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Happy With Our Lot in Wife

Yosef, who is clean in SA for a few years, wrote me a heart warming e-mail about his hard-earned life-experience:

Wednesday, 11 January 2012

I'll share this: I've B"H never cheated on my wife, I'm ba'al teshuva (I hope). She's frum from birth. Early in our marriage I told her, "With all these immodest images around, the only woman I want to see, and have on my mind is you!" ... "The only intimate image I want to feel desire for, is you!.. Please keep any catalogs with those pictures out of the home or hidden".. Later she found the SA white book. She was scared. She knows where I come from so I told her the truth: "all those images I still have from my past, that my father encouraged me to see, are bothering me in my yiddishkeit.. These meetings only help me get closer to Hashem, and you". She saw the honesty in my eyes and heard it in my heart and calmed down..

Later during one argument when I was emotionally 'finished', I told her "why don't you please come to an s-anon meeting. I'll never push you, I just think you'll get a better understanding of what my mind still does to me if you hear other ladies speak". She went, and was pleasantly surprised to hear identical feelings from other wives. Most importantly, she realized her own unrealistic expectations about a man, and how her own shortcomings played a part in our discordant moments.

She once even said "I wanted to yell at you today, but realized the problem was all in me; nothing to do with you at all."

One of my friends suggested: "buy LOTS(!) of those little cards that come with flowers: Write love notes on them to her and leave them around the house." I found this to be similar to the intro to the 2nd part of Tanya; "in order to have ahavas Hashem, one must think about and take actions in things that arouse us to ahavas Hashem." So too, I started writing things that I WANTED to believe about her (she was not really a passionate trigger for me at all!). "I enjoyed being with you", "I look forward to seeing you", "talking to you last night was really special".. etc. Soon these actions COMBINED WITH DAILY PROGRESSIVE VICTORY OVER (EXTERNAL) LUST, and commitment to the 'family unit', bore fruit: she has become a HUGE object of my physical desire.

All of my passion (which will never go away anyway, see Tanya ch. 27) is channeled as it should be: towards my yiddishe wife.

I still lust like crazy. I just try to be honest with the world, make a lot(!) of crazy jokes with my friends, learn Torah when I can - and have great intimacy with my spouse, Baruch Hashem!

I believe that if someone really wants, strongly enough, their own wife can satisfy them completely and entirely, and they can live a normal healthy Jewish life, full of challenges of all kinds that Hashem can help them through; and most importantly, with pure joy.

As the gemorah says "If someone says I've toiled and I've found; believe him!"