I got married with only one week of sobriety in Sexaholics Anonymous. I had just started working with my sponsor, and he said that it might be a good idea to postpone the wedding until I had more sobriety and recovery—but he understood that it was shortly before the wedding and canceling would have been difficult. My fiancée knew about my sexaholism and that I was in sex addiction recovery.

We got married as planned, and after that I crossed a few more boundaries and did the things I’m most ashamed of, including: being drunk on lust and relapsing on our honeymoon, lying to my wife, acting out in bed with my wife next to me, getting caught by her, and many other terrible things.

Being married of course didn’t help me stay sober at all. I kept relapsing, but thank God now I’ve been sober for over thirteen months (married for 2.5 years).

I surely wish that I had never done the harmful things I did in marriage, but I’m not sure that I would have become willing to do whatever was necessary to recover if I hadn’t fallen that deep. Perhaps all the problems related to having to postpone the wedding would have been a deep enough a bottom for me. But when I was getting married, I apparently wasn’t willing to go to any lengths to recover. Today I am grateful for SA and for my fellows in the program, and I hope that my experience will benefit other sex addicts.