I ended up marrying the guy I had an affair with about 8 months after we met. He was the opposite of my first husband: grounded, reliable and financially secure. But as I would soon find out that cliché about the grass being greener is so not true.
A few months into marriage #2 I found out that my husband was viewing a lot of online porn. I was devastated because I compared myself to those women and knew I could never look like them. It made me feel so inadequate. He promised to stop viewing it. He did not. Maybe he couldn't?
I got pregnant and we had a son. Two months later we had a surprise and found out I was pregnant again. We had a daughter. I want to add here that despite all the drama/chaos/insanity I have created in my life I am the blessed mother of 3 beautiful children all of whom are happy, healthy, well adjusted and doing well in school.
The divide between my husband and I was getting wider. I was resentful of his lack of affection and porn use and he was angry about my snooping and nagging. I was so desperate for love and attention and I wasn't getting it from my husband. Sometimes I felt like I was married to my father and in many ways we assumed a parent - child relationship. He made a lot of the decisions and I agreed to them. Partly because I didn’t like arguments (I have always and still am bad at handling confrontations) but also because it was just easier to not have to make decisions. He had some similar personality traits to Dad, ones from the onset I had admired, but the distant, unemotional side of him was difficult for me to accept. I was depressed and I felt doomed. I wanted so badly for this marriage to work out. What kind of a loser gets divorced twice? What was I doing wrong that I was so unhappy again in a relationship?
I started obsessing about the porn and all kinds of thoughts flooded my head. What if he took it too far and met someone from the internet? He was becoming quieter and more secretive so my snooping just increased.
One night after he was asleep I took his keys, drove to his office (he owned the business), and went onto his computer. The stuff there was more graphic then what he had viewed at home but what amazed me most was the amount of time he spent looking at it. I mean, if someone is horny, and they choose to look at porn, they get off on it and then they are finished until the next time, right? This was hours and hours per day. He was an early riser and usually left home at 5 or 5:30 am and I just assumed it was to get a head start on his day. But every morning for 2 or 3 hours until his employees showed up the computer history showed him on all kinds of porn websites.
At one point I considered suicide and I remember clearly that night sitting alone in my kitchen after everyone had gone to bed pouring out a bottle of over-the-counter sleep medication into my hand. I put the blue pills in my mouth and then spat them back into my hand. Something stopped me from swallowing them.
I went to therapy for my depression and was prescribed anti-depressants. It took a few months to find the right medication and dosage but they did eventually help. Things at home really weren't much better but the talk therapy helped me to see that I really didn't have control over what my husband did. But I did have control over what my reactions were. It also helped me to realize I was very co-dependent too.
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