The Penultimate Piece of the Puzzle

This is the fourth in a series of posts on how I came to discover my husband's sex addiction five years ago.

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When our son was born, our world performed one neat pirouette before going into a crazy, unexpected, largely incomprehensible interpretive dance. Mark and I found ourselves crazy in love with this tiny creature who cried almost constantly and who behaved counter to what every book, TV show, grandmotherly figure and misguided fantasy led us to expect.

That first year of my son's life is something we each seem to have merely survived. For all the love we had for each other and that baby boy, we existed in our separate dark places that year. Although Mark made a silent promise on the day of our baby boy's birth that all the intrigue, flirting and cheating would end, without the tools of recovery, each new stress was driving him to the only means of coping he knew: sex. And I was wrapped in a boa constrictor of anxiety that would squeeze tighter with each movement, crushing me with migraines and chest pains that would wake me in the middle of the night.

As the months crept on, I'd find that when I woke, from anxiety or the baby, it would be to an empty bed with Mark on the computer in the other room. I'd doze and wake every hour, only to find Mark still gone. It would be two or three in the morning before he would come to bed, and he'd be up again at five for work. I'd hear him in the shower, muttering and cursing to himself, as if he were talking in his sleep. I'd lie in bed, straining to listen, thinking those words held the answer to his secret.

What secret? I really couldn't tell. None of it made any sense. When I tried to talk about what he was doing on the computer or ask why he was talking to himself, I hit that soft barrier again: I was fighting to swim through sand, with only the illusion of mobility. I knew he was looking at pornography on the computer (whether because he told me or because I sensed it I don't recall any longer), but I couldn't understand why that should be a secret, nor why it would be reason enough to lose hours of already scarce and precious sleep. Why hide porn? I'd never had a problem with it: I viewed porn individually (as did he) and we'd view it as a couple. And why stay up for hours viewing porn night after night? I was there: a real live available partner. And sleep was there with me.

Something was wrong, really wrong. Something was being hidden from me, and I had to see that something. If Mark wouldn't pull aside the curtain, I decided I would rip it down. I sat down one day at our iMac (grandchild of our first computer, Abby) and installed software that would track each keystroke. Then in the morning, when Mark left for work after a night on the computer, I sat down to trace his footsteps.

I found he had an e-mail account I didn't know about (one of several, it turned out). I found that he had been frequenting a pornographic web site that allowed users to pay for access to adult chat rooms and pay still more for private video chats. I found that he had spent hundreds of dollars in a matter of days paying a woman to masturbate for him on camera and that he had been e-mailing her privately as well. I found that he had been attempting to set up our web cam to send video of himself back to her, but had been unable to overcome some technical difficulties.

I thought briefly about waiting until he got home from work to talk to him, but I knew I couldn't make it through the day with the blood pounding in my ears and my stomach churning in rage and pain and confusion. I picked up the phone with shaking hands and called him on his cell phone on his way to work. He heard the tremors in my voice, turned the car around and rushed back home.

The question I spat out over and over in my fury and bewilderment was, "What were you thinking? Why? Why? Why?" His answer, which seemed crazy, but which was delivered with utter sincerity was, "I didn't know I was doing anything wrong." I could see genuine bewilderment in his face. He didn't see the difference between his actions (which hurt and infuriated me) and viewing pornography (which he knew I was fine with). He told me that he was so worried about me and how exhausted I was with the baby that he wanted me to get as much rest as possible; he decided to use pornography and be as quiet as he could about it so he wouldn't disturb me. He said he had gotten bored with pictures years ago; they didn't do it for him anymore. So, he moved on to video, but recently that wasn't exciting enough either. He really wanted something more, so he sought out the video chats, which was just live, interactive pornography, right?

He was baffled that I was ok with porn, but not with this, that I considered this infidelity, betrayal, cheating. After all, no actual physical contact had been made. He looked like a soap opera amnesiac struggling to remember his true identity: furrowing his brow and saying, "Well, if you say I'm Dirk and I'm a surgeon, I think I might be able to see how that could be true..." There was something he was almost understanding, but not quite. And what he wasn't understanding was so. frightfully. OBVIOUS. It terrified me that he really couldn't see the difference between a Playboy centerfold and a live, online interaction. How could he not grasp the distinction? How could I trust him not to cross some other line in the future, something I understood to be there but he couldn't see?

Still, by the end of the conversation, he'd made it very clear that he was terribly sorry, that he never wanted to hurt me, that he loved and adored me, that he'd learned the difference between right and wrong, and that he was absolutely never going to do this again. He canceled his account with the porn site. He agreed to let me make decisions about the amount of rest and sex I needed instead of making that decision for me. He swore he knew right from wrong now and would never do wrong again. (And he never did do anything on the home computer again.) I was still hurt and uneasy, but we seemed to be back on the right track. Glad we talked about that. Problem solved, right?