stay married to this person, you might as well ask for a cambric shirt with no seams or needlework while you’re at it.
You really want to spend the rest of your life acting as your husband’s parole officer? Your choices are either to decide you’re OK with his occasional whoring as long as he does a better job covering his tracks, or you should leave him.
I’m not addicted to anything as far as I can tell, but I do have other problems that I’ve spent a lot of time discussing in internet forums. One of the things that keeps coming up in those discussions:
“OK, you want things to change, that’s understood. We all hope, for your sake, that they do. But will you be satisfied to continue living with this person when the same basic condition continues? (Even though many details will change for the better.) If not, then it would be better for everyone including you if you just end the relationship now.”
People change things. I mean, people change things. People do not change selves.
Only she, the OP, can decide what she can/will put up with. I know where my cut-off would be. It wouldn’t help anyone to know my boundaries. Knowing his how/what/when/where won’t do anything to move things along. It will serve to make her second guess every decision she’s made. I wouldn’t turn that rock over, for my peace of mind. But that, again, is my opinion.
One of the biggest issues with addicts and their loved ones is that the loved ones need to rebuild trust. But addicts lie. Therefore it can be one step forward, two steps back in terms of trust until the addiction is broken - if it ever is.
Addicts can change themselves for the better. It is very disheartening to hear the oft-repeated claim that people can never change. It’s just not true. But they have to really, really have one helluva determination to become the person they believe they can be. It’s not easy, maybe not even common but certainly possible. But I agree, rebuilding trust is the hardest thing with addiction. It’s not just the trust that needs rebuilding, it’s the entire relationship. That’s a daunting prospect that many people simply cannot and will not live with/thru (both the addict and their partner).
This strikes me as semantics. People don’t change themselves but they do change things about themselves? Isn’t what makes a person who they are simply a collection of “things”?
I didn’t say that they don’t. I have a sister who has been sober for a decade. But the chances of breaking an addiction on the first try aren’t good - and they certainly aren’t good if the first try is because you got caught and are being “made” to stop rather than coming to the realization yourself that you have a problem that needs to be solved. (My sister took three trips through rehab).
And that creates issues with trust. Addicts lie, its part of being an addict. They manipulate - that is also part of the disease. Rebuilding trust is a long process which gets set back with each lie or relapse. It is something that anyone caught in a dependency cycle with the addict should expect.
Yes, I’m sorry, I was conflating what you said with the poster above you. I actually agree with everything you said. Addicts CAN change, but often don’t. And they are excellent manipulators and liars, including lying to themselves. This is an important aspect I think often gets overlooked. It’s an inseparable component to the vicious cycle.
The bolded part is so, so true. Jesus Krist it’s true.
:smack: :smack: :smack:
They are suggesting that he may have passed it on to her before or during her pregnancies. Mother to child transmission is fairly high.
I don’t know much about escorts, sex addiction, and all that, but I do know something about polygraph. It’s voodoo. There’s no scientific basis for it. You can’t tell whether someone is lying by measuring blood pressure, pulse, respiration and skin conductivity. These things may change due to stress reactions, but a stress reaction doesn’t necessarily indicate deception, nor does the lack of a stress reaction necessarily indicate truthfulness. Not only that, but interpreting polygraph results is subjective; that is, two examiners may interpret results differently.
If I were you, Blindsided2, I would forget about using polygraph tests. It won’t tell you what you want to know reliably. You’d be better off using other ways to tell whether your husband is lying, such as looking for consistency and reasonableness in what he tells you.
This is probably the worst and saddest part of this whole (pardon the expression) affair. In an earlier post you mentioned wanting to see what his assignations looked like. I suspect it’s so you can look at them and ask, “What have they got that I ain’t got?” There is an old expression you should consider: You don’t pay a prostitute to have sex; you pay her to go away afterward.
Why this happened has nothing to do with you, how you look, or how you act. It wasn’t because you weren’t pretty enough, or had a big enough rack, or were supple enough in bed. Instead, it’s all on him. At the very least he should have come to you to say that he needed more than you could give him sexually and ask permission to seek intimacy outside the marriage. If he was reluctant to do so because he thought you would not give him leave – with whatever limits you negotiate – tough shit. The take away you need to consider is, you didn’t cheat; he did. You didn’t put your marriage at risk he did. If anyone’s self esteem should suffer, it’s his.
I too doesn’t see why this qualify as an addiction. **Ambivalid **mentioned spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on hookers. This I can see how it qualifies.
But the OP’s husband would have seen a prostitute about every two months (about 50/9=6 times/year) while he was travelling. That’s not an addiction, that’s an occasional activity. I wouldn’t be considered addicted to gambling because I visit a casino once in a while, or an alcoholic because I drink once in a while, so I don’t see why it would be different wrt sex. It seems to me that “sex addiction” is vastly overdiagnosed (and I’ve seen that a number of therapists think the same), presumably in part because any sexual activity outside the bonds of a monogamous relationship is perceived as “bad” in itself, and partly because it provide an excuse for the “offender” (“sure, I cheated on you, but that’s because I’m an addict”), which results in even a moderate amount of extra-marital sex being qualified as “addiction”.
Typically, something is considered an addiction when it significantly impairs you life and makes you suffer. In this case, the only damage done seems to be to this man’s marriage, which to me only proves that some people are unfit for the monogamous lifestyle which is our norm. Basically, I don’t believe that this man is in any way ill. He enjoys chasing women, he enjoys having sex with new partners, and he indulges in it. The problem isn’t this activity in itself, but the expectations of his partner, since he’s supposed to be in an exclusive relationship.
As a result, I also don’t believe for an instant that he will “reform” himself. I mean he can force himself to not have extra-marital sex anymore, I guess, but since I don’t believe that his behavior is compulsive, and something that in itself makes him suffer (rather, his problem is that his wife found out), I don’t see how it could be “treated” successfully with methods normally used for people who are in great distress about a compulsive behavior.
An addiction isn’t necessarily the quantity. Part of the definition is when it affects the rest of your life negatively, you know you shouldn’t, and you can’t help yourself, and even though you promise to stop, you do it again. Someone who drinks a lot who says “I should stop” and then does probably isn’t going to get classed as an addict. This is a guy who is married with kids, knows he shouldn’t have sex with other women, and seems to have felt powerless to help himself. Significantly impacting your marriage and the lives of your kids is a significant negative impact to your life. Putting yourself and your partner at risk for STDs is a significant negative impact on your life.
Now, it could be that he actually isn’t an addict, he’s just an asshole and using the “can’t help myself” excuse. We aren’t really in a position to diagnose from the internet.
As for treatment, treatment for any addiction is pretty hit or miss.
I’m with QuickSilver. I can forgive cheating on our taxes, smoking at work after promising you quit, having a car accident and not telling me, and so forth, but a spouse usually stands up in front of lots of people and swears that he/she will be faithful. That’s a pretty solemn occasion and a fundamental obligation to undertake.
Some people can blow it off. Bystanders will say, “Oh, that’s a personal issue between the two people in the marriage.” Or someone observes, “It was simply physical infidelity, not emotional infidelity.” BS. How can I trust a friend or business associate who can’t be trusted by his/her spouse?
That’s my $0.02, but lots of marriages apparently do recover. It’s just that I (personally) can’t see it. I’ve been married three times. Infidelity has never been an issue in any of them. If it were, I’d have been out of there like a rocket.
If I was cheated on from practically day one there’s no level of forgiveness that could ever be achieved. That marriage wouldn’t be one built on reality, what could we go back to when nothing was as it seemed?
I agree this is about basic trust, not ‘addiction’.
Even the complete de-moralizing of things like substance abuse is somewhat questionable IMO. There’s unfortunately weak evidence ‘treatment’ really helps, yeah people often know addicts who’ve been through it three times etc…because it doesn’t necessarily work.
Even so, drug addiction is ingesting chemicals which themselves might alter your brain chemistry till you become a different person and there’s no way back, realistically with all happy talk aside, pending discovery of a real medical solution. When ‘addiction’ is expanded to things you shouldn’t do but enjoy doing, especially just once in a while doing things you should never do, based on what your ‘natural’ brain is telling and doing to itself, I call if not outright BS severe skepticism about expanding ‘addiction’ to cover that. And with even less real evidence the psych industry can actually do anything about the newer ‘addictions’.
I don’t see a problem, as the person in a relationship, ‘judging’ that the other has been a liar on a basic level and kicking them to the curb. How much it’s anyone else’s business to feel put out by it is really a separate issue. But there’s also nothing wrong with opining on how dubious the ‘addiction’ concept is becoming, IMO. That kind of societal self-delusion can have broader consequences.