Sister Stories

We left our sister, Rebecca, yesterday having her husband return on emergency leave after she made a deeply shattering discovery about his pornography addiction and infidelity.

Rebecca, a longstanding believer in an able God, remarked of Christians naïve responses to marriages in crisis:  Christians say the worst things in response to marriages facing sexual addiction and infidelity.  You might see lists of things wives can do to “prevent” this – like wear make up every day – as if somehow that’s going to keep your husband from cheating.  The way to stay away from cheating is NOT to cheat.  You commit yourself to marriage because that’s what God says to do.

Certain friends were incapable of providing support.  Rebecca had a dear friend reflexively say that God would take care of these things over an abbreviated lunch and then leave.  “She couldn’t spare more than an hour when I was in crisis,” Rebecca shared.

After Ben’s emergency return for Rebecca’s surgery in June, she decided she would try.  By the first of August, she told him she would move back to their home when he returned from his deployment.  Ben committed that they would actively participate in Celebrate Recovery, a Christian 12-step program for addicts and their families.

“We acknowledged it was going to be a bumpy road,” Rebecca told me.  “We didn’t pretend that it was all fixed.  I wasn’t going to pull out the divorce card, but it was going to be hard.  I wouldn’t commit to a year or forever but that we would live under the same room today.”

There were hard intimate challenges.  They had to hash out the logistics of sex.  Part of his addiction was a fear of rejection and Ben had to learn that it was okay to receive a “no” in response to initiating sex sometimes.  Rebecca told him, “This isn’t a porn video.  You have to initiate it.”

Ben told Rebecca that the fact that she stayed with him gave him the motivation to tackle the addiction.  Rebecca believes, had she left, Ben would have continued down a vicious spiral of sexual addiction.

Rebecca said that she didn’t know at the outset that God would free Ben of his addictive cycle or that their marriage would be restored.  She shared, “I just knew that the bottom had dropped out of my whole world, and my only option was to cling to Christ at all cost; John 15:5 – I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”

She took one day at a time.  She didn’t actively try to change Ben – knowing she couldn’t.  She took the advice of wise counsel:  finding a Christian counselor who specialized in sexual addiction (who offered the sessions free to military families); telling a few friends who rallied to her side so she didn’t have to walk the journey alone, and while everyone wasn’t able to support her, she had tremendous support from far flung corners; and, she talked to God, even when there were more tears than words.  “Even my deepest questions were directed TO God, not ABOUT God to someone else.”

These are Rebecca’s words about this journey:

I often wondered if I would be able to forgive Ben.  Jesus tells us in Matthew 18 that it’s not enough to forgive up to seven times, but seventy times seven! During this time, those verses took on new meaning.  I would forgive my husband for some past transgression one day and wake up the next morning hurt all over about the very same thing.  I had to choose day after day to forgive him for the same act.  It wasn’t easy, but over time, the pain would pop up less often…and when it did, it wouldn’t sting quite as much. 

As the one year mark approached, I realized I had forgiven him.  I didn’t know when or how it had happened, but it happened!  Forgiveness… complete forgiveness!  I enjoyed being around my husband again.  And we were enjoying our new marriage.  All the will power in the world can’t make my husband stay abstinent, and it can’t make me forgive.  But as we say in Celebrate Recovery, “God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.”  We just have to believe that He can do it.

It’s okay to feel like you’re never going to get “there.”  And it’s still a risk.  You don’t know.  You take the step of faith and you don’t know that your husband’s not going to betray you again.  That’s scary.  But it’s so worth trying.  You can’t promise your marriage will be safe.  During this period, I felt like Moses asking God who he was to be God’s spokesperson and asks Him for a sign to which God replies, “you’ll have one after it’s all over.” 

Forgiving here has been the model for me elsewhere.  We let ourselves hold on to tiny resentments and leave forgiveness for the big things.  I had to choose to forgive.   Going through that process increased my capacity to forgive everywhere.  If I forgave my husband for cheating on me, then I let the guy who cut me off in traffic off the hook.  Everything is little after this. 

It’s 6 ½ years later and we are very much in love and have been blessed with a third child.  Even now as I reflect on what we’ve been through, I still can’t believe how far we’ve come.   I’m grateful for my current relationship with my husband, but the status of our marriage is not the miracle…it’s the status of our hearts.  Do I wish there had been another way to teach me this lesson of forgiveness?  Yes.  But my loving Savior has given me a small glimpse of what it was like to forgive me. 

In this installment of Sisters Stories, a dear friend has agreed to share her journey through a marriage attacked by infidelity and pornography.  Because of the personal nature of their story, their names have been changed to ensure their privacy.

Ben had recently shipped off.  An eight month deployment.  Rebecca was searching the computer for pictures of the kids when the pornographic images stopped her cold.  Horrified, Rebecca wrote Ben asking him what he knew about the photos.

You see, they had switched computers so Ben could take the desktop on the ship with him and Rebecca would be left with his laptop. 

She was ready to believe a lie. 

She was waiting for a lie.

But he told her everything. 

The next morning, Rebecca received an email that altered her world forever.  Ben admitted to an entire secret life of sexual sin which included a longstanding addiction to internet pornography and incidents of physical affairs, including an affair with a woman Rebecca considered a friend. 

“My biggest nightmare had just become my new reality,” Rebecca shares. 

She had known about his struggle with pornography when they married.  She knew that struggle continued their first two years of marriage.  After their second discussion about the pornography, and Rebecca’s sadness and anger in response, the topic never came up again.  She’d not considered pornography was still an issue until that day on the computer.  Nearly seven years into their marriage.  Rebecca says that whatever he saw on her face after that last discussion, Ben knew he couldn’t admit to pornography again and went into secrecy about his addiction. 

The addiction to internet pornography then grew into more.  Ben began a long-term affair with Rebecca’s friend which continued during her pregnancy.  It lasted on and off for a year.  During that affair, Ben had a one night stand with a stranger.  Things spiraled out of control.  Then they were reassigned to a station halfway across the country.  Ben saw a way out of the affairs.  But the pornography struggle continued, even as he shipped off two months before Rebecca’s discovery. 

I would learn months later that my husband paced the ship for hours wrestling with how much to tell me.  He chose to admit all the ugly.  Even though that’s more of his story than mine, it’s pivotal to understanding that the Holy Spirit was working in ways neither my husband nor I knew at the time.

He vomited out everything in his response to her email (since he was deployed, there were limitations on their ability to communicate).  The internet pornography revelations showed vast deception, even more than the affairs, from how he planned and orchestrated access to the lengths he went to in order to get a fix of porn.  His admissions exposed a deep addiction.   

After reading the email that morning, Rebecca’s mother arrived to stay with her son while she took her daughter to a doctor’s appointment for her chronic illness.  At the doctor, Rebecca felt like the whole world knew. She was mortified.  She had to be tested for STDs.  She thought about the pastors or politicians wives that found out this kind of news and the world did know. 

She was embarrassed too.  People would wonder how she could NOT know.  But as Rebecca told Ben, she never needed or wanted to find a reason he would be cheating on her because she simply trusted that he wouldn’t cheat.  She shouldn’t be embarrassed for trusting her husband – the one person she should trust!  When the real information was put in front of Rebecca, she didn’t try to pretend it wasn’t the truth.  But she accepted it was okay that she hadn’t been searching for secrets. 

She sat in her rental apartment, where she’d moved to be near her mother during the deployment, thankful for not having found out in their home.  A place that represented their life together.  Instead, she could process what this meant in a temporary place. 

Rebecca thought:

Well, I guess that’s what I have to do.  Divorce him.  It angered me because of my own parents’ divorces growing up.  And divorce wasn’t going to change all of what happened.  It wasn’t going to take away the pain of being cheated on.  Death was the only thing that would take the pain away.  A “reason” wasn’t going to help since then “I’d done something” to make him cheat. I didn’t have the emotional reserve to go there. I just let myself hurt. I couldn’t do anything – not even plan to leave.

Three months after her discovery, during which time they had each begun seeing counselors, Rebecca had emergency gallbladder surgery.  The military flew Ben home for two weeks on emergency leave.  They had two weeks to see each other face-to-face.  To meet with the counselors in person that they had dealt with remotely.  His stay brought up additional issues which could be vetted with counselors in real-time.  It gave Rebecca a snapshot of what it would be like to be together: “I started to believe that all of the recovery he had been telling me about remotely was sincere.” 

How could they form a life together after this earthquake cracked the ground she stood on?