I have been working on this journal entry/post for days now. It has been incredibly difficult for me, and my husband. I suffered numerous bouts of trauma and some self harm while we were in Japan. We are home now and my arm looks like a tiger got it. I hate when I get in that deep…

Journal Entry: January 15, 2015

There is a question that has been asked a lot since I have been on my trauma recovery journey. Believe me, it is something I have asked my husband nearly every day for a year. It is a question that has been asked about in recent comments, a lot, on this blog. It’s a question that enters my mind regularly. As I sit in a gorgeous hotel room near Tokyo Station, I look across to the Marunouchi Hotel. It is a hotel my husband frequented on business trips to Japan from 2006 to 2009. My husband spent five nights there in 2008 with Camilla the whore.

The question floating around is, how in the hell could your husband spend EIGHT YEARS going back to the same woman for sex and claim there was nothing there, that he didn’t love her, that he didn’t even have feelings for her. And just because he is saying he didn’t love her, what makes me believe he is telling the truth now, after so many years of lying. How can I be such a fool?

I admit it is pretty difficult to understand. For the entire month of January 2014, I had convinced myself that my husband was in love with another woman. Not that he had fallen out of love with me, but that he had created a secret fantasy sex life that he found more fulfilling than the sex life we shared. That he was able to share special moments with this other woman, and that sometimes he was actually choosing her over me. That somehow she was able to provide him with something I couldn’t or wouldn’t. He did, in fact, orchestrate trips so that I was not with him, and she was. I have never believed he wanted to leave me for this woman. In my mind, from what I witnessed every day in our life together, there was nothing seriously wrong with our marriage. We were happy and we both adored our little family, and our pets, and everything we have built together since we were 20 years old, and we have built a lot. We started with nothing. My husband worked long hours for years. We didn’t take a real vacation until our 10^th wedding anniversary. We didn’t need much. We had each other and our wonderful boys. In the past five years, the profitability of our company has taken hold and we are in a better financial position. We put in years of hard work and carried large amounts of debt. That hard work finally paid off. Hallelujah. Unfortunately, as everyone knows, most problems are not solved with money, especially not addiction. My husband grew up in a wealthy family and yet in his childhood, as a part of that family, abuse and neglect were perpetrated and addiction took hold.

In and amongst Blue Eyes’ traveling with his long-term affair partner for the past five years, we took numerous vacations together both with and without our children. I also traveled for business with my husband. The year prior to dday, he had traveled on numerous business trips early in the year without her, even to Japan. We spent two weeks in a rental apartment in the Marais district of Paris with our boys in May. It was my 50^th birthday present. We had a blast. It was so romantic. Six weeks before that, we were in Hawaii. I nearly died in a snorkeling accident off Maui and then the coral damage on my right leg became infected, the wound went nearly to the bone. My husband lovingly nursed me back to health. In August, we spent an amazing week in New York City. We continued traveling throughout the year to southern California, and then east again for business. In 2013, he spent exactly two nights with her on a quick trip to New York City. He spoke at a seminar. I coordinated his schedule. He spent maybe four waking hours with her, maybe, that wasn’t on a plane. They also had a quickie at her house in July. In between, we were together and working and going on about our lives with barely a disagreement. Life was good, or so I thought. Life was good for me, when I believed I had a faithful husband. I have never believed he wanted to sacrifice his family for the sex he shared with this woman. But, the trauma doubt did creep in daily those first couple of months making me feel like he had desired another woman because I was not good enough, thin enough, sexy enough, amorous enough, nurturing enough, attentive enough, available enough, that my breasts weren’t large enough, and even that my thighs were not strong enough! My crazy, trauma ridden mind conjured all kinds of self-doubt, where there had been none before dday.

Some of this doubt was actually a byproduct of my husband’s early disclosures. He was pretty hurtful in the beginning in trying to deflect away from his illness and rationalize what attracted him to his eight-year affair partner. He knew I was completely dumbfounded by the fact that his other woman was so, so, so AWFUL! I questioned him obsessively, “why this woman?” What was it about her that would cause him to put everything on the line? He had to have some feelings for her to potentially sacrifice EVERYTHING! She did ask him to leave me for her and he said he wouldn’t. He was very careful with his words so as not to scare her off in case he needed to go back to her. “Needed” being a key word as the addiction was very powerful in him and still is. When she asked if he would ever leave me for her, for eight years, he skirted the issue. He never said flat out yes, but he never said no. Eventually after my hounding him for answers to the WHY HER question, mostly on the defensive, he said he liked her deep voice, which is clearly the result of years and years of smoking, but I am sure he was thinking Scarlett Johansson or Demi Moore in his head and ignoring what he was seeing right before his eyes because she looks more like a cross between Mimi from The Drew Carey show and an old Phyllis Diller. He was attracted to her red hair (dyed, sort of, gray roots always showing) and blue eyes (beady little things in my opinion) and large breasts, but they are saggy, he says. Or maybe he wasn’t attracted to any of these things, but that is what he told her he loved about her when they were having sex. I have brown hair and brown eyes and regular old sized perky breasts, which in my sick and broken post dday trauma induced mind was never going to be interesting enough again. But then I would look at the one picture on the internet that was taken of Camilla for sales purposes for the real estate company she is associated with and I could not make sense of my husband desiring to be with this woman who is older, unattractive, uneducated, quite large, and looks downright mean. His fantasy obsession included being gently tied up with scarves, blindfolded, gagged, and ridden cowgirl style by this large and unattractive woman. In his addiction, Blue Eyes is monotonously ritualistic. How does a woman put up with that? After seeing her in person, I can now say that the photo that has been on the Internet since at least 2005 is actually an exceptionally good photo of her because currently, in real life, she is much, much worse, and that is not just the fear talking.

But then, in February I read a book by Patrick Carnes called “Don’t Call It Love: Recovery from Sexual Addiction.” My husband kept telling me he did not know why he did what he did. That he definitely did not love this woman and was not even attracted to her. He used her for sex. I yelled and cried and told him I would rather he had 80 women in eight years, or I would have preferred prostitutes, even beautiful, voluptuous, young ones. They require condoms and don’t call the wife. I would have preferred getting a call from the police, than getting a call from the smoking, hoarding, delusional, alcoholic stalker whore. Unfortunately, my life is in a shambles and I feel like I am dying a slow death and I do not get to pick the method of torture. My body and mind have been poisoned in all kinds of horrible ways with images of acting out partners, and sex, and spooning in a hotel in Tokyo, and strolling the streets of Gothenburg Sweden while a stranger takes a snapshot of them together. As I read each page of the Don’t Call It Love book, some part of me started to realize that my husband was most likely telling the truth. He did not know why he did the things he did. He did not want to be doing them, but he could not stop. He was not in love with nor even attracted to the woman he was having sex with. After reading the stories in the book, it is quite common for the sex addict to dislike the acting out partner most of the time because they represent that dark side of their personality. Being in control is an illusion. They choose their acting out partners carefully, because they are easily manipulated and will do and say all the right things and hopefully they will keep the secret. When the addict is not in his or her cycle, they want the acting out partner to disappear. By choosing an acting out partner with low self esteem, it is easier to get them to back off when they don’t want the stimulation. This is the case with my husband. Managing the secret sex life is an integral part of the cycle because many sex addicts have been manipulated and controlled and usually sexually abused by one or more people in their childhood, prompting a need to control a secret part of their lives as they grow. Enter masturbation, porn, “deviant” sexual behavior, one night stands, affairs, anything they believe they can control and that brings them that sexual release that is their drug.

So now, after 12 months of hounding my husband about his relationship with Camilla, here is the story as best I can tell it. Nothing in this tale is meant to be an excuse, because there is no excuse for what my husband did, and he knows that. Also, I will refrain from stating this repeatedly throughout the story, but anyone that follows this blog knows, I knew NOTHING about my husband’s sexual acting out behaviors. I did not know he obsessively masturbated to porn, I did not know about any of the women. And please remember, to all the betrayed spouses out there, and all the other women, and everyone everywhere, this is our story. By no means am I saying anything about anyone else’s situation. I am not saying or insinuating that your husband is a sex addict, or that the other women are unattractive or abusive, or that your lover is just using you for sex. How could I possibly be saying that, I do not know you? This is our story and that’s it. No ulterior motives, just me trying to make sense of my life as it is. Me trying to determine if my husband fell out of love with me, or fell in love with another woman. Eight years is a long time to have a sexual relationship with one woman and walk away saying he had no feelings for her. It is a very fucking long time.

The story of Camilla will follow in the next entry, because this is getting too long for just one post…