Hello,
I wish my first post on this forum wasn't this. After reading through to many threads and topics I have a deep regret that I didn't take the time to seek out this sort of social outlet before.
About myself and my situation:
My wife and I have been married for almost 7 years this May, we met just a year before that. I have, for lack of a better word, shattered my marriage on multiple occasions for the very beginning. She came from a pretty modest Christian upbringing while I came from family that never attend nor practiced any
sort or religion.
Just a couple months into our marriage, pregnant with our second, I went out with some friends to a rave (never again) where I kissed another woman. I truly don't know why, my wife and I were still in our honeymoon phase and things were great. I think the attention given by some stranger made me feel special since I was never one to receive any sort of attention from women and it gave me an overly inflated ego to do what I wanted without consequences. During that night the girl told me to find her on Facebook. The next day I did that very thing, I gave up after a short while but not soon after that my wife was going through the history to find something she searched for that day and came across my history. I denied it initially until each it of truth slowly came to light. This set us up for a very rocky start to our marriage as you could probably guess.
Fast forward to Late 2012, we now have 3 children... I was laid off from my job a year prior and was unable to find steady, lucrative work to keep us afloat. My solution was to move us 1600 miles away from her family and to be closer to mine. Shortly after moving a dirty secret of mine emerged, I was looking at pornography and had been for years. Sometimes more frequently than others but it had always been there. This was something my wife was not ok with and I agreed with her that it was not good for our marriage (before anyone says that porn is ok in their marriage just work with me on this and agree that it's not for my situation). I swore to cut it out and we moved forward and pick up the pieces of our marriage.
Skip ahead 3-4 months (mid 2013)... My job requires a fair amount of social media usage to be successful at it, mainly Facebook. Due to my past and most recent acts of infidelity my wife is prone to check my web history. One thing she wasn't counting on was FB's calculated way of tracking pages and people you search. She came across pages that had been searched anywhere from 2-3 months ago or even days before. The damning thing to hurt our marriage was that I searched for old girlfriends (3 to be exact) to look at their pages. Why? I still don't know exactly why. I run it through my head a lot, even nearly a year later, maybe I wanted to compared myself with them, wanted to make sure I was the better man and they just lost out. Maybe I wanted to escape to a time when I felt I wasn't held to such a higher standard from a girl (pathetic, yes), my wife is an amazing woman and expects me to be a man and take on the role that I should (not an unreasonable request). To add insult t o her injury, I searched an old girlfriend of an old friend of mine. This girl was particularly mean to my wife during the short period of time she was around. She came across a news feed of mine (mutual friends with someone that I have since blocked) and curiosity set in. She's not super attractive but she took racy pictures which I took the time to search out. This also came out around the all of this happened. To solve this I agreed to see a therapist to what we saw as a porn addiction. I went to a few sessions but I was not making much money at my job and have to put a halt on them.
Time went by and things were good, I was staying away from porn. I didn't sneak a peek on any pages that I shouldn't be going to. Things were good. Still gluing the pieces back but it was getting somewhat better.
I fell of the wagon, so to speak, just before Thanksgiving this past year. While I was navigating through random pages on FB I lingered on one of those inappropriate FB pages that you'd hate to have your spouse have in their Like column. I didn't Like it but I clicked and it was saved in my history. About a week went by and I was confronted about it. I denied it at first as is my first line of defense (stupid, I know). After many tears and heartache I decided that it wasn't that I had an addiction to porn which drove me to do what I did. I had a lingering/lustful eye that got in the way of my marriage. I ended up seeking out self help books and my wife came across one called Every Man's Battle by Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker. It pinpointed a majority of my issues and allowed me to address what was wrong with myself.
From Nov '12 to just a few days ago I was solid as a rock. No searching, no seeking, no checking out any women. I was committed to my family and and my marriage. I could write a book on why my wife is the best out there and how she deserves a good man but you already know that I contradict that thought by my actions.
So a couple days ago I searched for racy pictures of someone we've been watching on TV lately. To be honest, this person irritates, annoys and is downright despised by me because of how they act and conduct themselves. If I told you who, you would agree. This person made a sex tape and it's constantly brought up. My wife has watched it in the past just out of curiosity and the hype of the video and never watched it again. I made a promise to myself when she watched it that not only would I never watch it but that I wouldn't even know what she looked like naked which I was proud to puff up my chest about. My own curiosity set in and I looked up pictures of her to just to see myself what it was all about. No sexual gratification was down and it was search for and looked at for 90 seconds max on my smartphone. Well, I left phone at home today and my wife searched my history, she saw how I tried to hide it and it's bad now. I'm sleeping downstairs for the foreseeable future and s he made a promise that if this ever happened again we were done. We already made plans to move back home near her family a couple months ago so I believe her when she said she's separating when school's out for the kids.
That was a novel of a story and you probably don't know what I seeking yet. I guess I want to know what you would do if you were in my shoes. I want this marriage to work. She feels I'm doing this because I'm not able to just say I want a divorce. Divorce is the last thing I ever want. She's amazing and I strive to treat her as such but I keep messing up like this. I don't have male friends that I'm close to after moving. The closest person I have to a father figure is her father and I can't go to my in-law and tell him how I'm treating his daughter horribly AGAIN and expect unbiased advice.
Please asked away if you feel I may have left anything out.
I wish my first post on this forum wasn't this. After reading through to many threads and topics I have a deep regret that I didn't take the time to seek out this sort of social outlet before.
About myself and my situation:
My wife and I have been married for almost 7 years this May, we met just a year before that. I have, for lack of a better word, shattered my marriage on multiple occasions for the very beginning. She came from a pretty modest Christian upbringing while I came from family that never attend nor practiced any
sort or religion.
Just a couple months into our marriage, pregnant with our second, I went out with some friends to a rave (never again) where I kissed another woman. I truly don't know why, my wife and I were still in our honeymoon phase and things were great. I think the attention given by some stranger made me feel special since I was never one to receive any sort of attention from women and it gave me an overly inflated ego to do what I wanted without consequences. During that night the girl told me to find her on Facebook. The next day I did that very thing, I gave up after a short while but not soon after that my wife was going through the history to find something she searched for that day and came across my history. I denied it initially until each it of truth slowly came to light. This set us up for a very rocky start to our marriage as you could probably guess.
Fast forward to Late 2012, we now have 3 children... I was laid off from my job a year prior and was unable to find steady, lucrative work to keep us afloat. My solution was to move us 1600 miles away from her family and to be closer to mine. Shortly after moving a dirty secret of mine emerged, I was looking at pornography and had been for years. Sometimes more frequently than others but it had always been there. This was something my wife was not ok with and I agreed with her that it was not good for our marriage (before anyone says that porn is ok in their marriage just work with me on this and agree that it's not for my situation). I swore to cut it out and we moved forward and pick up the pieces of our marriage.
Skip ahead 3-4 months (mid 2013)... My job requires a fair amount of social media usage to be successful at it, mainly Facebook. Due to my past and most recent acts of infidelity my wife is prone to check my web history. One thing she wasn't counting on was FB's calculated way of tracking pages and people you search. She came across pages that had been searched anywhere from 2-3 months ago or even days before. The damning thing to hurt our marriage was that I searched for old girlfriends (3 to be exact) to look at their pages. Why? I still don't know exactly why. I run it through my head a lot, even nearly a year later, maybe I wanted to compared myself with them, wanted to make sure I was the better man and they just lost out. Maybe I wanted to escape to a time when I felt I wasn't held to such a higher standard from a girl (pathetic, yes), my wife is an amazing woman and expects me to be a man and take on the role that I should (not an unreasonable request). To add insult t o her injury, I searched an old girlfriend of an old friend of mine. This girl was particularly mean to my wife during the short period of time she was around. She came across a news feed of mine (mutual friends with someone that I have since blocked) and curiosity set in. She's not super attractive but she took racy pictures which I took the time to search out. This also came out around the all of this happened. To solve this I agreed to see a therapist to what we saw as a porn addiction. I went to a few sessions but I was not making much money at my job and have to put a halt on them.
Time went by and things were good, I was staying away from porn. I didn't sneak a peek on any pages that I shouldn't be going to. Things were good. Still gluing the pieces back but it was getting somewhat better.
I fell of the wagon, so to speak, just before Thanksgiving this past year. While I was navigating through random pages on FB I lingered on one of those inappropriate FB pages that you'd hate to have your spouse have in their Like column. I didn't Like it but I clicked and it was saved in my history. About a week went by and I was confronted about it. I denied it at first as is my first line of defense (stupid, I know). After many tears and heartache I decided that it wasn't that I had an addiction to porn which drove me to do what I did. I had a lingering/lustful eye that got in the way of my marriage. I ended up seeking out self help books and my wife came across one called Every Man's Battle by Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker. It pinpointed a majority of my issues and allowed me to address what was wrong with myself.
From Nov '12 to just a few days ago I was solid as a rock. No searching, no seeking, no checking out any women. I was committed to my family and and my marriage. I could write a book on why my wife is the best out there and how she deserves a good man but you already know that I contradict that thought by my actions.
So a couple days ago I searched for racy pictures of someone we've been watching on TV lately. To be honest, this person irritates, annoys and is downright despised by me because of how they act and conduct themselves. If I told you who, you would agree. This person made a sex tape and it's constantly brought up. My wife has watched it in the past just out of curiosity and the hype of the video and never watched it again. I made a promise to myself when she watched it that not only would I never watch it but that I wouldn't even know what she looked like naked which I was proud to puff up my chest about. My own curiosity set in and I looked up pictures of her to just to see myself what it was all about. No sexual gratification was down and it was search for and looked at for 90 seconds max on my smartphone. Well, I left phone at home today and my wife searched my history, she saw how I tried to hide it and it's bad now. I'm sleeping downstairs for the foreseeable future and s he made a promise that if this ever happened again we were done. We already made plans to move back home near her family a couple months ago so I believe her when she said she's separating when school's out for the kids.
That was a novel of a story and you probably don't know what I seeking yet. I guess I want to know what you would do if you were in my shoes. I want this marriage to work. She feels I'm doing this because I'm not able to just say I want a divorce. Divorce is the last thing I ever want. She's amazing and I strive to treat her as such but I keep messing up like this. I don't have male friends that I'm close to after moving. The closest person I have to a father figure is her father and I can't go to my in-law and tell him how I'm treating his daughter horribly AGAIN and expect unbiased advice.
Please asked away if you feel I may have left anything out.
Put the internet to work for you.
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