Believe me, I do! I have thought long and hard about whether my infidelity was an addiction. I do know about addiction and worked the steps for a chemical addiction in the 1980's. I attended meetings for at least two years. I never worked all of them, but I gained control and stopped the disease.

In my case, the dynamics of my infidelity don't really fit an addiction for me. It did in some ways, but not really in most. I am not saying it doesn't for some people, but I don't believe that was it for me. It was entitlement, immaturity, and resentment. Lying became a habit, for sure, and I became more and more adept at it to the point where it was fluid and natural. But when the need to lie was removed, and the excuses and lies were stopped as a result, so did the habit. Now, just like last night with the rehearsal episode, sometimes even telling the truth feels like lying, because it sounds like one. Lying itself is an incredibly destructive habit, but there is no withdrawal from stopping it, only reward. I am told that there is actually a form of addictive lying for its own sake, so-called pathological lying, and the textbooks list several categories of that. I know of some people who fit those categories over the years. Fortunately, neither the infidelity nor the lying was a true addiction. A disease of the soul, yes.