Telling the Wife

Of course you do, like most would.

If I were in your situation, I would value truth over the relationship.

But I'm not making a moral comparison or saying that you should do what I would. I consider morality individualistic and voluntary.

That's all I wanted to know. I'll sit in the corner with my popcorn now and watch.

Continue, folks.

 

Read this in a blog today, thought it was interesting and maybe relevant to what some of us were trying to communicate in the thread:

“The lying makes me feel like my personhood was taken away from me. I feel like I was not given the right to decide for myself about the relationship, to make choices for myself. Because everything was hidden, I was robbed of my human ability to choose for myself, and that makes me feel like my husband doesn’t see me as a full person.”

From this blog, a site run by a therapist: https://partnerhope.com/betrayal-is-dehumanizing/

 

what if she already knows?

maybe you think she is simpler than you, but she has secrets too.

 

8 pages about whether a grown man should tell the truth. Always entertaining...

 

Lol! Love it. Well, you know, us wives really don’t know what’s good for us. Better to have a man make those tough decisions. After all, what I don’t know definitely can’t hurt me. Ugh wait, if I had cancer I wonder if the doctors would tell me or just agree that what I don’t know can’t hurt me?

 

Is this the royal 'we'?

 

Lol, no but it was finally something we agreed on!

 

Thank you for this, had a good laugh. As a grown man myself, dedicated to the truth and facing it after many years of denying it, of course this is hard for a grown man to do.

Us humans, men and women alike, are masters at self-deception. We believe what we want to believe.

 

The blog you referenced is very good and has some great helpful information. Thanks for sharing it.

 

There are many pros and cons to disclosure, which you've read about through these forums I'm sure. One of the cons is how your spouse will react and what your relationship will look like going forward, and should she see it as adultery, the disclosure has the potential to end your marriage. How she reacts to it and what actions she takes as a reaction to it remains a mystery for now. No one on here can predict how she will see it, and no one on here can say with a degree of certainty how she will react towards you or towards the marriage after the fact.

My husband and I have talked about this a great deal over these years he has been in recovery. I learned about his addiction because I needed to know. The reason I needed to know is because he needed someone that was willing to crack open his outer shell and expose the side of him that he actually was, not who his addiction made him out to be. For him I was able to do that, but in a sense we are unique in that category and I'm aware of that.
Him telling me has allowed him to look at what led up to his addiction and begin to work on those parts of himself. By doing this, he was able to put a distance between himself and his addiction. Now, he's not perfect by any means in his recovery and still does stupid stuff every now and again, but he has not watched porn since August of last year.
I didn't put blockers on his devices and I dont monitor his online activities. I told him he is absolutely free to make his own choice on whether or not he wants to watch porn. But with that comes the understanding that I'm also allowed the freedom of choice, and it would be my choice to leave should he decide to watch it again. This way, he has to hold himself accountable for his own actions. Again, he still does stupid stuff here and there, but he's a lot better today in his own healing from his past traumas than he was a few months ago.

When we push that it is in your SO's best interest to disclose your addiction, the main reason behind that comes down to freedom of choice. By not disclosing, you're not allowing her that opportunity to choose for herself, which should be allowed since you have that freedom of choice for yourself. This is what I agree with. She should be allowed that choice.

Will it hurt her to know? No one knows for sure until it happens. She could be one that is indifferent to it.

I told my husband that I feel as though if he found these forums before I did, that if he had taken the time to learn about his addiction, how it impacts his brain, how it impacts his life, etc and then talked to me about that information first, then I think the disclosure wouldn't have impacted me as hard as it did. It would have still hurt, yes, but there would have been more understanding on my part. That understanding could have prevented a lot of the trauma that came from everything later. I dont know if this will work for you in your marriage, but maybe if you approach it this way, you'll be able to better understand how she will react to your addiction, so you can perhaps help her understand it more prior to your eventual disclosure, if that makes sense? Of all the research I have read, family support has been one of the top things that have helped people overcome addictions. Being able to connect with people in real life has a lot of benefits, especially so if that connection is made with your SO.

 

There is almost always going to be a level of discord, I imagine, unless you had one addict confessing to another. You don't have to be on the same page for it to be successful. A successful disclosure is one that removes secrecy, and does so in a prepared and thoughtful way. The goal of the disclosure is to restore the relationship to honesty and integration, as well as give the SO her free choice back. You aren't likely to be on the same page of seriousness or intention because you are experiencing the disclosure differently. For the PA it is, while difficult, disclosing what already happened, and what they experienced in real time. But for the SO, even though the acts are past, it is a trauma in the moment and it bends/breaks all of her past experiences. Everything shifts. It's going to be more serious to her unless she's already learned the ropes of addiction, which is not going to be most disclosures. Waiting for this magical moment is not going to come when the SO knows nothing. The only way to come close might be to go to your couples therapist together and state that you have an addiction to disclose but would like to do a therapy on the nature of addiction before disclosing it.

Even if you don't view it as adultery, and she does view it as such, the important point is that an agreement on what will be the new marker of fidelity in the relationship will be from this moment forward. For a lot of us SO, the only way we can stay in this relationship, is by turning it into a new one. The old one with secrets and lies, and to us infidelity, is broken and the moment of disclosure kills the old relationship and makes room for a new one to be built. It's not easy to rebuild, and God I wish I had not gone through this torture, BUT the relationship coming out of ashes, is turning out to be a really good one. And it would not be possible if I had not found out. My husband did not see it technically as infidelity when he was doing it. He sees it now, but even if he did not agree with me, he could perhaps have agreed that since it was important to me, that he could agree to not do it. You don't have to be on the same plane so long as you can move forward and hold space for what she does feel about it.

It doesn't matter if you think her view is unreasonable. She gets to decide what she thinks about what has happened to her. She deserves the right to know what is happening in her marriage. She deserves to have full consent over her sexual interactions with you. Here it comes, like you said it would, you are thinking like an addict. Addicts don't see it all clearly because they are focused on themselves and their gratification. On the escape of all things negative through that high. And they do not see things clearly in the relationship with their SOs. They think they've got it all packaged into a neat little box that only effects themselves. It does not. There are emotions and behaviors that come out, negatively effecting spouses and children - anger, short temper, low tolerance for things like, oh critical or judgmental statements or maybe less than perfectly behaved kids, low energy, etc. I can now look back to all the really jerky things my husband did, and guess what, they all happened when he was acting out. I can remember being blown away with how jerky he was being because I could not figure out why. He thought he was fine. Now that he's disclosed and working on real recovery, he can see it and is appalled that it is connected. He was confident he'd boxed it all up. Sorry to go on a personal tangent, but the point is that addicts avoid things that are unpleasant. They escape all uncomfortable things. Part of learning to stop the addiction is developing the ability to experience negative things and then cope with them in healthy ways. It is not just about never acting out again, but about getting to a point where you don't need to act out again because you don't need to escape. So I would posit her being judgmental or critical might even help you because she might just become a safe place to work through wanting to escape. She might become a place where you get extra grace to learn how to cope. I know she has her own issues, but it sounds like she's got a lot of experience living through hard stuff that she does not have the option of running from.

 

Yeah. See my post in the new guy forum to get an idea what awaits you. It ain’t any fun.

 

What about findom? I stopped porn. I found other things instead tho. I’ve spent little money, no particular individual involved and I’ve promised myself I’m done with it. I don’t want to devastate my wife. I feel like such a thing could be another level. She could treat it as an affair? I don’t want to ruin our otherwise wonderful life for something I’m disgusted by

 

As the girlfriend of someone with a findom/femdom addiction stay away from that fetish. It has torn us apart in ways I never imagined, and I do consider this affair/cheating in my own relationship. Anyways I wish you luck in your recovery. You got this!

 

Well I tried quitting for five yrs your way and it always failed after a few weeks. Since the bust last August I haven’t looked at porn. matter of fact She asked last night how I’m doing and I proudly told her I haven’t used or looked at any porn since then.
Like you I didn’t have the balls to tell her but don’t worry she’ll find out sooner or later. Either by walking in during the act as in my case or by some other way.