Last week, in Sex Love and Obesity Part 3 we left off at the point where I had decided to stay in my marriage and focus on myself for once.
I wasn’t sure when I was going to leave, or even, IF I was going to leave. Because somewhere in my mind I still believed that losing the weight might fix things. At this point I thought maybe if I focused on myself, I could inadvertently fix us both and save the marriage.
I stayed, because I had things I needed to do for myself before I left.
I’d spent the better part of 7 years of my life in this BDSM relationship where I was constantly in service to him, and I decided that for ONCE in my life I was going to have to put myself first instead of someone else. I stayed, and I had my gastric bypass.
There were moments over the next year that I wavered back and forth with my decision to leave. First, I waited to see if he found us a therapist and followed through with that promise. He didn’t. I waited to see if me losing weight changed the lying about online affairs and relationships. It didn’t. I waited to see if losing weight changed how affectionate he was with me, or whether he ever tried to instigate sex with me. It didn’t.
I started having my own online relationships outside of our marriage.
Why not? What’s good for the goose, right? I got deeply emotionally involved with someone in the online vampire role-play games that I played when I wasn’t taking phone calls or working.
When that first started I thought I was talking to a boy. When I later found out that boy was a girl, it added a whole new level of complexity to my life. Could I care about a woman like that? I wasn’t sure.
I began to rekindle an online romance that I had with a man prior to my husband. We’d had this on again off again internet and telephone relationship that had spawned out of my job as a phone sex operator. I ran to him any time things with my husband got bad. Of course, that entire relationship was based on fake photos, lies about who I was, and false promises of a relationship I could never deliver. In other words, I was cat-fishing him.
I didn’t lie about my online relationships like my husband did. I told him about them, kept them out in the open and offered him the honesty that he had never afforded me. He didn’t seem to care.
March 2011 – Weight: 250 lbs.
A couple of months later my Father had his first stroke and I spent three months in California trying to deal with that whole situation. My husband was there for me a lot through that horrible time. We started to get close again. I might have even forgiven him a little bit.
There was a stretch of time there for about 10 months when I bounced back and forth with my decision to leave. Him being there for me so much through my Father passing away helped heal some of the hurt and anger I felt. But then I found out he was still lying to me about the online relationships – apparently it was something he just wasn’t ever going to stop lying about.
His illness seemed to be progressing quickly.
He was taking so much Vicodin that he was filling scripts I had for Vicodin prior to my surgery without me realizing he was doing it and over medicating. I kept wondering why he was passing out on the couch after getting home every night. It wasn’t until I broke my ankle and tried to fill that script myself only to have them tell me it had been filled a couple of weeks prior that I started to realize what was going on. Of course, he denied that and lied about that too.
Anytime he got caught in a lie he’d deny it and make up an excuse. Sometimes his excuses were so out there I’d be offended by how stupid he must have thought I was to think I’d believe them. Other times the excuses left me thinking he was telling the truth and I was just to bitter and jaded with all the lying to ever believe him.
In this case, the excuse was that our legal names were so similar he must have grabbed the wrong bottle and called my prescription in by mistake.
Within a few months the Vicodin addiction prompted me to go to our family physician privately and express my concerns. Next thing I knew my husband was on Oxycodone instead of Vicodin. He stopped having the online affairs because he stopped doing pretty much anything. He’d go to work, come home, pop pills, sit on the couch and sleep.
I thought losing weight would fix our relationship and save my marriage. Get us back to who and what we were when we first started. But it didn’t.
November 2011 – Weight: 195 lbs.
As I lost weight he gained it. As I became more active, he became more inactive.
Before too long, I found myself in the very same place he had been in at the beginning of our relationship. I wasn’t attracted to him physically. Physical attraction is an obstacle the heart can overcome. But, I wasn’t attracted to him emotionally anymore either. I resented his inactivity and his lack of desire to be the best version of himself. I questioned if I wanted to spend the rest of my life taking care of someone who refused to take care of themselves. But more than anything I resented the pill popping prescription drug addict he had become.
He was supposed to be the Dominant and the strong one in our relationship. I was supposed to respect him. But I had no respect for him anymore. That respect had been tarnished by years of him laying the financial responsibility at my feet, unnecessarily lying to me, and by his denial about the abuse of pain killers.
Without respect and trust, the very foundation of the relationship was over. I knew this. Losing weight hadn’t changed anything in my love life. What it had done, was open my eyes up to how broken the relationship was. Losing weight had made it worse. Because I didn’t have that to blame anymore. My scapegoat was gone, and I had to start accepting reality.
I watched our marriage, relationship and life together slowly circle the drain and used exercise as my escape while I started to try to figure out my exit strategy.
It was October of 2011, I weighed 175 lb., the least I had weighed in my entire adult life. I was confident that having lost all that weight I could pursue a new life, find someone else, and be happy. My weight hadn’t fixed my marriage, but I was pretty sure it was going to make finding a new healthy relationship easier.
Yeah. I was wrong about that too.
In Sex Love and Obesity Part 5 – Realizing that losing weight isn’t a magic “life is great!” pill
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