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

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To tell the story of how I came to learn that my husband is a sex addict, I have to start nearly fifteen years ago, when we first moved in together. A pebble dropped in the pond then to create ripples that bumped against me years later and made me question what I thought I knew. Today you see the pond, tomorrow the pebble, then the ripples. Or so I intend for it to go...

Mark and I were in our early 20s when we moved in together. Our first apartment was like first apartments generally are: small, old, furnished with whatever came to us cheap or free. The apartment exists now only in photos and memories; the actual building was torn down years ago to make way for more luxurious accommodations.

The apartment consisted of one main room that served as both living room and dining room, a kitchen so small you could not stand with arms outstretched without hitting a wall, a bedroom and one bathroom. The floors were battered olive green vinyl tile throughout. The apartment came furnished with a burgundy vinyl sofa and mustard yellow vinyl chair that would stick to your flesh when you sat on them. (We immediately stowed both in the storage unit, which was (oddly) several times larger than the kitchen and replaced them with a futon.) There was also a dark wood laminate dining table, which we kept, although we rarely ate at it.

On our first night in the apartment, we ordered Chinese fast food and set the cartons up on the table: a feast for the friends who helped us move in. We ate off of paper plates, sitting on the tile floors because there weren't enough chairs to go around. We later created the illusion of a dining room for this table by erecting a Japanese shoji screen between it and the rest of the room.

I wouldn't have thought, given all the memories we created in that apartment, that the laminate table would play such a role. But it was sitting at that table that I realized that Mark was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. It was one summer, I think. I had just been on a visit home, back to the room I occupied as a teenager, and I'd come back to our apartment with old cassette tapes I'd recorded in high school by holding a tape recorder up to my clock radio. (Old school, people. Long before the days of downloading music from the Internet.) The songs were filled with static and snippets of commercials and D.J.'s voices; sometimes they started well into the song if it had taken me too long to recognize that this was indeed one I liked.

We were sitting at the dining room table listening to song after song on the poor quality cassettes and laughing. Then "Easy Lover" came on, by Phil Collins and that other guy named Phil. (At least that's how I've always referred to it.) "I loved this song!" we shouted together, and started singing it in crazy laughing duet across the table to each other. I felt so comfortable, so free to be myself, however ridiculous myself might be, and I was so happy and crazy in love that in the middle of that song, I looked across the table at Mark's shining eyes and smiling face and thought, "This moment, with this man, is where I want to be forever."

We bought a computer together sometime after that, and it made its home on the laminate table. Our friends told me later that the purchase of the computer was when they knew we were going to get married. It was a Apple Quadra, and we gave it a name, like a baby. That's geek love for you.

And indeed, it wasn't too long before Mark asked me to marry him. With "our song" (not "Easy Lover") playing on the stereo, he knelt in front of me as I sat on the futon in our living room. I don't remember what he said, because I fell down on my knees next to him before I think he was fully done. And we laughed and cried together, kneeling on the cheap area rug we'd gotten to cover the battered olive tile floor.

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Look! Phil Collins kinda used to have some hair...