Fixer-Upper

We have a two year old girl, who like every other two year old, is obsessed with Frozen. I’d say I’ve probably seen it 5,876 times, at least. I like it, it’s a cute movie. I didn’t see all kinds of hidden messages about, well, anything in it. But, the more times I watch it, the more the music speaks to me. I won’t pretend this is some hidden message in the movie or that the makers are all closet wives-of-porn-addicts with a hidden agenda.  This is just what I hear in the movie. 

Mainly, the song that I hear truth in is “Fixer-Upper”, sang by the trolls. There is one part of this song that I don’t agree with – that is when the troll says “I’m not saying you can change him, cuz’ people don’t really change…” because I am a firm believer that people can and do change. My husband is changing every day, overcoming his addiction, overcoming his proneness to anger, overcoming acting out. But, I didn’t change him. He is choosing to change.  But aside from that line – the next part of this song especially – I heard a message I needed to hear. 

The next line in this song, I believe is the reason why my husband changes – “We’re only sayin’ that loves a force, that’s powerful and strange.”  Love is powerful. He is choosing to change and overcome because of LOVE. Love for the Savior, love for himself and love for the family we are building. 

“People make bad choices, if they’re mad or scared or stressed. But throw a little love their way, and you’ll bring out their best!” Yes, people do make bad choices. My husband is no exception. I am no exception to this idea. When my husband is mad or scared or stressed, he triggers. When he triggers, he has a choice – to give in or to walk away. Sometimes, his anger or stress clouds his reasoning and desire to overcome and he gives in. In that same though, sometimes, when I’m mad or stressed, I say things I don’t mean or I yell at our kids. Sometimes I eat an entire package of cookies or forget about everything I should be doing. Sometimes I quit praying and reading my scriptures because I’m mad. We all make bad choices. His bad choices (specifically giving in to his addiction) are different than my bad choices. I am learning to throw some love his way when I see him triggering. He is learning to throw a little love my way when I am stressed. Mostly, we are learning to SEEK for the love our Savior is throwing our way, because in those moments – love really does bring out our best. 

“True love brings out the best! Everyone's a bit of a fixer-upper, that's what it's all about!... We need each other to raise us up and round us out. Everyone's a bit of a fixer-upper, but when push comes to shove, the only fixer-upper fixer that can fix a fixer-upper is…True Love.” I need my husband. He needs me. We need the Savior. My husband is a “fixer-upper”. He is addicted to pornography. He says bad words in front of the kids sometimes and he yells when he’s mad. I am a “fixer-upper.” I yell at my husband and I yell at my kids. I don’t do things on my too do list and I really don’t even keep my house clean. Everyone is a fixer-upper and that is where the Savior steps in. 

The Savior made the ultimate sacrifice – the ultimate “throwing of love” for us. He gave his life so that we could be free from the sins, addictions and mistakes that hold us back. The trolls in Frozen reminded me of this simple truth as I watched it. We are fixer-uppers. Not just our husbands with the scary addictions. We all need the Savior and his love to fix us up and get us back to our Father. We also need that love to help us heal from the pain and the hurt that a pornography addiction brings. If I am going to survive the rest of our life as the Wife of a Porn Addict – I am going to do it with love. With love for my sweet husband, love for our Savior and love for the promise that we can be made better through that love.

Seven months!

Seven months. 

My husband went seven months without looking at porn. Then yesterday, while flipping through an app that was supposed to block crap like this, he had a porno in his face. Meaning, he was faced with a HARD choice. Should he pull up the video, watch it in secret and get his fix? Or should he shut his phone off, put it in his backpack, run to a more public place?

Apparently, his choice was the first option. Click the link and watch it. 

I was playing with his phone yesterday. He was sitting on the couch with me, my legs thrown over his, one baby was napping, the other playing with her toys. We were laughing and life was good. I was asking him questions about the different features of his phone. Someday, I’ll get a new one so I was checking out his to see if it is what I want to get when my upgrade rolls around.

I found a feature that lets you see you usage history – it literally shows a screenshot of every app and program you used, unless you clear them off it. He didn’t clear it and while scrolling through that, something caught my eye. I scrolled back up. Was that… yep, my friends, it was; a screenshot of a naked woman on my husband’s phone.

My heart sank, my hands started shaking, my breathing changed. I literally threw his phone down and said, “Well…” I couldn’t breathe. He was supposed to have changed. To be doing better with this porn crap. I had seriously asked him not five minutes before if he was being “good” with his phone. He smiled, looked me in the eye and said yes. LIAR!

I didn’t know what to do. We talked for a few minutes and then I went upstairs. I locked myself in the bathroom and turned the light off. My knees hit the floor and I prayed like I never have. To feel forgiving, to feel like I could breath. I prayed for inspiration, for help reacting appropriately. Why, why did he have to do that? After SEVEN months, why?

Later we crawled into bed together. I was hurting. Then, he wrapped his arms around me, pressed his face into my back and cried. It’s been a long time since he cried. We talked and I could see just how bad he was hurting. He knew he screwed up; he knew I was hurting and it was his fault. He didn’t need me to tell him how stupid he was or how much I wanted to throw up. It was then that forgiveness came. It came easier than ever before. He messed up. He’s an addict and while that doesn’t excuse his behavior, it does mean sometimes he will mess up. We cried together and talked for a long time. 

Peace came last night, like we were both praying for. Forgiveness came after I prayed for help finding it. Today, I’m feeling okay about our relationship, which has been rocky for a long time. Today, I know we are going to be just fine. He’s going to be okay and so am I. I have rarely felt peace or an answer come so quickly when I prayed for it. It was truly a testimony to me that God is aware of us and our hurts and that he will answer when we plead. 

I hate this addiction. I hate the fear it brings to my home. I hate the tears and the lying and the massive wedge it drove into my happy marriage. What I don’t hate are the lessons I am learning. I am learning that I am stronger than I thought I could be. I am learning that tears and fears are real, but so are faith and the perfect love of our Father in Heaven. It took a painful slip up after seven long months of sobriety for me to realize how quickly my prayers can be answered, after feeling for months like they weren’t. My new resolve is to remember that lesson and apply much, much more often than I have in the last seven months.

Signs

I can’t say that the husband looking at porn was a complete shock to me. There were signs, signs I see much clearer now that I am two years out from d-day. 

There were nights when I went to bed alone while he played a video game. I would ask him to come to bed and he would say "just a minute, I’ll be there soon."

There were times I would wake up in the middle of the night and he still wouldn’t be in bed. I would think “I need to go see what he’s doing.” Those weren’t my thoughts. I believe they were promptings. But I never did follow up on them. I’d just call his name from the bedroom.

 

Always, when I walked into the room, he shut down his computer screen so the desktop showed. I would wonder what he was looking at but I never checked on it. 

Then there was his anger and frustration. He would snap at little things. He was never mean or violent towards me. But sometimes, he would yell and get upset and nothing. I could never understand where that temper came from. 

I never did anything about the signs I saw. On occasion I’d ask him why he seemed so frustrated. He would blame it on school, work or stress about big life decisions. I am sure those played a part – for sure when he was stressed his acting out got worse. 

I have spent hours and hours wondering what would be different if I had followed up on those promptings. What if I had questioned him when he shut down what he was doing on the computer when I walked in the room? What if I had really tried to figure out what was making him angry?

I never did those things because I falsely believed that it was his life and he could do what he wanted. I was wrong – we are married, that makes us a team. What he was doing – what I thought was just video games late into the night and being a little bit secretive about his doings on the computer – it was slowly destroying our marriage, his life and my self-confidence. Sure, it’s his life, but it’s my life too. It’s the life we are building for our little babies.

Now, I watch for these signs. I notice when they are coming and try to talk to him. I make sure to pray extra hard that he'll feel the Spirit. I can't change what he decides to do and I can't make him abstain from looking at pornography. Mostly, I try to listen to the promptings I feel and act on them.

 

The night of D-Day

After I composed myself I sent my husband a text. It was simple, “we have to talk.” I sent it just a few minutes before he was supposed to be home. We had a wedding reception that night.

I was hungry. At six months pregnant, I was always hungry. I started some Ramen Noodles. I had the water boiling and had just dropped that little square of noodles into the water when I heard the door open. I steeled myself for a hard conversation, threw a smile on and went to greet my husband. He walked down the stairs slowly.

“I got your text. What did you want to talk about?” he said.

I said nothing.

“It’s about this morning, right? About the computer?”

I still said nothing.

“Jess… I’m sorry. I, I don’t know what to say….”

He tried to talk and apologize. I turned the stove off and walked into our bedroom. (side note: those ramen noodles may or may not have sat on the stove for three days. I still can't make ramen noodles without thinking of him telling me that yes, he was looking at other women's naked pictures.) I cried. I didn’t know what to say to him. How do you ask the man you love if he’s been looking at other women naked the whole time you’ve been married or if it’s a new thing? How do you tell him how disappointed and heartbroken you are? All I could muster was, “Did you even think about our marriage before you started this?” 

That opened the floodgates. We talked for a long time. Somewhere in the middle of talking we got ready to go to my cousin’s wedding reception and went. I managed to put on a happy face and sit with my family. I managed to tell my cousin and his new bride how happy I was for them – all while thinking of my wedding day almost two years before. 

We came home and talked more. He told me how it started, how long it had been, how he never meant to hurt me, how it had nothing to do with me. I cried. He talked. I asked questions and cried.

Finally, we agreed to call my Dad and ask him to come give my husband a blessing. My Dad, the saint that he is, came right over with my Mom. They talked to us for a long time. Never judging, never blaming just talking to my husband about the atonement and then gave both of us blessings.

We went to bed after my parents left. My husband laid there for a long time. I sat in up in bed, hugging my knees the best that a pregnant woman can. I don’t think I slept. 

That night, I knew my world had changed. I knew nothing would ever be the same. I knew something was terribly wrong in our home and that something would have to change for us to ever be happy or have peace again. 

What I didn’t know then was that my husband was addicted to porn. Heck, I didn’t even really know that porn addiction was a thing. I didn’t know this was something we would deal with on a regular basis for the next few years. I didn’t know that my heart could break so many times. 

I also didn’t know that someday I would find peace. That I would be okay with this porn addiction. I didn’t know that I would find strength somewhere and manage to move forward. I didn’t know that I could still love my husband because that night, all I could think about were the terrible images I had discovered on my computer.

Discovery Day

Discovery day. D-day. If your new to the community of porn addict wives maybe you haven’t heard this term. If you’ve been around a while, you probably know what it is. We all have them. For me, it’s a day that brings heartbreaking memories. It symbolizes to me, the dawn of a whole new life. The day I realized my life, my world and my marriage would be forever changed. The day I earned a new title, one I never wanted. Wife of a Porn Addict.

My discovery day was August 6, 2011. It started out like any other day. I was six months pregnant with our first baby. I woke up in our little basement apartment and got a bowl of cereal. I decided to turn Pandora on the computer. I didn’t use the “big” computer very often, I just preferred my little laptop. We were students and the hubster bought a huge $700 computer earlier that year. It was supposed to be for him to use in drafting classes. I clicked on the computer and started typing. P… I stopped there, figuring that Pandora would show up in the URL drop down.  

The results didn’t have Pandora in them. Instead they were filled with the URL’s of sites I couldn’t have dreamed up in my nightmares. All of them included the word “porn.”

I went into our bedroom and asked my husband why the URL bar would be filled with results like that. He said it was probably from when he bought the computer, maybe the results were from something before. He had a few ideas as to where it could have come from.  I think I probably looked at him like he was an idiot and said okay. He left for work a few minutes later.

As soon as he left, I got to work. I pulled up the history.  It was filled with vile sites. Wanting to puke, I kept digging. I looked through the search history. Searches for words like “porn” “sex” and “boobs” quickly came up, along with the names of specific girls. The girls of his fantasies. Wanting to find something to tell me this was a bad joke, I just kept looking. Sometimes I wish I had stopped.  The more I looked, the more I felt shattered. There were files and files of images of girls doing things I can’t describe. The images I found on the computer that day are burned into my brain. 

I cried. I collapsed into a pile on the computer desk and sobbed. I got in the shower and bawled like a baby. I tried to get dressed and cried some more. I couldn’t believe the words and images I saw on the computer were something my husband would be looking for. How could this be my world?!

My husband is a porn addict.

He’s also an amazing husband and an incredible father. He loves me, cherishes me, helps me do the laundry and leads our home with the Priesthood. He gives our babies blessings, makes them laugh until all our sides hurt and gently teaches them to be kind to each other. Most days he goes to school all day, works all evening and then comes home to study and help me study.

This blog is a collection of our joys and successes and our pains and failures. It’s a story of two people, completely in love and how they are slowly overcoming the hurt and betrayal an addiction to porn brings.