I am Haunted by a Story

by Tania Rochelle

I can point to a lot of small things that acted as catalysts to finally ending my marriage to a so-called sex addict. Maybe ‘catalyst’ is too strong a word for these individual songs, images, quotes, and stories; maybe it is more that they added up to become THE catalyst, as one stacked up on the others to create a tipping point. There was the Tracy Chapman song, All That You Have is Your Soul, and Sarah Barielles’ She Used to Be Mine; there was the scene from Shall We Dance, where Susan Sarandon talks about our desire to have a witness to our lives; and there were the real-life stories of escape about my sisters in this struggle—the woman who packed up and left without telling him, never to see him again, and then showed up, a few months later, in my Facebook feed, with a radiant smile in her joyful new life. Each of these events rattled my brain, shoving further to its edges the fears at its center, the exhaustive excuses I made for my husband, the contorted ways I rationalized staying. In the six years between Discovery and the time I put down the tattered rope that kept me tethered to a life I would not wish on my worst enemy, much less my own children, I spent most of my soul and my identity renting my sham marriage.

But of all the messages the universe sent my way, it was a short story that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go, pushing me over the line. I came across the story, Plowing the Secondaries, by Brock Clarke, while I was searching for examples of extended metaphor for a class I was teaching. I have been haunted by it ever since. It’s a disturbing story of a man who invents an entire relationship, from introduction to discard, with a dying woman. The woman never even speaks. He imagines everything about her—her feelings, her motives, her perfection, her shortcomings, her past, and her future. The story illustrated for me what I had been living: that to my husband, i had never been a real person with my own needs and desires, my own thoughts and feelings, my own rights and freedoms. If he needed to make himself feel better about, say, hooking up with a stranger off Craigslist, he would imagine some offense I had committed that justified his cheating. He had created an image of me that changed as he needed it to.

For two decades, I had walked beside him, completely unaware that he was immersed in a dream-world, where every teen girl we passed in the mall or every hot guy at the gym might end up in his nap-time fantasies. And the man napped a lot. All those years, the jokes were on me: like when I asked what his plans were after his meetings during a business conference in Phoenix, and he quipped, “I’m hiring twin hookers,” prompting me to laugh and laugh at the last man I’d ever suspect of that. For even as he was developing me as a fictional character, he was wearing a mask himself, always pretending. And never did he pretend more or better than after he was busted, and he faked recovery.

I was an object to be used for his benefit, to provide him a family, legitimacy. My purpose was to prop him up, to make him look human while he secretly crept around in a perverse underworld, Ultimately, I realized that nothing I did made any difference. I could jump through every hoop the sex addiction treatment industry held up for me or I could scoff at the very idea of a grown man drawing red, green, and yellow circles of behavior; I could forgive him a thousand times or call him everything but his name; I could natter around in a flannel granny gown or tart myself up in pasties and a g-string. I could be a PTA mom or a meth head. None of it mattered. I was never real. Eerily, in the end, he even commented on an aspect of my face that he’d apparently never noticed in our 20 years together. It was as though he was seeing me for the first time.

Maybe you should read the story.

Here for your healing,

Tania