All good intentions

This is an email the Addict sent to me on June 5, 2007, four days after the first time I discovered he had been having sex with prostitutes for most of our marriage:

If you give me a second chance you will not regret it. I promise you. All I want to do is to hold you and comfort you and make you feel safe again. Please let me do that. 

I know you don't want to let me off the hook but believe me, I am not off the hook. I know how awful my behavior has been. I am going to do everything in my power to change my life and get the support to make that change so that I can ensure that I will never go down that path again. 

It seems like intellectually you don't want to punish me but you don't deserve to punish yourself either. You know that I have never, ever lied to you about how much I love you. You don't have to forgive me to let me love you and to, maybe, let yourself love me.

I will be, for you, the man you think I am, forever.

And this is the email he intended to send to me on Dec 28, 2022, after I found evidence that he was seeing prostitutes again, although we talked by phone before he sent it and he essentially said the same thing to me on the phone. (And he had been having sex with prostitutes again for about 9 years at this point.)

I have been in a shame spiral for the past month because I have been ashamed for lying to you about drinking and ashamed for thinking of acting out sexually on occasion so I have not been vigorous in my denials of your assumptions. I understand that because I lied to your face about drinking and deceived you in the past about my sexual acting out you don’t believe anything that comes out of my mouth.

 

But I did not take the actions you assume I have.

 

But it doesn’t matter what I say. You have decided that everything I have ever said has been a lie. It is impossible to prove a negative AND, more importantly, I HAVE come very CLOSE to acting out sexually and I have taken out money with the consideration of doing it.

 

But I have not.

 

But why should you give me the benefit of the doubt? No reason I can think of.

 

I am looking for a place to live. Do you want to cut all ties as much as possible or can I use this back space (our backyard office/gym space) for work and working out?

So many lies. Placing responsibility on me for not being able to give him the benefit of the doubt. This is the sick mind of the addict.

On the day he wrote that, the Addict was far away from any kind of SA recovery practice and was also just an occasional drop-in to AA meetings. I think daily practice would have made all the difference, perhaps coupled with regular therapy, both individual and couples. But we were not diligent about these things, maybe because, when things felt good, it also felt good to put the whole thing behind us and trust that we were in a new, rebuilt relationship where sexual betrayal wasn't possible any more. We had tools, support, behavior circles, and we had years of growing trust.

But without a daily recovery practice, everything we had learned and accomplished was not enough.

And, he did mention to me recently that he worried that he might be one of those people talked about in the Big Book as constitutionally incapable of telling the truth. So maybe nothing would have made a difference.