So, back in December, I randomly decided to google my husband’s social media handle. He uses the same one across multiple socials. I don’t know what made me do it but I just had a feeling I needed to go digging. What I found was so shocking I could never in my wildest dreams make it up…
I want to preface this first by mentioning that I have always had very firm boundaries around not watching porn. He agreed and led me to believe that he didn’t even remember the last time he watched it. We have had several conversations throughout the years about porn addiction and the way it reshaped your reward circut etc. I thought we were on the same page. Every once in awhile I would ask him if he had watched anything and his answer was always no. I think I kept asking because I was so blown away a man his age isn’t into porn. My best friend had confided in me that she and her husband were struggling with his porn addiction. The funny thing is, I kept telling her there are men out there that don’t watch it and will respect your boundaries and used my own husband as an example.
Well… almost five months ago now, when looking up his username, I found hundreds of pieces of media of my husband, fully nude, masturbating on sites like Chaturbate. HUNDREDS of videos/pictures/screen grabs of my husband in our HOUSE. All of the videos were timestamped and they went back as far as 2016. We met in 2018 and that was the year we started dating. When confronted, he denied it saying it was an AI scam. I showed him several more pictures of himself before he finally admitted it. The videos range from half an hour to over two hours. One of them was timestamped when I was 9 days postpartum. All this time, not only has he denied watching porn, but he has also been creating it.
The day I found out, I told him I want a divorce. He became nasty and cut all my credit cards off, removed me from the family spotify/netflix account, threatened to stop paying for our car and my phone bill. And more that I can’t even mention because it is just so horrible.
When I found out, we were in the middle of moving out of his mother’s house, so I was in another town, 5 hours away. He said he would no longer be moving down with me and our child and that he would be staying where he was because “there is nothing left for me anymore.” Even though he should be fighting to stay in the same area as his son, no matter what is happening between us.
It has been a long five months, with him finally coming around to agreeing to move to the same town as us. I have been solo parenting for months now and it has been the hardest thing I have ever had to do.
I am still so hurt and the trust is completely gone. He won’t take my no as an answer and is begging me to work on our marriage. He keeps saying, “What about for better or worse?” But my whole thing is, for better or worse, yes, but I can’t move past the fact that he basically conned me. I would NEVER entered or maintained the relationship this long if I had known what he was doing. This is a total turn off. I have the ick.
I guess I would like some reassurance that I am not completely crazy or overreacting. I would love for him to unpack this with a professional but he doesn’t seem to think he needs to. He doesn’t see it as a problem and keeps calling it a “mistake” and “the only lie I ever told you.”
Even after all of this, he continues to lie to me, after stating multiple times he will never lie to me again in his life. The last lie I caught him in was when he locked my out of my laptop by entering the PIN wrong too many times. When confronted about that, he blamed my son, saying he must have been button mashing. He denied it for three days before I told him that I knew it was him because my laptop took a picture of him (it didn’t really take a picture but I wanted to see if he would admit it). He finally admitted to wanting to go through my computer. I changed my PIN before he came over to watch our son because I had a feeling he would try to access my accounts, and I was right.
I want out of this marriage and I feel so trapped. He is now on another vacation, this is his second one in the past three months. While I am here working my ass off. I was a SAHM before all of this so it has really been an adjustment for me. I am just so angry and want to be legally free of this man. HELP.
And yes, I have talked to lawyers but they are too expensive for me at the moment. We also moved out of the state we were married in and now I have to wait a year to show residency in this new state before I can file. I am losing my mind. Any and all advice is welcome.