Hello Besties! My name is Erin! I am a 24 year old college student currently living in Utah. This is my last semester as a Theater Education Major at UVU. I spend most of my time student teaching right now, but when I do have free time I love to sew and write plays. I grew up all over the country and love getting to know people and their cultures. My husband and I have been married for 2 hard but wonderful years. We don’t have any kids yet, but we are infertility warriors and miscarriage survivors. We have so much hope for our future in regards to children, sobriety, and many more adventures! I am an aggressively strong advocate for openness and vulnerability. I love to connect with other people on a deeper level. I do everything in my life with an almost unhealthy amount of passion! Along with that, I am also a compulsive planner and a self diagnosed control freak. Above all, I believe that the secret of happiness is living in the now, no matter what struggles come my way.
A young adult woman, raised to love God and respect His commandments, marries a man who struggles with a pornography addiction. Her whole life she has been taught it is wrong. He stays clean for a while and then relapses. This wife has given everything to him both emotionally and physically, and this betrayal hurts unlike anything that she has ever felt. She does not know that it is possible to feel pain in every fiber of her being until this moment. Yes, her heart hurts, but so does her brain and her neck and her stomach. Her body somehow feels like it is exploding and imploding all in an instant. And her reality is doing the exact same thing. Nothing in her life will ever be the same again.
All she wants to do is scream.
But she can’t. Her husband struggles with pornography and that is not her secret to tell. If she told, people would think less of him. And what would they say about her? No one would love him. No one would respect him. No one would understand her. They might ask why she stays with him or if he is really a “good guy”. He is already stressed and struggling enough. He doesn’t need any extra pressure. This is his story, not hers. How could she tell anyone? It isn’t her place, is it?
This is what I hear every time a young wife comes to our support group for the first time. More often than not, we are the first people that she has ever told about her husband’s addiction. These women feel like they have to go through this alone because it is a topic that most people incorrectly associate with shame.
My Story:
I grew up in a wonderful family. I was blessed to have two loving parents and three rambunctious brothers who always kept me on my toes. I was the third child in our family, and we were always financially stable. My life was pretty good, and I am grateful for that every day. To the outside we probably looked picture perfect, but we had our struggles.
When I was about fifteen my mom came into my room one night and told me about a family member’s struggle with pornography. I don’t think I understood exactly what that meant back then, but I knew it was bad and that our church taught us that it was wrong to be involved with it. All I really know about his journey is that he struggled for a very long time and that he is in full recovery and has been for years now.
This may not seem like a lot, but this was my first exposure to addiction. I can now recognize that this was something God placed in my life because He knew what I was going to be up against later. From the moment that I learned about my loved one’s battle with pornography I began to recognize addicts as people with struggles as opposed to only seeing their addiction. There was no way I could look at this loved one and only see the worst part of him, especially when he was working so hard to banish that part forever. I loved him no matter what.
When I was 21 I began dating the man who would become my husband. When you are single and people ask how you know if you should marry someone, more often than not they say something like, “You just know!” As a single person that is infuriating, but then one day it happens and you really do just know. After that moment it all kind of fell into place.
I remember the night we first talked about if we wanted to get married. I was so happy that I thought nothing could ruin my mood. Then he said that if we were serious I needed to know some things about him. He told me all about his struggle with pornography. It had been going on for about ten years. He had tried a lot of things to help. He had been through a program that had helped him maintain sobriety for just under a year. Sadly, he had fallen into old habits and was working really hard to overcome them. This is the part where most people I know would have told me (and did tell me in many cases) to run as far as I could to get away from this man.
About two years earlier I had encouraged a friend to work through these same struggles with her fiance. At the time I felt God telling me these exact words: “Remember what you are helping her to learn, you will need it one day.” In this moment, I heard those words again in my mind. I felt immediate peace about my decision to get married. Our engagement was hard and had a lot of bumps, but when we got married he had only relapsed in the two months leading up to our wedding. That was a miracle for us at the time. I was so proud of him.
I in no way regret marrying my husband, but I also admit that I did not know what I was getting into when I did. When you marry someone, you marry all of their baggage too. He married my anxiety and I married his addiction. When you think about pornography on a surface level it seems so obvious that relapses happen because the addict wants to fulfill some type of sexual desire. I just figured the problem would naturally go away now that he had me and we could have a physically intimate relationship. (Our church does not believe in sexual relations outside of marriage, so we were not intimate until afterward our wedding.) That did not happen. He was sober for three months after we first got married, but then one day he came to me to let me know that he relapsed again.
It hurt to hear. My heart was shattered. I remember driving home from school that night and I could barely see because I was crying so hard. I felt like every nerve in my body was on fire. It was a physical pain. I was devastated. I had so many feelings of inadequacy. Was I not pretty enough? Was I not frisky enough? Was I not smart enough? Was I not willing enough? Was I not enough?
It took a while, but I have learned that the answer to all of these questions is an absolute and irrevocable NO. I didn’t learn that overnight, and I definitely still have those thoughts more often than I would care to admit. We have attended Addiction Recovery Groups for months and it is amazing the progress that we have seen since then. Every Tuesday we would go to the building, kiss in the hall, and he would walk into his twelve step program specifically for pornography addiction recovery. Then I would walk into my room full of wives and mothers who are all striving to support their loved ones. I have never felt more love than I felt in that room every week. The women in this journey with you are absolutely amazing.
Our Recovery:
There is a moment in this narrative where a decision is made: You either choose to stay and fight alongside your husband or you choose to walk away for your own protection. Neither choice is wrong. You need to do what is best for you. But the moment you found out, the moment you felt the effects of this addiction, this struggle became your story too. Your husband is not the only one hurting because of this addiction.
If you are anything like me, this changed your whole world. It is something you think about multiple times a day. It changes how you watch TV and how you listen to music. You might find yourself worrying about how people dress at the mall or getting anxious when you go swimming with your spouse. Everything is different. No one ever told you that you had to suffer in silence. For some weird reason, we put that onto ourselves. But it is so unhealthy. You can not and should not go through this alone.
At the beginning of this journey it can feel a lot like being stuck in a hurricane. Everything is spinning out of control. You can’t seem to find anything to hold onto. There is a solution:
Take ownership of your own story!
My story is not easy, and it is not over. If anything it’s just beginning. But it is mine. And about 90% of the time I feel hopeful about my future. I can honestly say that I am usually happy. Yes, I have hard days, but who doesn’t! I won’t apologize for being human and having problems. Our life isn’t perfect. I dare say it generally isn’t easy either. But my husband and I are fighting this battle. Together. Every day. Every hour. That is our solution and our story.
There is so much about this that you do not have any control over. So why not take ownership over what you can control? I can not describe how liberating it is to feel like you are actually winning at something. And, in this story, we have to take the wins where we can get them.
Something magical happens when you decide that this is your journey as well as his. All of the sudden you are allowed to hurt. You are allowed to reach out for help. You are allowed to be angry and upset and frustrated and hurt. You are allowed to have bad days. It feels like a ton of bricks is lifted off of your shoulders because you have given yourself permission to feel and process all of the crazy emotions that come with addiction. The hurricane definitely does not go away, but you are now in the eye of the storm. Everything may be spinning out of control, but now you are standing on firm footing. You finally have control over one thing: yourself.
OWN YOUR STORY.
If you are an outsider reading this, I urge you to open your hearts. If these women can love someone struggling with addiction, so can you. If my story sounds all too familiar to you, THERE IS HELP. There are so many people out there going through this same thing, and we can all help each other and learn from one another’s experiences. I have so many resources that I would love to share with you. No one is alone.
Love,
A Twelve Step Wife
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Danielle is the owner of Today's the Best Day. She strives to provide creative and uplifting content in order to enrich the parenting experience for women everywhere. Danielle hopes to help you and your family to make every day the best day! 
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