Journal Entry: June 6, 2014

We have an agreement, my husband and I. If he needs to go on a business trip, especially if it is overnight, I will go with him, at least for the foreseeable future. He is still early in his recovery, and is completely susceptible to his acting out patterns and behavior. Those eleven business trips he was on with his acting out partner are never far from my mind. Sure, he could go alone and white knuckle it and hopefully he would not act out. I’m pretty sure he would not call her, not even for phone sex, those days are over, but I am not at all sure that his other mistresses, porn and masturbation, wouldn’t show up in his lonely hotel room late at night and feed the addiction, putting him squarely back in the cycle. My husband never hired prostitutes or visited online chat rooms, either at home or while away, but he was never far from his favorite porn sites and pay per view porn, both at home and on the road. At this point, we are not going to test what will happen if he is in a hotel room alone. Visions of Mark Ruffalo in the movie ‘Thanks for Sharing’ immediately appear in my head. Normally not such a bad image, except when he is playing a sex addict.

I am grateful Blue Eyes is actually back to doing some work. The challenging aspect, however, is that his work entails a lot of travel and a lot of selling, which means tapping into the showman personality, which takes a toll. This week, he needed to travel to a nearby city about three hours away by car. We stayed one night in a hotel and he had meetings over the two days, then we drove home. I thought I was ready for this little excursion. Turns out, I was wrong.

Maybe I was just beaten down from the stressful week we had had. Who knows? Trauma recovery is an unpredictable bitch. As soon as we got in the car, I was reminded that she drove him in my car last summer to this very same city and although they didn’t have sex on that day, they were together. I was being discussed and betrayed. It hurts. He had made two other trips to this city (at least) where they had had sex. Very similar trips to the one I was taking with him now. Same three-hour drive, same clients, same general hotel vicinity. I was careful not to book a hotel they had actually stayed in together. One of the hotels they stayed in used to be my favorite. A hotel we had stayed at together numerous times and also a hotel we had stayed at with our children while visiting family in the area. All those memories are tarnished because he decided to share that hotel with her. It sucks. The hotel we did stay at was less than half a mile from another hotel where they had stayed. After we arrived to our room, it felt creepy, like I was just another whore having sex with him on a business trip. These are not feelings I want to be having. I want them to go away, but they just don’t. I cried, we had sex, I cried some more. We slept, then had sex again. Sigh. The next day, as I sat in the car working on my laptop while he attended client meetings, I felt lonely and empty and I again thought about her and why she would want to have this vacuous relationship with a married man. Sure, they would have had sexual relations once or twice the night before, but then, she waited around while he worked and then he drove her home, where she was alone. At least my husband and I have a real relationship. Sure we had sex twice the night before and here I sat waiting around for him, but then we would drive home together and we would then be together in a home we built together. We would sleep together in the bed we share and have dinner with our child and take our dogs for a walk. Sure there are things like dishes and cat boxes and taking out the garbage, but that is what life and marriage and a real relationship are all about.

We returned home and there was an email from my brother, the one that works for us, asking about booking a trip for him and my husband to visit Japan. They need to meet with clients next month. Once again, I would need to travel to a place my husband had been to with her on three separate occasions, travel on a plane they had potentially been on together, be at airports they had definitely been in together. Thoughts of those trips began cycling through my mind, the sightseeing, the hotels, the VALENTINE’S DAY. I just couldn’t see me being ready for that in little over a month. Even though The Pragmatist is currently in Japan and I would get the chance to see him again, I can’t do it. Even the thought of being in Japan next month is making me physically ill. It is so sad that these feelings haunt me. I have been to Japan with my husband more times than she, we lived there for pete’s sake. But the trauma response is too powerful. Tomorrow I will book that trip to Japan for my brother and another one of our sales team. I will not be going, and neither will my husband. It is too soon.