| My husband is 50 years old, we've been married close to 3 years now. We've had some bumps in the road, but have been working hard to communicate better and our relationship is stronger for it. My question is can someone have an "addictive" personality? Meaning can they easily become addicted to one thing and then change their addiction/obsession to something else? He started smoking pot with his older brother's friends when he was 11. He got married the first time at 20 and continued to smoke pot until she threatened to leave him. He stopped... but then became very involved in a church, he was raised Catholic but this was one of those non-demoninational churches where they speak in tongues and lay hands on people (I call them Scary Crazy churches - but I'm not a big fan of organized religion to begin with). He got deeply involved in this church to the point the wife finally left him. He was single for 3 years and became an assistant preacher at this church and met wife #2 there, he wasn't especially attracted to her, but he thought God had put her in his path, this was a Christian woman he was meant to be with. So they got married and he said they didn't have sex until their wedding night and when she took her clothes off for the first time he realized he had no sexual attraction to her... but God put her in his life, so he stuck with it. She was a manipulative woman (she's the mother of his child so I've dealt with her in person and I know he's not just saying that to color her as the bad person, she really is a narcissist) When his son was 3 he had had enough of her and left her. She told the church and they basically shunned him, so he left that church too. Within a few months he was hooked up with some woman he had met in a bar. He marries wife #3 ten days after his divorce from 2 is final. Within a year they are into the swinging lifestyle. She has an alcohol problem, but he's drinking alot during this phase too. That marriage lasts 5 years and he leaves her because she won't quit drinking. He's hooked up with a new girlfriend within a few months of that, and is living with her by the time divorce #3 is final. The swinging has stopped, he didn't tell the GF anything about it (and I know it ended because I found his old check registers and any reference to sex clubs and stuff ended a couple months before he left #3). He claims he never cheated on this girlfriend even though she moved to a neighboring state and he only saw her every other weekend. This relationship lasted 2 years. When he broke up with her he went through a series of one night stands for about a year until he met me. When we got together I noticed that he drank, what I considered to be, alot. 2 or 3 beers every night after work, and lots of drinks at bars on the weekends when his buddy's band was playing. At first he tried to get in my pants very fast, but I'm not like that - been used by men before and wanted a real relationship with someone. He got upset at that at first and said we probably weren't compatible then, but changed his mind and continued dating me. Almost as soon as he told me that he was in love with me, I noticed a marked change in him - he didn't drink as much, wasn't interested in hanging out with his buddy's band, and was claiming to see a connection between emotion and sex for the first time in his life. (Now, I didn't know his complete past, he colored it in his favor for a long time, but finally confessed to me after we were married - that's a whole other story in and of itself) Now he's a "homebody". He'd rather sit home watching something on tv with me then go play darts with his friends. We have alot in common and similar interests, so most of our activities are with each other. He doesn't hang out with his old friends anymore - and I felt sort of bad for that, almost as if he was sacrificing his friendships for me, so I tried to get him to join the dart league again, or go visit his friends, but he said he didn't want to, so we made new friends together. He says he's in a "healthier" frame of mind then he has ever been in in his life. But I'm wondering, is he just in another "addictive" phase of his life? I do know that he had a not so great childhood and I think he grew up feeling unloved - that may be why he went from bad relationship to bad relationship just trying to fill a void. When we did go to therapy, the therapist labeled him an "addict" and he got upset over that, saying he did not have an addictive personality. | |||
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