My Husband Was A Secret Sex Addict
By Marina Dell. Posted on .
When I mustered the courage to ask my husband of 16 years if he was having an affair, he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, "It was just an escape. It will be over with one phone call. You and I are still going to grow old together." I accepted this explanation. He was crying, for God's sakes. And then there was that line about love in our retirement years. The performance was totally believable.
In reality, our whole life was a performance. We appeared to be a wholesome, book-loving, middle-class pair. We had three beautiful daughters, ages 9, 6 and 2. One friend thought we seemed so compatible that she always asked after Jeff with the line, "How's your soul mate?" I guess you could say we were the perfect couple. But it seems my overly trusting nature enabled his excessive lying.
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You see, my husband led a double life.
I don't know when he went off the rails. I do know that he got so good at lying that no one—not his family, not our friends, not our marriage counselor and most certainly not I—suspected that he had two separate lives.
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On the surface, he was always smiling, well-dressed and charming to strangers and friends alike. Underneath, however, his life revolved around sex—affairs with real, live women, voyeurism and exhibitionism, and paid services that ran the gamut. Extensive business travel allowed him to pursue undetected what I later came to recognize was an unquenchable sex addiction.
There were warning signs, but I ignored them. The most significant were the interminable lulls in our love life. But I was able to rationalize them when he said things like, "I'm worried that I might not get that promotion" or, "I'm angry that you spent so much money on that dress." I never suspected infidelity. Jeff had intimacy issues stemming from abuse by a female teacher that began when he was only 9. He had my empathy, my kindness, my patience, my love. I believed he couldn't be with anyone but me. Why Women Who Suspect Cheating "Look The Other Way"
