The Honeymoon's Over

On my honeymoon, Husband Numero Dos had taken pain pills along with us into another country. I watched these like a hawk, for many reasons. When they all went missing the last night of our trip, I knew he had taken them - and mixed them with alcohol. He rarely even drank, so the combo was alarming. For the first time, he angrily laid his hands on me also. I had never been physically frightened of him, despite his strength. But that night, I was petrified, and I knew that things would not be smooth sailing just because I had convinced him to marry me.


At that point, I prayed, “Lord, if my gut is right and something is going on, please let it hit me in the head like a Mack truck - so I can’t ignore it.” Two months later, I discovered porn on his phone - lots of it - despite that even just a week before our wedding he assured me I never needed to worry about that, because he believed it was infidelity to look at it. My feelings of betrayal rivaled my fear of what he would do if I confronted him. I prayed on it for weeks, and finally confronted him. He denied it was his porn, cried, and swore that he would prove that it wasn’t his. The logical part of my attorney brain knew he was lying, but I was in for a penny, in for a pound.


A few weeks later, after making no headway to gain confidence that it was not his porn, a text message came through on his phone, lining up a meeting with a neighbor to buy pills. Everything in me wanted to explode in a pool of vomit. Two of the three intolerables were right there on an iPhone screen - within the first 2 months of marriage to a man I’d been with for over 5 years.


I went into investigator mode. And let me tell you - there is no better investigator on the planet than a codependent wife. I searched the phone records, Find Friends, bank accounts, car floor mats, HVAC vents, gun cases...everything to try to prove to myself that what I was seeing, I wasn’t really seeing. I prayed and prayed that I was wrong, but I wasn’t.


When I confronted my new husband, he left for 3 months and moved back to his house up the street, only contacting me when he needed money. I eventually had to tell his family, so they would not give him money. You see, money is the lifeblood of addiction, and I knew that no access to money and prayer were the only two things that could stop him. When I told his mother I didn't want to tell her what he was up to but I needed her to trust me not to give him money, she immediately asked me whether her precious baby boy was buying prostitutes. "Good Lord, no!" I responded. "Is he selling drugs?" she asked. "No. He's not selling them. He's taking them." Within fifteen seconds, her concern for her son quickly took a detour, and she accused me of mismanaging our money. She asked if she could pray over us, and asked God to "convict my daughter-in-law of where she needs to repent to my son about what she's been doing with their money." I left her home, stunned. Mind you, I had already gone to his sister and she flat-out told me she didn't believe me. These betrayals were crushing. His mother would tell him he had to come back to me, but only because of of it looked to the outside observer. It was all about appearances.


Without his family to support me, I poured over my Bible, writing verses about addiction, pornography, marriage, and recovery on post-its that I hung on my bathroom mirror. I’d walk our subdivision at night, stopping in front of his house praying out out loud for him and his 3 kids who were hiding out in it. I kept my circle of confidants very small, determined to keep our secret life a secret. Three months after leaving me, he only returned on my promise that we would not discuss any of it again. He told me that I had made a mountain out of a molehill.


While we didn’t discuss it, it didn’t die. I just had to know what was going on, at all times. I had no trust, but went through all of the motions - all the while checking up on things with an obsession. The addiction was the elephant in the room as we played Brady Bunch - selling our individual homes and moving into a large home that could accommodate all of us.


We were on a crazy cycle, and everyone knew it. Everyone discussed it - but us. In our home, gaslighting, manipulation, and lying became the prevalent languages. I genuinely thought I was going crazy and I couldn’t tell truth from fiction anymore. He would tell me that I needed to be institutionalized, my accusations and lack of trust were just “so crazy.” He would triangulate his family by lying about me to them. When I told him that I had secretly been drop testing him and every test came up positive (remember….crazy investigative skills….), he accused me of getting drugs myself, and taking the tests, to set him up. Life was the very definition of “unmanageable.” To read my journals from that time period is mind-blowing to me now.


All day, every day, I prayed that sobriety would somehow find its way in to my marriage. And to help God out, I treated my husband like a teenage boy who just simply needed a good, strong lecture from time to time, and I praised him to the skies when he did the slightest impressive thing. I went from being the enabling codependent to being the controlling codependent, and back again - with whiplash speed. Our relationship was manic and toxic - one day we’d be a happy couple and I was confident in his love for me - and the next day he’d ignore me and refer to me by my maiden name as if we weren’t married.


The chaos in our family that I thought we hid so well must have been apparent to those who knew the signs of addiction in a home. Several of my Christian friends urged me to try Alanon, and on Labor Day, 2016, I walked in to my first meeting. I secretly went to two meetings a week for the next several months, alarmed at the way that we all seemed to have the same story. I also attended AA meetings, alarmed at how all addicts and alcoholics seemed to have been handed a script at some point - insults to lodge at their spouses, ways to manipulate money, gaslighting techniques, redirecting of accusations. I was baffled and encouraged at the same time - I began to guess what my husband's next move would be, based on what I'd hear in the rooms and at the tables.


As I soaked in the stories of recovering addicts and alcoholics, hopeful that if I could just change my behaviors, my husband would find sobriety and we’d finally have a Godly marriage. I prayed over my husband while he slept. I hung scripture up in our house. I was that crazy lady in the War Room movie, rebuking Satan while walking around the house.


But God hears all prayers, and Satan does tremble at the name of Jesus.


Unfortunately, he sometimes takes loved ones with him when he flees.