I’m writing as a woman whose man is addicted to pornography. As a woman who is fighting this addiction together with her man, although really it’s him who is going through it first-hand. I am too, but from a different angle.
I’m not really writing for advice. More to get it off my chest, I suppose. It will take a weight off my heart to put it into words. I have someone beside me I want to spend my life with. We’re both young, a little over twenty. I didn’t find out about the addiction by accident; I found out from him. He admitted it himself. I’d suspected before that he watched sometimes, and I’d told him what I thought about it… but I wasn’t expecting anything like this.
A man can’t grasp what a woman feels at that moment. I love him, so I support him. I support him, so in a sense I fight alongside him. It’s hard to fight a “failure” like this, because that’s what I’ll call it. For him it’s his personal failure; for me, as a woman, it is too. I probably don’t need to write that deep down I feel humiliated by it and very low. But I think that in this situation there’s no room for my grievances.
Nobody is forcing me to stay with him; I do it because I want to. He has been in recovery for a few months. He’s very determined; he really comes alive when he says he’ll never go back to it and doesn’t understand how he could have behaved like that. That it was sick. That it was abnormal. Those are his words. I’m proud that he can see it. I wait patiently… I put up with things… because there are all kinds of situations. Sometimes he’s in a bad mood (for no reason, apart from the addiction, which is the main reason) and he’s short with me, impossible to be around. And yet I stand it. Afterwards he apologises and says it’s hard for him to control the “illness”, that his head hurts and he feels bad.
It’s sad for us, the women. We stand beside the men we love and we support them… but in her heart every woman feels sadness. I’m sure of it. Even if some of them never say so. There are women who don’t want to focus attention on their own sadness in this situation, because it isn’t the main problem right now; to some it might even seem trivial. But when I listen to friends who have “healthy” men and they share details of their sex lives… I feel that sadness. Not resentment, not blame. To err is human. Just sadness that someone was so irresponsible and selfish that, with a woman at his side, he chose those empty prostitutes who take money to be filmed while men do whatever they want with them.
Men who are addicted: you want women who respect themselves. Good women. Loving women. Think long and hard about what your woman is feeling right now. You’re ill, but she has feelings too. She’s living through this too. In your place I’d be bringing a truckload of flowers, for that humiliation. We love, so we support and quietly endure everything, but don’t forget about us. We’re strong, but in this situation we need support too. It’s hard as hell for me; I try to keep my composure and not fall apart. But I pray for the recovery to end. For a positive outcome, for us never to return to this subject. For it to be treated as the past.
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