He has never respected boundaries. He is not typically the one to push them, although he was the first time. But after the first time and being expressly told what is okay and what isn’t, he has still always let the other person push boundaries as far as they want. He will let them push until it crosses the line into something that hurts me, and then act like he didn’t realize he was doing something wrong because it happened so gradually. I see now he will never be the one to say “this has gone too far” The only way it will not go too far is if he does not engage.

He wants to engage so badly tho. Most of his social life has always been online, and he has discovered many new kinks and aspects of his sexuality. He wants to engage with the kink community, he wants to express his sexuality to others and have a sense of belonging to that community. He wants to join the discords, DM people, go to the conventions. He goes to therapy about this.

He is willing to just stop entirely, he has deleted his social media apps for weeks at a time before in an attempt to do this. But he always goes back, saying he feels he is ready to manage it without getting up to anything inappropriate. He always blocks the people that were problematic. But there is always a new person. He always fucks up again eventually.

On one hand, I want to say it’s nice that he is willing to disengage entirely for the sake of our marriage. He doesn’t want to hurt me, or our marriage and he’s willing to try to give up something he really craves to protect both.

But on the other, if the only way he will stop is to not engage at all, and the only way I can be sure he isn’t engaging is just to trust he isn’t doing it behind my back…. I don’t know how to live like that.

Even if I could trust that he wasn’t on social media at all, if the only thing keeping him honest and faithful is the self imposed lack of opportunity to be otherwise…. I don’t know. It kind of feels like there’s no point? In that scenario, he’s basically just on a leash, and should the leash become untethered, it’s over. I keep asking myself, why am I trying to keep him here in a monogamous relationship when it’s always going to be that fragile? Is being in a relationship that fragile even worth being in? If he were with somebody else would it be easier not to stray? Why do either of us even want this relationship at this point?

This is really just venting and organizing my thoughts for therapy, but feel free to share your experiences with similar situations. Thanks for reading.