Lying....or Not?

I was being a good little Baptist girl and reading my Sunday School lesson for last week and came across a statement that fueled a long, heated discussion with my husband.


The lesson was on forgiveness, but the statement concerned lying. We've had really good lessons this month, all about relationships and how to be trustworthy, forgiving, etc. Of course, everything (and I mean everything) gets filtered through my ever-present "SA filter." So maybe you wives will understand where I'm going with this and maybe you will agree with me since not too many people have.

Here's the statement. (I don't have the book beside me, so I'm paraphrasing).


.....telling the truth does not mean we have to disclose everything we know......


Okay, that may seem straightforward at first glance. And I suppose it is. I do agree with the statement, and I can think of many situations where disclosing everything I knew could have made a situation worse. I'm sure you can think of situations as well. In context of the paragraph, the author clearly meant it to promote honesty within the church, but to deter blabbermouths. I completely agree with this statement.


Except with my husband and his addiction. When I hold this statement up to our relationship and his honesty about his porn use, I come to a very different conclusion. If he does not tell me when he has looked at porn, and then I find out about it, that is just like lying to me. If he looks at porn today and doesn't tell me about it until June 29th, that is a full month of lies. Right?

Hubby does not think so. Get this, hubby believes it all depends on the question he is asked. If I do not specifically ask him if he has looked at porn today, then he is not lying. If I only ask how his day was, he can say "fine" and that to him is not a lie. If this logic is true, then it could be said that over the 10 years or so that hubby was binging on porn, wrecking our marriage, and keeping the whole crazy mess hidden from me, he never lied to me. Because I never asked him the specific question, "Are you looking at pornography?" I just knew something was wrong, but I didn't know what. So my question was usually, "What is wrong with you?"

Is this crazy to anybody else but me? Hubby knows I want to know within 24 hours of him looking at porn. So if he waits more than 24 hours, the result is LYING. His silence is a lie.

Now, I do understand that for you whose hubby's has actually had an affair with a living, breathing person, the word "disclosure" brings up a whole other issue. When? Where? How many times? What song was playing? And the list of questions could go on.....

Although I understand how you would want to know this, I also know that full disclosure is sometimes not the best way to go. Some things we are better off not knowing.

But I am just talking about honesty and trust between my hubby and me and him 'fessing up to looking at porn. I am not taking it upon myself to ask him every single day if he looked at porn...that is not my responsibility. I want him to have the courage to step up and take responsibility for it, no matter what question I might have asked.

You Won't Believe Where I've Been

This blog will be somewhat vague in order to protect any one person's identity. Please understand this as I try to tell this story with little to no details.

I've been wanting to blog about this for a long time, but I felt that out of respect and privacy for the couple, I could not. However, after yesterday, I feel it necessary to tell their story in order to deter others from going down the same path. At the same time, it is a wonderful story of God's grace and answered prayers.

I know a couple. They live in another state. Dear, dear friends of both my husband and me. Several months ago, we received devastating news that the male (I will just refer to him as "the male") had been arrested. I will not tell you the exact charge, but it was a crime of sexual nature involving the internet.

Shock. More shock. We were in shock. We could not believe it. This guy was a Christian man with more morals in his pinky than in my whole body. How could this have happened? Well, I think we know how. Internet porn. That's where it all started.

An interesting side note to this story: The day before we received the phone call about his arrest, I wrote in my journal the following words: "Today I pray for the Lord to send someone my way for me to help. A wife who needs ministering to." The very next morning the phone rang with the news of "the male's" arrest. I knew who I had to talk to. I had to talk to his wife.

Six days later, I called his wife and from that point on, we have been talking weekly. Her life has been changed forever. And I mean changed down to the smallest detail. She quickly filed for divorce as I think we all would, but after much prompting from the Holy Spirit, felt the Lord calling her to stay with her husband. Her church family and her family have pretty much shunned her for this decision.

So back to yesterday. Yesterday was his sentencing. My hubby and I went. None of his wife's family came. How sad. I sat next to her while the sentence was handed down to her husband.

Although he will spend years in prison, the sentence was lighter than we all expected, so we are praising God for that. I am also praising God because when we exited the courtroom, the few family that was there, along with the lawyer, all joined hands in a circle and "the male" led us in prayer! He had just been sentenced and he was leading us in prayer. Amazing.

They are hoping to write a book about their experience which is definitely not over yet. His wife will have alot of hard days ahead of her, but she is a strong Christian woman determined to make their marriage work.

My hubby has been strongly affected by this whole matter as you can imagine. And sitting in a courtroom listening to a lawyer explain how this slippery slope was all started in motion by internet pornography was a sobering experience.

Husbands, this is a serious addiction. Don't think the above story could not be about you and your wife. It could be. It could easily be.

Wives, do not for a moment think you are "overreacting" to his pornography use. This is a serious addiction with serious consequences.

What Am I Thinking?

While at storytime at the local library with my 2-year-old this morning, I realized I was once again scanning the room looking at all the moms and wondering if pornography was ever or is currently an issue in their marriage. In my twisted little imagination, I imagine us all getting locked in the storytime room, all the kids going to sleep, and me taking a poll of the mommies there. Asking them questions like, "To your knowledge, has your hubby ever viewed online porn?, etc." I hear statistics all the time about how prevalent porn use is, and I would love to be able to do my own unofficial polling. Weird I know, but nonetheless, I think about these like that.

Of course, you cannot tell by outward appearance. There are times however that I feel I am thinking so loudly that surely the people around me know what's going on in my head. On days I feel good and secure, I think about it in the way I described above, as a reaching-out, I'm here-to-help-you kind of way. On days I feel this fight is hopeless, it is different. For example, if I had found out yesterday that my hubby viewed porn that day, my storytime thoughts would have been like this, "Hubby would find her hot." "She is so much prettier than me." "I am such a slob in these jeans." "Which one of these would hubby go for?" And it goes on and on.

After over a year of recovery, I have gotten better at not letting these thoughts control me. I can't say I never think them, but I have gotten to the point where they do not consume me. The irony is that this makes me more sympathetic to hubby when he talks about struggling with his thought life i.e., lust. It is VERY HARD! He struggles with lust, I struggle with obsessing about his struggle with lust. Exhausting.

The bottom line is this. The Bible says we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. God can do this if we allow him to. It is a minute-by-minute transformation. And it is exhausting. But the Bible also says to come to Him you are weary and burdened. And I don't know a spouse of any addict who would not fit that category.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

I hope my readers, if I have any, are patient people. This is my first post on my first blog. So I guess you could say I am a novice at this. I have enjoyed learning more about the blogging process, but I have a whole lot more to learn. Like our lives, this is definitely a work in progress.

I had never even read a blog before November of 2006. Didn't really have a reason too I guess. I suppose I had heard of them but had assumed they were for people who knew more about computers than I do. But in a desperate attempt to find someone, anyone, who knew what I was going through, I stumbled into the world of blogging. I found out that I was definitely not the only one struggling with a husband struggling with porn use. In fact, there are whole communities out there in "cyberspace" dedicated to the careful and oh-so-important recovery of us wives. Yes, we need recovery too. You are important. Your husband's addiction is not your fault. It actually has nothing to do with you. And he would still look at porn no matter if you were a supermodel yourself. These statements are easy to say, hard to believe.

Reading and creating blogs has not been the only change in my life since November 2006. There have been many, and most not near that creative. I guess the most common sense discovery I made that keeps coming back to me is this: Addicts lie. I hate to think of my hubby as a liar, but he perfected this trait with many, many years of practice. Now we are rebuilding. Rebuilding trust is very hard to do, sometimes I think it impossible. But we are giving it our best try, and my hubby is really trying.

After discovering my hubby's addiction, I was thrust into a world I never knew existed. I like to call it the underworld of sexual addiction. I am almost envious for those innocent days when I did not know terms such as "the addictive cycle," "the rollercoaster," "codependent," "acting out," "sexual anorexia," and "triggers." However, if I had not lived through this, my marriage would not be as strong as it is today. In a strange way, my hubby's porn addiction is the best thing that has happened to our marriage. Now we are real. Good or bad, we are real. Does he still have slip-ups? Yes. Do I still feel like throwing in the towel and kicking his butt to the curb? Yes. We have by no means figured this whole thing out, I don't think you ever really do, but we are definitely farther along than we were this time last year.

This blog is about living with a recovering porn addict. The good, the bad, and the ugly.