Journal Entry, Cont’d: January 15, 2015

The story of Camilla:

Winter 2005, Blue Eyes was feeling like shit. His relationship with his family was on a serious downward slide. I was incredibly busy with our kids and my volunteer work. At the time, he was managing four start-up businesses with all the stress that goes along with it. He was traveling a lot. On this particular winter day, Blue Eyes was slipping into one of his cycles. He had always masturbated to porn, obsessively, when in his cycle. He had two brief affairs a few years before. He had groomed women in the past, but at this lonely juncture, there were no women on the line. Blue Eyes wrote a Craig’s List Personal Ad, Man seeking Woman, yada yada. Clumsy nerd type, 42 years old, lonely, needing someone to hug and hold him, to nurture him. He did not mention he was married. He did not really know where this would lead, but the secrecy of it gave him a thrill. He obsessively checked the secret email he had set up to receive the Craig’s List ad responses. A few weeks went by with the only replies to the ad being gay or trans men. Then, an email from Camilla arrived. Blue Eyes and Camilla emailed back and forth a bit, and the emails quickly became sexual. Camilla wrote titillating stories, which included all of Blue Eyes’ favorite topics: clandestine sexual encounters, light bondage, lots of silky lingerie, large breasts, etc… After a few weeks of emails and Blue Eyes working up his nerve, they agreed to meet up, at her house.

Blue Eyes drove to her house on a sunny spring day in 2005. There wasn’t a lot of talking or conversation. Camilla quickly set in to providing the requisite hugging, kissing, caressing, and nurturing that Blue Eyes sought from his ad. She played out his sexual fantasy from the very first time they met up. He required a condom. She balked, but gave in that first time. She stripped him down and tied him gently with silk scarves to her antique metal headboard. She gagged and blindfolded him and then she undressed herself and climbed on top of him and rode him hard and fast. He came very quickly. He then cleaned up and although he knew he should not, he was riding the high of his sexual addiction and he made a date to meet up and do this again the following week. She wanted him to stay, but he begged off. He had meetings to attend to.

After he left, he felt remorse and guilt and shame. He swore he would never do it again, but as the date of their next encounter approached, and she sent him a provocative picture, and he sent her a picture in return, he could not keep himself away from the drug. He did not really care who she was, or what she did, or why she did it… she had a vagina, and breasts, and she was willing to play out his secret sexual fantasy. Unfortunately, in the photo Blue Eyes sent to Camilla, he forgot to take off his wedding ring. She immediately noticed it and became angry. She told him she would not get involved with a married man. He begged, she quickly gave in, but that would start a line of questioning about me, and why he was stepping out on me, what was wrong with me, and our marriage that he needed her, that would last for the next eight years.

My husband told Camilla that he loved me, but that I was not nurturing to him and that we had sex maybe once a month. This seemed to appease her for the time being, and she constantly cooed how he deserved to be treated with loving and nurturing and sex every day. After their first time, she refused to allow him to use a condom. At the time, she was 49 years old and had gone through menopause, so there was no way she could get pregnant and “she had no diseases,” so there was no need for the condom. Blue Eyes gladly gave in. After they met up a couple times at her house, his addictive cycle started to wane and he realized he did not want to be behaving this way. It was not right. He told Camilla he could never do this again. She became angry and aggressive, which further solidified Blue Eyes desire to get out of the situation he had orchestrated. It was at this time, that I saw the email on his computer when I was cleaning up our family room in preparation for a volunteer committee meeting. He told me the sob story of how he was lonely, put in the Craig’s List ad, emailed with this woman, met her for coffee, but no attraction and no sex (lies). I was clueless since I never thought my sweet, gentle, kind, loving husband would cheat on me. I believed him and we moved forward from this sordid incident…

But then, a few months went by and he started getting those antsy feelings again. The masturbation and porn were not doing it for him. He called Camilla and with a little sweet talk, they started the pattern that would last for the next three years, and my husband got very good at hiding all the evidence. He intended for me to never ever ever find out about his “little” secret sex life. Two or three times a year for a couple weeks, Blue Eyes would go to Camilla’s house for basically, a quickie. Sometimes she finagled a few extra minutes out of him so they could get to know each other better. One time she even talked him into to taking her to lunch at a nearby golf club, which he hurried through. They shared and he charged it to the company. From the bill, it seemed he had dined alone. He shared very little about our family life, but he talked about himself, his childhood, and his needs that were (supposedly) going unmet. She talked about herself. She grew up in the same neighborhood my parents grew up in, a working class area of town. Camilla came home one day to find her mother dead in her bed. She was fourteen. She is the youngest of three girls. She was briefly married to an alcoholic. Her father died years ago. Her oldest sister, also an alcoholic, died of cancer a few years ago and left her quite a bit of money, which she partially used to buy an apartment complex. She answers phones swing shift at the Labor & Delivery department of a local hospital. She works as many shifts as possible, especially holidays and weekends as she has no family. She also holds a real estate license and sells about one house per year. She entered puberty early and obsessively masturbated when she was young (hoppity hops and tether balls were her “props” then). She loves sex and is a self proclaimed nymphomaniac with drawers full of toys that she uses alone. She told my husband that he had ruined her for other men, oh brother.

At one point over the years, she demanded he meet her for drinks in our building. He was working late, I was off taking care of our kids’ dinner, and so he did meet her. When we moved offices, she orchestrated an after hours tour of our new offices. And once, when I was out of town, they went to a movie at the theater in our building. There was always blackmail involved… if you don’t meet me, I will call your wife.

After three years of the intermittent unpaid whorehouse quickies and a small smattering of quick social encounters downtown, she finally told my husband she had had enough of him coming to her house. She had been trying to get him to go away with her to the coast, or on a trip, for some time. She said she felt like a whore (really???). She said if he wanted a “relationship” with her, they would need to go away together, on a real trip. He told her that was not going to happen and at one point, he was at her house and there was a contractor present who had been working on a partial addition. Camilla was screaming and yelling at the man and he looked at my husband and said, “you really need to get your mother under control.” My husband was horrified by the altercation and the fact that someone believed the woman he was having sex with was his mother! Incidences like these propelled my husband out of his addiction and back into reality, but the reality never lasted very long, a few months maybe and then he was back at it.

A couple months into 2008, the cycle was back, and so was my husband’s desire for the secret sex fantasy with Camilla. At this point, my dear followers, I really believe my husband was just too lazy to find a better partner. He had a lady on the line that was willing to do what he wanted and she had the right body parts. His fantasy obsession would kick in, and I think he cared not one bit what she looked like, or who she was, or what she did for a living, or where her house was, or anything. He wanted that fucking drug, and he was going to get it. Apparently it is a lot easier to live a secret second life than I would have thought, especially when you have a loving and trusting wife at home taking care of everything for you because she thinks you are working.

He was planning a business trip to Japan for April 2008 and he invited her to go along with him. She had to pay her own way, he would not pay any of her expenses, period. She got to share a hotel room with him. He would not be seen with her, or sightsee with her. I’m not sure she knew all this when she agreed, but there were many other rules. If someone came to the door of the hotel room, she hid in the bathroom. They took separate elevators to the lobby. My husband had meetings all day including all meals and often returned to the hotel late in the evening. He got pretty creeped out by Camilla as she would follow him out and then take pictures of him as he purchased tickets for the subway, or went into a coffee shop. He had no idea she was following him until he got back to the room later that night and she showed him the photos. He asked her to stop doing that and to stop following him, but she didn’t. About half way through the trip, she became angry that she had spent so much of her own money and he was ignoring her and only wanted sex but nothing else. He told her that was the deal. She stormed out to go to a bar and sometimes didn’t return until early in the morning, or the next day. This pattern persisted throughout all their trips together. They would eventually have make up sex and then as the trip came to an end, she would realize she was just a whore on a business trip and she would become angry and aggressive and refuse to sit with him on the plane on the way back home. At the airport, she would re-engage in angry conversation with him and then she would proceed to call and text him post trip threatening to call me if he did not return her calls and texts. His calls and texts back were merely to close out the cycle by weaning off the communication with her. Inevitably she would try to call the home phone or my mobile phone, but I never (well, almost never) answer No Caller ID or Private phone calls. I always thought it was the dreaded in-laws. As I have said before, I never in my wildest nightmares thought there was someone in my life scarier than my mother in law, but there is.

After the dreaded April 2008 trip, my husband did not contact Camilla again until January 2009. In May 2008, I started my personal blog. On that blog I posted lots of pictures of our family, our kids, our vacations. My first couple posts were of my older son’s first prom (the son Camilla mentioned in her dreaded dday phone call), and the story of mine, and my husband’s courtship. I started the blog so that my rather large extended family could follow our activities if they wanted and because I love to journal and write. The blog was not private. Much of my family does not live in the city we do, and they seemed to really enjoy the blog. At first I did not have a Facebook or any other easy way to share our life. One of the intriguing things about the blogger blog was keeping track of the daily stats. It was kind of fun to watch who was reading my blog and I was able to match up my family and friends with their IP addresses and keep track of whether they visited on any particular day. I was so new to blogging, the silliest little things kept me entertained. After getting my Facebook, I would link my posts and it made it even easier to follow the traffic. Pretty much from the very beginning, there was a visitor who obsessively checked my blog, and they were accessing it from the city we live in. I could not figure out who that person was. I eliminated everyone I knew, but could not figure out who would look at my blog so many times a day. There was also a follower logging on from a local hospital server. I did not know anyone that worked at that hospital. Well, as it turns out, it was Camilla. She obsessively followed my blog from just about day one. I have since stopped posting on that blog and I also made it private so that she could not go back in and feed off of pictures of my husband.

In January 2009, Blue Eyes had a business trip scheduled to Copenhagen for two days and Helsinki for five in late January. The cycle was back, and he asked her if she wanted to go, same rules as before. I’m thinking he must have promised her something else, but pretty sure he didn’t deliver. She paid a bunch of her hard earned money to visit Helsinki Finland in JANUARY. This just blows my mind. Do you know what it is like in Helsinki in January? It is a barren wasteland of snow and ice. WTF. I guess it was desperate measures for whores with no other prospects. I am not really believing that Camilla is in love with my husband or that she actually believes she has a chance at a life with him. He waited NINE MONTHS to call her back! I will say that most of 2009 and the first part of 2010 were incredibly stressful times for my husband with his family. There was so much bickering and everyone turning on each other and then all of them turning on Blue Eyes. After Helsinki, my husband then took Camilla to Chicago in September for two nights, and then two one-night trips to Silicon Valley late in the year. February 2010 was the dreaded Valentine’s Day trip to Korea and Japan and then radio silence. No contact for 15 months. In May 2010 my husband’s brother committed suicide. Even though things were certainly no better with his family, he took stock of his life during this time and decided he wanted to be a better person. He felt like his secret life was going to kill him. He thought a lot about his brother and what would cause a person to take their own life. He thought that if I ever found out about him… well, he didn’t want to think about it. He somehow managed his addiction until May 2011, and then, folks, he called her again. This time she agreed to go away for one night, but on the hook was that wonderful trip to Gothenburg Sweden. The night he was away with her in early May, he sent me the itinerary he wanted me to book for Sweden… a trip I was no longer invited on. They planned it out that night in early May. They then texted and emailed the rest of the month of May and the addiction was back in full force.

There is no managing an addiction without help. The addict cannot manage it alone, especially when someone is waiting there to hand him his drug and all he has to do is put up with her whining and bitching about why he can’t be more for her. To a certain extent, it has got to be at least a little flattering having someone who wants you so bad, and this goes both ways, a mutual fuck fest of insecurity, low self esteem and fuckedupedness. Him needing his drug and her supplying it and her believing she is giving him something he cannot get at home, and guess what? She’s right, he cannot get a secret messed up relationship with a low self esteem whore willing to lie and cheat and blackmail her way into someone else’s life, from me. You gotta give her that. She’s got me there.

Anyway, back to the story. The Gothenburg May trip ended much the same way as the others although somewhere in there she talked him into a day of sightseeing together. Every trip they took together, she started asking for a little more. February 2010 in Japan, she got a quick, cheap, dysfunctional Valentine’s dinner. February 2012 in Japan, she got another half day of sightseeing. Months and months go by between trips with no contact. Each trip is the same with Blue Eyes working and sleeping 95% of the trip. Finally, 2012 rolls around and Blue Eyes is back to trying to manage his addiction. We are empty nesters. Blue Eyes decides that as long as I go on trips with him, or he goes with sales guys, he will not be tempted to invite her. He doesn’t want to invite her. He doesn’t want to ever see her again. But then, in late August 2012, we drop our younger son at college and I go off from there to spend some time with a friend in NYC. My husband is distraught over our son leaving for college. He doesn’t want me to go to NYC. He wants me to return home with him. I say no. I want the time with my friend. Blue Eyes returns home by himself and then proceeds to call Camilla and tell her he is on his own and can they get together. He can spend more time with her, and so she drops “everything” and agrees. He goes to her house and they proceed to rip each other’s clothes off and have their ritualistic sex. Then Blue Eyes wants to leave. She gets mad and doesn’t want him to go. She knows he has no place to be, after all that is how he coerced her into letting him back in her house in the first place. He comes up with the brilliant idea of bringing her to our house. She does not want to do it. He talks her into it. He says they can watch a movie together. She finally agrees. When they drive into our neighborhood, he makes her duck down so no one can see, then he drives into our garage and shuts the door. He gives her a tour of our house, but won’t let her into our bedroom. She hates everything about our house. She says she hates our family photo. She hates my decorating. She does not want to be there. Blue Eyes sets up a movie to watch. She asks if he has watched the movie with me. He says yes. She gets upset and asks to leave. Blue Eyes knew this would happen, it was all an elaborate scheme to get away from her. He takes her home and doesn’t even get out of the car. She storms into her house. They do not talk again until the following March as he is planning the seminar to NYC and he asks her to go with him, and she agrees. The short two-night trip to New York would be their last. In my post regarding the phone records, it is obvious that she is really furious after the NYC trip. It was most likely the least amount of time she has ever been able to spend with him, and he knew that was how it would go. He got his fix. It took him two weeks to talk her down once they returned home. On July 30, 2013 they had their last sexual encounter. She agreed to a quickie at her house. God only knows why. Blue Eyes decided then and there he had to end it and on August 14, 2013 he did.

She obsessively called my phone for months. I thought it was my mother-in-law. I did not answer it until January 11, 2014, discovery day. The day life as I knew it ended. I tried to be as objective as possible in telling this story with the information I have. I am not making excuses. My husband is more culpable than Camilla. He started the whole thing and he restarted the whole thing, every time. I believe I know why he did it, and I’m pretty sure I know why she did it. I still question my husband, all the time. We just discussed this very topic last night as a matter of fact. In order for me to feel safe, and to feel like I am not wasting my time on a lost cause, the next 30 years of my life even, I still need him to dig deep down in there to that place that drove him to sex with this woman, because the other big question floating out there is… if he could keep up this charade, this addiction, this burning desire to have control over a secret sex life for our entire marriage (and even before), how could he possibly be able to stop and control himself and his behavior now. We all know how difficult it really is to change our habits, especially when those habits include addiction, so how will he be able to do it?

This is why acknowledging that sexual addiction is a real addiction is the only way a sex addict can heal. They need to abandon their denial, their compartmentalization, and their rationalizations and excuses and they need resources. They need a 12-step group that works for them. They need a proper therapist. They need the support of family and friends and they need to embrace their own reality with honesty. The success rate overall is not high, but there are a lot of factors playing in. Can an alcoholic stay dry? Can a drug addict stay clean? Can a sex addict manage their behavior? Can a man who has betrayed his wife remain faithful if he is able to acknowledge and manage the demons inside? I believe the answer is yes, but not by themselves. My husband’s story is a sick one, but if I am going to stay with him, at some point I need to start really believing in him. For now, I believe Blue Eyes did not have any healthy feelings for the woman I call Camilla. Being detoxed out of your addiction kicking and screaming and then having your drug thrown in your face, is a horrifying experience.

If Blue Eyes ever did have “real” feelings for that woman, he sure the fuck doesn’t anymore because after months of her calling and stalking, he has now seen her face to face when he is not in his addiction and she is one scary ass bitch.

And that is something on which we both totally agree.