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"My jealousy and a sense that I was
competing for affection against an elusive other lover burst through
my facade." |
My first
husband left me for a younger woman, leaving me with a sense of personal
failure. I decided that my mistake had been marrying a man with "poor
values" - alcoholism, materialism, and bizarre sexual preferences. So I
decided to find someone who shared my moral values: my second husband was a
minister who seemed to be smart, fun, honest, thoughtful and kind.
Four years into our
marriage I became painfully aware of a passionate affair he was having. I asked
myself, "How could this be? He is so different from my first husand."
I was sure somehow I was wrong, so I rationalized and made it a practice to
trust - and not to look for things I didn't want to see. I tried to make things
better, to focus on the kids, to stick with it and try to work thing out. I
channeled my discomfort about my marriage into resentment, anger and criticism
of issues at work, in my community and in politics. That approach worked fairly
well for the next four years or so. One day, it stopped working.
There were too many
suspicious lunches, notes, telephone calls, night meetings and an eerie absence
even when we seemed to be most intimate. Finally, my jealousy and a sense that I
was competing for affection against an elusive other lover burst through my
facade. I was tired of always having to keep my guard up, of competing and
always losing. It was eating away at my sense of who I was, depleting what
little I had left. I finally gave up. I knew that to save myself, he had to go.
So I confronted him, and when I saw panic cloud his face, I knew I had been
right all along. I raged and told him to get out. I couldn't live this way any
more. I was screaming and throwing rocks in the middle of the night in our front
yard. The unmanageability of my life lay in our rock-strewn lawn.
In the morning he
asked that we make an appointment with a marriage counselor, just to help us
through the separation process and to protect our son from unnecessary pain. I
agreed, looking forward to the end of the madness. At that appointment the
counselor confronted my husband with his sexaholism. She also confirmed my
powerlessness, saying that he had to choose to get better; there was nothing I
could do to change him. She suggested that he attend SA and I attend S-Anon, and
I am forever grateful for that suggestion. My husband clung to his new program
and I immediately grabbed hold of mine. It was a confirmation of all I had
experienced - I wasn't crazy. The lasting gift of this program for me, though,
has been my renewed sense of purpose and joy in myself, the knowledge that I can
not only survive, but joyfully live with or without my husband. Today I use the
program to live, not just live with sexaholism, and for that I am
grateful.
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