It Doesn't Matter

Image credit: Photo by lapidim on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

My husband and I left the kids with a babysitter and went out on a date last night. Mark had a work crisis he wanted to deal with before leaving the office, so to save time, I decided to meet him there rather than waiting for him to meet me someplace else. When I do have to meet Mark at work, I tend to make sure it is after hours, when his coworkers are unlikely to be in the office. Visiting him at work always provokes anxiety in me, because he has a history of acting out in his sex addiction with coworkers, most recently by taking a female coworker out for a dinner date about a year ago.

I'm not ready to meet or interact with any of the women he works with, in spite of the fact that Mark says he has not been physically intimate with anyone there, even Candace, the woman he took out to dinner.

In my earlier days, I would have spent a huge amount of frantic energy trying to find out "the truth" about his relationship with each and every woman he came into contact with during the day. I would have tried to find evidence to conclusively prove or disprove his assertion that he did not have sex with Candace. I would have reviewed the 24/7 videos from the monitoring system and GPS tracking system I'd have had installed on his body (if such a thing existed and my codependent craziness had progressed along the path it was taking). I would have looked for some indication about whether or not I should feel hurt and whether or not I had a right to be upset.

But here's the thing I've found as I've worked on my own healing: It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what he actually did or didn't do. Even with conclusive proof that nothing more has happened than what I already know about, I would still feel hurt. I still wouldn't want to meet any of his female coworkers, because regardless of whether or not I should find them triggering and upsetting, I do. My feelings are real, regardless of the circumstances, and the past still haunts me. And that's what I have to deal with by continuing to work on myself.

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This post was originally published at The Second Road.