Upon my urging my husband went to marriage counseling with me. And it doesn't work when one party doesn't want to be there. (Karma?) He felt like the therapist was taking my side and the sessions were all about me bitching about his porn use and lack of attention and him relunctantly agreeing to stop. I think we might have gone to 3 or 4 sessions and then stopped. It was around the same time I also stopped going to my own therapist too.
He was miserable, I was miserable and on top of that we had a busy and stressful life between work and the kids (my daughter from my first marriage, and our two together, and he had two sons from his first marriage). But such is life and people have gone thru worse, yet I had a hard time coping with all of this.
His porn use continued and eventually if I thought if I couldn't fight it why not join in. I offered to watch it with him and went too far: losing a lot of weight (and I was never heavy) getting cosmetic surgery and highlighting my hair blonde. I thought if I could look like the women in the movies he watched he would be more attracted to me.
It was a temporary fix.
I think we were married about 3 or 4 years when my husband suggested that we experiment with an open marriage. I am ashamed to say that I agreed to this. I was so afraid of losing him, so scared he was going to have an affair. Who was this man I had married? It wasn't easy for me to watch him with other women and I pretended that it was all ok but deep inside me I was so sad. I didn't want to share my husband and I didn't want some strange man touching me.
Also, around this time he admitted to me that he had had numerous affairs while married to his first wife and told me that when he married me he promised himself that he would never do that again He wanted this marriage to work and regretted what he had done. It made the swinging/open marriage make more sense. They way he described it was we could both explore our sexuality in a safe environment with out any secrets. Everything would be in the open.
My drinking picked up a little. Whenever we went out we drank. However, he was handling it a lot better than me. I always felt crappy the next day and had bad hangovers. We never drank at home but dinners out were always a few cocktails before and a bottle or two of wine during. Ironically, it was these nights out when I felt closest to my husband. Alcohol was my escape and I could pretend everything was alright and it felt like we were going out on a date like the times before we got married and we didn’t have all this extra strife and stress in real life. I could pretend for a few hours out alone with him that my life was just fine.
Today as I write this with almost 11 months of sobriety I wonder if I have some deep emotional or mental issues because what sane, normal, respectable woman would agree to something like this and not put limits on what is acceptable behavior?
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