Yearslong struggle with RJ and OCD
This is a long one - bear with me. I have spent years struggling with RJ over a specific partner/event in my wife’s past, though only recently found out the name for it, as it came up during ongoing treatment for my diagnosed OCD.
I went several years without it cropping up or bothering me but now feel blindsided by its recurrence - the obsessive thoughts, replaying in my mind not only the event that causes the RJ but also some of the arguments that came after the fact. It’s causing friction between my wife and I and I am struggling with how to handle it.
Background:
My wife and I are in our late 30s and have been happily married for nearly 10 years. Several years before we met, my wife met and had sex/essentially a one night stand with a prominent celebrity. She was single at the time. Our values are not misaligned - we both dated around in our single years and I admit that given the opportunity to have a one night stand with an attractive celebrity I would have likely done the same.
I reacted to the information very badly. Part of the reason was how I found out. All of my wife’s friends knew that it had happened, and one of them made an oblique reference to it in front of me just a month or two after we started dating. It was enough that I was able to surmise what happened, but I didn’t say anything to her about it for a while.
Over the next 6-8 months, I tried to ignore my suspicion, hoping that I had misinterpreted a joke and that what I feared hadn’t actually happened. However, during that same time frame, other oblique references were made to this celebrity. I finally asked my wife point blank if she had hooked up with him and she readily told me that yes, she had.
That’s when things got really bad. First, I told her how upset I was that I was left in the dark about it when seemingly everyone else in her life knew and joked about it often. A couple people, as mentioned, made jokes right in front of me. It made me feel like I was the butt of the joke. Even her teenage brother made a stupid reference to the celeb the first time we met (“hey sis, how is that celeb doing??”) which pissed me off - why tf did her little brother know about it?
It got worse - I snooped through her phones and emails and found her original text exchanges with the celebrity. I found her texting and email a bunch of friends about meeting him, how excited she was for the prospect of him calling her, how awesome her night with him was, saying that they had fantastic sex. Predictably, seeking out more info blew up in my face and I felt terrible both about myself and about what had happened in her past.
She tried her best to reassure me: that it was in the past, that she cared about me now, that it wasn’t important to her anymore, etc. She said the reasons she didn’t tell me until I asked were because a) she was embarrassed and b) she was afraid how I’d react, which given how I DID react felt justified. And rationally, I believed her. I have never questioned her love for me, and I am fully aware she did nothing wrong.
But I couldn’t let it go for a long time. I grilled her about it. Asked things like how could you do this, would you have thrown yourself at this guy if he wasn’t famous, how can you possibly not be comparing me to him, etc. I made her feel very bad about herself.
Eventually I got over the worst of it. It cropped up from time to time, like when a friend would unknowingly mention him (not because my wife hooked up with him, but because he was a celeb) or when I would see him on TV. But I never went back to belittling her over it or asking for more details.
We got married, things have been great for years.
Then a couple weeks ago, seemingly out of nowhere, it all came rushing back to me. The night itself, imagining them having sex, remembering all the excited texts and emails she sent her friends about it and about him and how hot he was. As a guy in my late-30s who looks it, I started obsessing again over whether she could possibly enjoy sex with me having this athletic, hot celebrity sexual experience in her past. I kept this all to myself for several weeks and eventually told my long time therapist about it (though I’d never brought the situation up to him before).
Last week my wife asked me what had been bothering me, since it was apparent I was struggling. So I told her - just a very simple statement: I’ve been struggling a lot with the celebrity situation lately. I left it at that.
In the moment she got upset, told me that she felt like a slt about it when it happened and feels like a slt about it now. We went to bed tense.
The next morning she told me she was angry and we’d talk later. I waited anxiously all day for that conversation. When it happened, she unloaded on me. Told me that she wasn’t going to be slt-shamed in her own house, that my obsessive issues over it were the cause of all her anxiety, that she didnt ever want to hear me upset about this situation ever again. Even if I saw the celebrity dancing naked on TV, she wanted me to paste a smile on my face and tell her everything is great, suffer in silence because she can’t deal with it anymore. She told me that years ago when I first handled it so badly, she had considered ending the relationship but obviously decided I was worth it. All this despite the fact that I didn’t rehash anything, didn’t ask for more information or reassurance, didn’t do anything like slt-shaming her, simply told her it was on my mind. And I told her that I was trying to address the situation the right way, with a therapist, after handling things so poorly years ago.
Over the next couple days I started feeling a little better about the situation, smoothed things over with her, didn’t rehash the specifics of our fight.
But again, all the obsessions have rushed back. I’m thinking again about texts and emails she sent 17 years ago. Replaying their sexual encounter in my mind. Comparing my body to his. Feeling like I was the only person not in on this huge joke and that it was at my expense. All driving me crazy, but I’m working with my therapist on it.
What I don’t know how to handle is conversations with my wife. Part of me wants to tell her that I was simply trying to communicate with her because she knew something was bothering me, that I wasn’t slt-shaming her, that I wasn’t rehashing the original fight. And to stand up for myself and tell her that it’s not fair of her to tell me to suffer in silence and put on a happy face, especially using language that she should have known I’d find triggering (the comment about him being naked on TV). I think I’m entitled to my feelings, to being upset, especially if I’m not asking for her reassurance. But now I’m afraid to talk to her. I feel that her comment about once considering ending the relationship was an implicit threat that if I don’t hide my feelings from her sufficiently, she’ll start considering ending it now. And on top of that, I feel like her telling me to fight the obsessions and put on a happy face are counterproductive and will make things worse.
I don’t even know what kind of feedback I’m looking for. I just feel like shit and I’m lost. I know I need to continue working with my therapist on the OCD and on making the memories less impactful to me. But how can I break down the wall that I feel like I’m responsible for building between me and my wife?