I found out about the addiction on a Tuesday. It was late, around midnight, and I had taken his phone because the Ring camera was down and someone crashed their Tesla into a neighbor’s bougainvillea. There were Snapchat notifications. I opened one. I wasn’t expecting the digital equivalent of self-immolation.
Over the course of 12 years, my husband—a man with a titanium American Express, a gym-sculpted frame, and a deep, almost alarming reverence for J. Crew’s fall collection—had wired over two hundred thousand dollars to women online. Dommes. Findommes. Human ATMs in Louboutins and fake lashes who called him a worm and asked for rent.
We’ve been married for three years. Together for nearly a decade. I didn’t notice because I wasn’t supposed to. He’s charming like that. Smart. Funny. The kind of guy who turns the family Christmas party into an elaborate murder mystery and gets complimented by bartenders for being “so in love with his wife.” It’s a brand. We were a brand. But this was off-brand. This was off-everything.
He didn’t even know the total until I told him. Like it was Monopoly money, tossed around during a manic episode he’s been living inside for over a decade. He cried. I didn’t. Not then. My eyes felt like hard plastic, like the glossy ones on those American Girl dolls. Expressionless. Watching. Absorbing. Waiting to process later, like trauma does.
He said it wasn’t about sex, but about pain. Of course it was. Everything is, eventually. He said it helped him escape the pressure of being “perfect.” Perfect at work. Perfect at parties. Perfect for me. The man who got off on imperfection—on being punished, degraded, emptied. I told him he had a choice: therapy or nothing. He chose therapy.
People online told me to leave. That I was pathetic. That this was cheating, which—yes—it was. That I should burn his wardrobe and post the ashes on TikTok. I didn’t. Instead, I made coffee, calculated his spending in Rocket Money, and stared at our dwindling net worth like it was a dying dog.
It’s funny. I used to think trauma looked like bruises and hospital bracelets. Turns out it also looks like a Chase statement, where $700 vanishes to a woman named “GoddessAluraXXX” every Thursday at 3:42 p.m.
People ask if I’m angry. I am. It comes in waves. Saturday night, I screamed at him on a street corner like we were in some Netflix docuseries about betrayal and brunch. I said I could do whatever I wanted now. He said okay. That’s what he does. He says okay.
We’ve paused all sex. He’s in therapy multiple times a week, in an anonymous program for people who sexualize their own destruction. I watch the money now. I get alerts for every transaction. Our dynamic has changed. I am not his wife anymore—I’m his compliance officer.
Still, I haven’t left. Maybe that’s its own sickness. Or maybe it’s because I know what’s underneath—the childhood abuse, the shame he never spoke about, the sadness he disguised as spontaneity. Maybe I believe him when he says he wants to get better, even if he never fully does. Maybe I still love him. Maybe I love the version of him that never existed.
Or maybe I’m just tired.
The house I wanted? It’s gone. The vacation home we talked about? Burned away, pixel by pixel, into cash tributes and encrypted chats. I didn’t just lose money. I lost a fantasy. And fantasies, unlike money, don’t have a refund button.
So here I am. Married to a man who gave away our future, $50 at a time.
And now I’m the one holding the receipt.