Husband's lack of desire for me is unbearable

Dear HisHeart,

They, through their porn/masturbation addiction, have trained themselves to respond to the fantasy. Real women are just bad porn to them. And heaven forbid if you have real needs or desires of your own. This is part and parcel of the addiction, it is not, REPEAT NOT, you. YOU are NOT in any way part of the problem. YOU ARE NOT IN ANY WAY to blame. You are a victim of his addiction.

Run. Never look back. Find a decent man or live out the rest of your days alone. Living with a sex addict will bring you nothing but heartache and pain. Remember, addiction is a progressive disease. Chances are you've only seen the tip of the iceberg. Run. Be done with him.

My best to you, DW

Devastated Wife: Thanks for sharing.

Hi Hisheart,

I don't know of specific books, but you can research books with at least some perspective of faith on
www.christian book.com
Even if you look for them used on Amazon or Ebay, they have pretty good descriptions and reviews.  If you find something really helpful, please return and list it in the "Resources" forum.

I hope you will pardon me being a bit cynical, but I guess the devil made the deliverance minister lose his home?  And yes, I realize it could have been job loss outside of his control.

Praying for you both...
TruthSeeker

Hisheart,

As I have read your post over and over again, I begin to weep and go back to where to my own problems and struggles. How I treated my wife and kids because of this choice that I made so long ago. And I call it a choice because that's what it is. We chose to keep looking at pornography, to live in a fantasy world and let it affect our everyday live and the people that we are suppose to love. I too starting looking at porn at about age 11 and went through sort of what your husband is going through. I have no problems with performing with my wife but the porn would always pop back in my head after we were done. And I made the choice to wait for her to go to sleep and look at it.

Porn is a made up fantasy world were the user doesn't feel persucuted or outcast. The person feels wanted no matter what they have done and we believed that it filled a void in our life that our spouses can not. That is all a lie. It is nothing but feeding our mind pictures and vidoes of Gods childrens, mother, daughters, sisters brothers in acts that were intended for married people and to honor Gods love for us. Just like DW said, this is not your fault.

It has taken me almost 25 years to realize that choice that I made has been the the ruler of my life and almost destroy everything that God had blessed me with. My wife was on the verge of divorcing me and I was going to lose everything. But I wanted to change and it led up to one thing. The one thing that started this whole addiction in the first place. A choice. I chosed to give my life back to God, to get rid of all my pornography any where, stop lusting with my eyes, stop feeding my flesh and stop self gratifying myself. In the begining it was hard, but I kept making that choice to continue on. My life was at stake here for I didn't want to go to Hell. My family was on the line here for I didn't want to lose my wife or have my kids grow up with an father addicted to porn and choosed it over them. I made a choice to change and haven't looked back sinces.

I'm saying this because there is hope but it is a choice that your husband has to make his self. No matter how many times my wife caught me and I said I was going to change, I said it to get her off my back. Addicts are pathogical liers, that has come with years of practice to hid our addiction. But I can assure you that when I made my commitment to God and gave everything to him, I haven't wanted to go back. The choice is your husbands, not yours. You need to take care of yourself and get to where you need to be. Let God work on him. That's what had to happen to me.

I am sorry for the way he has treated you in the past. I'm sorry for the millions of men out there that are addicts because of a choice they made and continue to make that is hurting their love one’s life. We don't see the damage until the fog has lifted and we have been delivered or it is to late. I will pray for you that God will heal you spiritually, physically, and emotionally. And I will pray for your husband to see through the fog that has blinded him for so long and come to know Christ, to ask for his forgiveness and have him work in his life.

Remember it's all about choices. What we chose to do now, will affect us later down the road.

Tired

One of the ways the 12-step fellowships operate is that when speaking, we share our own experience, strength and hope.  We do not give advice.  I'm in no position to say what might work for someone else, or what another person can or should do.  What I can talk about is my own feelings, my own success or failure, perhaps what I have done in a situation similar to that in which another member finds himself.

When I do this, everyone else in the room needs to honor my words as describing how things have worked for me, or at least, how I currently think they have worked.  Each member can then decide whether or not my experience is helpful to them, and can try to follow my path or can let it go by as my truth but not theirs.

I really like this system.  It compels me to be as deep and honest about myself as I can be, and it keeps me out of the drama of trying to run somebody else's life.  And it keeps us friends.  I'm fine with you saying things that wouldn't work for me as long as it's clear that you are talking about you, and not me.

I think Tired is doing all that pretty well in this post, and I want to commend him for it.  I don't know if that's just your natural way of talking, or if it's something you learned from the chaplain, but I appreciate it.

If what Tired says isn't inspiring or helpful to some particular user, that's fine.  Tired's job ought to be to tell his story and to let others take from it whatever may help them, or to leave it all behind, as suits them best.  I'd be very surprised if Tired's goal in this thread, which is devoted to marriage and family, was to help anyone who has not had much to say in the thread and who had not been married.

Man, I really appreciate the supportive voice you're adding to many of the threads here.  I also want to be very respectful of the importance in your life right now of standing up for yourself and not giving others power over your life.  But right now in that effort, you are sometimes coming across as fixing other people and ordering them about because they aren't writing quite the way you think they should.  I wonder what would happen if everybody stopped trying to fix everybody and we just shared our own stories in our own way and let others do likewise?

My apologies to all for violating my own principles in the cause of peace.

Tim M.