Boundaries

Why didn't anyone tell me that I can say things like this?:
"If you talk to me that way I will go spend the night at my friend's house."
"If you look at porn you will not be sleeping with me."

In my case, following my parents' excellent example of a healthy marriage went terribly wrong. My parents were loving and giving to each other, putting each other's needs first. But it takes two to have a relationship like that. One person doing it becomes a slave!

My father made it a point to teach my brothers to treat women with respect. Both parents taught me and my sister to only date men who would respect our physical and emotional boundaries. But no one told me I was responsible to see that I was treated with respect after marriage. My husband seemed like the kind of man who would. He was raised to respect women too.

Maybe pornography warped his view of women.

Or maybe I did, by letting him control me.

Either way, it ends here.

Is This Going to Save Our Marriage?

Yes and no. We're both committed to making it work, so our marriage will be saved. Does that mean his adultery was necessary? I wrestled with this question while reading this yesterday.

My husband claims experiencing this has helped him to value me more. We were both virgins (technically) when we got married, so he always had to wonder what he was missing. Now he's learned it wasn't much. (I wondered too, but I valued monogamy too much to let that get beyond vague fantasy.) I've no doubt he does value me more now. And yet, there is no way it was worth destroying the rare, valuable, beautiful thing we had just to find out how rare, valuable, and beautiful it was.

This will be the catalyst that saves our marriage. It is forcing us to deal with things we didn't before. Even simple actions I failed to take, like sending our two-year-old to spend some time with his grandparents so we could talk uninhibited, or shopping for music to fend off depression, have now been coerced.

But we could have done those things before. This is just the end of the road we were speeding down. We could have gotten out of the car and walked a side trail before we ran smack into the mountain we'll now have to climb. He could have gotten help with his sexual addiction before this. I could have given him an ultimatum before this.

To anyone reading this who hasn't hit the mountain yet, pull over now. There is another way! And either of you can choose it, if you have the courage.