I’m the F1 wife here. I realize people on this forum believe this idea, but I just feel like I’m being cheated on and am being pressured to accept it as something Godly and right. Due to addiction issues and more, I really have had no trust for him for our whole marriage, and so trying to trust him in this issue is made extremely hard. I imagine that it would be easier for a wife to accept this if her husband was always a trustworthy person.
I'm just going to say exactly what she's talking about so people know the context.
For context, I have an addictive personality. My grandpa (the one who died when I was a baby) was an alcoholic and I inherited that trait from him. I've always avoided alcohol because I know I wouldn't be able to stop if I started drinking. I used to be addicted to sodas. I was drinking a ridiculous amount. I had to stop completely because I couldn't just drink a little. I haven't had one since 2011.
The specific issues she's talking about here are mainly porn and spending. A neighbor kid introduced me to porn when I was 10 years old and I became addicted. It was a struggle for most of our marriage because I had been relying on it to deal with my stress since I was a little kid. I tried to quit a few times unsuccessfully. I was finally able to let it go when my other grandpa revealed his affairs when he was dying a few years ago. It was hard at first, but at some point, something inside me changed, and I don't have a desire for it anymore. I just find it completely repulsive now, especially thinking about what kind of man it made me when I was doing those things. I have no respect for the person I was. I just find the image of myself doing that completely pathetic and it disgusts me.
The spending issue is my coping mechanism for stress. It comes and goes depending on what season I'm in. When I get stressed, I often just turn to shopping because I've lacked healthier coping mechanisms. We have my paycheck setup to automatically put money into savings and retirement to make sure I can't go too far.
For context though, we have over $40k in cash right now (not including any retirement funds). I do have an unhealthy relationship with spending, but my wife has the opposite problem. Because of the way she was raised, she's very uncomfortable with spending money. Her dad's a miser. I spend a lot more than she's comfortable with, but I also make a lot of money and we're financially stable. We paid off our first house in three years and we only have a small mortgage on our current house.
