Image credit: Photo by Corie Howell on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

I have spent my share of time cyberstalking the women my husband has acted out with. (Hey, I'm codependent; I'm really, really good at focusing on people who aren't me.) And I'm not alone. Focusing on and obsessing about the activities of acting out partners is an unhealthy behavior nearly every partner of a sex addict engages in at some point. During my last binge googling the name of one of my husband's former lovers I realized I was engaging in a form of emotional cutting, purposely causing myself pain (and getting something from it).

Since then I have been tempted a few times to just check in, you know, and make sure his old lovers still have fewer Facebook friends than I do (because we all know what an important measure of a human being's worth that is), but thankfully I've been able to recognize that I'm standing there, ticket in hand, ready to jump on the crazy train, and have stopped each time. (Actually, just writing about it has me itching to do it. "What harm could it do?" the little voice in my head is saying,"You can just check real quick. No one will even know. And then you don't ever have to look again. Just this one last time." Yep. Craziness. Still.)

But in spite of being cut off from the good stuff, that little crazy part of me has been weaseling its way around the rules and getting some cheap thrills lately anyway. You see, if you're in recovery around your relationship with a sex addict (go figure!) you tend to meet other women whose partners have been unfaithful and you tend to be the one that your existing friends call with they're dealing with infidelity. This week, a friend fresh in the pain of her own cyberstalking adventures shared some of the information she found with me. And I found myself thinking, "Looking up my husband's lovers is obviously bad for me, but it doesn't hurt to cyberstalk someone else's lovers a little, right? After all, they didn't do anything to me. So there's no harm in looking at their pictures and bios and résumés and Facebook friends and tweets. I'm just getting enraged on my friend's behalf, and that's not nearly as bad." So I poked around beyond what I had been given already.

But spending time googling other people's lovers is obviously (when you're not off in Crazytown) a healthy way to spend time. In fact, in a lot of ways, it seems crazier than obsessing over my husband's lovers. At least when I'm focusing on his acting out partners, I'm feeding off my own pain rather than voyeuristically engaging in someone else's drama. And I'm seeing that the fact that something like this feels like a safe way to indulge myself only shows how deep the need to indulge is. But spending my time googling people in my friends' lives can't really be a harmless new diversion for me, any more than beer would be a smart recreational choice for an alcoholic who has given up hard liquor. It's a simply a crazy new twist on the same old unhealthy behaviors.