Never a good time

This post was written about three weeks ago. My husband I have been in very different places emotionally in the last week, which I want to write about, but in order to do so, I need to publish this post first. I would have published it sooner, but I was out of town and staying somewhere with a bad internet connection.

For a long time I have been trapped by the concept that there is no good time to sit down and have a talk with my husband about his pornography use; for about 18 months in fact. While in some ways it has given me a needed reprieve and time to focus on taking care of myself and learn to have my happiness be independent of his behavior, it has also been extremely difficult in many ways. Especially in the last few months when I have received increasing impressions to talk with my husband. After my recent short but successful talk with my husband I didn’t know where to go next. My therapist gave me some good general advice about how to not go about things based on what she knows about our relationship, but I wasn’t getting specific guidance from God with anything. Of course, I have to, and hate to, admit that in the last 6 weeks-ish my relationship with God through prayer, scripture, and journaling (ever since Elder Eyering’s talk in 2007 I’ve been keeping a daily journal that includes at least one statement of how I’ve seen the Lord’s hand in my life) has not been as strong as it should be. I’m really struggling to spend the time in these activities that I should be and want to be. I’d love to blame the Christmas season, but the irony there is pretty condemning. We actually had a really great Christmas season as a family. So nice that of course, it just didn’t seem like a good time to bring up serious issues with my husband.

But, in the weeks before and after Christmas, I started noticing my husband engaging in certain behaviors that in the past have been strongly associated with his pornography use. Not every single day, but more often than in the past, and picking up speed. As I took note of these behaviors over the course of weeks, I began to accumulate traces of anxiety. Not nearly as much as I would have in the past; thanks to my therapist, Zoloft, and an otherwise stable life at the moment I’m currently in a position of strength (I’ll take it as long as I can get it!). But still building. And then, last weekend, it reached critical mass: over the course of 24 hours there were a few more behaviors/interactions with my husband that were much more serious triggers to me. Although as I think back, I credit myself (in other areas of my life I am trying to become the kind of person that seeks less personal credit, but in this arena, I’m all for giving myself all the credit I deserve; I don’t have to explain myself there, right?) for being triggered by relatively small things (I see it as a positive sign that I am sensitive to signals that something in our relationship isn’t as it should be) and by not overreacting in majorly inappropriate ways. Of course, I should also hold myself accountable to the fact that at first I was not fully aware that I was responding to triggers. It didn’t take me long to figure out though. 

By the end of that 24 hour period it was 10pm on Saturday night and I really wanted to go to sleep. But because of an interaction I had just had with my husband, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I was a mixture of anxious, angry, hurt, and scared and I knew if I tried to lay down to sleep I was going to toss and turn and cry for a while and be up longer than I wanted to. I really wanted to talk to my husband about my feelings. Of course, my initial response was thinking that it was not a good time to do so. My husband and I were exhausted from spending all day preparing to go out of town with our two young children for 3 weeks and would be getting up early in the morning for an all-day drive. But not talking to him sure wasn’t going to help me get my beauty sleep, either. I knelt on his side of the bed (he was downstairs using his laptop on the couch) and said a stream of conscious prayer about where I was at. As I prayed and as I rose from prayer, it made sense in my mind to talk with my husband and I felt calm enough to trust myself to do so in a pretty healthy way. 

As it crossed my mind once again that now was not a good time and reflected in frustration that there is never a good time, I suddenly made peace with this fact. If there is no good time for some conversations than that means that whether and when these conversations occur should not be dependent on external conditions---they just need to happen when they need to happen. If there is no good time for them, then there can’t really be a bad time for them, perhaps?

I descended the staircase. Drum roll, please!

I sat on the couch, told him I’d like to talk, and asked him to put his laptop away. I can’t remember exactly what order it all came out (probably mixed---I’m typically pretty anal about chronology and organization, so I really struggle when events and feelings are so intertwined that it’s difficult to convey things in conversation in a linear fashion), but I told him calmly but strongly that I needed to apologize for some ways I had interacted with him in the last day (I truly was sorry; I don’t like being an anxious nag) BUT that he needed to know that my behavior was connected to negative emotions I was experiencing based on behaviors he had exhibited in the past day and in the past few weeks that were emotional triggers for me based on their association with pornography use. I told him that I recognized that tonight was a particularly inconvenient time for a long talk, but that because there is never a good time to talk, I was not going to keep letting him off the hook like I have been for the past year and a half. I told him I would not force him to talk with me now, but that if he did not want to talk now, he needed to tell me when he would feel ready to talk with me, up to one month from now (unfortunately this long of a span was appropriate since we were going out of town for 3 weeks and wouldn’t even be together for some of that). I also brought up a very specific issue that I identified almost a year ago that really needs to be addressed and told him that at this point I wouldn’t try to force admissions from him in our conversation, but, referring to the behaviors he has shown and the things I’ve been feeling, I deserve a response from him on this and other concerns. 

As I finished talking, a few tears trickled from my right eye (the eye that he could see from his position to my right) and my voice trembled here and there while I talked. But I felt very in control of myself and my emotions. It felt AMAZING.

Silence. Nothing coming from husband. I have had to get used to this with him. He is naturally someone who takes a lot of time to think about what he’s going to say, and I have to give him some credit and say that I have reinforced this tendency since no matter what he says or how quickly it comes out I always have a response and thanks to my editorial skills, am well trained in critique.

Inner stillness from me. I talked about this with my therapist a bit months ago. I realized that I needed to work on being still when I talk to my husband and not let my anxiety overtake me when I’m waiting for a response from him. I unconsciously found a loose thread on my bathrobe and wound and rewound it around my fingernail---a nervous activity, but enacted very slowly and in a controlled fashion. I’m telling you, I owned this experience, and it felt so good!

Eventually, and in pieces, from him: an apology for some behaviors over the past day . . . ok, I was just going to list them all bang, bang, bang, but I have to stop here for a minute. There are few things I appreciate from my husband as much as an apology. I’m the kind of person who acts fast and talks fast so I say and do a lot of stupid things, but I try to make up for it by facing my mistakes bravely and providing timely and sincere apologies when appropriate. My husband is much more cautious and is less often in the position of needing to apologize for his behavior. For a long time I have focused on the positives associated with that and always felt he was inherently a better person than me. But in the past two years, I’ve come to see that for him there are weaknesses associated with that strength. He has less experience recognizing the need to make an apology and less experience with and comfort with making one. A few months after I found out about the  pornography I learned, through a very long, drawn-out, and strained conversation we had in the middle of the night how important it is for me to hear apologies from him when they are called for and how difficult it is for him to do it.

Ok, tangent over. I got several appropriate apologies from him, validation that my emotions made sense given the behaviors he had been exhibiting and the triggers they represented, admission that there were “some things for [him] to talk about” related to the issue as a whole, and a statement that although now was a particularly bad time to talk, we would talk tomorrow during our long drive about when to do that.

Best part of it all: he didn’t appear to be “shutting down” as he normally does with these types of conversations. Although, instead of staying downstairs with his laptop (he had previously claimed to not be ready to go to bed), he did follow me upstairs and fell asleep pretty promptly (I really don’t think he’s lying when he says conversations like these truly exhaust him)---before I did, in fact. Which led me to think that if talking like this really helps him shut down and sleep, having the talk the night before a long drive when he needed to go to bed early so he could get up early really might have been a good time. J Oh, and I’m happy to report that even though he fell asleep before I did, I laid in bed peacefully and for not too long before I fell asleep.