Sexual addiction, an umbrella term which includes pornography addiction, is likely the most harmful addiction when it comes to marriages. The reasons for this are numerous and include the shame associated with this addiction for both the addict and the spouse, the sense of betrayal, and stereotypes linked to the addiction.
I specialize in counseling wives of sex addicts, and I often see women who haven’t told anyone about their husband’s addiction, sometimes for months or even years. The lack of support available to spouses, and often inaccurate information being put out about partners of sexual addicts, can cause a wife to suffer additional trauma and feel like she is partially responsible for her husband’s behavior.
Since this is a “process addiction,” versus a chemical addiction, it is so hard for wives to understand. This lack of understanding can cause numerous misconceptions to be held as truths and can postpone healing.
#1: How can my husband love me and look at porn when he knows it hurts me?
It is possible for your husband to love you, even though he is looking at pornography. In fact, the two are completely unrelated. Men are better than women at compartmentalization. A man’s brain can be compared to a waffle. There are many different compartments so that he can divide his life up into separate components that don’t touch each other. His marriage and family can be in one compartment, his job in another…you get the point.
This is a benefit when a man is fighting in a war and able to focus on the task at hand without worrying about his family back home. But it also makes a man able to look at pornography without thinking about how it may hurt you or his marriage. Women’s brains are more like spaghetti where everything is connected. We are more likely to be worrying about our kids when we are at work and thinking about work when we are at home.
When a man becomes addicted to pornography, it can become a perceived need rather than a choice for him until he becomes willing to reach out for help. His use of porn causes a release of the same chemicals involved when a drug is ingested. At the height of his addiction, nothing, not even the risk of losing his job or his marriage, is enough to stop him. This explains how a politician or celebrity can make such risky, career-destroying moves without stopping to consider the consequences.
Later I will discuss the kinds of consequences that can catapult an addict into reality.
#2: Why does my husband prefer porn and masturbation to sex with me?
Norman Doidge, psychiatrist and author of the acclaimed book, The Brain That Changes Itself, studied porn addicts. He stated,
They reported increasing difficulty in being turned on by their actual sexual partners, spouses, or girlfriends, though they still considered them objectively attractive. When I asked if this phenomenon had any relationship to viewing pornography, they answered that it initially helped them get more excited during sex but over time had the opposite effect.
Your husband had this addiction, or the proclivity toward it, before he ever met you, regardless of what he says. In spite of what you think or even what he might have said, nothing you could do could be enough to sexually satisfy your porn addicted spouse.
Pornography presents an unrealistic reality that damages a person’s brain. They become engrossed in this fantasy world where they don’t have to worry about pleasing anyone but themselves and no emotional connection is required.
While a porn addict desperately craves love and intimacy (something he is probably unaware of), he seeks it out in the exact place that will cause him to become less and less able to experience it. As I hear sexual addicts talk about their past, it becomes apparent why they are so uncomfortable with the idea of intimacy. This topic is beyond our scope here, but it is important for a wife to be aware that there is a reason her husband became addicted to porn, and that reason is not her.
Read Part 2 answering these four questions:
Question #3: Why am I not enough if I am sexually available to him?
Question #4: He says he looks at porn because I don’t have sex with him enough, am not pretty enough, am too fat, etc. What can I do?
Question #5: My husband says all men do it. Am I making too big a deal out of this?
Question #6: My husband refuses to get help or admit this is a problem. How can I make him stop? What are the risks if he doesn’t stop?
Do what im going to do change the password and he only uses it when im around
I have been with my partner for 8yrs and been married for 2 and we have a 1yr boy.
We are both around 30. When I first met my partner, I never knew how bad his addiction was, and don’t think it was as bad as it is now. Like any typical male I thought it was normal to have you know the dirty Calendar in the shed, buys a zoo magazine, gets the odd dirty email from mates etc.
But It wasn’t till a few years being together I think it all got worse. I caught him watching porn. I left for work and had forgotten something then ducked back into the house but he didn’t see me and gave him a fright and was quick to turn it off, and asked him what he was doing and his reply was nothing. and I got really upset and thought I wasn’t good enough for him, but he thinks it ok and normal for guys to do this. So I was angry and upset for a bit but got over it thinking he would stop, but it never ended there caught him again, and also all the history on the Internet, then he learnt how to clear that when I found out how else he was doing it.
We never have a problem doing it or him getting hard etc, he more has a problem With PE. Not lasting very long. So he gets upset with that but I’ve told him that it doesn’t worry me, I married u for who you are and don’t get down on yourself as many men have this problem.
He says he is doing this because of that, but that is just a lie he has a addiction that he will never get over, I don’t think as we have ended up in many heated arguments about me finding this rubbish and it has to stop or I’m out. But When you come home and find a piece of paper with girls names on it/porn names and then google it then find that rubbish on it I believe he has got a problem, anyone who has time to do this has a problem.
He doesn’t realise how much it hurts me to think that I’m worthless and why am I even in his life if he doesn’t even need me or to be evenlooking at all those women, when he has me. He is loving and caring but has this side to him that i dont like. When I think things are going good and hasn’t been doing it, then bam slaps me back in the face.
I nearly find it hard to even have sex with him after finding all this. Then he thinks I never want to do it with him.
I always treat it as he is cheating on me. All I want is for him to do is stop going out of his way to look at that filth. Does he have a problem or is it just me. He knows I hate it and how upset I get when I do find out he’s doing it, but he doesn’t see the wrong side of this, and still manages to always go back looking at it when I’m out or go to bed early.
What your husband might be experiencing is the effects of his porn use on his body. It is very common. Porn is emasculating. It hijacks a person’s brain chemistry, literally reteaching their brain how to respond to sexual stimuli. If you husband wants to get his libido back, he might want to read this e-book about porn addiction and how it kills marital intimacy.
My fiance and I are getting married in a week. I have worked with him with so many things, not just porn. I know he had an issue with it before he met me, as he used to be the ‘provider’ of porn to his buddies in high school and college. I also had a problem with it. I hadn’t been in a relationship, so it was a good way of a ‘release’ for myself. After about a month or two of going out, I had stopped watching it, as my needs were being meted by my new partner. I’ve never had an issue with the past of bf’s watching porn, or at least I didn’t know about it. So nothing ever came up.
Then I start to get viruses on my computer, and he is spending the night all the time. This never happened with my computer before. About after a year and a half of being with him, I noticed he had a porn addiction. He had magazines and hundreds of videos in his room. I had him delete everything on the computer, and he tossed the magazines and videos. I thought that it was over with. We then move in together (in his mothers house) since I had been kicked out of my own home and had no where to go. We get a new car, I get a great new job, and we are doing well.
I start to find all those videos that he told me he deleted. He just put them on a hard drive, and plugged it in when he wanted to use it. He hasn’t been working for most of the time that we’ve been together since he was wrongly accused of something (This is another issue all in itself).
He is also Mexican, and was raised in a household where the women do everything, and the man is waited on. (Another issue we have been dealing with).
I have gave him ultimatums saying that if he didn’t stop looking at porn, that we would take a break and I would move out and live in my car if I had to. He doesn’t want to lose me so he says he will stop. He has said he will stop at least 3 times, and we have a god cry because he is ashamed and sorry that he hurt me.
He hasn’t watched porn from what I can tell in the last month and a half. but then I go through the history on the ‘iPad’ and it shows he has been looking up girls on Twitter. This makes me feel like he is ‘shopping’ for other women when they are on his profile.
I feel no love when we have sex. In fact I would call it just that, sex. He claims to have ‘erectile dysfunction’ because he can’t keep it up for long. He has to stay a consistent ‘motion’ in order for him to finish. He gets angry when he isnt able to stay hard, and sometimes accidentally directs that anger towards me (Not in a physical way). He never advances on me anymore, and he is making me feel worthless and ugly.
Before I knew he had a problem, he wanted to get a loan to start a porn business since there’s big money to be made in that business, so he says. I thought about it, since he wasn’t working and it was something he could do with his time. He called my mother and asked if he could borrow her camera (I did not know of this), he went over to her house while her bf was at work, and told him he wanted to borrow the camera to take some pictures of girls to look into doing this porn website. Now this is where the story gets tricky. My mom said that my fiance asked her to pose in lingerie so we have something to start out with. My mother is a bit heavy set, and my fiance said that she OFFERED to pose in lingerie to help us start out. I haven’t been able to look at my mother the same way and have found myself starting a fight with her whenever we speak because I haven’t forgiven her.
I have finally started to feel comfortable with having sex with my fiance again but its not the same.
I love him and want to forgive him. How do I help him with this? Please someone help! I am 24, he is 26, we are still young and have our whole life ahead of us. I don’t want to be dealing with this for the rest of my life.
My immediate instinct is to tell you to cut your losses and leave him, given his behavior toward your mother. (Out of respect for you, if he asked, he shouldn’t have done so; and if she offered, he should have refused.)
However, if you truly do believe he’s repentant and is trying to quit, the next step is to get information to help him break free from what sounds like a full addiction. And remember: addiction is an actual biological and neurological response to a stimulus. He has trained his brain to require porn. He WILL go through withdrawal symptoms. In fact, erectile dysfunction is a common result of porn use. Basically, he’s been training his brain to require thousands of women to be turned on, and you can’t compete.
The information he needs, then, is the sort that will explain what porn is doing to him, as well as how to detox. You can get a lot of that information in our e-book The Porn Circuit, and he would probably benefit from the community support from Reddit’s NoFap group as well.
You may also want to set up reports for his Internet use through accountability software. It’s not spyware he should know that his Internet use is being monitored, and ideally he should willingly volunteer to have it monitored. These reports should go to someone you both trust to address the heart of his porn use, like triggers that cause him to turn to porn instead of, say, talking to you about his problems. You may also want to receive his reports yourself. It will hurt when you see him turning to porn – and remember, he’s addicted so he almost certainly will – but knowing that you will know when he views porn may help break the temptation to look at it in the first place.
(As part of Internet Accountability, make sure you replace Safari on his iPad with a monitored browser, and then lock it down so he can’t install apps without your permission.)
Either way, I highly, highly, highly recommend that you postpone the wedding until you get this sorted out. I’m sure that sounds painful (and probably expensive), especially since you’re hoping things turn out well, but postponing it is still cheaper than a potential divorce.
I totally agree with Lisa on this one: Call off the wedding (for now). I have had similar struggles and I promise you, what a guy like this needs is for you to keep the standards high, forgive him as much as you are able (and then some more), but be uncompromising in your commitment to having this out of his life before you move forward. It’s suicide to do anything else. I would also stop having sex with him.
This is not meanness on your part. It is deep kindness.
Lord, I am so very sorry. I am such a POS. I pray for forgiveness for the hurt I have caused women. I can’t even stand to look at myself in the mirror. I ask God to forgive me and I ask all I have hurt to forgive me. I feel so low, but I realize I should feel ashamed, very ashamed.
Stay strong, brother, and rejoice in the fact that God has already forgiven you.
I’m just so broken, this has been an ongoing battle for 6 long years. I don’t even cry anymore because I’m so fed up. I now find my husband watching gay porn, transgendered porn, rape porn, and the list goes on and on. He has apologized and promised to stop so many times I’ve lost count. I don’t know what else to do but leave. Its like he doesn’t care at all. Leaving seems to be my only option, maybe that will open his eyes. He doesn’t even come to bed with me because he’s to busy watching porn, we haven’t had sex in weeks. I’m tired of yelling, fussing, feeling worthless, crying, and down about myself.
Leaving him is an option, but I would first recommend deliberate separation as a means to help him to see the seriousness of his wrongdoing. He needs to know that he is pushing you away. Divorce is an ugly thing, so don’t be too quick to go there. I’m so sorry to hear about what he’s been doing, especially since his fetishes are so harmful to you, your marriage, his mind…and to the women in those films who are being brutalized.
Do you have anyone you can speak to about these things face to face? It is so important for you to have a lot of support right now.
Polly, have never reached that point, but my heart and prayers go out to you. I will pray for your husband. Porn is the devils bait to tempt men. I feel the lowest I have ever felt after reading yours and others posts. I WILL NEVER look at the poison again. I swear to you, everyone here and most of all God.
Will he read the comments here? They have had a life changing effect on my heart.
Hi, I met this wonderful guy about 6 months ago. In the beginning he wanted to have sex often but not romantic love making, he wanted to try different position like porn he said, claimed he love me but after 3 months into the relationship all sex stop. We had no sex in the last 3 months, when i go see him we would cuddle and sleep, sometimes i feel his erection but he makes no effort to start anything., i tried kissing him to turn him on but still nothing. Am so hearth broken and i am positive its porn cause he mention once that he watches porn and masturbate
Certainly, porn can be a big factor in this. Do you have any evidence that he continues to use pornography?
Wow… after reading all these stories I don’t feel so alone. So thank you ladies. I’m 33 my husband is 48. We have been married almost 13 yrs. His second marriage… when we meant I found numerous videos and magazines. I asked him about them and his response was he didn’t need it anymore he used it because he was single for 3 yrs. I believed him and moved on. Well since then I have found porn and nude sites several several times. He always says he sorry and won’t do it again but he does. He claims he has never masturbated to anything he just looks. I don’t believe that. My husband has had issues with being able to maintain an erection enough to have sex. We have sex in other ways but not the way we should.I have never made an issue of it in fear I would make him feel like less of a man but he has no problem making me feel like less of a woman.he recently started to receive help but I just don’t think I can get over being hurt so many times. Tonight I took my wedding rings off an said I will jot put them back on until I see a change.I just don’t think he will change. last November I had found nudes galore on our computer which seemed to bother me more than porn. I told him I was leaving an the next day his dad passed away. We worked things out at the time and he again promised me he would stop. I found it again today. I love him so much but hate him so much at the same time. Do I stay for us and our two hoys?? Idk…. anymore… I feel so ugly unattractive and not sexy at all. Any advice would be greatly appreciated…. thank you…
Hi Mandy,
Many wouldn’t blame you for ditching your husband and running from all of this, but you’re no fool if you stick it out a while longer to see if a real transformation can happen. It is possible, and for the sake of your marriage vows, your husband, your kids, and your own heart, it is worth trying.
The real question is where you can go from here. In part 3 of this series, Ella answers the question, “Is there hope? Can a man like this change?” Ella writes, “I recommend that you take some time to come up with some clear, firm boundaries for your marriage. While this may not result in the desired outcome, it is worth it to put in the effort. At the very least, this is a first step toward helping you get to a place where you can make an informed decision about the direction for your relationship.” She then outlines what some of those boundaries could be.
Your husband likely needs some help with this. Porn can sink its teeth deep into a person the same way drugs and alcohol can (in fact, the same neurochemicals are activated watching porn, meaning that it has a similar addictive nature). Many guys don’t quit this by sheer willpower. Our free book, The Porn Circuit, talks a lot about this. Feel free to point your husband toward us as a resource. We’d love to help him. But just remember, you cannot do the hard work for him. He must be the one to own his wrongdoings and make steps to change.
My husband and I have been married for 19 years. I am very much in love with him. About 10 years ago I caught him masturbating to porn. I became as obsessed about “catching him” at it as he was with doing it. I kept telling myself things to bury how it was actually making me feel but I realize now I was living and breathing his porn addiction daily by constantly wondering what he was doing and snooping on him. In the last few years we have had a lot of stressors in our life and he had been spending less and less time with me and the kids. I finally had an affair. I was feeling so horrible about myself and my life and then this guy comes along and tells me all the things I need to hear about myself. It was a horrible thing to do and I feel SOOO guilty. I know there is absolutely no excuse for what I did. But now my husband has left me and our three kids. He has a girlfriend in another state that he met on an affiar website. He is so mad at me. He tells me his addiction to porn was all of my fault because I didn’t have sex with him enough. That I rejected him to much and he had no choice but to take care of things himself. I don’t know if that is true or not – we didn’t have sex very often. Maybe once ever 6 months. But I now wonder if I was never in the mood because I sensed something was going on. I often felt like an object instead of his partner in the bedroom. He refuses to come back to me and says he is just totally pissed. The thing I don’t understand is why he can’t see what he was doing to me all of these years. Am I wrong in thinking that instead of being pissed and leaving his wife and three kids, he should be feeling remorse for his years of addiction and what that did to our marriage? He grew up with extreme sexual abuse at the hands of his father so I can’t help but feel if I could just get him in to therapy he could be the man I know he is. But he refuses to go. Also, I wanted to say, his brain has definitely changed from all of these years of watching porn. He is less decisive, he can’t remember things, he has a poor opinion of women in general, he blames others for his actions and he is making choices that he would have NEVER made years ago. I don’t know what to do – or even if it is worth trying to do anything. I don’t understand why I want him back… but I do.
Hi RebaLou,
Thanks for sharing your story here. It breaks my heart to see how much sexual brokenness can break up a family: sex abuse, adultery, pornography. My prayers are with you and your family.
First, you are not crazy for wanting your husband back. Marriage was designed by God to be for life, and there is naturally a mourning one should feel at the loss of that.
Second, everything in your story sounds cyclical. He uses porn; you feel less desirable and initiate sex less; he reacts and seeks out more porn; you feel lonely and unattractive; you have an affair; he retreats into more porn and an Internet girlfriend; the cycle continues. The point isn’t who is more to blame: both of you had a hand in these things. Both of you were sinned against. Both of you chose to react to another person’s sin in a sinful way. Both of you sinned against each other.
That said, as the man in this relationship, your husband needs to understand his role and he has failed to do that. He sought out porn instead of pursuing you. If you really were not giving him enough sex (and once every 6 months is pretty minimal), then he should have spoken to you about it and pursued a romantic relationship with you, not retreated into the easy road of porn. When you had an affair, he most likely used that as an excuse to leave the relationship with no thought of reconciliation. I’m not saying he left the relationship for for no good reason, but he continues to do harm to himself and to you by not forgiving you.
What to do now: First, seek his forgiveness for the affair. Explain you know the difference between forgiveness and trust: forgiveness seeks to hold no grudge or retaliate against you, but trust needs to be re-earned. You desire his forgiveness. Second, tell him that for the sake of his own heart and his future relationships to seek help for his porn problem. He needs to get the root of why he looks at porn so much, because you are not the cause of that. He’s lying to himself if he tells himself that. No woman, no matter how attentive or beautiful, can capture a man’s heart who is already captured by porn.
I have been with my husband for almost 7 years & have been married for 2 years having met on a dating site. Our relationship has been amazing, affectionate & passionate up until a couple of years ago when I suspected, confirmed & confronted him about his regular porn site visits after finding history on our laptop.
I believe that he didn’t stop watching porn as soon as I left the house he simply deleted the history & covered his tracks.
He very rarely uses the laptop at home now as he is in an office job which has an in house pc. What he watches on here is out of my hands but he is now watching porn on his phone.
He visits the bathroom daily & before bed each night spending 20 minutes or so in there sometimes which he assures me is because he is using the toilet. I have checked his history on his phone & have seen that he is watching porn.
Our sex life has diminished from 6-7 times a week to 2-3 & this is weekends only & I believe that when we do have sex it’s after he has watched porn which has turned him on.
Today I left home to take the dog for a walk & he decided to stay in bed. When I checked his phone he had watched porn while I was out with the dog even though he had watched it last night before bed.
I feel bad for checking his phone & know he would go mad if he knew but that now makes me feel at a loss as to what to do. I feel unattractive & not at all sexy but how do I approach him when all he will do is flip at me for checking his phone.
I feel sorry for him in a way & really think he needs help but am pretty sure he won’t admit he has a problem.
Here’s how I might approach him, “I’d like to talk to about something that’s been on my mind. I know in the past you’ve really struggled with pornography. I know this is something you’ve wanted to stop doing for the sake of building trust in our marriage. I believe the best way for us to build trust is for us to not have secrets. I would like to reserve the right to look at your phone’s Internet history whenever I want. This is something I need to see so I can rebuild my trust of you.” Then ask to see his phone.
If he is defensive, stay calm and say, “I’m confused. Why wouldn’t you want me to see your phone. If I was doing erotic video chats with men online, I would expect you to want to know that. I would expect you to not trust me until I proved that I wasn’t doing that anymore. That only makes sense.”
He might say, “Well, that’s different.” Ask him why. What makes it different? If he says that there’s a big difference between watching porn and chatting online, then you know the source of the problem: he doesn’t think watching porn is a big deal that should concern you. Draw this difference of opinion out to him. Say, “This is where we disagree. You think looking at porn is no big deal, but I do. We are going to have to come to some sort of agreement about this, because it sounds like you have no problem with it and are willing to hide it from me just to keep me happy. You would have to agree: this is not the kind of marriage you want, and this is not what it means to have trust.”
See where this gets you.
Before July 2013 my husband used to love having sex with me every night, sometimes when we wake up in the morning and sometimes in the middle of the night but two months ago everything has changed. At first i thought that he was cheating on me. So i went through his phone but didnt find anything that could prove that he’s cheating on me. But when i browsed his internet history on his phone, there were quite few porn websites he had visited. I also checked his laptop and same as well. So then i thought that my husband is somehow addicted to porn. I talked to him about it but he’s in denial. There were a few times i caught him on the act. This is really hurting and bothering me a lot!
Camille, since you’ve caught him in the act and since you can show him the evidence on his Internet devices, he can’t deny that he uses porn. The issue is not whether he is “addicted” (although, he might, in fact, be addicted). The issue is whether he is fantasizing about porn women while being married to you. Have you talked to him about that?