1. Welcome to NoFap! We have disabled new forum accounts from being registered for the time being. In the meantime, you can join our weekly accountability groups.
    Dismiss Notice

Unanswered Suspicions

Discussion in 'Partner Support' started by curiousjo, Oct 14, 2019.

  1. curiousjo

    curiousjo Fapstronaut

    36
    12
    8
    I'm new to this group, but not new to the world of PA. My husband has been using since long before we were married. I have caught him many times. I've confronted him many times. "I'll stop. I'm sorry. It won't happen again. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." I hate the I'm sorrys the most.

    Anyways. Last year I discovered his use again. He will always lie, I won't give up, and then he comes clean. But only a little bit at a time, he'll share shreds of the truth. I know when he's lying, and continue to ask him until he finally admits his use.

    I thought he was doing good. But my intuition has nagged me otherwise for the last six or so months. My intuition is freakishly accurate, it's a blessing and a curse. I've asked him recently and of course, like always, he maintains innocence. I can't imagine after all these years that he actually quit viewing porn and masturbating. Maybe I'm just being unfair.

    We don't have passwords or locks on our phones. He used to charge his phone in the kitchen, a pretty neutral place in our home. He has since started charging it in the bedroom on his nightstand. He works nights. So when he's sleeping during the day, I'm home.

    I looked through his phone (something he's aware of me doing from time to time) He has his YouTube settings set to pause, pause history, and pause search. So I'm guessing this means that it won't track what he watches and what he searches. His most recent history is from November 2018. Well that's weird. In my opinion, the only way someone would want to not have their history found is if they're watching/doing things that they should not be doing. The same goes for his Google settings, all paused.
    He actually uses a search engine called DuckDuckGo. I don't know too much about it, but it's huge on privacy. There's actually no way to view the history on it! Well either that, or I'm an idiot and can't figure it out.

    In the past, I would typically find things and be able to show him, so that he had no case when he chose to deny it. It's impossible to do this now since almost everything he has on his phone is paused, or ultra private.

    Maybe I'm just being paranoid because after all these years, denial has always been his response. I want to trust him, but I absolutely cannot. He's proven that I can't trust him.

    Another concern is that his PE never improved after supposedly not masturbating, or watching/looking at porn for the last 16 months. I thought there would be some improvement on that front, considering that it was never an issue in the past. It didn't really start becoming an issue until about 6 or so years ago.

    I guess what I'm asking here is for opinions. Am I being paranoid, or should I confront him about it? I gently confront him. I hate the word confront because it sounds so hostile. I have asked several times over the past 2 months, but he always says that he's been doing really good about it.

    I hate this undeniable feeling that I get when I know but he won't admit it.
     
  2. Always trust your gut, especially when you've been doing this for so long. You're not just being paranoid. You're being realistic. As you said, if he's innocent and has done nothing wrong, then why the need to hide things? And, if he wants you to trust and believe him, he should have no problem being transparent. It's up to him to rebuild trust, and the best way to start is by no longer being deceptive or hiding what he's doing. Liars are the only ones who need to keep everything hidden. I'm sorry you're dealing with this.
     
    curiousjo likes this.
  3. fadedfidelity

    fadedfidelity Fapstronaut

    You do to need to ask us—you already know he has been faking recovery! Just save your time and leave him. He has wasted years of your life and continued to choose his addiction over your relationship. Time to kick him out!
     
    hope4healing and fuzzywaz like this.
  4. fuzzywaz

    fuzzywaz Fapstronaut

    414
    778
    93
    You're not crazy. He is using.
     
    fadedfidelity and hope4healing like this.
  5. curiousjo

    curiousjo Fapstronaut

    36
    12
    8
    Thank you for your responses. Sometimes you just need to hear it from another person to fully admit to yourself what you already know to be true.
    It's crazy how you can make yourself crazy by thinking that you're overthinking things. It's nothing he ever says to me that makes me second guess myself, it's just me getting inside my own head. I just want to give him the benefit of the doubt. But my intuition is strong, and ceaselessly nagging at me. I hate going through these roller coaster cycles.
    I know how dangerous p can be, and I don't want it to lead him down a road where he makes horrific offenses against our marriage.
     
    fuzzywaz likes this.
  6. fadedfidelity

    fadedfidelity Fapstronaut

    Yes, that’s just it. We love them so deeply that we want to think we are overreacting or being too sensitive just so we don’t have to face the truth. I used to do it myself. It’s “just porn”, right? BUT we know that it is much more than that.
    If they watched it and then they still had emotional intelligence, compassion, wanted to be an active partner around the home and an active father to the children then maybe we could consider it “normal”. But they don’t do all of those things mentioned above plus the sex life becomes either absent or empty or worse case; abusive and dangerous. We lose our lover, friend, and partner. We also suffer personal damage to our self esteem with constant rejection and them using us as psubs. Our children suffer from two detached parents due to the turmoil in the marriage. It affects friendships and family outside of the relationship too when you start to pull away and isolate yourself to keep his secret and your embarrassing pain. For a woman, it is embarrassing if others know your husband prefers porn to you! They wonder what you aren’t doing in the bedroom or think you are a prude.
    As SO’s we are frogs in boiling water...the heat slowly creeps up until it is too late. We don’t even know how we got here! The secrets and lies and his double life behind closed and locked doors, passwords changed and secret credit cards and electronic devices make us blind to the betrayal.

    We can either choose to stay in a toxic relationship and ruin our self worth while hanging onto false hope of him changing OR we choose ourselves and become strong, badass women who will not tolerate being treated like trash!

    My husband knew I was choosing the latter this time. I snapped and said NO FUCKING MORE! I deserve better!!! I was serious about divorce and leaving. I was serious about caring for and respecting myself over him. He knew he had to do it for himself and not me. There is no guarantee that I will continue to stay and he knows that. His words mean nothing and I do not trust him.
    BUT I stay because HE showed REAL change through ACTIONS this time. He didn’t keep playing the victim and didn’t make excuses. He stood up to his addiction and got help with a therapist, joined this site, read books, listened to audio tapes, started improving his diet and exercise, and stepped up to help. He didn’t continue to play on his computer and neglect me and the kids, nor put his job/work first anymore. He works from home more and no longer stays at hotels alone when doing overnight and out of state jobs. He made arrangements with his work so that he always has a male co-worker go with him so he is not alone in a hotel room. (That was a huge trigger for him.) He found out what his triggers were and has worked on replacing bad habits for healthy ones. (Example: Doing project around the house instead of watching porn.)

    Unfortunately, I see the forums here and on other sites like this and most PA’s will never change. They will relapse time and time again, or worse, get deeper into their addiction, even worse, fake recovery.
    Some PA’s will be forthright and blunt and refuse to change and leave. Those SO’s may not feel like it, but they are the lucky ones if they have a PA that is the latter. They will not waste more years of their life, their youth, with a liar that betrays them over and over again. They will not wake up one day to find they are now 50 or 60 years old and still dealing with the same empty shell of a man, hoping yet he will change.

    But for most SO’s, your partner was not the person you thought you married. They were snakes that hid a dark secret and fooled you into trusting them. They use your love as a tool to blind you to their addiction. They become master manipulators, gaslighting you to feel like you are the problem, a nag, controlling, not sexy enough, etc.
    Porn twists their reality and screws up their brain to believe that all women want to be sex objects, used, and oogled. They get jaded by normal and desire more novel, strange sexual things. Pretty soon, real women don’t make them hard any more. Then they lose their ability to get hard at all. This is something the porn industry knows about and they don’t care! That is the reason for all of the boner pill ads around porn!!! They could give a shit if they ruin men, women, and families—as long as they get that money.
     
    Last edited: Oct 17, 2019
    fuzzywaz and Lilla_My like this.
  7. Lilla_My

    Lilla_My Fapstronaut

    571
    1,533
    123
    First of all, per usual, I see a lot of "leave him, he is using" in this thread. It's not a bad advice, quite the opposite, however, it's a pretty generic one on here, and also kind of ironic in this part of the forum (which consist almost exclusively of married women, who themselves would almost certainly be better off if they left their husbands). Yet most of us don't leave, even if we perhaps should. There is rarely any definite answer to that.

    Because marriage is an investment, and I know you have put in a lot of effort, time, emotion and money in your relationship. Maybe you have a family. Things are always much more complex than we make it out to be when we tell someone to leave their marriage. If it was easy for you to leave, you probably would have done so.

    It's very true though that most, if not all PAs, don't even consider adjusting their behaviour until it costs them their relationships. If you need to leave to preserve your sanity, you definitively should, even if it's just temporarily.

    So what kind of conversations can you have with your husband about this? I assume it's a touchy subject. Does he understand that you are not comfortable with him deleting his web history or using private browsers? Could he consider changing his habits in order for you to feel safe? Could he install a porn blocker?

    How does he react if you tell him that this is something that's troubling you, and that you two, in tandem, figured out what to do to make you happier and safer in the relationship? That would ultimately shift the conversation from (what he would interpret as) blame to maybe something that could ultimately be a project for you to feel better, something he could be on board of.

    Further, is it possible for him to maybe find a job that doesn't include night shifts? Working nights can have dreadful impact on our health, and it's a possibility your husband is dealing with an untreated depression. Because if he is engaging in unsuitable behaviour and he is unable to stop, it could be an indicator that he isn't where he is supposed to be mentally. Porn leads to depression and depression leads to porn - both of these factors can equate the end of an otherwise happy marriage. Is he aware of why he needs to stop for his own sake?
     
    Last edited: Oct 15, 2019
  8. fadedfidelity

    fadedfidelity Fapstronaut

    I am curious to know more about your story. What have you tried so far throughout the years? Is he on this site? Does he post on the forums? Why not use a web filter/porn blocker? Have you two (or just him) been to see a certified sex addiction therapist? Has he shown any interest in reading and learning more about betrayal trauma and porn addiction? Is he willing to show you his phone or computer at any given time if you ask? Have you talked about him getting a different job or take a different shift to help his recovery? Have you ever kicked him out of the house or temporarily separated in different homes or he live in a basement of the home?
     
  9. budvap

    budvap Fapstronaut

    76
    62
    18
    Tell your partner that you cannot fully trust him because of obvious reasons. Set up some rules like “full transparency on browsers” or whatever bothers you. Be strict that you put the rules down and expect him to follow them. No negotiation. It is his turn to get your trust back! (I hope you are sensible enough not to make the rules humiliate your partner :)).

    As an acknowledgeable P-addicted partner I would never protest against this if my wife asked me for. To the contrary, I would express full respect to her. If he does not, then something is most likely wrong there…
     
  10. Faceplanter

    Faceplanter Fapstronaut

    I'm just going to chip in that there are reasons to do such privacy changes that would not mean PA is back or even be bad. I have had to research such things myself (YouTube is paused right now for my searches I think).

    I will do searches for resources on sexual issues and PA topics online and on YouTube and since I have kids in the house that might use devices logged into those same accounts I have paused the history so they don't have weird videos in their feeds or from their searches.

    I doubt this is why in the OPs case, but if the PA has an immediate response of "this is why I did these privacy settings" it might be reasonable. Anything along the lines of "I don't know how that happened" are BS, in my opinion.
     
  11. fuzzywaz

    fuzzywaz Fapstronaut

    414
    778
    93
    Preach
     
  12. curiousjo

    curiousjo Fapstronaut

    36
    12
    8
    Here we are three weeks later. I couldn't quiet my intuition. I asked my husband about the things that I found on his phone. I told him I didn't have time for BS, give me a straight answer. Typically he will beat around the bush and drag it out. He came clean, which I am thankful for. I gave him some suggestions, this website being one of them.

    Actions speak louder than words. That hurts.

    He has watched a few informative videos that I sent him. I asked him to make a plan to attack this monster head-on. Again, actions speak louder than words. He has yet to come up with a plan to be able to avoid porn and hopefully resist the temptation.
    I understand that this is an addiction, just like alcohol, gambling, food, shopping, drugs, etc. The way that addiction works doesn't change based on the specific addiction.
    I will not leave my husband because porn has a grip on him. I made the choice 11 years ago to commit myself to him. So when he's going through something like this, me walking out on him would only make it worse. I don't want this to get worse for him. I want it to get better. I am making the choice to stand by him and love him through this. Will it be easy? No. But that does not mean I should give up. If it were me, and I had an addiction of some kind, I certainly would want to know that he would be by my side through the thick of it. I'm not going to give up on him.

    We've had numerous conversations about this. He knows how I feel about it, he feels the same way about it. He's definitely not one of the PAs who turn it around on the other person. He feels terrible about it. He is willing to make changes necessary to avoid porn. But being willing and taking initiative are two different things.

    The job is definitely something that can't be changed. He could change shifts, but it would be more detrimental to him. The work dynamics are totally different from night shift to day shift. He would be more stressed and get paid less to be on days. I'm a stay at home mom, so his income is all we have.

    I have shared with him websites that give extensive detail on what happens when one watches porn. He is aware of the dangers all around. It seems like he cares, but then no true action is taken.
     
    Last edited: Nov 7, 2019
  13. curiousjo

    curiousjo Fapstronaut

    36
    12
    8
    I definitely do not shame him about this. I understand it's something that he doesn't WANT to be involved in, but just can't help himself. He feels enough shame on his own, I refuse to add to it. It's just not constructive. I want to be there for him, to support him as he climbs out of this. He never has issues with me checking his phone, but...he did tell me that he deletes all the bad stuff before he gets home in the morning. I put a monitoring app on his phone. I didn't want to have to do this.
     
  14. curiousjo

    curiousjo Fapstronaut

    36
    12
    8
    I agree, and it makes sense that one would want to protect children from seeing those types of things for the very searches that you're talking about. Algorithms are crazy things, but they could always make mistakes and fill your suggested videos with all sorts of dirty stuff. Unfortunately you are right, and this is not the reason that he had his history paused.
     

Share This Page