Been married for 20 years but just can't tell her

Nope, not perfect, not even close. I am honest and truthful and faithful though. That’s all I ask of my husband. The rest we can work through. What I was saying is , if you can’t open up to your wife, find someone you trust who you can open up to. Addiction thrives in secrecy.

 

We went through 4 before we found a good one! Lol.

 

What is apparent in all your posts are a great deal of resistance, which is the norm for an addict. I'm reading from you (mind you, I'm not quoting, just interpreting):

• It's okay to keep someone in the dark about something that very much concerns them
• Everyone lies and betrays, so it's a viable strategy to do the same
• Nobody has a perfect marriage, so why aim for one?
• She is bad anyway, she quit therapy, so she is very much to blame for the marital problems
• It's awfully difficult to find a good therapist, so let's wait
• There might not be any compatibility between yourself and wife anyway

Now, neither one of these statements are necessarily wrong. But would you challenge yourself to take full responsibility for your actions? Regardless of what she has done. Regardless of who she is. Would you strive for perfection, regardless of if it's possible or not? Would you do anything and everything in your power to make your marital life great?

 

@Thelasttime1092 , while I 100% agree with your decision to not tell your wife (only you can make that decision knowing all the details) my advice would be to not bee so closed to other opinions as well. Even just acknowledging them for yourself can lead to a greater understanding or support for yourself to keep going. It's a hard battle to win so use everything you have available.

I'm sure as you keep your no pmo going the changes you feel and see will allow you greater perspective and clarity over all this. Just stick with it. I was absolutely in the same boat, rejecting a lot of things I didn't agree with. I still do.. the people who say this is impossible to beat while keeping it a secret, I don't agree with. But I can appreciate the benefits of being totally open at the same time.

Open your mind to anything along this journey, and you could be surprised where it leads you.

 

Nobody here knows you personally, and no one judge you. As I made it clear in my post, it was merely my interpretation of what you are conveying, not necessarily the absolute truth of what you are thinking and feeling, or how your life is shaped.

However, it seems like (again, "seems like") you only want one opinion. You seem to want people to give you additional reasons for not telling your wife. There are plenty of guys here that will pat you on the back and tell you that you are doing the right thing, if you want to hear that. They will say it's not a big deal. To them, that's the truth, because they are not the ones kept in the dark.

Sadly, women who have been victims of secret porn addictions and affairs will not give you the convenient advice you might wish to hear. In the relationship advice forum, you are inevitably subjecting yourself to opinions from both sides.

Obviously, you don't have to take advice (or offence) to what anyone say in here. But I'm troubled by the fact that you are so troubled by other opinions than your own, especially since it was my understanding that you wanted input. Nobody can possibly know the "complexity" of your life, because we as readers of your thread can only deal with the information you provided and draw conclusions based on how it usually is, which is that women want the truth, and relationships where the truth is hidden more often than not suffer terrible (and avoidable) consequences. That's not to say it will be like that in your case.

People here are not your enemy, or here to judge you or tell you what to do, and I am truly sorry you feel that way.

 

You HAVE to tell her you've cheated her all these years. There is nothing more manly OR loving than to give her that. TRUTH.

My husband told me after 3yrs marriage. I have a STRONG libido...so after finding out all these years it was because he was going to other women, plus he told me after I gave birth and became cruel for seemingly no reason...I broke everything I could get my hands on when he told me.

He thought I was going to hug him and cry with him and say we'll fight this together.

But the thing about this addiction is it leaves the addict unaware about the pain they've caused. At least my husband has had an inflated sense of self, self-love and a desensitization for the pain of others(not sure if it's him or all users). BUT the desire to bring it to the light has to outweigh the desire to escape punishment or relarional damage.

We told our teenagers. And hope that one day God can reconcile and restore all the damage done, and hopefully allow us to help our sons. Let's face it, the culture/temptation is not diminishing but growing more accessible. Now my head isn't in the sand and despite everything, I'm thank for at least that!

 

@Thelasttime1092
I agree with you. There is a lot of jumping to conclusions on these forums. Which is unfortunate, because there is a wealth of experience inside the brains of all the people who frequent the nofap forums. Unfortunately, it is normal for people to want to assume that their problems, their symptoms, their solutions, and their current and previous situation is very similar to everyone else's. You can't come onto nofap hoping to receive professional advice. You will receive a lot of bad advice and some good advice, but, grit your teeth and read the bad advice looking for little nuggets of inspiration.

There are a lot of 'fixed' and 'recovering' addicts on here that I believe only fixed their porn problem and are currently oblivious to their core issues and are still in denial; hoping that quitting porn will bring the happiness that they so urgently want. There are spouses on nofap who find out about their husband's porn use and incorrectly come to the conclusion... 'See, I always knew there was a reason why our marriage has sucked for so many years', making it easy to ignore the real problems at hand, like 2 overworked parents, or conflict resolution problems, or whatever it may be. Then, there are a ton of married guys on here who have or had porn induced erectile dysfunction. There are some who were addicted long before marriage, some who got addicted during marriage. Some spouses on here have high libidos, some have low. My point is this... you are right, lots of different experiences, requiring lots of different solutions, and everyone would do well to be flexible and less prescriptive when giving advice. But, come on, we are a forum of broken people finding our way through the forest at night with no moon, set your expectations low and be happy you have found a place where you can safely share your story and find support.

Marriage is hard, life is hard, porn is a plague on the male population. A mentally strong and healthy spouse shouldn't see porn as her husband cheating with 1000 women. A spouse can define 'cheating' however they want, but just because you can equate 'cheating' and 'porn' as the same, does not mean it is healthy to do so. The healthy thing for a spouse to do is learn that for most of the men on here, we use porn like any other coping mechanism (food, alcohol, drugs). It is a way to cope with our anxiety, to cope with our pain, to hide from our responsibilities. We hate porn and we hate the fact that we have to use it to not feel as bad, just as much as our wives hate it. We probably hate it more than our wives do. If you were a child of the 80s, you watched made for tv movies about terrible men who watched porn and how their wives finally found out and left them, and everyone in their life ended up hating them, including their kids, their parents, their friends, etc. They were portrayed as perverts, not worthy of redemption, not any better than child molesters. If you were like me, you watched porn and thought it was harmless outside of marriage, and then you realized you found the woman you were going to marry, so you told yourself you were going to quit, but it was too hard, you were not equipped by the world and by your parents to know what to do, and society made porn such a moral taboo that you never felt safe enough to tell anyone about your problem.

What husbands need are spouses who are understanding, who try to understand the real problems. Wives who can differentiate from their emotions, their hurt, their anger; differentiate between those emotions and what is really going on with their husband and with their marriage. A wife who understands that their husband could fix the porn problem, but the issues that cause our daily pain and anxiety will still remain. If we quit porn without fixing the underlying issue, it will be like people who use food as a coping mechanism going on a diet... they won't be able to sustain the diet forever because the diet only addresses the symptom.

Unfortunately, our wives, just like us, are imperfect and asking them to forgive us and be understanding about porn is just as hard or harder than quitting porn. Thus, we move forward bound together in pain, walking into the fire together hoping we can come out the other end stronger and still married. If we can't survive, that sucks, but it happens.

Here is my advice, coming from my perspective, sorry that I jump to conclusions, it is hard for me not too.

You don't have to tell your wife. You know your wife, if it will destroy your marriage and damage your kids, you have a lot to think about. If your wife isn't strong enough to handle the bad news, it might be in her best interests not to tell her. But... if you are not willing to tell her, I think that is a STRONG sign that you have a lot of work to do in your marriage and I would bet that some or a lot of the reasons you use porn are because you are coping with everyday pain/anxiety/dread related to your marriage. If you *know* that your wife would leave you over porn, then can I safely conclude that she has openly talked about how terrible your friend's husbands are that look at porn? How those men deserve all the punishment they have coming to them? It must be dreadful to listen to your wife saying that while knowing that you look at porn too. Do you ever agree with her condemnations of other men just so she doesn't suspect your own addiction? If she is that judgemental of others, she is probably judgemental in other areas. Is she a forgiving person? Probably not. In my opinion, judgemental and righteous people are toxic; they have a hard time giving and receiving real love. Even though you never asked, my advice regarding your marriage is that, regardless of whether or not you tell her about your porn, start fixing your marriage, push the hard issues, get to a point in your marriage where you can safely tell your wife about your porn problem. Make your marital life interesting by making things uncomfortable and get some of these deep seated issues resolved. Your marriage doesn't have to be be sub standard, it can get better, but it will be hard.

Regarding your porn addiction. If you have a lot of anxiety in your life, fix that first, then work on the porn. If you insist on fixing the porn first, you can try to switch to a different coping mechanism, a healthier one. Unfortunately, porn is too accessible, too pleasurable, too easy, and I don't think there are any drop in replacement coping mechanisms. I tried quitting while my anxiety and pain was high, when I was in a mental place of chaos; I tried quitting with all my heart and I failed. I am finally having some real success these days because 4 years ago I found relief from my anxiety, so, today, when I remove the porn, I don't have incessant anxiety waiting for me behind the curtain.

Good luck and be easy on all of the amatuer psychologists on nofap. We want to help, but we could do better.

 

If you call it cheating or betrayal, I don't really care. But let me tell you, I've seen tons of mentally strong people, men and women, being completely broken to sliverins by this. I've talked to ladies in here that had a great life, a stable upbringing and even watched porn together with their husbands occasionally, before their life was ripped to shreds by endless compulsion and lies from their significant other. I've seen new mothers being left because their husbands rather watched filth than care for a newborn. And I doubt I speak only for me when I tell you I take great offense to being called mentally unstable by any man who can't keep his hands out of his pants, despite the overwhelming reasons to do so.

As a person who has been physically cheated on, I can further enlighten you stating that porn addiction hurt just as much, if not more. I would rather die than go in to a prostate cancer ward, telling the men there that prostate cancer isn't really that painful (because I don't have a prostate), or suggesting a kick in the balls actually feels like eating a piece of apple pie (I don't have balls). Likewise, I don't want to hear about what period pains feels like from a twelve year old boy, or what colours to paint my living room walls from freaking Ray Charles. If the majority of women are hurt by being lied to about porn addiction, if they feel like that's cheating to them, they have right to feel that way. If you ask your wife if porn addiction is cheating to her, and she says yes, then it is cheating. If she says no, then it isn't. But wanting honesty and faithfulness in a marriage certainly isn't "unhealthy" or a sign of "mental unstability".

I've read your posts and I sympathize a lot with your case and the OP writer's. If you feel like there are better solutions to your problems and that your marriages are of a calibre that couldn't handle the truth to come out, nobody is going to force you to tell. Maybe you can find other ways of beating this, and other ways of fixing the marriage. Nobody is saying you are wrong in that, in fact, we are rooting for your success. Those who have been on NoFap for a while, sometimes years, have seen marriages breaking down and they have been thoroughly educated about why. They generously give advice based on what they know. Statistically, it's fully possible to see that some methods have worked better than others. Professional therapists within this field work a great deal with "full disclosure". Maybe you brush that off as bad advice too, who knows. Bottom line is that anyone can choose for themselves.

Lastly, it pains me to see that you are greatly diminishing the deep suffering of women on here, and that is called gaslightening in its finest form.

 

I agree with @Thelasttime1092 that he should not tell his wife.

I also sympathize with the SOs. Some posts in this tread are guilty of invalidating the SOs feelings. It is our job to tell our SOs that porn is not cheating nor is it a big deal and we get to decide how they overcome our indiscretions. That is entirely up to them.

I also am also sympathetic with the SOs that they prefer honesty and have been hurt by deception and betrayal.

But as @Thelasttime1092 has indicated, not all SOs will stay by their spouses. If he reveals his sex addiction, from what he has posted, I am not doubting that his wife will leave him, destroying his family and impacting his children. Again, this is not taking issue with his wife’s lack of “empathy” or denial of sex/porn addiction. She is entitled to her opinion and nobody would be able to put any blame whatsoever on his wife if she unwittingly catches her husband in the act and ultimately decides to leave the marriage. The PA is entirely to blame.

But you are playing with a ticking time-bomb that you need to disarm. When your wife tells you about her girlfriend going through a divorce because her husband cheated on her. You hypocritically respond, "That's awful. I always knew he was a jerk". But you know inside that you are just as awful as the cheating husband that she is talking about.

What you and I need to do is get through our addictions. No more porn, no more masturbation, no sexting, no prostitutes, and no more sexual behavior with anybody other than our wives. Get an AP, start therapy, read books and bring our compulsory sexual behavior to an end.

If we can do this, we will no longer be lying, deceptive or cheating on our spouses. Our consciences will be clear and our marriages will remain intact and our children will not be damaged.

The present and the future can be promising, but only if we deal with our pasts.

 

@Lilla_My
I enjoy every one of your posts. You are thoughtful, in touch with your emotions, forthwrite, thought provoking... just excellent. Thank you for that.

On the nofap forums I have been accused of 'gaslighting' I think 3 times. I never really understand what it means, so I have to look it up:
Gaslighting: manipulate (someone) by psychological means into questioning their own sanity.

The spouses on nofap have every right. every right. I mean, every right. To be upset, to be hurt, to be emotional, to be angry, to be pissed. The spouses deserve love, support, and understanding. You, Lilla_My, were hurt. Being upset about what I wrote is normal. For some relationships, all of the blame rests on the Husband, for some relationship the blame is shared. In all relationships, the porn addict deserves blame, they have to take responsibility.

Once we move past the initial shock and trauma though, we have to do the hard part and move onto healing behaviors and thoughts. @Lilla_My I don't think I have ever read a post from you in which you shame a porn addict, you seem to be kind and understanding. But, in this very thread, other people have shamed @Thelasttime1092 for deciding not to tell his wife about his porn addiction.

I wrote what I wrote for @Thelasttime1092. It was not meant to be a condemnation of you. I did refer to your words ("cheating with 1000 women") and I stand by what I wrote. You still have every right to be angry and human. You agreed with what I wrote when you wrote:

But, I was not writing to you or for you. I was writing to @Thelasttime1092, to reassure him that it is OK if he feels like there is more going on in his marriage.

There are a lot of people who think they are strong. But, if porn destroys a marriage, was that marriage emotionally strong? Truth is, usually there are lot deeper things going on than just porn. If it were just porn, things would be so much simpler. Porn would be easier to quit.

What is wrong with stating to a fellow husband the following: "You need to fix you. Your wife will probably be devastated. If your marriage is going to work, at some level things will be out of your control. Your wife is going to need to forgive you, that is going to be on her, if she can't forgive you, your marriage will likely be over. If there are deeper issues, you might need to address those problems first and if those issues reside in your wife, those need to be fixed too, your wife's issues will be out of your control." That sums up my opinion on the entire subject. The husband has work to do and the wife has work to do, even though it wasn't the wife who created the mess. It isn't fair, it sucks, the whole thing is terrible.

 

I've read your post with great interest and want to thank you for your nuanced answer. It cleared out a lot of questionmarks. Us women here on NoFap are in debt to all the married men on here that not only provide us with great insight every day, but also selflessly reach out to other men (both the younger crowd and the fellow dads). You're the pillars of this forum, and the amount of good you can do is insurmountable.

Porn addiction is largely a compartmentalization illness, where the PA wrongly considers his alternative life a relaxing hobby, separate from his official self; a little wank in the bathroom, and then he bursts into the family scene like some kind of lit-from-within Broadway star, ready to love his wife and be a good friend to her (what a lucky gal! He did not physically cheat!).

It's not like that. Porn abuse eats away at the grey matter and creates a hypofrontality in the brain, leading to less compassion, less emotional response, less patience, less desire for physical intimacy, less happiness and less self restraint. The porn user questions his love for his wife, his committment, her looks, her over all use to him. The non porn addict that married her is not the same man as the porn addict she eventually will divorce.

As previously mentioned, porn is rare in the meaning that it can take a fairly stable relationship and grind it into a pile of noxious dust. Pornography and masturbation might go on for minutes (or hours) a day/week, but it's personality altering capacity is there for months, years. Depression leads a man to porn, and porn leads him back to depression due to further downregulation of dopamine receptors. He seeks an answer to why his marriage is bad, and a picture of his wife shows up in his illogical addicted brain. He seeks relief from this bad feeling, and a picture of another woman pops up on his phone. And on it goes, because there will always be an endless supply of "new and nude", but the wife will, as long as the addiction has a hold on him, always be the same old disappointing road block.

Bottom line; As with any addiction, porn makes the marriage seem worse, leading to more porn, leading to an even shittier marriage. Strangely, the wife is considered "co-dependant", "controlling", "judgemental", "prude" and "mentally unstable" when she puts her foot down for not agreeing to a situation, or a man, she didn't choose.

 

@Lilla_My
Thanks for that.

The last few posts have been eating at me. I see the pain in the spouses on nofap and how they have their own journey to go through. And I see the pain in us porn addicts and how we have a related but different journey to go through. In general, having both groups of people on the forum is great, but often it leads to hard to resolve conflict. I find it very difficult to find the right words in these situations.

At my house, my wife and I run a little bit of a half way house. We have had 3 different men come to live with us as they work out their issues with addiction to drugs and alcohol. We never ask them to come, they ask out of the blue. I think it is because they see our home as a safe place to come and not be judged.

Since 2015, I have been on nofap on and off. I been active on nofap cumulatively for almost a year. All of the successful and well grounded quitters I used to know have moved on. Some of the most adamant and vocal, I solved my porn problem for my wife, I was such an asshole, but now I am cured and everything is lollipops and icecream, people are now divorced. In 2015, new spouses were introduced to 12 step programs and told they were codependent addicts themselves. Now, in 2020, the new spouses are being supported as trauma victims. In 2015, we had it all figured out. Now it's 2020 and we still think we have it all figured out. We don't. We don't have addiction figured out, we don't know what the best path to recovery is. We struggle through it like we always have, some people succeed, and some people don't. We have yet to figure out what it takes to get everyone to snap out of their bad behavior.

I don't think most PAs who have found themselves on nofap feel that way. I never felt that way my entire marriage. I was always ashamed, there was nothing happy or relaxing about giving into my addiction. Unluckily for me, the mighty orgasm is powerful enough to squash out a lot of those feelings of shame and anxiety, at least for a brief moment.

One the things I think a lot of us married PAs struggle with is this. Women, and the mean things they say when they are angry. I don't know if all husbands on here will agree. But, when my wife gets really angry, she says some stuff about how she feels that just makes me feel terrible on the inside. I used to take it all to heart, I used to believe she meant all of it. Now I know better, now I know that in fits of anger she says things that she means in the moment, but doesn't really mean in a logical sense; she means them in an emotional sense. This used to be terribly confusing for me, because I took what she said literally and I took it to heart. Things like... "You are such an asshole" or "I don't love you" or "You don't care about me anymore" or "I wish you would go away and never come back". None of those things are true, but an immature version of myself used to believe they were, simply because my wife told me those things. Sure, I can sometimes be an asshole, I can sometimes be unlovable, but, most of the time, that is not who I am. It is important as a recovering addict for me to know I am not those things and for me to be surrounded by people who reinforce a healthy image of myself.

So, when a spouse of a PA jumps on the forums and vents, they deserve compassion for their pain, they have some right to vent. But, I pray that the PAs reading the venting don't take the venting the wrong way; I pray that they don't allow the venting to reinforce their own belief that they are not worthwhile human beings, that they are not worthy of redemption and compassion themselves. Most of us PAs, early in our addiction, are very prone to believing those negative things about ourselves. That type of thinking slows our recovery.

EDIT: Every time I read a PA post... "I am not worthy of redemption", "I do not deserve to be forgiven"... I cringe and feel sad. And, those comments are made a lot by PAs in a marriage on these forums. They are not helping their marriage when they buy-in to that self deprecating thinking. They are not helping themselves. It is just wrong.

We know that porn addiction is a nasty addiction, like alcohol, and some kinds of drugs. We also know that just like those other addictions, they amplify the suffering that drove us to the coping mechanism in the first place, creating a negative feedback loop. What we don't know is that the porn is what caused the marriage to fail. It is not black and white.

When a PA posts how their wife is being difficult, maybe it is just that simple. Do wives stop being human and fallible when their husbands get addicted to porn? Do porn addicts lose their right to call their spouses out when they are being unreasonable, because their past transgression was too much? We all know the healthy answer to both of those questions is No. Unfortunately, some people on here think the answer is 'yes' to the second question. That is unfortunate because it is a major roadblock to marriages coming back from this addiction.

 

There seems to be confusion about the term "judgemental". Holding someone responsible for their actions is not equivalent with being judgemental. If an SO feels that masturbating to billions of women is a form of cheating and is deeply hurt by those actions, then you happen to be responsible for her pain, no matter if your actions were fueled by addiction or not.

 

Don't bother, man. I already told my girl (now ex) about my pmo, and look what happened: She left me.