Earlier this year I married a man at my church who I'd known (thought I'd known!) for several years.  I thought he was a somewhat shy, inexperienced guy who just hadn't met "the right woman" till I came along.

He did drop some hints about his "wild past".  Well, I'd had kind of a wild past too, so I laughed and went along with it as a kind of joke.  See, I just assumed his "wild past " involved women, as mine involved men..

Well, on our honeymoon, he confessed that it was a lot more than that.  As you may have already figured out from my being here, his "wild past" involved having sex with men - men he'd met on the Internet.  But he insisted that was all over with, that he'd stopped when he rejoined the church several years ago, and that he really loved me and wanted us to have a happy marriage.

And I believed him, because - well, it was our honeymoon; and because I'm almost 50 years old, have never been married, and really wanted to be (and still do).

But shortly after we moved in together, I discovered his computer was *filled* with pictures of naked men.  Not even men - teenage boys!  At that time, I too was addicted to Internet porn, of the S&M type.  So I didn't really feel I could sit in judgment of him.  One day, though, I opened a page with one of those pictures, and I just started crying.  I don't really know why, but it just made me so sad.  See, even though all these websites he looks at insist the boys are "over 18" and therefore legal, to me they still look like little boys.  I don't think I would have been so upset if they looked like grownup men!

I confronted him about these photos.  He cried, and I cried, and he promised he was going to remove them from the computer.  But he didn't - he just moved them to a part of the computer that, apparently, he thought I wouldn't see.  But I *do* see them - they show up in the "history" toolbar on Internet Explorer every time he opens one of them.  So I know he's still looking at them, every day.

We still have sex regularly, so I know he's bisexual, not homosexual.  And I might be able to deal with that.  It's the dishonesty that bugs me.  We're both Christians, and gay people are welcome in our congregation.  So that's not the issue.  The issue is the hiding, and the hypocrisy.  And the fact that, every time I stumble on one of those photos, I feel like crying all over again.

(And for my part, I gave up looking at the S&M porn sites, because I felt it was hypocritical for me to criticize my husband for looking when I was too.)

What advice do I want here?  Well, I don't really know.  Perhaps just support, more than advice.

I know I don't want a divorce - we've been married less than a year and overall, I like being married and don't want to go back to being single.  Whatever problems we have as a married couple, they're still way preferable to the loneliness I experienced as a single woman!  So I'm ready and willing to accept this and deal with it.

The problem for me is - there's really no one I can *talk* to about this.  Certainly no one in our families - he's not "out" to anyone but me, and it's not my responsibility to do that for him.  No one in our church - for the same reason.

But sometimes I just really, really need to "vent" -- so is it OK if I come here to do that?

Thanks for listening!  I feel a little better just for having written it all out!