Husband’s Past
Question
I have found out that my husband had a very promiscuous past, he slept with 40 women, made sex tapes, and went to special massage parlous.
He and I are greatly in love and when I get upset he talks lovingly and says he is sorry and tries to comfort
But the fact and the images that keep running like a reel in my head and leaving me in a state of anger and betrayal won’t seem to go away.
Should I leave him?
Forgive him?
I do not feel like I want to be intimate with him when he has done this act with so many other women.
Could you please help and give some sort of advice or wisdom
Am I in the wrong for bringing it up time again?
Answers
I truly empathize with your sense of revulsion and upset at what your husband did in the past. However, if what he did is in the past and only in the past, I am not sure that you should allow it to impact negatively on your marriage. Judaism teaches that when a couple marry, it is as if they have cleansed themselves of all their previous sins and the husband and wife are moving into their married life together in a state of purity and chasteness. That means that when you and your husband married you, he did so in a state of absolute purity. Even though his past sounds horrific, my feeling is that so long as that purity has remained within your marriage, it would be terribly sad to bring it to an end because of things that happened prior to your marrying each other. What is true is that in order for that to be successful it will require monumental self-control and inner strength from your side not to allow his past to define the state of your marriage.
Please accept my personal blessing that whatever decisions you make be the right ones.
Best wishes from the AskTheRabbi.org Team