Hi,
I’m Claire. I’ve been with my boyfriend, actually my fiancé now, for six years. We don’t live together; we did for a short while, but that’s not what I wanted to write about. We’re slowly planning a wedding. We’re both twenty-five. That’s our general situation.
I care about him a lot, and he cares about me. We love each other, but… well, exactly. Something in our relationship has always been off. Happy, supposedly, but not completely… For a while now I’ve been realising that the reason is sex, or more precisely pornography. I knew he watched it, and it never particularly bothered me. I thought it was normal: a young guy, I’m not always around, so fine… Sex went like this: my fiancé tried to satisfy me as well as he could, without looking after himself. My orgasm first, and once he was sure I’d “got there”, he finished without any trouble; a guy always “comes”, after all… After sex I’d be all stirred up, it was great, wow, I wanted to smother him in kisses, and he was like a rock… As if nothing much had just happened… It took me a long time to work out that for him, nothing really had happened. One evening we happened to watch a film about masturbation and porn. The scales fell from my eyes, and even my partner admitted there was a lot of truth in that film… A few months passed, and in the meantime I read about the subject online. Finally I found the courage and had a serious talk with him. I told him how I felt: unattractive, not good enough. That I feel he keeps his distance from me after so many years together, that he isn’t building a full relationship with me. It seemed to me he understood that he had a problem. He decided to stop. But later it turned out he decided to stop because I wanted it, and in his view that’s the only reason. He also said I can’t be close to him because it gives him too much stimulation. That I understand. But he doesn’t want to see me at all during the first stage of the “therapy”. He’s terribly on edge now; fine, I’ll get through it. The thing is, he’s ill… He has psoriasis. The stress and the mood swings from quitting make it flare up, his skin itches… I can’t bear watching him suffer even more because of it… He’s crushed, and so am I. He thinks there’s nothing to live for, because he isn’t allowed anything anymore (no alcohol and none of the foods he likes because of the psoriasis, no porn because of me). I’d like to help him somehow, but I don’t know how, and on top of that he’s isolating himself from me. At moments I’m ready to call the whole thing off, just so he’d be in better shape mentally and physically… How should I behave? Step aside, as he wanted, or stay as close to him as I can despite what he says?
I don’t know how strongly addicted my fiancé is. Until now he masturbated to pixels almost every day, spending about half an hour on it. He mostly looked for videos in the categories he had always liked; he didn’t reach for anything harder. Rarely, but it did happen, he didn’t feel like real sex. I know, though, that sex with me wouldn’t satisfy him even if it were three times a day; it just isn’t the same. For the last two years it’s mostly been me who started things. At most four times, he couldn’t finish during sex.
I think I’ve given the most important information. Of course I want to support him… But does quitting make sense if it’s only because I asked? Is there a chance that if he holds out for a while and notices some positive changes, it will sink in that he had, or has, a problem, and he’ll stick with it for reasons other than just my nagging? He’s a very stubborn person, so I know he can hold out for a long time, but is it worth anything when he has no motivation of his own? How long could quitting take in our case? I realise everyone is different and there’s no magic formula.
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