Destroyed Marriage

I am cross posting this from the 30-39 forums, I hope its allowed. I just think this section is better suited to my situation.

Hello,

I'm a soon to be 33 year old male that has finally been forced to come to terms with my porn addiction. I discovered porn at 13 years old, and have been fascinated with it ever since. All throughout my teen years and 20's, I just thought my porn use was what normal men did. Reading about the effects that porn has on the brain, and reflecting on my own life, I realize now that I have never given myself a chance to develop a healthy view of sex, and that this addiction has influenced all of my relationships and my life.

It all came crashing down when my wife, who is post partum after giving birth to our first child, discovered I had cheated on her online. I went to an adult chat room and found a girl, who is the exact opposite of my wife, and had cybersex while she watched me on camera.

I have understandably been kicked out of the house, and am facing a divorce. I am allowed to see my child for a few hours each day, but my presence in the house becomes too much for my wife, and I want to respect her space at this time.

I am 6 days porn free as of today. I have been on the Recovery Nation site as well, and I am currently committed to bettering myself as a person, and to never watch porn again. I understand my addiction is a symptom of other issues in myself, and I am going to work on improving myself. Porn addiction has taken everything from me. My house, my wife, my new family.

I already exercise semi-regularly, that will become regularly. I will do yoga every morning. I will commit to a better diet, and I will use my spare time on doing productive activities to better myself.

I want to know the person I can be without porn, because I feel like I have only ever met that person in brief lengths of time. I want to be a better person, because if I don't, I will never be able to maintain healthy relationships, romantic or otherwise. I have to be a better person, so that when my child grows up, I can be a success story, a proper role model, and guide them through those formative teenage years. So they don't make the same mistakes I did.

My therapist told me I should join some sort of group to help with my recovery, so here I am. I am going to post about my progress, and hopefully one day someone will find my journal here and use it as inspiration for a better life.

The rest of my entries are here:

https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/nothing-left-to-lose.300053/#post-2868965

I will be updating this thread with updates from now on

 

From my last entry in my other thread:

Was told to read a great book called "Out of the Doghouse" in regards to infidelity, and so far its helped paint a clearer picture about the gravity of my actions. I absolutely did commit infidelity and I absolutely crushed my wife by doing so. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong - which has been sort of the issue. Most of my family wants to sweep this issue under the rug as if it was just a mistake. It was not. It was a series of bad choices that I willingly made, with no regard for my wife's feelings.

That's the problem with a porn addiction isn't it? At least for me. I was always so focused on myself. Porn is just a symptom of that though. Maybe it caused those self-involved and selfish tendencies to amplify, because my mind was always craving that high that porn gives, that nothing else can every compare too.

I do know it definitely plagued my relationship for a long time. Simple things - wife wants to have a date night at home with some drinks, and I don't want to drink because I read before how alcohol effects protein synthesis and recovery. Sure, I work out regularly, but I'm not an athlete or professional bodybuilder, I can just have a nice evening of drinks with my wife. There's so many small things I can think of where I put myself or my desires first, rather than just thinking about what she needs. Most of the time, what she needed was quality time with her husband. That's it.


I know porn didn't make me cheat. My selfish tendencies, my focus on my own personal pleasure with complete disregard of the consequences, and disregard of my wife's feelings, is what made me cheat. That is something that I have to fix, because its an issue that would exist, porn or not.

I do believe that porn use did feed into that though, creating a cycle. There were extended periods of my relationship where I was not using porn at all, and I can say that I was a much more attentive, empathic husband during those periods