Carl and Alissa sat on the front porch in the early April sunshine. “Tell me again why you are mad at them? You can just… let it all out” Carl waved his phone wildly as he leaned forward and thrust it in her face like it was a microphone.
Alissa didn’t hesitate. She eagerly unloaded a detailed account of her friend’s recent social failings into Carl’s phone. He seldom seemed to care what, or if, anything bothered her at all. The fact that he was even interested in this little dust-up with her two closest friends at church seemed like an anomaly in itself. Mandy and Damon were a great couple, and had really become faithful friends over the past year, but more to Alissa than Carl. Carl just seemed to tolerate them, so as he urged her to vent her frustrations, Alissa gave herself to the passionate narrative.
“Its not what they said, but how they said it. Like everything I have done for them was worth nothing. They made me feel like a social outcast from their precious group, like it was their click and I was just being allowed to hang around. They were just so snobby about the whole thing. I don’t even know what made them think they had the right!”
Carl pulled the phone back and tapped a few buttons on the screen and announced “There. I sent them what you said. Now they know how you really feel!”
Alissa looked at her husband, stunned. After almost 14 years of marriage she was used to his rather unconventional social skills and had learned to roll with the punches. She’d lost friends. Some relationships had been salvaged by her apologizing passionately for him and working to keep him away from the few friends she had left. Mandy and Damon never really interested Carl. He had cut out early on a recent family night in their camper, taking the family’s car and forcing Alissa to wait for him to return the next day. Mandy and Damon had of course been very nice about it, and Alissa and the kids had spent a cozy night on the pull out sofa. The didn’t understand that for Carl, if he wanted to go home and nobody else did, it was entirely reasonable for him to just leave, to fulfill his own desires. It was always about Carl’s preferences. And Carl preferred for Mandy and Damon to hear how Alissa felt, so she’d stop complaining about the situation.
At a marriage intensive, six years before, the clinical psychologist assigned to her had used their only private session to affirm that from her vantage point she felt like Alissa was doing just about everything right in the marriage. She wasn’t perfect and tended to assume the worst about Carl’s intentions and motives, but Carl had some real mental health issues that were never going to allow him to do his part to heal their relationship. In their private afternoon session, the therapist had used the entire time not as previously planned to focus on identifying Alissa’s weak points, but to help her learn to cope with Carls, because Carl she said, was never going to change.
“If he showed any sign of joy in your suffering, I would suspect he was a psychopath. As it is, he is so absolutely immune to your discomfort, so cold and uncompassionate to your very obvious deep emotional pain that he at least has to be on the spectrum. I would have to administer a diagnostic to know for sure, but I don’t think he can feel empathy. He has probably learned how to ACT empathetic, but when it comes right down to it, he doesn’t care about anybody’s feelings but his own.
Sending a secretly recorded voice text to someone’s friends without getting permission was just the sort of thing Carl would do, without even knowing what he’d done wrong.
“Are you serious? Tell me you are just kidding and you didn’t just send that!” Alissa pleaded.
Carl looked confused. “No, I sent it. Now they know how you feel and you don’t have to obsess about it anymore.”
He couldn’t even imagine her feeling anything but what he was feeling, and she knew that yelling at him or arguing to help him see his mistake would only cause a needless fight. She needed to have a drink and relax. She turned to walk into the house and pour a glass of wine, and remembered that she was sober now, had been for more than a month. She grabbed her keys instead and calmly said “Thank you for solving my problem. I am sure I wont hear from them again. I am going to a meeting.”
She found a meeting that was starting soon and walked in five minutes before it started. It was a small meeting and everyone seemed to know each other. Nobody stopped to say hello. Her sponsor Kennedy had told her “If nobody talks to you, its your responsibility to talk to someone else. I don’t care if they are young, old, short, tall, fat, skinny, you walk up to the closest person there alone and introduce yourself and ask them how they are doing. If nobody is alone, count to 100. If everyone is still chatting and ignoring you, then and only then do you have permission to leave.” She hadn’t yet made it past 50.
A younger guy with an ACDC shirt was sitting alone at the tables pushed together in the center of the room. She took a seat a couple empty chairs away and said “Is this your first time at this meeting?”
ACDC Shirt said it was his first time. He recently moved to the area and a new friend was speaking at the meeting. He’d come along for moral support and because this group apparently goes out for Pho afterwards.
“Are you a big fan of Pho” she asked.
“I spent a year in Vietnam, and I did get pretty attached to noodle soup. I’m always looking for the best Pho.”
“What were you doing in Vietnam?”
He laughed. “Drinking, mostly! Well I mean, I was in the Army. I was discharged but I still like the soup. My girlfriend doesn’t get it.
“Divorce is not an option, unless he leaves me. I’m the only one who has committed adultery.”
The therapist took Alissa’s hand in her’s and looked her squarely in the eye. “Do you really think if one of the disciples had walked in on a Pharisee looking at porn on smart phone that they wouldn’t have stoned the man? The Bible says if a man even looks at a woman with lust, he has already committed adultery in his heart. If he is ejaculating into a sock rather than a vagina, and the woman isn’t in the room, is it really remaining faithful to his wife?”
“I don’t know. I had several affairs. Never on purpose and always when I was hurting from his porn addiction, but the way I seen it I am the one who sinned.”
He sinned first. He lied to you, and hid his porn addiction until after your marriage, and even then he didn’t humbly confess. You caught him. He has been unfaithful to you hundreds, if not thousands, of times since then. From what I can tell, for all his saying ‘sorry’ he’s never really given it up.
Porn addiction causes all kinds of intimacy problems in a marriage, and because the addict is so focused on their own satisfaction, they can be completely oblivious to their partner’s needs. I see this all the time in my practice. You are responsible for your own sin, but who among us would judge a child for stealing an apple, when they are absolutely starving.
“Yes, but I wasn’t starving, not really. He has always been kind to me in public. Its only when we are at home that he lets himself slip and the contempt comes out. It’s not like he’s been abusive…”
Alissa’s therapist gave a knowing look. “Abuse takes many forms. In your private life, Carl has starved you of compassion and affection. Perhaps not even intentionally, he may not even be capable of genuine emotion and you don’t warrant “The Act” when you are home together. Either way, the result has been a very good show for everyone else, all while you have been alone in your own private hell. Most women would have ended things long ago. If you are determined to endure, then you will need to change your expectations.”
Nodding slowly, Alissa took a deep breath. “Will it get worse? It seems like he’s gotten worse over the years.”
“Porn, like any addiction, will get worse over time if nothing halts the progression. His contempt for you may or may not grow. If you stop nagging him about the porn, he will feel less resentful. As it is now, he blames you for standing in the way of his real desire: false intimacy with a sexual partner that expects nothing of him. Give up on trying to stop him from having that, and he may be willing to meet your needs from time to time, simply because it serves his purposes to have a sexually responsive wife.”
“I always respond to him. I’d have sex with him every day if it would just make him be kind to me. He just only cares about his video games, his work and of course porn. If he wants sex, I always say yes… because I have learned I suffer in some way or another… if I dare say no.”
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