PoSAs and Cheating- Right or Wrong?

Yesterday I got a text from a female acquaintance, G, I'd met at an Al-Anon meeting. We've had coffee together before the meeting a few times during which I heard earfuls about how difficult it is putting up with her husband, who cannot seem to stay in recovery from alcoholism.

After a dozen years of her husband's failed sobriety efforts, this woman feels exhausted in her efforts to get him into solid, long-term recovery and help the rest of his life not fall apart so he doesn't lose his job, and therefore, their lifestyle. So, understandably this woman is at her wit's end. Sound familiar?

It's worth pointing out that this woman's husband is a drunk, not a sex addict...big difference in terms of damage to her self-esteem.

Oh, I reasoned, that must be why she always has a handsome man, not her husband, in tow with her at meetings. When I inquired about who Mr. Good-Looking was, she shrugged nonchalantly, the way ridiculously beautiful women sometimes do and said, “Oh, I found him while I was trolling on Facebook, went to college with him a hundred years ago. But he's cute, and he's super-successful.”

Oh.

Just a week earlier, I had spent an hour on the phone with her husband, J, who had asked about a particular rehab facility that I recommend highly. He and I had a warm talk with his committing to begin the rehab next month. When we got off the phone, he was far from my best friend, yet I had established a connection. That matters to me.

Yesterday's text from G read: “SO sorry to ask you this on no notice, but if J calls you, please cover for me & tell him I am with you. I'm actually with someone I met online. Big kiss, G”

I was instantly furious. How dare she assume that I would participate in her deception! Lying to her husband was not something that I was going to do, so now what do I do? Monitor my phone calls and then just not call him back if he does call?

Just a week ago I was extolling the virtues of a program I attended myself years ago, that was based, in part, on the courage to live with total transparency and truth-telling in one's life to the man that she wanted me to lie to?

As of yesterday, when she texted me, J had 34 days of sobriety under his belt. Complicating my anger at being railroaded into lying for her, was that I can relate to her husband's challenges, the difficulties of early sobriety.

All I would have needed in my early sobriety days was finding out my partner was sneaking on dates behind my back. What a sordid mess that would have generated. And I think that's the point I'm trying to make here: avoidable big messes.

And ever-present on my mind is the PoSA dilemma—we often get driven half-insane watching the SAC in our life sabotage every good thing we'd built up together, often over years.

We can find ourselves wondering, “When is it going to be my turn to feel loved and appreciated for a change? I'm so sick of being the cheerleader around here!”

When his sexual anorexia deprives me of a love life and yet his libido is alive and well for seemingly everyone but me, it is all too easy to get spectacularly bad ideas about evening the score. Or seeking partners outside the relationship.

Avoiding big messes means I have to gravitate to the side of honesty above all else, marital status or religious imperatives notwithstanding. When I start the ugly process of deception, a big mess is not far behind.

Sneaking around might feel vindicating to a PoSA, because after all, the SAC sure wasn't worrying about our feelings when acting out. But adding our own dishonesty to the already foul pot can only make matters way worse in the long run.

We PoSAs know it's almost impossibly difficult navigating life with a SAC, this is a challenge that no one volunteered to undertake, most of us were thrown in kicking and screaming in pain and fury. There is nothing fair about it at all.

And I don't know about other PoSAs, but at my lowest points with my SAC, opportunity knocked each and every time. At my counselor's insistence that I steer an extra-wide berth around such deliciously tempting situations, there was another reason that overrode the more logically-right reasons:

I just knew that if I did indulge in an outside dalliance, I would somehow get caught. That's how 'against me' life felt back then. I knew my SAC would then fling it back in my face and then blame me for only everything that had gone wrong. And, in the process that SACs seem so adept at, exonerate himself somehow. It would have been a double loss for me, a blow to the relationship and there would be another soul involved in this morass. If I cannot fix the relationship with the SAC, I sure as hell cannot fix a second relationship that was supposed to fix the first one. A big mess, for certs.

Oh, that was so not gonna happen, after all I'd been through! I did end up spending a few hours chewing on pencils to avoid some tempting offers. I am human and vulnerable to temptation as we all are. Though it was not easy, I'm glad for the way it turned out—no matter what else, I know I acted honorably. And that's always something to be proud of. Sometimes that is the only solace we walk away with, as paltry as it feels compared to the vengeance that seems so much more richly satisfying. Or the romantic offers that seem so tempting.

What are your thoughts about this? Were you able to resist temptations of your own if/when your SAC was still acting out? How did you do it and what were the outcomes and lessons learned? What are you proud of in your healing process?