Marriage without Trust?

Will you ever be able to trust your husband again?

If you can never regain trust, are you willing to accept a marriage without it?

I wrestled with this, as most wives of sex addicts do. The Acceptance stage of grief was a pivotal point for me. I was reading stories of women who stayed with their sexually addicted husbands in Your Sexually Addicted Spouse , and it suddenly made things very clear to me.

Here are a couple of those excerpts:

...some twelve years later, I still have scars and even soreness in places. I'm not sure these scars will ever heal. I still cannot stand naked in front of my husband. I will not allow him to see me dress or undress. The innocence is gone. I do not want to share that part of myself, because I cannot be totally open to him. I trust his heart towards health and towards me, but I also know deep in my bones that he has the capacity to act out again and I would again be left to pick up the shattered pieces. I don't know when or if that fear will ever go away.

I feel safer now with my husband than I did, say, ten years ago. But totally safe? Not yet. Will I ever? I know I will be safe at last when I am finally home with Jesus. There is no other totally safe place.

I was shocked. Twelve years after discovering her husband's infidelity, this woman still didn't feel safe? Twelve years into his supposed recovery, and she is afraid to be totally open with him?

The answer was suddenly clear to me. For me, there is no marriage without trust. Trust is FUNDAMENTAL to marriage. Marriage is BUILT on trust!

When I went into therapy and expressed forgiveness for my spouse and a desire to repair the relationship and the marriage, I made clear that I had two bottom-line boundaries for my husband. They were:

  1. No more porn-surfing or whoring. Period.

  2. No more drinking (because his alcoholism over the 24 years of our marriage had resulted in many bad incidents, including drunk driving).

I believed with all my heart that his love for me was greater than his love for alcohol and his love of illicit sex. Yes, I truly believed that. (I hadn't learned enough about addiction at that point!)

My therapist told me it was unrealistic to think that an addict would not have relapses. I was confounded by this. I could not and would not believe that he would cross those boundaries! I would not be able to accept relapse! Relapse would end the marriage. So she had to be wrong.

Five months into his "recovery," he drove home drunk after work. That was a clear indicator he would not be able to stick to boundaries.

Eventually, in our separation, he would fully regress into alcoholism and sexual addiction, and he would lose his job because of it. I finally understood: An addict will relapse. An addict cannot be trusted.