"Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself."

Mark and I lived most of our lives in the Matrix; we were born in it, grew up in it, met each other in it, were married in it. For over 30 years, our brains tried so hard, and failed, to make sense of what was wrong with our world.

In the Matrix, we had not just a happy, but a perfect marriage; we were ridiculously in love (total strangers would comment on it), we communicated well, we never fought, we shared the same interests, we had frequent and fabulous sex. Intellectually, emotionally and sexually we were a perfect match. Everything was perfect, yet something was a little off.

There was a receptionist at work Mark became friends with. I would never have bothered; as far as I was concerned, there was just nothing interesting about her. But I believed Mark saw in her the beauty that is in each of us. That's the way he was. He'd strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere, and develop a quick intimacy, even when he didn't have anything in common with them or didn't share their interests. He was just so much nicer to everyone than I was. So, he would go to lunch with her, he and I went out to dinner with her, and he went to dinner at her house when I was out of town.

This friendship was one of the splinters in my brain. I could feel it there, something off, something not right. But as hard as I worked it, I could not figure it out, not within the bounds of the Matrix. By all appearances, Mark had to be interested in the receptionist sexually: there was no basis for a friendship. Yet he couldn't be interested in her sexually: there was no basis for attraction. Friendship is based on common interests, mutual respect and well, liking one another, which didn't appear to be the case in this friendship. But then sexual relationships outside of marriage are the result of having and unhappy marriage, a sexually unappealing spouse or someone more appealing outside, which wasn't the case either. The receptionist wasn't physically attractive, I was. And there was no way he would risk losing our perfect marriage for someone so unworthy, someone who wasn't as attractive, as kind or as intelligent, someone whom he didn't even like and so couldn't possibly love. It didn't, and couldn't, make sense from inside the Matrix.

Mark and I escaped from the Matrix together one night. I had to figure out why the world didn't make sense, and so did he. Sitting on our sofa, facing each other, we swallowed our red pills and were yanked, breathless and gasping, out of our happy, warm dream into the sunless ruins of our real world.

That perfect life was a fantasy, not reality. Mark hit on and flirted with and had fantasies about and had sex with women outside our relationship from the moment we met; women he not only didn't love, but didn't even like or respect. He didn't do it because he didn't love me; he did it because he didn't love himself. (That misunderstanding was what kept us both trapped.) All those female "friends," all the ones I couldn't see the worth in, he didn't see it either. They were objects, ones and zeros, part of the fantasy world that surrounded us.

Addiction is a disease not, as most imagine, of intense craving or enormous lack of willpower, but a disease of fantasy. Those of you who have escaped from the Matrix know the feeling: the feeling of having lived in an alternate reality where things appeared right but felt wrong, the feeling of having been ripped from that to see the world as it really is, a world you could not conceive until you saw it. And those of you who are still in the Matrix, when Mark and I meet you, we will just look at each other and, doing our best Laurence Fishburne, say, "You think that's air you're breathing? Hmm..."