Starting the journey

[champagnesuppanova]

Hello All. I found this site the other day on the morning after my SO admitted to me that he is addicted to P and MSB to P. To be honest, I had known for a while that there was a problem there, but I was waiting for him to come to me and so that we could actually have a constructive discussion about it. So we have gotten to point 1 - he has made the admission to me.

This is a complicated relationship. Our past has relatively short, but it has been rocky. We've been together about 18 months. I am 33, he is 28. I've had long term relaitonships before but he has not. He has admitted to me in the past that he has never been faithful to a girlfriend ever - and yes, if you were wondering that does include me.

When we met, I knew he was a player. I thought we would just have a short fling and that it would fill time before Christmas, but he kept calling me and we kept seeing each other and before I knew it we were 8 months down the line and he was breaking up with me.

For 3 weeks we were apart. I let him go and began to get over him and move on. Then completely out of the blue he asked to meet me for coffee and begged me to give him another chance. Literally begged, on his knees in tears for 2 hours before the coffee house closed.

Anyway, eventually I agreed. When we are good together, we are really good. We both have the same interests, the same energetic approach to life. Our minds think about things in the same way. We just click on virtually everything - apart from P.

When we got back together, I told him one of the conditions was that he stopped chatting to other girls online. I knew that he did this using various chat services - you know the ones I mean. And there were some "social networking" sites that he would use to meet girls and get their chat addresses and I also made it a condition that he had to stop using those sites.

Initially, he did. He shut down his accounts, cleared out is mobile phone of "unwanted" phone numbers and cleared out his chat service contacts lists.

It was about 2 months before he started using again though. He has alwasy used P. I didn't actually see that as a problem to be honest. But now I see the chatting and the P as part of the same problem.

His background also screams out "issues". His father committed suicide when he was 3 or 4 years old. His mother never met anyone else. He left home (he is not a UK citizen) when he was 19 and came to the UK with only £400 in his back pocket. That was 9 years ago. Since then, he has managed to carve himself out a life in a country where he didn't even speak the language.

Now he has a job that pays a reasonable amount, but not as much as me. He is sensitive about his size/weight, he has expressed to me in the past that he does not believe that he is worthy of being loved. He isn't happy with his job - he doesn't think it is a good job and he wants to do better. He has done half a degree but he wants to finish it and feels bad that he never has.

As for me, I have a good job with a career that is going from strength to strength, I have a masters degree, when we split up I dropped 2 dress sizes. I own my own home (he lives with me) and I am basically set up in life.

Why is all this relevant? because I believe it goes to the heart of why he uses P - he lacks self confidence and has low self esteem. I think he uses P to get a high, I think he chats to women to prove that he is still attractive, a "stud" to boost his self esteem. And I think all of this is compounded by me because he looks at me and my successes and then looks at himself and he feels inadequate - hence his feeling that he does not deserve to be loved.

Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, I do love him a great deal. He finds it extremely difficult to talk about his emotions. I am the only girl he has ever made any sort of commitment to. This is his longest relationship. He has allowed himself to open up to me emotionally. He has trusted me with that. I recognise the fragility of his self esteem and so I am prepared to stick with this relationship and with him because even if he doesn't think he is worth it, I do.

So, I feel like his admission to me that he is addicted to P is something of a break-through. He found the courage to make that admission of his own free will without prompting from me. I viewed that as a huge mark of trust on his part - him asking for me to hear him and support him and not be angry or upset. And my response was to thank him for being so open and honest with me and give him a hug. We didn't talk any more that night, but in some ways we didn't need to.

I can't check his internet history because his computer is password protected. he stays at home a lot of the day while I go out to work. I know he watches a lot of P - he confessed it to me. His routine is basically shower, eat, P, sleep. He says he does it because he gets bored.

He strikes me as one of those men that struggles to connect with his own emotions. I recall during the first 8 months of our relationship, we had a very healthy intimate life in bed, but there was very little emotional connection when we were together intimately. Since we have been back together, we have begun to have a much closer emotional connection. I suspect that he finds that very scary. I suspect that he is absolutely petrified of being hurt. In the past he has expressed a concern that I will wake up one day I realise that I am with a waste of space dork and so I will dump him. I told him then that he should have more confidence in himself.

So, that is him, that is me, this is my journal and this is our journey. I'll keep you posted.

[waterlily327]

Hello Champagnesuppanova, and welcome to TTF. I am also pretty new here (joined at the end of March). I am a SO of a PA...you can read my journal if you want all the background but in brief my BF & I have been dating for 4 years and we are in our early 20's. We also joined TTF together.

I don't have much time to write to you today (I am sorry for that), but I wanted to drop by with a few quick words after reading your post.
1. Communication-talk to your BF about as much as you can.
2. If he is not on TTF, see if he will join. If he already sees that he has a PA, then some additional support here might help him out a lot.
3. Take care of yourself. A SO's PA has been an emotional rollercoaster for most people here...don't forget to take care of yourself or you will burn yourself out.
4. Make sure your BF knows how his P-use makes you feel
5. Internet filters! K-9 is great, and its free!

Stay strong, and good luck!

[champagnesuppanova]

Thank you Waterlily for your thoughts and advice.

Reading other peoples journeys here has been uplifting in that it makes me feel that I am not completely alone in dealing with this. Some of the journeys have been quite harrowing and trying and that does make me worry for the future. But I have made a commitment in my own mind to try and see this through, always knowing that it will be tough.

One of the slightly complicating factors to my situation is that I believe my BF has been the victim of abuse. When he first came to the UK he met up with a man who was an established member of my BF's community in the UK. This man holds himself out as a psychoanalyst. As part of the "treatment", this psychoanalyst asked me BF to do all sorts of inappropriate things and it ended with full intimacy. My BF confessed this to me in December. That was when things began to come together in my mind - the P use, the inter-net chatting, the way he had cheated on me when we were together for those first 8 months, his lack of emotional connection - treating physical intimacy as an endorphin high instead of the emotional experience it is meant to be between two people.

All those things add up in my mind and I see a man who has been seriously affected by his father's suicide followed by a lifelong search for love and affection. He thinks he has found a way to feel good through P, but he has always lacked emotioinal intimacy. In our relationship, he has found a place where he feels he can finally begin to let go and connect with someone on an emotional level but he still has his PA, he still needs his "hit", he still doesn't have the courage to completely let go and trust that a committed one-on-one relationship can be enough to satisfy him.

Although he made the admission to me that he is addicted, he can sway from accepting that he has a problem to being angry with me that I want to talk about it. I am not sure whether to try to introduce him to TTF yet. It may still be too early. I do try to talk to him, but he gives me very clear signals about when he is not prepared to talk about his PA or the problems it causes. I think he feels guilty knowing that it hurts me - and he does know that I feel second best to it, that I hate going to work because I know he will look up those sites when I am out the door. I am worried that he will decide that it is too much hard work and he would rather go back out and chase girls again the way he has done for the last 10-15 years.

We live together so getting space away can be difficult, but I do try to make time for myself. Sometimes I deliberately stay late at work, just to show myself that I can. The issues I am dealing with do not just relate to his PA, but they relate to his infidelity from before. In a funny way though, I don't actually think he would cheat on me again - it would be extremely difficult for him to do that now because we live together. But the PA seems to have taken the place of the women that he would previously have chased and so the PA has become more intense for him.

While I was waiting for my account applicaiton to be approved for TTF, I had a conversation with my BF where I pointed out to him that it had been 10 days or so since we had been physically intimate. He was surprised it had been that long. I think it shocked him a little and he tried to close the conversation on that subject down - I think because he felt bad about it because he knew how he had been getting his highs and he realised that I had been going without.

I'm sorry to put so much out there in one or two posts. it's just this is the only place where I can be brutally honest about everything. I can't tell friends because I don't want them to judge him and I don't think it is fair for other people who know him to know about this issue. So when I begin writing on here it all just becomes verbal splurg.

I hope that through writing like this, I will eventually be able to organise my thoughts. I realise that at some point, I am going to have to make a decision about whether my efforts to help him are working or whether it is too much for me and I should leave. I dread having to make that decision. But I am alive to the prospect that it is a decision I may have to face at some point.

I hope that, given his acknowledgement that he has a problem, perhaps he is further down the line to making a full commitment to recovery than I first thought. But given his tendancy to clam up when it gets too tough to talk about, I know this will not be easy - not that it was ever going to be easy! But you know what I mean.

As for internet blocking, he has his own laptop that has a password and I can't get into it to install any kind of blocker. Plus, I want to respect his privacy as much as I can. I already know he watches P and what he gets up to on his computer because there have been a couple of times when I have used his computer and when you type "www" in the address bar, all these website addresses come up that are obvious what they are. So there isn't really anything that I could find out by getting into his computer that I don't already know. And I have the confession. I am trying to work towards what I think should be the next step - us talking about how he can do things to stop his pattern of behaviour i.e. the shower, eat, P, sleep pattern. I hope that he will want to try to put together a plan to stop the boredom so that he doesn't have time for P.

Based on how things have progressed so far, I think it will be a couple of weeks, maybe more, before he feels able to talk about this issue in any meaningful way again. He has told me that he feels that I am complaining too much when I try to talk about the lack of physicaly intimacy between us and that he feels nagged. So I will give him time and space and see what happens.

But thank you again for your support and kind words. I'll try not to drone on so much in my next post. I'm new to this and at the moment I just need to get stuff out that i have been holding inside of me for so long.

[champagnesuppanova]

I’ve just been re-reading my previous posts because I wanted to write something today. It was a bit odd really because as I read I noticed that virtually everything I had written was factual – about him and me and our history together. I haven’t written anything about how I feel. All the writing I have done about emotions is about my concern for his emotions. And today I need to vent. I mean REALLY vent some stuff. Reading my previous posts has just emphasised that for me.

OK. I am angry, upset, probably depressed, hurt. I want to cry almost all the time – it feels like the tears are always sitting in a pool just behind my eyes. Leaving home to come to work this morning was horrific. I knew that probably almost as soon as I left he would be on the computer hunting for his next fix. And it makes me feel sick to know that as I close the door on our home together. I imagine in my mind the images that are being projected into our home. I hate the very idea of it. And I hate that he wants to look at those images at the drop of a hat and yet when I get home he won’t be interested in me.

It makes me so mad that I lost 10kg, dropped two dress sizes, have spent hundreds of pounds and a ridiculous amount of time running around trying buy nice underwear, nicer clothes that fit the newer slimmer me – the newer slimmer me that is meant to be more attractive for him because it was HIM that told me I was too fat and that was why he lost interest in me before and dumped me last August.

Well now I’ve lost the weight, I’ve got the new wardrobe. I’m here, I’m willing and ready and him don’t want me. He has no idea how rejected that makes me feel. I feel like there is no point trying any more. Even when I make an effort it isn’t noticed. It’s almost like I am invisible some days. I go out to work, earn the money, pay the mortgage, I cook, clean, stock the fridge. And he sits at home during the week because his work is mainly at weekends, and he eats the food, dirties the dishes, throws his laundry on the pile, and doesn’t even say thank you when I run round after him.

I feel totally taken for granted. This is stupid. I’m running myself ragged walking on egg shells round him because I am so afraid that he will leave me again like he did last August. It makes me too afraid to really tell him the depth of the pain that I am feeling. I want to scream it at him, open my heart and show him the wounds because they feel that real. I want him to SEE my pain, FEEL my pain. Dammit I am so wound up right now. And it’s always that way. When I am away from him the feelings well up, because I know he is back home without a care in the world, watching his P, eating the food, making a mess for me when I get home.

And I make these resolutions to talk to him about it, but it all melts away when I see him. Because I know he does love me. He does do things for me – he built me a shed in our garden 3 weeks ago because he wanted us to have somewhere to store the garden stuff. He knows how much I love gardening. He spent hours building the frame for the shed to stand on. He bought me a beautiful watch for my birthday in February it was gold with a Swiss mechanism. For Christmas he completely redid my motorbike – striped it down, repainted it, bought new bits, pimped it up basically. He spent hours, hundreds of hours working on it for me. We went snow-boarding at new year in the French Alps. I had never been before but he is really good. He wanted desperately to go off and have a blast, but he spent time waiting for me, making sure I was ok, watching me, teaching me, praising me when I did well. He does love me, I know he does. But he doesn’t love himself. That makes me so sad because I know he is such a sweet caring man – he thinks about me a lot. Just today, he tagged me in some pictures on a social networking site – FB- you know the one. It was an event I had done on Sunday that he knew I was involved in. He had gone through all 193 photos of the event and tagged me and wrote funny comments on them. He did that this morning while I was out of the office at a meeting.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m being too hard on him. Am I being too demanding? Is it me? Am I the problem? It feels like I’m going crazy. It’s like there is this second conversation happening quietly in the back of my brain all the time. It’s constant. How much will he watch today? Will he watch at all? Will he try to find something else to do? If he was on the computer to tag photos of me, what else is he up to? How long have I been out the house now? What are the chances he has already MSB whilst I have been gone? Will he do it again this afternoon? Constant, constant questions. I wish I could just shut it off but I can’t. It’s horrible.

Knowing that he loves me and feeling that he loves me are two different things though. The knowing comes from the things I have described. But the feeling. That is meant to come from those everyday little intimacies. This morning as he slept, having worked hard all weekend, I kissed his hair before I closed the bedroom door and snuck out to get to work early. I left a note for him telling him how gorgeous he looked and how I didn’t want to leave today. I want to let him know that I still love him, despite his confession. I am there for him. I am desperate for him to reach out to me again and to trust me and to realise that I’m not going anywhere as long as he trusts in that. That’s all he has to do is just trust that if he talks to me it will be ok because if we can talk about it, then we can deal with it.

This is yet another rambling post. I thought that with writing my brain would become more organised about things, that I would learn to cope, to control the things I am feeling. It doesn’t seem to be happening yet.

But at least now I have some idea about how I feel about all this. I had to go back and correct some of what I wrote because I slipped into writing it as though I was writing to him personally. Maybe the suggestion I have seen on this site to write a letter to him is a good idea. Perhaps that is what I need to do. But I am scared that if I write that letter and I give it to him that he will get angry at me and that it will all be too much for him. I am so, so scared. This man has come into my life, taken my heart, battered it once already by cheating on me and breaking up with me – although I didn’t find out about the cheating until after we had broke up. And yet, I took him back. That is my responsibility. I took him back knowing all that. I know he appreciates me doing that because he has disclosed to a mutual friend that he has never had a girl just take him for who he is before and that is one of the reasons he loves me.

So you see, I feel like I am trapped. Too scared to leave the relationship, too scared to risk him ending the relationship because I am too scared of the pain of going through that break-up a second time. And yet, I am desperate, miserable, tortured if I stay in the relationship because of the damage to my feelings of self-worth that is occurring whilst he gets his rocks off to computer images instead of being with me. I feel absolutely stuck, caged in by fear. Such fear. So hopeless, helpless. I don’t know what to do next. I want to do something because I want to try to take control of all of this, gain some sort of sense of balance back in my life but I haven’t the first idea how. I desperately need someone to help but I feel too ashamed and embarrassed to tell anyone I know. It is suffocating. It’s almost like a physical pressure pushing down on my head. If I am honest, it is unhealthy. I’m at crisis point. I know this because I know how I lost that weight. It wasn’t healthy. I have never told anyone how I did it, but it wasn’t pleasant. It wasn’t surgery. It was partly exercise – I tell friends it was a combination of exercise and diet. It started when he dumped me and I found out he had cheated. I just stopped eating. And when I had to eat, I threw it up again. The throwing up only started after we got back together. It was after we got back together that he told me that the reason he had dumped me before was because although he still loved me he had lost interest in me sexually because he thought I was over-weight. That was all the motivation I needed. I kept the weight off that I had lost when he dumped me, and I set about losing more. It’s messed up. I know it’s messed up. But I haven’t told anyone that’s what I did. My brother suspected once, but I brushed it off. Said I was feeling sick because of a hormonal imbalance with my contraceptive pill but that I would sort it out when I got my next prescription. I got more careful after that about hiding the throwing up.

I don’t know if I should even post this now. I’ve written it though. I need to put this out there. I can’t carry it inside me anymore. I’m too tired. I just want to go home and sleep and be held by someone that loves me. I don’t want to feel this alone anymore. Why do I feel so alone when I have a boyfriend? It’s all just so messed up I don’t know where to begin.

[Mac]

Wow
Now that is what I call a good posting day.
Getting things off your chest is very liberating. Post away,
That is why it's called your journal. Say what you need to say.

Mac

[Mrs Black]

Champagne - i feel for you.

All of us here on TTF have been through (somewhat) what you have.

This is a place where you can say what you want, what you feel (whether you feel it is fair or not), how angry you are, how scared you are and have people understand. I suspect, that like most of us on here, it's not the sort of thing that you feel comfortable talking to even your closest friends about - and that's what makes this place so special. No need to make apologies, no need to apologise for how you feel and us SO's need that.

Please try to look after yourself a little better.... you have a lot going on and a lot to deal with at the moment and you need your strength and presence of mind to get you through.

I hope you find peace - maybe your BF would benefit from being on here, as you say - but in the meantime, welcome to the community and keep posting....it stops your thoughts going round and round your head and drving you mad.

Angel blessings.

[champagnesuppanova]

Well, yesterday was quite draining. All that typing and thinking really did take it out of me. I also wrote a letter to my BF. It ran to 5 pages of pt 11 typed text on single spaced lines. I even printed it off, signed it and put it in an envelope. But when I got home, he was so happy to see me and asked if we could go out for dinner. So I put it to the back of my mind and we got dressed and went out and had a really nice time. Proper quality time with each other. We talked and laughed and smiled and just really enjoyed being with each other. And when we came home I wouldn't say he jumped on me, but we had time together in the bedroom. It was just nice. It was just what I needed.

It made me wonder if I am things out of proportion in my own mind. Maybe I was just having a down day and focusing on the negative too much.

This morning was good as well. We got up together, had breakfast, I went to my class and he had to go to work. We both came back around the same time and then went out together to sort his mobile phone contract. He asked me to go with him for back-up. He wanted me there because he values my input. And then we both had to go off to work for the rest of the day.

I feel uplifted because when times are good like that, I feel ok about us. I feel that we are good, that we do work, that there is hope and a future. But it's the roller-coaster. When things are bad, they get really really black in my mind.

Perhaps I need to find balance inside myself before I start to approach him and invite him to this site. If I can make sure I have myself sorted - and lets face it, based on my last post I have some sorting out to do - but if I can do that sorting out, then I will be in a much better position to be there for him when he needs me so that we can get through this.

But all, in all, I am feeling much more positive today. He complimented me last night, said I looked nice - I had on new skinny jeans and he noticed. Said they gave me a nice figure and that he couldn't believe I have never dressed like that before (I tended always to wear baggy jeans and hooded tops as I do a lot of outdoor sports). I told him it was because I never thought I had the figure to carry stuff like that off - he just looked and smiled and said I looked good.

Things like that make me feel good about myself. He noticed. He cares. He isn't ignoring me. I don't need compliments like that every day, but yesterday the timing could not have been better.

[stillandagain]

you wrote "but its the roller coaster"

Champagne, this is the hardest thing for me. Its like being chained to the roller coaster.

I like roller coasters - they are an acquired taste for me. Something about the exhilaration and fear, and courageous victory of actually doing it.

But I want to choose when I get on and off.

THIS isn't about choice! And its really hard. I don't trust the up's but want to enjoy them and be thankful, and the down's are so very hard and painful.

Just trying to reframe/enhance the metaphor!

[champagnesuppanova]

I've spent a lot of time today reading other peoples journals. Both SO and PA. It is quite eye opening and it helps me to know that I am not alone. I do feel quite alone in dealing with this at the moment because my BF and I are not talking about his addiction openly yet. I am still getting signals from him that he isn't ready and it isn't up for discussion. But I'm still keeping the feelers out there. So at the moment, it for me it is still a lonely journey. I would really love for him to join here so that we can deal with things openly, but I guess these things just take time.

One of the things that I have noticed is that this begining process that brings most people to this site is an awful lot like the grieving process. People talk about the loss of innocence, undermining everything they believed to be true about their relationship. It does seem as though the SO goes through a process of grieving for the relationship that they thought they had because it doesn't exist. It was a fiction.

I look back at my posts before and I can see that grief in myself there. The despair, the heartache that grieving puts you through.

Today I am on a pretty even keel. I think alot about how and when I can bring the subject up with my BF. I have thought about leaving my computer on at home with this site on the screen "by accident" as a way for him to discover it and perhaps prick his curiosity.

The letter I wrote is still on the back burner. We had such a lovely evening yesterday and morning today. I was meant to go out to a concert with some girlfriends but one of them had to pull out at the last minute so my BF stepped up and took the ticket. He didn't particularly want to go to the concert, but he didn't want to be home on his own and would rather be out with me. The fact that he had a choice between an evening with his computer and an evening with me and he chose me - wow. That really made me sit up and take notice. It was just the smallest decision to make, but to me it held so much signficance and the more he makes choices like that, the more I have hope for the future.

He was looking at his computer last night when we got home from the concert. He has downloaded a lot of flims for us to watch - normal films!! His hard drive was almost full apparently so he was talking about moving some of the films on to an external hard drive. He started going through the list of films he has that we haven't watched yet. I told him to stop reading it out. Then a few moments later I said to him "you could delete that folder you have that is labelled 'sex madness'.". His immediate reaction was to say that he didn't have anything like that on his computer, but he said it in that sheepish way with his eyes down that means he isn't being honest.

Anyway, I said to him "I have seen the file name. It's ok, I know it's there. I was just suggesting that if you wanted drive space, that could be something to delete". He went quiet after that. Then a little while later he found the folder and all it had in it was a black and white movie that he didn't even realise he had down loaded. But in a wierd way I think he got my point. I really wanted to tell him he could delete Skype and msn an Yahoo messneger from his computer as well but I didn't want to push him too hard and have him get angry and snap.

We had this incident back in January when I discovered an msn conversation he had been having with a girl he had picked up from some website or other. It was pretty graphic stuff they were talking about. They had arranged a meeting. I found that conversation on a Thursday. Their meeting was arranged for the following Tuesday. My plan was to wait until Tuesday and see if he went - I knew I could be at the place they had arrangd to meet at the same time.

I lasted until the saturday evening before I cracked under the pressure. He was horrified that I had seen the conversation. It was surprising. He wasn't angry with me for looking, but he felt awful that I had seen the things he had been saying with other women. We had been talking before about his chatting with other girls and he had sworn it was all just fantasy. So it made me curious and I wanted to see what this fantasy world held for him that I wasn't providing. In some ways I wish I hadn't seen that conversation. In other ways I'm so glad I did. He promised me he had no intention of actually meeting the girl. I actually believe him on that because he had scheduled a client meeting with a client of his that I am friends with at the same time as he was meant to meet the girl but before he knew I had seen the conversation.

His reaction to me discovering the conversation was to put his arms round me and tell me we would get through it. Since that day, he says he hasn't been chatting online. I don't know whether or not that is true. I know he hasn't used his msn account, but I also know he has other ways of chatting to girls. I have told him I know that he has a skype account and that I don't like that. He still says he doesn't chat to other girls. I want so much to believe him, but he hides behind the password to his computer and I can't see what he gets up to.

But when I look at the sequence of events - him telling me in December about his psychoanalyst having sex with him and me accepting that from him without judgment, me finding the msn conversation at the end of January and then him stopping using msn, then last week his confession to me that he is addicted to P and MSB - that chronology says to me that he is reaching out to me. It is sporadic at the moment, but I believe that is because he is scared.

After the conversation where he admitted that he is an addict, it is as though he has tried to make changes - to use P less so that he is there for me more. I wonder if he is trying to have a journey by himself, on his own, without my input, so that he can change for both of us. He is a man who believes very much that a man should be the man of the house. But he finds it hard going out with a career woman with a high profile job and living in her flat. I think he finds that emasculating. It's as though all the things that first attracted him to me are also the things that drive him to P and MSB because they affect his self esteem.

I wish he could see himself how I see him. I wish he could understand that I want to help him. He is a beautiful man, inside and outside. He tells me frequently how lucky he feels that we found each other. I so want to be able to curl up next to him and tell him everything will be ok if he would just talk to me. I'm not angry at him because it is things that have happened to him that have made him like this.

Sometimes I think that it is because he is trying to protect me that he doesn't want to talk about the PA with me - because then I will see his other hidden life, that other side to him that he doesn't like. But I have accepted him for who he is and at the moment, that side of his life is part of who he is and I can handle that. But it would be an awful lot easier if he trusted me with the truth about himself. Maybe he can't trust himself with the truth about himself yet. It's a place he has to get to - I can't take him there.

[champagnesuppanova]

Today I feel guilty. My BF had a rare lapse and left his computer open and went to work. I'm working at home today for a change. Well of course, I had a thorough look through his web-browser history. All the usual stuff was there. I also had a look through his saved files directory - and I know a thing or two about finding hidden files - but there was nothing there. No downloads, nothing to suggest that he has been swapping photos with other girls like he used to.

Then as well as looking for P, I checked his web browser history for the last time he used this particular social networking site where he picks up girls - I'll call it Toggle although that isn't the name of the site.

When we got back together last August, I made it a condition that he had to delete his toggle profile. He did. Then he set s new profile up a couple of months later. Which I found and confronted him about - I did a screen print of the page and gave it to him and asked what it was. He was embarrassed and promised me that it was nothing and that he only chatted to girls on the other side of the world and that it was only cause he was bored. He promised to delete the profile, which he did. Then he set up another profile and this time he hid it - pretty well, but not well enough. I found that one in December although I didn't actually tell him this time, I just monitored his use of it.

He hasn't used Toggle in about 5 weeks or so it seems from his browser history. For him, that's a big thing. Bearing in mind he has no idea that I am aware of that profile - he's stopped using it off his own back. When I think back, that was around the time that we had one of our talks about his internet use and how I found it disturbing and that I felt disconnected from him. It was one of those talks where we cleared the air. I told him how much I loved him and that I was scared of losing him and that I felt like I was losing him to his computer.

So it seems that maybe he does listen to what I say and how I feel and that me opening up to him about how scared I am has an effect on him and he reliance on these websites.

All this makes me wonder, if simply having talks with him has that impact, what kind of effect will my letter have on him? Will it really bring it home? It is making me think that even though things seem to be going pretty well between us at the moment, I should still give him the letter. It was rock the boat big time, but maybe that is what we need. Or I was thinking I could tell him about this site, but I'm not sure I want him to read my journal.

I also wanted to say thanks to those people who have been posting and reading my journal. When I posted yesterday that I feel alone in the journey, I had a look afterwards at the thanks I have received and it helped lift me a bit. So if you are reading this, thank you. I sort of have a sense that there are people out there following my journey and having that sense of people being with me really helps. This is a very special place. I've felt a lot calmer since I've been on here and been reading other peoples experiences. Thank you one and all.