More Marriage Trouble

November 2000

I started to suddenly gain weight at an alarming rate. I hadn’t really changed my eating habits, but I chalked it up to menopause and possibly thyroid issues, which ran in my family. I felt disgusted with my appearance and had to resort to larger, more loose-fitting clothes to feel comfortable. All of the old tricks I had successfully used in the past to lose weight no longer worked. Nothing worked!

While I had pretty much emotionally detached myself from my husband, a small sliver of hope remained that we might possibly salvage our marriage. We had been getting along a bit better and I just wasn’t ready to throw in the towel on my marriage. Besides, I felt I had enough on my plate just dealing with the ongoing cancer treatments, working and raising a daughter to deal with the thought of divorce. Those thoughts of saving my marriage were shattered, however, when I found out by accident that my husband had been obsessively surfing the Internet for pornography. I had to go into the computer history (for a reason I don’t recall now) and discovered a very extensive and lengthy list of porn sites that had been visited. Now it suddenly dawned on me why he stayed up late so many evenings, long after I had gone to bed. I knew that I had not visited them and I was fairly certain that my daughter hadn’t either. But when I saw that he had visited a porn site for young teenage girls, I felt like someone had hit me in the stomach with a sledge hammer. Had he done something to MY daughter???????? At the same time I had discovered this information, he was on his way to Toronto to pick up a part for an automobile he was restoring and my daughter had rode along with him. I had to wait almost four hours for them to return to confront him with what I had found. During that four hours, I experienced a kaleidoscope of emotions: extreme anger, betrayal, disgust, anxiety and profound fear that he had possibly done something to my daughter. I would never forgive myself if that was the case because I was the one that had brought him into our lives.

Upon their return home from Toronto, they could both immediately tell that I was extremely angry and upset. I sent my daughter upstairs to her room and went ballistic on my husband!! I showed him what I had found and asked him if he had ever touched my daughter in a sexual manner. He swore he hadn’t and hung his head in shame over what I had discovered. He told me he was glad I had found it because he hated keeping it a secret. I couldn’t bear to look at him and kicked him out. In the meantime, my daughter was extremely alarmed at my behavior and demanded to know what this was all about. I told her and asked her point blank if he had ever done anything to her. She clearly and definitively said “no”. I was immensely relieved, but still profoundly shaken at what I had discovered. There was really nothing left of this marriage but an empty shell. My husband went to stay with a friend and after several days he contacted me to inform me that he wanted to see a sex addiction counselor to overcome this and save our marriage. I foolishly agreed to this and several days later he returned home. He did find a female sex addiction counselor and saw her once, possibly twice, before he began to find things wrong with her. He abruptly stopped seeing her because, according to my husband, she didn’t know what she was doing. Of course, this led to my eventually finding more porn on the computer and we were back to Square One. Only this time I totally disengaged myself from him and went on to live my own life while pretending everything was okay between us. I didn’t have the energy to officially pull the plug on the marriage just yet, but I knew it was just a matter of time.