Before I knew about my husband’s sex addiction or recognized my own codependency, I had lots of explanations for how things worked in my life. I believed that if people were passionately in love, had a satisfying sex life, like and respected each other and were happy together, neither of them would ever cheat. I’d get little niggling feelings every now and then that something wasn’t quite right in the way my husband was around other women, but then I’d run through the mental checklist: Was he in love with me? Check. Was our sex life awesome? Check. Did he enjoy my company? Check. Was he happy? Check. Ta da! No reason to cheat. I’d satisfied myself logically, based on my understanding of how the world worked, that it was impossible for him to be cheating, yet the uncomfortable feelings remained and I was completely unable to figure out what was causing them.

It wasn’t until I learned the details of a lifetime of sexual acting out that I started to see that what I believed to be true about how we operated, wasn’t. (Oh, you mean I’m not all powerful, and people cheat because they’re unhappy with themselves, not me? Come to think of it, when I cheated on an ex-boyfriend, yep, it really was about me, not him. Go figure.) The world was a very different place than I imagined it to be. It was as if someone put glasses on me and for the first time and a new world erupted around me. Suddenly, I looked around at those soft green blurs I called trees and said, “Oh, I can see the individual leaves on them!” And as I progress in my recovery, my eyesight gets clearer and clearer.

When all the lies and deception were revealed for what they were, at first, I was very angry at my husband for tricking me, for pretending to be a “normal” guy and then turning out to be a sex addict. (I mean, the nerve! How dare he!) But as I’ve worked on my own issues, I’ve come to see I hadn’t been tricked in quite the way I thought. It turns out he and I were both walking around with big warts on our noses, but our spiritual, emotional and mental eyesight was just too blurry for us to see them, on ourselves or each other.