So the first D-Day was two years ago on Tuesday, July 19, 2011, when I learned that my husband had been sleeping with a “friend” of ours. The second D-Day was in February, 2012 when he finally admitted to me that he was a sex addict and told me about most of his acting out over the years. Since then we have been working hard on our marriage and ourselves, and going to marriage therapy. In the spring, I felt like we were finally getting somewhere, that things were getting better and that there was some real hope for us. The summer has pretty much blown that feeling to smithereens. It turns out that we were just starting to pretend again like we had before when we were naive and unwilling to acknowledge our problems.

He had several slips and at least one relapse over the summer. I don’t know if it was the depression from the season, because summer will be forever marred in my mind from the first D-Day and thus always depressing, or if it was my traveling without him, but he relapsed pretty badly, and in the process I discovered some things he had been lying to me about still, even after two years. So we both slipped back into pretty severe depression and we haven’t been happy since.

I’m working on it. I’m working really really hard. My doctor has since diagnosed me with Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder so I know that’s at least part of the problem. But I am also working on thought-stopping, loving myself, and telling that awful, critical, demeaning voice inside my head to just stfu.

He’s still so depressed, though, that it feels kind of selfish and self-absorbed to me. He talks about how he thinks he ruined too many things and has destroyed our marriage. Sometimes it seems like he’s determined to ruin us just to prove a point about what an awful person he thinks he is and how badly he thinks he screws everything up. It’s crazy making and so utterly frustrating.

I say that he just destroyed the image that we had built up of our marriage. The problems were still there, we were just hiding from them and pretending they didn’t exist until they turned into a rotting foment of trouble. I say we still have hope but only if he’s willing to work at it and go see a CSAT and go to SA meetings. I keep telling myself that I can’t control him or his behavior. I just have to work on myself, loving myself, healing myself, with the hope that this will help my marriage and that he will work on himself as well.