daggeredheart

I'll try to be brief. Married 12 years, two small children. Husband is a loaner, antisocial, computer programer, gamer, porn addict with no family or friends. Sounds like a great catch eh? However, I love him dearly and up until recently thought we were on the same page in our marriage. I'm a social butterfly and our counselor calls me "dynamic"....spouse is content to stay at home and live on his computer with not enough interaction with me or the kids. I am the activities director and all around do it all woman.

Our sex life has been vanilla with me having the much higher sex drive and I was always bothered that he would masturbate to porn instead of having sex with me. I did put on weight after the kids but I've since lost over 40 pound and still going strong. Husband has never complained but I know he appreciates me losing weight. Needless to say, I lowered my sex drive to match his and after the kids we would have sex once a week but some months we went longer due to his sexual needs being met by porn and I just went without.

Five years ago I caught him with profiles on adult friend finder type sites. Confronted and asked him about hit, he confessed to it all, we went to counseling but never really got it solved.

Three months ago, he started a EA affair via a iPad game. The girl was a young college student from Iran. We are in the US so the odds of them transitioning to a real life affair were slim but possible. I confronted my spouse. He was in love with her, confused about us and was leaning more towards chucking the marriage and kids for her. I asked him to leave, which he did for a few days.

A few days later our oldest was hospitalized and we ware thrown together in a confined space and rekindled our relationship. Did a lot of secret revealing and sex and the typical hysterical bonding stage. We are in counseling and go once a week.

He wrote a no contact letter, ending it with her ( his choice and sent me copies of it. It took another month for him to end his addiction to the iPad game ( trickle ending??) and all those avenues closing sent him into depression. It was rocky.

Some days I wanted to walk away and still do when I get upset. There is nothing like the pain of watching your spouse openly mourn the loss of his online love, send out rescue parties to sooth her wounds while you dangle on the vine. I don't know how I got through that and those memories will haunt me. I feel like sec on choice.

There are several healing things that he has yet to do and doesn't seem interested, like a sincere apology from the heart which our counselor suggested. We've had a few steps forward and few steps back. Have gone on a few romantic weekends, spiced up the sex life etc.

One of the biggest improvements was his revealing his sexual desires. He has wanted to try butt plugs, dildos, MMF and more. I'm comfortable with the sex toys but the MMF seems like the nail in the coffin for me. He has revealed his inner secrets about penis attraction and participation in receiving and giving bj or anal. All that was not too shocking considering the porn history he views ( she male stuff)

I'm troubled by his recent history where he google searched her Facebook profile, google plus profile and a generic google search.

It seems like to me that he is still curious, and I don't feel safe. I don't know why he can't talk to me about it and I'm a very open person to all of this because I hate secrets.

When I first discovered it, he wanted to leave so I accepted he had made up his mind and told him I loved him and wanted to work on the marriage but if he wanted out then I would respect that. The whole scene was heart wrenching.

I knew that his affair would have a "never ending" feeling because it didn't run it's course.....a forever "what if"....

what now? should I be forever haunted by his perpetual affection and interest in her or save my sanity and end this relationship?

Can anyone help me here.

2nd_t!me iz_best

dont know what you WANT to hear but i would be gone and no looking back.

ANY type of affair is enough for me to call it quits.

iheartlife

With regard to the EA, get the book Not Just Friends by Shirley Glass, it goes into great detail with EAs and can help you understand what was / is going on with him. If you can get him to read the book too, or excerpts at least, that would also help.

You are extremely right to be concerned that he is still obsessing about her. If you read the book, you will see that this behavior is an escapist fantasy (no surprise to you there, I'm sure) but that it also has many addictive traits that make it a habit that's extremely hard to break. Very similar to other addictions, he has to reach some type of 'rock bottom' before he will let that fantasy go.

You may need to return to counseling if you aren't still in it.

I am not even slightly surprised that this porn addict was hardly having sex with you. It wasn't about the weight, it was about the frequent masturbation. All men masturbate and all men are interested in porn, but the two together for hours every day can really kill a man's sex life. Ironic, I know!

I found this video very informative, it's a rather famous TED lecture that explains what happens to a man sexually when they masturbate and enjoy porn to great excess.
TEDxGlasgow - Gary Wilson - The Great Porn Experiment - YouTube

(As an aside, this turned out not to be my husband's problem. His viewing of mild porn every few months or so was not the cause of our sex life tanking, it was his long-term emotional affair. But on the brighter side, we are fully reconciling so this is thankfully not an issue any more.)

daggeredheart

Yes, I do have that book and I have re-read it several times. He has read excerpts in regards to his dwelling on it.

He says he mostly thinks of her in the car. Too much alone time or when he hears sappy music.

Also his online affair was a month long-- with two weeks of it being the "i love you, no I love you more state"

I don't know if length impacts intensity of the emotions.

iheartlife

That probably helps, that it was only a month long, but the fact that he is still checking on her means he hasn't been out of contact long enough. They say about 6 weeks for the effects of the fantasy to start to wear off. Start. And I would probably start that 6 week clock from the point that he stops checking on her via facebook etc. (You do know how to download a facebook account and check for chats between them there, right?)

Let me know what you think of the video vis-a-vis your own situation. You can PM me if you'd rather not post it here.

daggeredheart

no, how do you do the Facebook thing. I've logged into his, he's not a friend on hers. etc. When he ended the fling, she booted him off....he says there has been no contact other than the original goodbye email to which she responded almost two months later...

D day was Feb 18th 2012. So we have been in counseling and repair work ever since. I own almost every affair book there is and I've been through most sites.

I'll watch the Ted talk tomorrow when I have privacy to listen fully.

daggeredheart

OH and I talked to him tonight without admitting that i snooped and he said that he googled her because he wanted to see if that was anything new... she is a student in a field where they make public space discoveries.. which is a huge draw for him, anything scientifically related.

*sigh* he says he thinks he will always be curious about how her life turns out but that he can "control" it because he wants to be here,that he appreciates and loves the life he has here, that it's nice to come home to a house and he "hopes" his emotional attachment to her faces in time.

which all makes me feel like chopped liver. eh?

iheartlife

Okay, so log in as him.
On the very first page, in the upper right-hand corner, there's a little triangle-shaped arrow that points down. Click that. In the drop-down menu, choose Account Settings.

At the bottom of the Account Settings page that pops up, you will see, Download a copy of your facebook data.

Facebook will then send an email to the email account for his page telling him that he's requested a download and they will advise when it's ready. You will then some time later get an email saying it's ready and you'll go back to this page, click download again, and up will pop a page that gives you a button to download the data.

My husband hardly used facebook, so his download could be read on one computer screen. But a heavy user's download would likely go on for many pages, esp if they used messaging a lot.

Please note the bold above--in case you don't want him to know you're getting the download, or he tries to intercept it, or changes his password on facebook, etc.

iheartlife

My D-Day was Feb 17 2012. DD#2, that is...I also own about 15 affair-related books and have checked another bunch out of the library. My new hobby

We just had our first counseling session this past Saturday. It went very well, I was extremely careful to do the research to find someone trained on infidelity issues in particular. BTW, I found them via porn / sex addiction therapists--because the two are so related. My husband does not have porn or sex addiction issues, but affairs are escapist behaviors with addictive qualities so there's a lot of overlap there.

daggeredheart

Oh my goodness we are both walking in a similar journey. My counselor told me to quit over thinking the affair and get out of the self help books and just "feel" the emotions. To let them run over me and out the other side. Easier said then done when you are a virgo.


Thank you for the Facebook tip, I'll practice on my own account first.

daggeredheart

That ted talk was mind blowing. It describes my spouse to a T. *sigh*

Where do I go from here? Makes it sound like I'll never have a complete husband because he knows the how's and why's behind addictions but doesn't want to stop because he enjoys that hobby it's his entire life unfortunately. So perhaps the bigger question is what am I willing to live with in a marriage?

That is what scares me.

iheartlife

I'm glad you had a chance to watch the video.

I think the part I found most astonshing was hearing how men in their 20's are resorting to viagra over this issue, but it isn't working because it's not physiological, it's all in their head.

Sorry if I missed this--is his counselor specifically trained in porn addiction? Just a run-of-the-mill counselor isn't going to be equipped to handle a cancer like this.

daggeredheart

Just run of the mill relationship family -- in fact she could be addicted, she keeps her phone an iPad by her constantly and actually started to excitedly engage him in the latest iPad discussions during one of our session....even though she knows that his affair started via a iPad game.

Do you have suggestion for finding a local internet addiction specialist via website?

The most shocking part of the video was the erectile dysfunction because he has started to experience that in the last month ( he's almost 37)

He's used online porn since his teens and can't masturbate without viewing it.

He actually "knows" all about why it rewires the brain but doesn't desire to stop it, sounds hopeless.

iheartlife

I wish I did have suggestions for finding porn addiction counselors; the only way I know how to find them is to google it and your local area and hope something pops up. Even if it's a distance away, call them and see if they can recommend someone closer.

I'm disturbed to hear how your counselor is handling this. It's obvious she has no idea about infidelity, or she'd be the first to understand what a HUGE trigger that would be for you. I can't even imagine. Blech.

But the path to recovering from any addiction--or horribly bad habit that injures your spouse--is to WANT recovery. So getting him into counseling, when he doesn't believe he has a problem, is the issue.

I wonder if ED will eventually wake him up to the sucky life he is leading. But probably not.

daggeredheart

I thought that too.... that she didn't realize the trigger but partly that's due to spouse's reluctance to share in counseling how deep the online affair was to him emotionally.

He still pines over how exciting it was. Guess the dopamine was such a rush.

I am hoping his ED will trigger something in him. I sent him the video, but he hasn't watched it yet, which is pretty typical, he avoids anything that makes him "face" himself.

I'm tired of worrying about his problems and feel defeated but I know that's not the right attitude to have.

HOw are you coping with healing, I would love to hear your story since we are in similar timelines.