Rick,

My wife had a three year emotional/sexual affair with a coworker.  I like so many others trusted too much and never had a clue, even though as I look back on it now, there were clues.  I discovered the affair on October 14, 2012.  Since then my wife started, and has four more weeks, of H4H.  I just completed HH.  Durimg her lessons, there was one on "walking completely in the light".  My wife professed to me beginning about in late January 2013 she was completely open an honest with me and she very much loved "walking in the light".  Now, on September 9, 2012, we were up at the lake with my brother and his wife and at about 5 AM that morning my brother's wife awoke me screaming in my ear she had just caught my brother and my wife about to have sex.  I went out, and questioned my wife, who said nothing at the time.  Later, while still at the lake, she did admit my brother had gotten on top of her.  We went home and I questioned her at length about it and she had nothing more to add.  Remember, this is all before I discovered her three year affair.  I directly questoined her about that event for about fifteen minutes back at our home and I was convinced nothing had happened.  After discoving her three year affair on October 15 2012, I asked her many, many times again about her and my brother, and each time she said nothing ever happened.  Well, fast forward to March 15 2013, after my wife had been in H4H for quite sometime and professed to me she had told me everything, and that was only about her three year affair.  On March 15, she sat down on our bed and told me she had had sex with my brother one time earlier in the summer of 2012, before September 9 2012.  I was devastated.  Here she was telling me for basically five months she loved being totally open and honest with me.  Five months of that.  And here she was telling me she had been lying for those five months.  It was another D-day, really a TRIPLE betrayal: she was lying when she told me she had come out with everything, she had drunken sex with my brother, and admitted they were about to have sex again on September 9 2012, drunk again, and now I knew my own flesh and blood brother betrayed me.  My brother who said sex with my wife meant Nothing to him!  Now I know that means also it meant Nothing to him to betray his own brother.

It happens every now and then that when I get very close to my wife, that after a week or a week and a half, I bounce out and say to myself what am I doing?  What am I doing here beginning to trust my wife and falling in love with her again, what am I doing trying to work on our marriage skills, most notably intimacy in the new sense I have learned the word in my HH class, that it is radical honesty that at first may be destabilizing but in the long run is for the greater good. 

I am very, very, concerned with myself and this "cycling behaviior" where I get really, really close to my wife, and then suddenly, just out of the clear blue, I do a complete reversal and want to leave the marriage and I talk about completely giving up, we end up sleeping in different rooms, we don't talk, and things degenerate greatly until I "come around". 

I know my wife did the bravest thing she has probably ever done in her entire life; she did not have to tell me that truth about her and my now estranged brother, she volunteered it.  I know it was probably the most intimate thing anyone has ever done for me, and she is diligent with her H4H and she shows me every day she is "all in".  Even when I am cycled "out of the marriage" she is patient and non-defensive.  I know those behaviors are what keep me coming back, that and my love for her.  But still I cycle, even though it is getting less frequent, it is so alarming to me. 

What can I do beyond praying to God to let me be a vessel for His love for my wife, beyond realizing she gave me the greatest gift I have ever received (that is hard to swallow but I know it to be the truth), beyond realizing I see her chaniging, beyond our successes at communicating honsetly, both emotionally and sexually?  Those all seem like powerful changes and ought to keep me out of the cycling out zone, but I know they can happen.  Please help me with any thoughts, knowledge you have, and any suggestions of what I could pray for about this behavior of mine specifically.

Hi Rick,

My wife and I just completed week 10 of EMS and it was a very challenging week for us. The topic of relapse is very relevant to me specifically because I have relapsed so many times in our marriage of almost 7 years. I have never had a physical affair, but my battle has been on and off with pornography since I was a child, where I was exposed to it at a very early age. I have come a long way in this battle, but it’s been a long road with success and failure. It has gone from no porn for the first two years in our marriage, to a couple years of viewing porn on my iPhone, to no porn, to another season of lying and looking at porn, to viewing movie trailers and trashy TV shows, to online photo sharing, to now double takes of women.

Just last week, my wife asked me if there was anything that I haven’t been telling her and that she was praying that the Holy Spirit would convict me to share with her. After standing there for about 30 seconds I eventually told her that yes, I have not been sharing with her that I have struggled with ‘double takes’ over the last month or so (a good portion of this time we were in the EMS class). I did commit to telling her if I did have any double takes then I realized that it was something I didn’t even necessarily agree with sharing with her. I tried to bring up my thoughts on the subject during a counseling session with our pastor one Sunday and it did not go well. She was furious, angry, sad, upset…. And we ended up not even going to church but just leaving immediately. I basically told them how I felt that a double take wasn’t necessarily a sexual sin, but maybe just a stupid thing to do that was disrespectful to my wife.

When I do a double take I’m not having sexual fantasies, imagining what that person would be like to have sex with or having much thought at all. Sometimes, I do notice a draw to look at girls that are running or walking by, or if they are wearing something that is maybe a little too revealing and I although I make an effort to not look, and to think about my wife, sometimes I do look. Sometimes I notice 20 girls in a day and‘double take’ 10 times, other days 2 times, other days none. I feel in my heart that at that point I have crossed a line between being tempted an actually doing something sinful, although I don’t think or know if I would call it sexual sin.

I know that lying to her is wrong, and I have and need to continue repenting of this if I do this in the future. I know in my heart that ‘checking girls out’ is a sin also. I hate it, I am trying to be accountable to other guys on this topic and want to be transparent with her but don’t want to agree to share things with her that I don’t believe will help either of us. When she flips out, it puts squeeze on me and I am tempted to lie to her.

I don’t want to lie, but I also don’t want to agree to something that I don’t view is healthy for her or that leads me to more temptation to lie. I can call it sin, or stupidity or a high risk activity, but I know that in my heart it is not the same degree of struggle I face when I look at porn or sexual material online in private. I don’t want to have her spin out of control over every time that I bring something like that to her.

I don’t feel like sharing that level of detail is healthy in our marriage but agreed to do it in an attempt to rebuild trust. I don’t think that it ‘builds her up in love.’

I do have guys that I talk to on a regular, weekly basis about my struggles and share real struggles with them with regards to sexual temptation and I am willing to share this type of struggle with them, as I have in the past. I know God is changing my heart and healing me of this but it’s been a slow process, with lots of stumbling along the way.

Any advice you have on how we can move forward is much appreciated.