My partner has a problem with porn, and I was the one who discovered it.
The beginning of our relationship: great sex, lots of tenderness, and then after a while, stop. I put it down to the drop in excitement that comes once you’ve been together for a while, to habit, to the stress and tiredness we’re all condemned to these days. But what set off the alarm was that we’re young, healthy and not weighed down by things like children or family, so why had the fire of those first weeks gone out so fast? I grew up believing that men love sex and are almost always ready for it, and that it’s mostly women who ration sex and often have to be asked, and so on. So I was convinced my sex life would be wonderful: I want it often, I know my body, I know how to warm it up, and having a man I love beside me makes the desire even stronger. I hit a wall in my relationship, because the wonderful beginning had stirred up my desire even more and convinced me that life could be beautiful and fulfilled in this area too, while everything slowed down.
It started with our first night together without sex and ended with constant excuses that my partner was tired, sleepy, stressed. At first I tried to be understanding, after all we know what life is like these days, but over time such huge frustration grew in me that I cried through many nights, rejected and feeling completely unattractive, while my partner slept sweetly. Out of spite I decided to stop initiating sex at all, hoping that maybe my pushiness (as I thought of it then) was putting him off. But the result was that we made love even less often, which completely broke me and dragged my self-esteem down to the floor.
I felt terrible. I thought something was wrong with me, that maybe I was some kind of “hypersexual”, but is that even possible, damn it? For a happy, healthy person, is wanting sex at least twice a week abnormal? And as a woman??? I broke the rules of trust that should exist in a happy relationship and checked my partner’s internet history. What I found knocked me off my feet.
It turned out that for many, many years (he hadn’t cleared his history in all that time) he had been treating himself to pornography in amounts that made my head spin. It was a huge shock for me (though to be fair I should mention that until then porn hadn’t been much of an issue for me; I’d occasionally looked at it myself and could enjoy masturbating to that kind of video, but I did it very rarely, and for me it was a kind of variety during the so-called dry spells when I was single). But what I saw threw me into a real panic: it was definitely too much (although it wasn’t the kind of thing that makes you feel sick), and I decided firmly that the amount didn’t fit into any subjective “normal”. All the more so because when I checked the days and times of the videos, it confirmed something I’d noticed before: it was exactly when he hadn’t felt like sex that the videos had been watched, shortly before or shortly after. I stepped in, and my partner pushed back. He explained that he simply likes watching that kind of video, that he treats it as entertainment on a boring day and sees nothing wrong with it, while assuring me that I’m the woman of his life, very attractive, that I turn him on, it’s just that right now he’s going through a phase where he has no energy for sex.
I explained to him that knowing he watches these videos while there’s no sex with me affects me very badly, that it lowers my sense of my own attractiveness and deepens my distrust of him, which makes me question the point of the relationship. He said he could stop and wouldn’t watch them anymore, since it hurt me so much. He really did stop (for a while), and I really felt the difference for the better. I told him I understood he might have a problem, that he could count on me if he felt he had a problem with it, that he could count on my support.
I told him to tell me if he felt like going back to it, and I’d try to help him, that we’d get through it together. The tenderness came back, and the attention to my needs. I felt wonderful and believed we had put the problem behind us. Sometimes I asked how he was doing; he said he was fine, and I believed him, because I could feel myself that things were different. But it didn’t last long.
After a dozen or so weeks the old stress-and-tiredness pattern came back, and having learned from last time, I decided to play it safe and checked his history again. Unfortunately I found more unmistakable evidence that his old habits were back… If a woman who has been through the same thing is reading this, she probably knows how I felt. It was awful. I felt like the most naive fool, like someone who had given all of herself to help the person she loves, only to find out she was being lied to and deceived. The whole meaning of the love that connected us turned to dust, it simply vanished. I couldn’t believe that something we had worked on for years had been thrown away for anonymous women showing off their charms to anonymous viewers. Sad… All of this is the lead-up to where things are now. I told him what I’d found and how I felt.
I said I wanted to break up because I no longer saw a future for us. I felt I couldn’t trust this man anymore, that he had hurt me so deeply I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I accepted what had happened. I asked whether our whole relationship had been worth what he’d been watching online. Of course he said no. He admitted he had gone back to it because he still didn’t think it was anything bad, and he’d decided he simply had to pay more attention to my desires, but that lasted only a moment and he could no longer reconcile the two. And that was the breaking point. He concluded that the two couldn’t be reconciled, and that his wish to share his life with me outweighed his wish to carry on with a destructive habit. I won’t hide that I gave him an ultimatum: me or porn. But for the first time I heard my partner say he had noticed the destructive effect porn had on his life and on our life together.
He stopped seeing it as innocent entertainment and started seeing it as a danger, and decided he had to look for help; he said he wanted to see a sex therapist. Around then I found material online about quitting porn. I showed it to him, and things got moving. He read all of it. Full of fear, but also determined, he started following the advice. He admitted that an article in which women described their partners’ porn habits made a huge impression on him. Before, when I told him how I felt, he treated it as oversensitivity and needless panic, but all those women’s opinions showed him that many women really do see it in the same negative way.
More importantly, he was badly frightened by what he read about men losing their erections as the habit went on (he didn’t have that problem yet, which had convinced him his porn habits weren’t that bad). What he read really shook him, and because of it (and the prospect of breaking up with me) he decided that he did have a serious problem and finally resolved, seriously, to stop. So far it’s going pretty well for us. Though small doubts bother him, because he’s now going through a flatline and worries that his natural drive won’t come back. I try to support him, telling him it’s a sign he’s recovering, and I hope he’ll stick with it.
But I want to say one more thing here. It’s very important for a woman who goes through this hard crossing with the man she loves. If she tries to support you in this process and has been part of it from the start, like me: focus on yourself, obviously, but don’t forget about her. She has the right to feel all the negative emotions, the frustration and the grief, that your habit has caused her. I made a mistake while supporting my partner through this.
For a while I focused only and exclusively on him, but after some time my grief over what I had lost in those months, years, of going unfulfilled reached its peak. Give her the right to her grievances, and support her too, because she has also sacrificed her desires, her happiness and her fulfilment. Be tender and, as far as you can, open to the hard moments she goes through because of your recovery. It’s very, very important.
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