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He watches porn every morning, but sex with me feels like a favour

My husband says watching is harmless and only occasional. I know he watches almost daily, while sex with me has become a weekly favour.

I’m Olivia. I’m thirty-eight, my husband is forty-five, and we’ve been married for five years. At the beginning it was like it is for everyone: sex, sex and more sex, non-stop, even though we’re not teenagers.

After the wedding it was still fantastic, but for a while now I get sex every Saturday or Sunday, and even then it’s as if he’s doing me a huge favour. At first I told myself it was age, stress, my husband runs his own business, and so on and so on… At first my husband watched porn films quietly, hiding it from me. But I caught him a few times and told him openly that I didn’t like it, that to me it wasn’t normal, and so on… Indignant, he said he wasn’t sleeping around, he wasn’t cheating on me, and that watching films SOMETIMES (meaning every day, in the morning before work) was nothing terrible.

I accepted it, but it wasn’t the answer I’d been waiting for. And so I felt undervalued; I thought I didn’t turn him on enough, that I was old and unattractive. Over time my husband found a paid adult subscription and talked me into ordering it: he’d watch now and then, he’s an adult, all men are visual, all men watch porn, and he’s too old to hide his watching from me — that’s what my husband said. And I thought to myself, well, maybe the man has a point. So we’ve had that subscription for about four years. OFFICIALLY. My husband watches when I’m not at home, or he gets up for work about an hour early, and I know 100% that that’s what he’s doing. He often gets up at night for a cigarette, and I know for certain he puts it on for those few minutes just to watch, even briefly :( I’m devastated. When I ask him about the films, he flies into a rage, says it’s his only entertainment, that he only watches sometimes, that it’s not a tragedy. I don’t know whether he masturbates, but I suspect he does; I’ve never caught him at it. But how can a man watch those films without masturbating…

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