Do You Love Your Wife?

I am not an addict, but be aware that many addicts lie also to themselves. I think you are asking because you already truly know the answers to these and are either looking for confirmation or comfort.
Ask yourself what love is and then ask if what you learned from his actions match what you know love to be.

 

Hello, first off, I just want to say I’m sorry what you went through and the betrayal you experienced.

Have you ever asked your ex husband those 3 questions?

In terms of the other questions you have for us here who have had issues with illicit sexual activity, I can share my experience. I’m not speaking for everyone here, but maybe I can be somewhat of a representative for other men here who claim to be Christians, who love the Lord and hate their sinful habits, and who want to and are willing to do anything to leave their sinful lifestyles.

I personally really do love my wife and actually came clean with her regarding a part of my addiction, porn and masturbation. I didn’t disclose to her that I visited massage parlors, as that would have ended our marriage and destroyed her personally. But, as her husband, I hated living in hypocrisy, with the shame and guilt, that I realized that I either had to leave her and the kids and go full blown into destroying my life with illicit activity OR change my ways and stop being unfaithful both in my mind and seeking out sexual services. I did the latter. I hated my sinful activity that I took drastic measures to cut it out, repent from it, and never return again. It’s been almost 6 months and my life has never been better. My marriage has improvised, my wife and I are really close, and overall we’re in a really good place.

I can’t speak for other men as to why they see escorts or watch porn or go to massage parlors, but as for me, it wasn’t because I feel like my wife was neglecting me or because I loved that secret lifestyle. Not at all. I hated it. And it was all rooted in my addiction to porn from a very early age. I wished I
Never got sucked into it and eventually sought out greater highs. But it got to the point where I knew that I was on the brink of destroying my life and so I knew I reached my rock bottom and was convinced that I had to quit. I recognize masturbation and visiting Asian massage parlors for the drug that it was and I really hated it and didn’t want to replace my marriage with it.

Part of my journey was also deeply entrenched in a spiritual fear. As a believer, I constantly heard passages of Scripture being read in church about how the sexually immoral will not inherit the kingdom of God, and I started to take that to heart. I was litterally having God’s Wors scare the living hell out of me, because I didn’t want to stand before God and recieve his wrath instead of his mercy when I died. That shook me up, and actually sanctified me to the point of me needing to reach for outside help. I had a pastor and a friend help me with getting over porn and masturbation.

But I came here to NoFap to seek accountability for not visiting AMPs, and so fate it has been successful. I would say that the root issue of visiting parlors for me was tied to masturbation and seeking to “desires” myself whenever I experienced a difficult situation in my life. Since I discovered masturbation at the age of 12, I used it as a daily ritual to decompress myself either rin the morning or evening, and that just messed me up. I had to detox and twisted my brain for a few months to not allow that kind of behavior to control me.

All by the grace of God, I’m at where I’m at.

 

Someone once said "you're not in love with someone until you don't want to cheat"! They might love what you do for them. But that doesn't mean you don't deserve love or that there is anything wrong with you. We may never have someone that truly loves us because the majority of men think it's okay to cheat and watch porn and still pretend they love you! It's the world we live in. It's best to move on and stop trying to figure it out. You're wasting your time on this earth. He'll regret it when he's alone and the only person that wants him is an escort. But that's not for you to worry about. Haddaway said it best when he said What is love? Baby don't hurt me .

 

I long for a wife but I am not sure if I am ready for that haul yet, I like think of some of my posts as either a form of self-motivation or a subliminal cry for help, Perhaps a little bit of both. I am unsure at this point. Opening up about things like love or what pleases me sexually I honestly quite hard for me to do, Even just talking about something simple like music can be too much for me. But know this, As horny and as degenerate as I get at times, I love my wife if I ever find one, how do I know this, because if I didn't, I'd be trying to find ways to rail every woman that has simply given me a boner. Which I don't want to do, I don't want sex with any woman unless she has made vows to me and truly loves me.

 

Any post which explains what love is or is not will get it wrong. People are complicated and the ways in which we experience and express love differ enormously. @RDucky have you watched the recent Netflix series The Diplomat? The main couple in that have a terrible marriage but they still clearly love each other, in their way.

My own experience of love is very different from my wife's. She knows herself, that's one of the traits that attracted me to her in the first place, while I am more adrift as a person (or was). She knew how much she loved me the moment she saw me, but for me it takes some kind of event for me to access or witness my deeper feelings. For me two events enabled me to see how deeply I love my wife.

The first was bad. Before we married I had a sort-of affair with her best friend's girlfriend. (Sort-of because we never had sex, though that was her stringing me on, not me being moral.) After that blew up my then-girlfriend and I went on holiday together, ostensibly to patch things up but I had decided that the honest thing to do was to break up. When the time came for the big chat I had a powerful wave of realisation that I was making a big mistake, that my life was about making this woman happy and that leaving her would be a terrible mistake. So I stayed and to prove myself to her we married.

The second was the birth of our first child, our daughter. That was such a miracle, and brought me so much joy, I was washed over again with the realisation of how deeply I loved my wife.

But for her my behaviour has obviously fallen short. When she approached me in 2010 (we started dating in 1983) to tell me that my porn use was destroying her self esteem and that, to protect herself, I would have to stop or she would have to leave I could see how frightened she was. She honestly thought that I would risk losing her rather than quit porn. It upsets me so much that I did that to her.

There are so many things I am proud about in my current streak (I'm on Day 2428 without porn) but the most amazing thing is when my wife tells me that she has never felt more loved than she does now.

I'm not sure whether I love her more now than I did before, but I know that I am more aware of my love and I am much better at expressing it and living its implications.

 

I think you’ve about nailed it - slightly different story but I hated it. It was tearing be apart as I just didn’t seem able to stop.

I’m not a religious person - but a good mate of mine (and his god) helped me see the light and realise I really had to stop before I destroyed myself and the people I most loved.

So @RDucky - I too am sorry from the bottom of my heart what a man put you through in the name of addiction. I’m just so glad for my sake and that of those I love so much that I found a way out of the spiral. I’m truly sorry your husband didn’t and you got hurt so much.

I really can’t stress enough how genuine my understanding for you and my apology is meant to be.

 

Every answer will come from a different person, with a different perspective and possibly a different agenda. A cheater might tell you that it's possible to cheat and still love. Maybe they truly mean that or maybe they want people to believe that because they don't want their spouse to leave them. I might say they don't love you because when I cheated I didn't love the person anymore. Would you cheat on someone you loved? Even if he tells you he loved you..Are you going to believe him? Do you love yourself? If you don't feel loved, will it even matter? You've been through some trauma and it's going to take time to heal. No matter what any of us say, you will heal in your own time. Once you have, that question will be at the very back of your mind...if it is there at all.

 

P.s. 3 decades is a long time to waste someone's time. I'm sorry he did that to you! Love or not that's selfish and wrong!

 

My husband swears he loved me. I pointed out all the behaviors that proved he didn’t. No offense, but if I make a mistake and it hurts my child, I apologize and take action to never hurt them that way again. I don’t lie to them. I read everything I can about how be a good, healthy parent. Same thing when I married, I worked at being a better partner . Do I think he loves me now? Yes, his behaviors support his words. His actions show it. I think of love like a fruit tree, you plant it, it grows and the fruit is the manifestation of the action you took to make the tree healthy and produce fruit. You water it, prune it, fertilize it. If one partner isn’t doing their part, or worse is just chopping off branches, the tree will bear that out. The work you put into it produces no fruit, small fruit, damaged fruit, or healthy fruit. If the addict is barely watering the tree, the fruit will be affected. Fruit is the shared love. You can be married, with an old tree that’s never produced fruit.

 

So much truth here. The biggest reason I didn’t cheat on my husband was not because I loved him, it was because I loved my children and myself too much. I knew cheating would hurt me. I knew I couldn’t live with myself. Hell, I was 40 years old, felt completely rejected ( not once in those 17 years had my husband ever said yes to sex) and my perfect “ type”, albeit 10 years younger, came on to me like a freight train! Hardest temptation I’d ever faced. By that point I didn’t give a rip if I hurt my husband, But I couldn’t do it to my kids or myself. I just believe addicts love their addiction more than anything until it starts hurting them more than anything.

 

"I just believe addicts love their addiction more than anything until it starts hurting them more than anything" that was very good statement. It really takes a strong person to resist that temptation once you've been wronged.

 

I think it depends what you mean by love. If you define love as an emotion, i.e., a feeling of attraction, then yes, an active addict may have feelings of love for his wife yet still cheat on her. In my faith tradition, love is defined as "willing the good of the other". In other words, love is shown by actions. An active addict who betrays his wife is not loving her, because he is doing something against her good.

 

Very good. That’s exactly how I interpret it.

 

Love is an act of the will where there is a giving of self for the good of another. Within marriage this self-giving must be mutual as any imbalance between the spouses would indicate selfishness, and therefor a lack of love on that spouse’s part.

Not all egotists are addicts, but all addicts are egotists and egotists are by nature selfish. One could say addiction is the result of runaway egotism where a person has become so preoccupied with their perception of themselves that they’ve become a slave to selfishness.

There can be many underlying factors for this though and some can be rooted in past trauma where the habit of being preoccupied with one’s self was a survival mechanism for past abuse. A distrust of others puts you in constant survival mode and it just so happens that the ego can’t be maintained without constant protection, which usually comes in the form of rationalization, dishonesty, and secrecy. This is why honesty, trust, and accountability are the way out of addiction and egotism —this process is called the death to self, which I think is only accomplished by the grace of God.

 

Great insight. And explanation

 

@Cecil’s Ghost I don't understand this bit:

Would you expand on that please?