found out after fiancee's death

d_renew,

I can only answer that question from my own experience.  I spent years trying to be an attentive husband and father (not doing as well as your fiance) and engaging in deception (not exactly about the same acts, but the details don't matter).

For me, much of the deception was aimed at myself.  I was trying hard to be someone that I was not.  I really wanted to be that guy who lived a sane life without being a slave to desires that I abhorred and did not understand.  I hid my addiction in order to keep my wife from being hurt, and in order to keep myself out of trouble, and because it let me pretend to others and to myself that those desires were not part of me.

This wasn't good and it wasn't sane.  It doesn't make sense to me any more than to you.  Still, it was my life for over 30 years.

The split personality you talk about is the weird divided state of every addict.  We build up walls between ourselves and others, between ourselves and God, and between ourselves and ourselves.  We can't accept some side of ourselves, and so we try to cut it off.  Because it is part of ourselves that we are not feeding in healthy ways, that side of us develops overpowering needs that it meets in unhealthy ways, completely overpowering the side of us that we wish to become.  And we hate that part of ourselves, and we fear it, and we don't understand it, and we hide it.  For me, that's the addictive cycle in a nutshell.

I'm sorry you had to find out about your fiance's addiction the way you did, and sorry he never found peace and healing in his life.  One of my fears was always being exposed by dying; it's hard to read about it happening to you.

There's nothing to be done to defend our actions, by which we have done so much harm to ourselves and to others.  It might help to know though, that your fiance may well have felt as much incomprehension and pain about his actions as you do, coupled with the horror that it was he, himself, who was acting this way.

My wife once said to me that she thought I just didn't understand how much I was hurting her - that if I did understand, I would stop.  When I finally got into recovery, I recalled this phrase to her - it had come from 15 years earlier.  I said I thought that for me the real horror of addiction was that I did understand her pain, and that I still couldn't stop.  And so every day, I went on, hiding from her and trying to hide from myself the incomprehensible sin I could not free myself from.  Maybe that experience of being divided against ourselves is a way to make your fiance seem on some level more understandable.

When I first admitted how I was living to a counsellor friend, she looked at me and said softly, "It must have been hell."  It is hell, both for the people around us, and for the addicts themselves.

I've said this before on this forum, but it may apply here as well.  One of the things that drove me finally into recovery was a sense of total isolation from others, from myself, and from God.  At each of our liturgies, we sing the Beatitudes, and for many years, I thought, there is nothing here for me.  The peacemakers?  No.  The righteous?  Of course not.  The pure in heart?  I don't even understand the idea.  It wasn't until I was in recovery and beginning to be able to approach God as who I am, a sex addict, and to ask what God was saying to the real Tim, that I could begin to understand.  It doesn't say, "Blessed are the righteous," does is?  It says, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness."  I'm not righteous at all.  But how can you hunger and thirst after righteousness more than by trying, every day for decades, to be righteous; and by knowing, every day for decades, that you have failed?  Only then did I begin to understand that for all the years I had been hiding from God (and from my wife, and from myself) in fear, God had in fact been speaking to me, and that His word was, "Blessed".

I'm sorry your fiance never came to this point of self-realization in his life.  As you try to think about him now, though, maybe the image of a desperate and incomprehensible flight from pain might help.  I think that is the inner experience of addicts; at least it's mine.  He was hurting other people in that flight, and hurting himself.  Maybe he never found the way out.  But that he has already spent many years in a hell he could not understand and dared not share may show him now more gently and clearly, both to you and to God.

Again, I'm sorry you had to have this experience; and again, my story here is only my own, offered with the thought that maybe one addict's life might shine a little light upon another's.

Tim M.

I'm glad you're able to see how much we all have to regret and to begin the terribly hard but important process of understanding and forgiving both yourself and your fiance.

The question about the role of your fiance's addiction in his death is interesting to me - it's another way he and I are alike.  I had a heart attack at 52, but was fortunate to survive it without lasting damage.  For many of my colleagues, my heart trouble seemed unbelievable.  I have no family history of coronary artery disease, I cycle and run and heat the house with wood I cut by hand, I eat a largely vegetarian diet, and I'm not overweight.  For the people I work with, there seemed to be no explanation for my illness.

My own perspective was different.  I've lived a life of enormous internal stress, mostly hidden, but also manifesting itself in rage toward my family that my colleagues never saw.  At times, I hated myself enough to contemplate suicide.  And for 40 years, I filled my heart with all sorts of crud metaphorically.  What wonder if my heart was also filled with crud physically?  To me, my heart trouble was unsurprising and made perfect sense.  I'm not sure my cardiologist looks at it this way, but to me this story seems perfectly sensible.

In a way, the heart attack has also given me a marker that lets me say, see this is where your old way of life led you.  Now you have a chance to build a new way of life leading somewhere else.  I'm sorry your fiance didn't get that chance.

I also totally understand the complex set of feelings you report.

Finally, an obvious thought that doesn't exactly fit with all the sweetness and light here, but it sounds like you should obviously assume your fiance may have been engaging in highly unsafe sex.  Do get yourself tested for a full suite of STDs if that puts you at risk.

And yeah, in our crazy, divided world we can be delusional enough to end up exposing people we love to risks like that.  I wish it weren't so.

Do well.  It sounds like you're handling an unimaginably horrible situation with a lot of maturity and dignity.  I hope you find a peaceful path through all the pain.

Tim M.