"I AM SERIOUSLY OVERWEIGHT AND MY HUSBAND IS
DOWNLOADING PORN"
I have several predicaments,
all interlinked:
1. I have been stuck in a bad place with my weight ever
since my two kids were born 6 and 7 years ago. Whilst I
was never skinny, I managed my weight well enough with
frequent returns to Weight Watchers. My husband has
never seen me thin (neither have I). I put myself
through weight loss surgery 3 years ago, which has been
largely unsuccessful since I am now heavier than I was
before the surgery. The gastric band makes my life
unpleasant at times and my husband and mother think I
should have it removed so that I can at least eat
normally again (ie: meat, fruit and vegetables, which
don't go down well at the moment unless cooked to mush).
I'm inclined to keep it just in case one day I might be
in the right frame of mind to make it work. I hate being
fat, don't like the way I look, can't find clothes to
fit and shy away from social situations because of it,
which brings me to the second predicament.
2. My self-esteem is low
at the best of times, but right now, very low. I am
well-educated, bilingual with French, have lived, worked
and studied all over the world, have always walked into
good jobs easily, but continue to believe I'm faking it.
I currently hold a management-level job in a large
French company. I don't feel good enough for the job and
always think that if I was thinner, I'd do better and be
taken more seriously in my professional environment.
That said, even when I was at my thinnest ever, I had
similar feelings. My low self-esteem makes me not very
pleasant to be around sometimes. I'm lethargic, easily
irritable, highly sensitive.
3. My husband of many
years loves me, but lately, he tells me that he's not so
sure any more. He's a really decent human being (which
is one of the reasons I chose to marry him) but some
years into our marriage, he started to get into porn on
the Internet. This came to light when I was pregnant
with our first child, and coincidentally, at the same
time, we discovered that my family-man, strong moral
values father had been cheating on my mother for over 30
years with a string of affairs to his name. I was
completely devastated when all of this came out, and was
very depressed throughout the pregnancy and after. To
this day I still suffer bouts of depression. I have
never spoken to anyone about it before as I have always
considered that I'm strong enough to deal with my
problems on my own. My husband was contrite and stopped
trawling the porn sites. I didn't trust anything he did
for a long time after that, but had finally put it
behind me when last week I discovered that he has been
downloading pictures of naked women again for over a
year and had built up a huge collection, hidden on our
shared computer. Again I am angry and hurt, also by the
realisation that this must have started around the same
time he stopped having sex with me. When confronted, he
immediately deleted his collection again. I can't work
out whether I'm being too hard on him because this is
something all "normal" men will do or whether I am right
to expect him to meet the moral standards I always
thought he had. I think men who look at porn are sleaze
bags. I was brought up in a puritanical environment
(despite later discovering that that was a facade for my
father). I hate what this is doing to my mind: I feel a
mixture of attraction and repulsion towards the porn in
my own mind, feel totally worthless and ashamed of my
body because of the comparisons I make, and I also can't
help thinking that if my husband can get into porn like
this, he could also be cheating on me. He goes away on
business trips a few times a year.... I thought we
shared certain values when we got married (I was my
husband's first and only girlfriend), but I feel like
it's all starting to slip away now. Are my expectations
for my marriage and my husband too high? Do I need to
get over my moral standards and insecurities and let him
do as he likes? How can I get out of the funk I am in
(besides the obvious - lose the weight)? I am past 40
now and weight has been an issue since I was 5. I don't
even go to the doctor anymore because I'm sick of being
told off about my weight. It's been killing my spirit
for years but I seem powerless to do anything about it.
I also wonder how different things would really be for
me if I was thinner.
ANSWERS
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