I'm sorry about the sudden cut-off
I am with my wife 2 or 3 times a month, but -in general- she is like a piece of ice during relations. For fifteen years I kept on trying to make her feel good. In answer to Jack's question: I tried everything, I always thought that there has to be some way to make her happy and I made it very clear to her that I want to do what she wants. But the feeling was always that she was doing me a favor and I could hardly live with that. It makes me feel like I'm with a zoina and worse, because as low as I have fallen I can't handle the thought of my marriage being defiled. (To me marriage is a very holy thing. For example, I can't imagine how someone can look [lustfully] at the kallah by a wedding.)
The reasons I was making her miserable are, firstly, she felt inadequate even though I almost never complained. Secondly, relations (and usually all physical contact) were stressful for her and she built up resentment. Thirdly, every time I told her that I love her, or showed love in any way and she couldn't reciprocate, she felt guilty. It all built up in her, while I didn't know anything about it. As far as I knew our relationship was great and I alone was suffering.
Back to were I left off.
To be honest, I still have a hard time accepting that it's possible to fall so low after being so high. But in my mind I know that it's possible and it really happened to me. Make no mistake, the menuval didn't have an easy time. His old tricks were useless on me. (By the way, I forgot to mention before that it seems that the tears on the day of my wedding, wiped away about 95% [or more] of the garbage that had been stored in my brain.) First he arranged for stress to build up from many different angles. But even then he couldn't even suggest the old stuff. So he slowly got me to loosen up a little on shmiras einayim. I would look indignantly, at frum women in the street (although the styles 13 years ago weren't nearly as bad as today) and I would say to myself: "Here I am working so hard to be an ehrlicher yid and they're just parading around like that." (By the way, that was a big mistake; who's to say which nisayon is harder) The menuval tried to give me the feeling that everyone had deserted the battlefront and left stressed-out, depressed and battered me, all alone. I don't remember the exact details, but the bottom line is that eventually he broke me.
It hurts very hard to fall that badly, but I didn't give up. It was back to the ups and downs. The stress would build up until I would succumb and bye a p... mag. I would read it until I would masturbate and then throw it out. Sometimes I would save a telephone number from it and call from my house when my wife was sleeping. One time I made a kabala that I wouldn't buy p... for the next six months. After five months I couldn't control myself, so I went to a place to watch a video. (The hadracha on this site for making vows, is the perfect solution to this problem.) I actually have trouble believing that I did these things with my full beard and all.
The most dramatic change of my life (like many other people that I know) was, when I discovered R' Tzvi Meir Zilberberg Shlita. His clarity and complete understanding of what Hashem wants from us and also his complete understanding of the menuval's tricks, transformed me in to a new person. For a few years the menuval was left totally in the dust, but as we all know he never gives up. At this point the real challenges of life began. For example I started worrying about my children. When I saw one of my sons playing with his bris in his sleep (he was about 8 at the time, and I saw it twice a few days apart) I literally almost died from pain and worry that chas vesholom he will go through the hell that I went through. It was also then that my wife started saying things about are marriage that upset me very badly.(But in the beginning it was nothing compared to what happened in the last few years.) Still I had a whole lot more defense than I had had before. But there is no end to the menuvals arsenal (until Moshiach comes). So once again it was a new fight. I would hold out for long periods of many months or years, and then somehow he would get me again. It could be on a trip to the U.S. or when I had Internet access for a few minutes and I couldn't control my curiosity. [What I did was extremely reckless. I was by my friend sitting by his computer and he walked out for a few minutes. I did what I did and I didn't know that I need to delete the word in the search history and the browsing history. It's hard to imagine how he didn't catch on. (I have pretty sound proof that he didn't.) I think it was a ness.] Even when I fell I got back up fast even when I was feeling quite depressed.
About 5 years ago I really pulled myself together. I became very much in control of my life and very thought out. I was doing a program of working on self improvement that is very intense. My sedarim in learning were very solid and orderly. I wouldn't waste any time, I was always patient, I never got angry, there was no chance in the world of me saying a word of loshon horoh and obviously I was very very happy. It was impossible for the menuval to get me.
Then the impossible happened. I don't remember what started the stress, but I want to tell you what happened next. I remember that I was feeling stressed for about a week, when one night I walked in to the bathroom in shul and got the shock of my life. Let me first point out that I'm talking about an exclusively chareidi area. Somebody (presumably a young teenager from the heimishe yeshiva next door) had drawn a porn scene on the wall. I don't know about other people but I CANT LIVE WITH THAT. It simply drove me out of my mind. I can't handle the thought that any innocent boy could just happen upon something like that and there is no way to protect them. I know we can try to fortify them but that does not calm me down. This, by the way, is one of the main reasons that I hate the menuval so totally, so completely, so vehemently and so unforgivingly.
But as much as it broke my spirit, that deceitful obnoxious maniac still could not get me. After that it was one thing after another. I have to omit some of the major stuff, so I shouldn't be identified. Suffice it to say that there's been tons of pain, tons of turmoil and tons of worry. At the height of it all, I went away for a few days to try to get back to myself. When I came back, my wife informed me that life is better without me. (She did not at all mean that she was considering breaking up. She was just trying to say that I should change.) I know that a lot of people take such things more lightly, but I just cant. To me, my relationship with my wife (and my love for her) is a very central part of my life. I tried a few times to get an apology out of her, but she doesn't even understand what the problem is.
After a while of recuperating I began to concentrate very much on building her up. (By that time I understood most of what was bothering her.) I thought I was doing a great job, but then she dropped another bomb. (The fact that I don't remember exactly what she said, is a good sign.) I became such a total mess, that I was allmost powerless. It's important to realize that I had become very distant from acting out. I hadn't touched my bris in years. I don't get excited when from seing p... . But I became such a total wreck, that the menuval managed to blow up my curiosity about what is on the Internet. Over the next few months I visited an Internet place a few times. I, Boruch Hashem, put a stop to that, but he still didn't give up. At a time that I would be feeling particularly week, and siting by my computer at work, suddenly I just needed to know all kinds of things. Like, how good is the censorship on picassa web albums. Or what happens if you search in images with this or that word with safe search on. The list goes on and on, so I'll spare you the rest. Of course, once I was heading in that direction one thing lead to another. Eventually I would get aroused and a couple of times I was even mz'l (without actually touching)
I still have a little more to fill in but I'm out of time now
