Widowed at 21

The title of this post is meant to pique your curiosity. To entice you. To draw you in. The rest of this post , and the blog it's attached to, will hopefully make your visit worth it.

This blog is my journey from young naive woman, to devestated spouse, to bitter porn widow, and hopefully, eventually, to loving wife. Care to take it with me?

I do not pretend to have all the answers. I do not claim that this blog will, in ANY way, help you as you travel your own journey. But I will say this... we've made lots of mistakes in our journey thus far and many more will follow, I'm sure. I'm praying that someone will recgonize and learn from our mistakes.

Feel free to comment without judgement from me. I will not condemn you wether you be the addict or the widow or anywhere in between.

I am 28 years old. I am a Christian. I am female. I am a mother. I am a wife. And I am a porn widow. You may call me Esther.

I married my husband, whom you may call Amos, when I was 21 years old. We were virgins when we married. Within the first six months of my marriage I was a porn widow although I had quite some time ahead of me before I found that out.

To be fair, I knew Amos looked at porn when I married him. He promised that there would be no more of that after we married and I beleived him. And I truely think that Amos also believed it. There was a big production involving his porn stash (a handful of DVD's) and a small sledge hammer. And that was that. Or so I thought.

I was whisked along in marital bliss for the first couple of years of our marriage before my bubble burst. I remember sitting down in front of the computer in our very small 900 square foot townhouse and browsing the history. A strange site was listed there. And then another. And another. So, I opened the first one up only to be accosted by a pair of (greatly enhanced) naked breasts beneath the face of a seductivly smiling woman. Shocked by this, I checked the other sites. All of them trash. All of them filth. 

Amos was in the family room watching television and I called to him. As he came casually and confidently into the office I watched him. I saw it when it happened. I saw the facade of doting husband melt away into a look of horror and panic. I asked him then... "What is this?"  He tried his best to compose himself and to tell me that he had no idea what this was and that his brother must have looked up porn on our computer. I wanted to believe that. I tried to believe that. Unfortunatly, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. He came clean. I broke down into tears feeling betrayed and discarded. I grabbed my wallet and keys and left the house. I had to think. I had to compose myself. I had to decide if I would forgive him.

Perhaps I should interject here that marrying Amos meant leaving my family and my home and moving 1500 miles away to place where I knew no one. I had a choice to make when he proposed to me. I chose Amos. I had a choice to make again. Should I bail ship? After two years in this state I had still not made any close friends and although I thought I was very close to Amos, how close could I actually be with someone hiding a secret this big?

Ultimately I chose to go back home to Amos. It was just a mistake and he didn't realize how much it meant to me that we have a sexually pure marriage and that he not lust after other women. That night in bed he admitted to picking back up his porn habbit about six months after we married and he had been hiding it this long. I learned that nights when he stayed up late doing computer "work" were nights he actually browsed porn sites and ultimately masturbated to them. He apologized and promised that it would never happen again. He loved me.

The last thing I remember asking him that night was this:

"Do you ever think of other women when we have sex?"
"Yes." he said.
"Do I know any of them?"

There was a pause then. No answer. Finally I said:

"Nevermind. I don't want to know."

He laughed when I said that. That's right...  He. Laughed. And then he wrapped his arms around my waist and buried his nose in my neck and went to sleep. I cried myself to sleep that night in his arms.

And thus our house of cards begins to topple.

My next post will tell you what happened when trust and forgiveness is rebuilt and reborn.