A lot of girls are attracted to the bad boy type. I’ve always liked the nerd or nice guy in the crowd. I grew up around plenty of real life bad boys, and that was no life at all, in my book. I’ve watched countless women be abandoned by dead beat dads. So I went hard in the opposite direction. The opposite of the bad boy would be a grounded, authentic man, not a nice guy. Now we all know the difference (thanks to Abdul Saad).

In the next couple of posts, I am going to get a little more personal. I am one of the rare betrayed partners who experienced discovery via confession – albeit a sanitized, incomplete version of the real truth. This is pretty appropriate for a good guy, don’t you think? Beyond that, he even said “I’m addicted” when he told me what he had been up to. Internally I thought “no he’s not addicted!” with an eye roll. If you look up ‘straight laced’ in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of Phil. Living with him was a combination of utterly predictable responsibility and sweet, thoughtful gestures. He’s a gentle man. He’s a faithful Christian type. Most of the women I encounter in betrayal groups say they hadn’t been close to their spouse in years/decades, even if he presented well in public.

But in my case, Phil went to work every day, wearing the same kind of clothes, coming straight home after work, kissing and embracing me every evening. We had dinner as a family at the table most nights. He asked the kids about their day and helped them with homework when needed. We went to church every Sunday. He was on stage at church every Sunday. He was on the board at our kids’ school. He made the money, he paid the bills, he made time for the two of us to get away from family life nearly every weekend. He screened every movie he watched with the kids, he didn’t allow any kind of vulgar jokes, music, or TV in our home. But he’s also fun. We did a lot of hosting parties. We had a large social network that we truly cared about, at least I did. He’s a supportive, involved dad. He’s fun and easy to talk to! He was constantly and gently reminding the kids to do the right thing. He’d even talk to unbelieving coworkers about the importance and family and faithfulness. I had someone in the community pull me aside and ask if I was married to Phil…because not many people have the last name Dough. I said yes. The person told me “I just want you to know he carries himself if such a way at work that I knew something was different about him from our first interaction. I knew he had to be a Christian.” This is who we all knew Phil to be. Not a closet Christian. Honesty and uprightness were a staple of his reputation – and I certainly never saw any evidence against it… Until Dday.

Learning that kind of (good) person was keeping secrets, sexual secrets, and doing the very kinds of things he counseled others to not do is a very challenging thing for the brain to make sense of. I had decades of evidence filed in my brain regarding Phil’s ethic, his hard work, his kind gestures, his countless disgust responses at sin, him going the extra mile to teach our kids or do the right thing. I stood beside him during countless church services where he “amened” and raised his hands during worship. I believed that he was committed to God, me, and our kids like I believed the sun would rise in the morning. When I learned he wasn’t the man he led me to believe he was, it was as if the news of the betrayal was poured into my heart but it just sat on the surface of what our life had been like the frozen layer on top of a lake. I busted my a$$ to support that life. Faced with the news that I was being deceived and betrayed, I froze. My heart froze. Reality froze. I couldn’t seem to wrap my mind around Phil stepping outside of our marriage. After all, Phil was a known quantity. He went to great lengths to let people know what he was about. He went to great lengths to let me know he was into me – I didn’t think I had competition keeping his attention. But sadly I did. I was aspiring to be as faithful, and hardworking, and smart as he was. But it wasn’t real.

I had certainly encountered several unseemly characters in my lifetime, but this “good guy” type wasn’t one of them. I thought most addicts disappeared from “normal” society or CHURCH at least… (now I know this isn’t true 😉 ) I was stuck in shock and in pain, feeling duped and scared. Something about the extreme good coexisting so closely with the bad made the whole situation feel sinister. I recently heard a lawyer and author speaking about a high profile child trafficking case in the courts. Many famous people are implicated in this case. This author was speaking about one such person, a lawyer, who is regularly on major news outlets as an expert. This individual denies adamantly engaging with the alleged perpetrators in the case even though plane records indicate he did. In fact he went so far as to say “I only ever travel with my wife.” The author said “Either he IS a good man who is fighting to defend his good name or he is a monster.” This is a natural response to the good-guy-perpetrator dilemma. Bad-boy-bad guys don’t create as much cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a term for the state of discomfort felt when two or more modes of thought contradict each other. The clashing cognitions may include ideas, beliefs, or the knowledge that one has behaved in a certain way.

This next part might seem like an aside, but hang with me. Me reading about this court case is taking my power back in a small way. Phil didn’t like it when I watched the news because he said the female anchors looked like bimbos… He’d always leave the room. He had tight rules about not watching racy TV or movies…. So for years if I wanted to watch the news, I’d watch alone, but I was fine with it because I thought he was only guarding his eyes and protecting his sexuality. After Dday when I checked the history on our computer (something I had NEVER done our entire marriage), I saw he was reading dozens of news articles on perpetrators such as Harvey Weinstein. I was in shock. I stayed away from those kinds of stories. (Ephesians 5:12 “It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret.”) I also learned when he started edging back into addictive behaviors, it started on news sites…. He was doing worse in private than he reprimanded me for doing in public. In those early months of recovery, when my brain was trying to make sense of this, I’d ask him over and over “Why were you reading those articles?” This was a ruminating point for me because I was trying to understand why he’d have such a strict public rule then break it, making himself a hypocrite. Had he no conscience about his hypocrisy? If he had told me “Hey I’m keeping up with the Weinstein case”, I don’t think I would have cared. Would it have led to questions? Perhaps yes. But because he had refused to watch news with me while he did worse in private, it made his behaviors seem dangerous and unsafe, and much more confusing to make sense of.

After going through the disclosure process, any betrayed partner has literally pages of material that she could panic and ruminate over. This example I shared about the news is a pretty small thing, but it’s a clear example showing the impact on partners of nice-guy-sex-addicts.

• I had years of evidence of Phil sharing his position on, in this case, unseemly news
• I allowed his view to change my behavior, our family’s behavior
• I allowed his views to impact my beliefs about intaking salacious news stories
• I had high levels of trust regarding his habits around news intake
• He was doing the opposite in private than what he was doing in public
• This creates a high level of cognitive dissonance regarding something like the news, his beliefs, his private behaviors
• This cognitive dissonance has a big impact on me trusting Phil at face value in the future, even if he’s showing me good behavior. I’ve known this to be false in the past
• If I can’t trust Phil is honest about things like his news intake when it appears wholesome, can I trust anything he espouses?
• This emotional and psychological struggle is happening in the partner while the addict is probably doing a pretty decent job of showing up at therapy, support groups, etc, adding to the feeling of cognitive dissonance

He never gave me a very satisfying answer to why he was being so hypocritical with news sites. But I understand it these days. I am not ruminating on that particular fact because of the work I’ve done around the things in this series. In fact, I watch all the news I want anytime I want, and I don’t ruminate about his weird, past news intake habits (private or public) anymore. Thanks for reading and learning with me! 🙂

The video below is a must-see!