Status Updates From Counting the Cost

She told me that the rumors were true, that Josh had confessed that he’d been addicted to pornography for years, and that he had paid to join a social networking site for people wanting to cheat on their spouses.

it’s always the damn religious people

Our bank balance was low, Derick only had a few days’ vacation available, and with Cathy back home, still on edge recuperating from the wedding day, we were worried about even being away at all.

There was only a little pushback from the production team, but once we made it clear we weren’t taking cameras along on our honeymoon, they made it clear there wasn’t any money from them to help with the honeymoon either. We took five days and disappeared off to the beach in North Carolina. It suited us to keep it simple and short.

I’d seen what had happened when Josh and his bride, Anna, had let the network pay for their honeymoon to South Carolina—how they’d edited it in a way that made the two of them appear like inexperienced, naïve kids who had grown up in a sheltered environment and were about to head off to have sex for the first time. The whole thing was embarrassing and designed to make them look bad.

… some things are not worth the cost. Some things are not for sale. In among all the emotional turbulence that we were going through in the run-up to the wedding, I was always clear our honeymoon would not be on the show. It was private and it was precious, and it was absolutely not something that I was willing to sell for an all-expenses-paid honeymoon vacation.