Taking the plunge.

I have laid awake many nights thinking about starting a blog or writing about how I have been impacted by Pornography. As many times as I have thought about it, I had a million reasons why I should not do it. Too many people will criticize, not enough awareness, the impact it will have on myself, I could go on and on. Today, I realize that while there are so many reasons why I shouldn’t put this out to the universe, there are so many more reasons why I should proceed. I will try to proceed with caution. Pornography/sex addiction impacts so many people in so many different ways. I am not an expert and will never pretend to know everything there is to know about it. What I do know is that I need an outlet for the thoughts. So, here I am.

Most likely, this will sit out in the webisphere unread, collecting some sort of web dust if that is even a real thing. Maybe it won’t, maybe someone else will benefit from my story. Here it goes. June 11, 2015 was a day that changed my life forever. Sounds dramatic, right? I wish dramatic was all that it truly was. My daughter whom at the time was 15 was home alone while we took our son and his two friends out for pizza. She decided to play on the xbox. Not long after she makes this very ordinary decision, I get a phone call from her on my cell phone asking if my husband can hear our conversation. I’ll never forget what went through my head at that moment. Inside my head, I screamed “I knew it!”. And, I did. I didn’t quite know what it was I even knew, but, I knew something was wrong and I knew at that moment, she had found out what it was. I walked outside the pizza shop where my husband couldn’t see my face or hear my conversation. What I heard on the other line was this “Mom, I am so sorry. I hate to tell you, but, Dad is cheating on you.”

I can’t tell you how your body physically takes over when you can tell that you’re in danger, but, it does, and it does it with a vengeance. I told her to screenshot whatever it is that she found and advised I’d be home in five minutes. Knowing my husband was always wanting to know what we talked about, I simply told him, I have to go home. He followed me out, just outside the door and looked and me and said “What’s wrong?”. I could see the look of worry on his face. I had seen it a thousand times before. All of those other times it never made any sense. It’s as if there was a sense of panic each and every time, only, that reaction never fit whatever was going on at that time. That was, until that very moment. I turned to him and simply said “you know what’s wrong”. With that, I ran to my car. I rushed to that house. My son who had baseball practice afteward was with my husband, so, there was an 80/20 chance that he’d still go to practice after my last comment. I knew that he knew I found out something and he’d start erasing/deleting any evidence that he could from his phone. I was in a race against time to find out what was going on and what to do about it.

Most women fear the big C. I think we all worry someday, Cheating, will come for us. How it comes for us, we never know. I guess in my head, it would always be with a very well built, skinny, voluptuous woman and she would be beautiful. Makes sense, right? They’re not going to risk their marriage and their family unless it is with someone really worth it. Well… That was not the case in my situation. I rushed home, my entire body shaking and adrenaline running through me like coffee through a wet, saggy paper cup. When I walked through the door and saw the image on the tv screen (remember, it’s an xbox that was used here), I was even more upset. As upset as I was however, it didn’t compute. His name was there, the incriminating conversation was there, but, the image that was there, no, it didn’t fit. This woman was on a scale of 1–10, a 2 maybe? I am not Elle McPherson here, but, I would like to think I’d make it to a 5. This was a blow to my ego. This didn’t make sense. I didn’t quite know my husband’s type as the women he dated prior to me ran the gamut, blonde, brunette, etc. However, this didn’t fit. I considered my husband to be a catch in a lot of ways and this just couldn’t be happening. At least not with what I saw on that screen.

I don’t want to get into the specifics of how my next few days went. It’s irrelevant mostly, but, honestly, it’s truly a blur. There were conversations. Some loud, some weepy, but, mostly, just confusing. We started to see a marital therapist as well as separate therapists. However, immediately after seeing that image, I turned into one of the best internet/electronic sleuths known to man. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating, but, I impressed myself. Over the course of the next week, I found others. I found all varieties of women, from all different websites. None of what had been going on was delivered to me in a nice neat fashion via my husband the way I would have liked. I had to find it all, and question and argue to get the truth. My husband eventually came to me and told me that his therapist THINKS he has a pornography addiction. This began my new research job as a scorned wife trying to understand what happend to my almost perfect marriage/life.

Pornography addiction. Sex addiction. Call it whatever you’d like, it’s an addiction. If you’ve stumbled upon this, I am sure you are probably a man or woman scorned by it, just like me, trying to find answers. I can promise you this, you will not be happy with what you find. It will not fix anything for you. You will cry, a lot. You will read more than you ever thought you could read to the point of making your head spin. If you are here and you are researching, I promise you one thing and one thing only, you will find support. It comes in many different ways, comfort of knowing there are others like you, comfort in knowing there are others with situations worse than yours, but most of all, the biggest comfort and probably the only comfort I have found since learning of this addiction’s existence, is just knowing that I am not alone.

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