Living With His Porn Addiction
This is a hard one for me to write, probably because it is where I was cut the deepest. This is the area of my life where deep trauma still resides and where I can feel anger and pain still bubbling in my depths. It is an area that my mind torments me with, thoughts of not being enough, not being beautiful, never being able to let my guard down totally. It is the part of me that got so raw that I didn’t even know if it would heal as much as it has done so far. The emotional and mental abuse fell well behind me in many ways but the sexual abuse lingers and haunts my thoughts, stealing my sleep and exhausting me.
When I first started dating him he told me he hardly watched porn and wasn’t interested. All men watch porn these days right? As women we are just expected to accept that the man we are with wants to see as many other vaginas as he feels entitled to alongside our own and that we should feel confident and secure enough within ourselves for the man we are with to satisfy their desires. We are pressured to accept the objectification and degradation of women as a normal thing. We are also increasingly watching porn ourselves as we take on the attitudes towards sex and intimacy that have been portrayed in the world around us. So, I accepted that he sometimes watches porn and got on with life. What he didn’t tell me was that he had an almost thirty year porn addiction and I had no idea…
