Post by Deleted on Mar 1, 2006 21:13:50 GMT -7
Hello everyone and just call me "Bud."
To best explain my situation I will copy an email I sent to my sister here. Please provide your thoughts and insight. Thank you.
The letter:
Thanks for the great letter you recently sent. I really appreciate your continued love and support and I need your feedback regarding the same issue that I told you about before with my wife and I. She sent me a well intentioned email the other day. Mostly containing updates on things going on. She is doing apparently great with the kid’s education, with managing all the affairs relating to our home, and with the money I give to her each month. She’s doing great in every area but one. The most inner, personal, and tender area for me. Well, she’s doing better now, then say, two months ago, but still having the same trouble. She admitted to me she still struggles with bombardments of these weird temptations and fantasies but she said she has immediate victory over them about 95% of the time when they come. Again, this is fantasies involving famous movie stars and/or actual men that she may interact with during the course of life. She admitted that she had a 2-day fall out regarding one of those time about two months ago. (That would put me in Iraq for about a month already) This is, again, where she functions (overall) outwardly in a normal way, managing the affairs of the home and kids but actively works out a fantasy in her head with someone else. Then, after that is over, she will be carrying around guilt and depression for a day or two. Then things will be normal until the next time she starts to give in and repeat the cycle. As I told you before, when I was home she would let me make love to her but then she would pretend that I was that person. So I am enjoying her but she is enjoying Mel Gibson or her manager at work (she “all the way†fantasized about him but this incident manifested in the real world in the form of flirting between them but not an open exchange of verbal affection) or the Youth Pastor at our church. But with the Youth Pastor they both verbally exchanged verbal affection, she wrote him letters, they made phone calls, and physical touching, bumping, lewd and explicit comments, youth pool party pushing dunking and flirting, and rubbing on several occasions. They would dress up in each other’s favorite outfits for church without my knowledge or the knowledge of his wife. She even attempted to leave the house one day and physically meet with him without my knowledge. She said she wanted to run to Wal-Mart that night but I wouldn’t let her leave the home because it didn’t feel right to me) In her favor, she admitted to me what was going on between she and the Youth Pastor before they both ended up going “all the way,†and that’s why I confronted him like that and put a stop to that one. To my knowledge she has not actively pursued a relationship with a physical person since that time she did with our youth pastor just before I left for Iraq. But who knows. I can’t help but shake the feeling that there’s other people she as been physically involved with that she has not yet told me about yet.
Furthermore, she was telling me how well she was doing and how she had been focusing on trying to fantasize about me for a change and how much she was beginning to actually like it. Wow, I thought to myself. After 10 years of marriage you can finally enjoy me for a change and like thinking of me. I feel so happy…
This just doesn’t compute, for me, and I have told her so. How can you say you are so truly in love with someone and yet have this continual problem. She says she is only in love with me and feels as much a victim as I do. She claims she can’t help these temptations but that she is doing better and better with them. She says before that they were always very sexually stimulating and exciting for her but that now, more and more, the temptation still presents itself but that it often disgusts her or makes her sad. But for me, I just can’t see both of these co-existing.
Like I said, I think she is doing great in many, many areas. I don’t think she is at all a danger to the kids and I think that she is very functional. I found some groups called Sex Addicts Anonymous who have many similar issues and I have starting working with a Christian forum online ministry that deals with people with similar issues and their spouses. If my wife’s problem was being an alcoholic, I would say she is a functioning alcoholic or a functioning sexoholic. Crazy to even say, I know. Anyway, here’s my attitude about it.
Part of me wishes she’d cheat all the way and get it over with. Then we could divorce and move along. That would be terrible though and I want to believe she could one day completely tackle this issue. On the other side of the coin, this problem is (figuratively) killing me inside. I cannot remain completely intimate and emotionally vulnerable to her regarding this ongoing problem. I have to be able to survive and hold it together inside. I can’t make love to her each time wondering if it is me this time, what she’s got going on in her head all day. When she says it is me in her mind is she lying like she has before and then later admits. What do I do. A divorce would send her WAY backwards and devastate the kids and all of us. Total intimacy and oneness is not possible either. I feel like I need to make the deepest and most intimate parts of my heart off limits to her for now. That means no more consecrating our marriage for now. Does that mean I move out? Sleep on the couch? Sleep in the same bed? No! I don’t want to be mean to her but I really feel like just saying, “don’t touch me.â€
I don’t think my wife is a crazy or a dangerous person but I have to admit that this problem…I just don’t know what to do anymore.
She told me all about how great she has been doing the last two months and also about her current struggles and the 2-day total failure two months ago. I was supposed to be glad for her but it had the total opposite effect. I guess I had assumed she had pretty much conquered the issue after I left. All this just reopened the wound for me.
Looking forward to your advise and thoughts.
To best explain my situation I will copy an email I sent to my sister here. Please provide your thoughts and insight. Thank you.
The letter:
Thanks for the great letter you recently sent. I really appreciate your continued love and support and I need your feedback regarding the same issue that I told you about before with my wife and I. She sent me a well intentioned email the other day. Mostly containing updates on things going on. She is doing apparently great with the kid’s education, with managing all the affairs relating to our home, and with the money I give to her each month. She’s doing great in every area but one. The most inner, personal, and tender area for me. Well, she’s doing better now, then say, two months ago, but still having the same trouble. She admitted to me she still struggles with bombardments of these weird temptations and fantasies but she said she has immediate victory over them about 95% of the time when they come. Again, this is fantasies involving famous movie stars and/or actual men that she may interact with during the course of life. She admitted that she had a 2-day fall out regarding one of those time about two months ago. (That would put me in Iraq for about a month already) This is, again, where she functions (overall) outwardly in a normal way, managing the affairs of the home and kids but actively works out a fantasy in her head with someone else. Then, after that is over, she will be carrying around guilt and depression for a day or two. Then things will be normal until the next time she starts to give in and repeat the cycle. As I told you before, when I was home she would let me make love to her but then she would pretend that I was that person. So I am enjoying her but she is enjoying Mel Gibson or her manager at work (she “all the way†fantasized about him but this incident manifested in the real world in the form of flirting between them but not an open exchange of verbal affection) or the Youth Pastor at our church. But with the Youth Pastor they both verbally exchanged verbal affection, she wrote him letters, they made phone calls, and physical touching, bumping, lewd and explicit comments, youth pool party pushing dunking and flirting, and rubbing on several occasions. They would dress up in each other’s favorite outfits for church without my knowledge or the knowledge of his wife. She even attempted to leave the house one day and physically meet with him without my knowledge. She said she wanted to run to Wal-Mart that night but I wouldn’t let her leave the home because it didn’t feel right to me) In her favor, she admitted to me what was going on between she and the Youth Pastor before they both ended up going “all the way,†and that’s why I confronted him like that and put a stop to that one. To my knowledge she has not actively pursued a relationship with a physical person since that time she did with our youth pastor just before I left for Iraq. But who knows. I can’t help but shake the feeling that there’s other people she as been physically involved with that she has not yet told me about yet.
Furthermore, she was telling me how well she was doing and how she had been focusing on trying to fantasize about me for a change and how much she was beginning to actually like it. Wow, I thought to myself. After 10 years of marriage you can finally enjoy me for a change and like thinking of me. I feel so happy…
This just doesn’t compute, for me, and I have told her so. How can you say you are so truly in love with someone and yet have this continual problem. She says she is only in love with me and feels as much a victim as I do. She claims she can’t help these temptations but that she is doing better and better with them. She says before that they were always very sexually stimulating and exciting for her but that now, more and more, the temptation still presents itself but that it often disgusts her or makes her sad. But for me, I just can’t see both of these co-existing.
Like I said, I think she is doing great in many, many areas. I don’t think she is at all a danger to the kids and I think that she is very functional. I found some groups called Sex Addicts Anonymous who have many similar issues and I have starting working with a Christian forum online ministry that deals with people with similar issues and their spouses. If my wife’s problem was being an alcoholic, I would say she is a functioning alcoholic or a functioning sexoholic. Crazy to even say, I know. Anyway, here’s my attitude about it.
Part of me wishes she’d cheat all the way and get it over with. Then we could divorce and move along. That would be terrible though and I want to believe she could one day completely tackle this issue. On the other side of the coin, this problem is (figuratively) killing me inside. I cannot remain completely intimate and emotionally vulnerable to her regarding this ongoing problem. I have to be able to survive and hold it together inside. I can’t make love to her each time wondering if it is me this time, what she’s got going on in her head all day. When she says it is me in her mind is she lying like she has before and then later admits. What do I do. A divorce would send her WAY backwards and devastate the kids and all of us. Total intimacy and oneness is not possible either. I feel like I need to make the deepest and most intimate parts of my heart off limits to her for now. That means no more consecrating our marriage for now. Does that mean I move out? Sleep on the couch? Sleep in the same bed? No! I don’t want to be mean to her but I really feel like just saying, “don’t touch me.â€
I don’t think my wife is a crazy or a dangerous person but I have to admit that this problem…I just don’t know what to do anymore.
She told me all about how great she has been doing the last two months and also about her current struggles and the 2-day total failure two months ago. I was supposed to be glad for her but it had the total opposite effect. I guess I had assumed she had pretty much conquered the issue after I left. All this just reopened the wound for me.
Looking forward to your advise and thoughts.