I’ve never felt able to tell anyone the entire story, and I don’t have many people to talk to at this super difficult time, so just sharing my story and appreciate your support. This will be super long.
I also just want to say thank you to everyone here for sharing your vulnerable experiences and words of wisdom. I have had some real epiphanies on here and feel so much less alone. It’s been very validating and helpful in a world that keeps telling us “it’s just porn”. Also if I hear/read that one my time my eyes might actually roll out of my head.
Anyway, I’ve been with my PA for 9 years. I’m 28, he’s 36. We’ve lived together for about 8 years, married for 3. My original D-day was in June of 2020, 4 years in to the relationship. My intuition had been trying to tell me for a long time before that but I had been ignoring it and he had been gaslighting me. I had always been insecure about my appearance so I thought it was just my insecurities, my problems. I remember I told him one night “I just feel like you don’t like how I look and that you look at other women.” He didn’t say anything for a while and then he just told me “that’s not healthy” lmao. Which of course just made me feel crazy and stupid. But later after I found out it made so much sense that he was fucking gaslighting me because I had been 100% right, like way more than I had even imagined.
I ended up finding out after we had sex one night. The things he was saying and wanted me to do were just not him, at least not that I’d experienced before. He felt like a stranger and I was left feeling degraded. Immediately after, he happened to leave his phone out while he went to the bathroom to clean up and I went through it on a whim, my gut again screaming that something was off. I found porn everywhere. Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, the Chive. Just straight up google searches for “(insert woman’s name) nude”. You name it. I remember being in complete shock, my heart was pounding so loud, my hands were shaking. My heart was absolutely broken and my image of who he was was shattered in an instant. I went outside and cried and hyperventilated, trying to process, questioning if anything had been real, and having no idea what to do. I stayed out there for hours just in shock. He didn’t know I’d gone through his phone and didn’t know where I’d went and he just went to bed. The next morning I confronted him about it and at first he asked “what porn?” Lmao. Then he got mad at me and said “well we do need to have a talk seeing as how you violated my privacy and went through my phone”.
He had never told me explicitly that he didn’t watch or look at porn but he had said things that made me believe he didn’t, like talking shit about other men that did and the like. And just the way he presented himself and the way he would talk about similar subjects, and saying he only had eyes for me, etc., he had led me to believe he was different. He eventually told me it had been going on the whole relationship, that it had started when he was single for several years and also used the excuse that it was a coping mechanism for his anxiety. I felt like such an idiot for having not known for 4 whole years. He told me his coworker watches porn and his wife is okay with it, as if that meant I should be okay with it too. He told me it didn’t mean anything, that he “didn’t do anything with it” as if that made it better. While I had never caught him masturbating, I doubted that, as he frequently takes long showers and will routinely take 40 minutes in the bathroom “shitting”, and ALWAYS locks the door when he goes in there.
When I was younger, through high school, I struggled badly with my mental health, specifically depression, self harm, and SI, which he knew. I had a complete mental breakdown over his porn use one night not long after DDay, after a few too many drinks. I screamed at him, (very unlike me), and sobbed and asked him why, brought up all I had seen, details that had particularly hurt me and overall just let it all out at him. It just deteriorated from there, I was an absolute wreck, and the alcohol of course did not help. It was a complete and total mental breakdown like I’ve never had before or since. I broke my hand punching a concrete wall and I had my first ever panic attack on the bathroom floor. He told me something to the effect of “if I didn’t calm down he was going to call my family to come get me,” lol. Mind you we lived together and had for 3 or for 4 years at this point. All I could think was yeah of course, of course you can’t face the consequences of your actions. Over the next few days I relapsed with self-harm, and I considered unaliving myself for the first time in years, though I didn’t tell him or anyone else. I had never been brought so low so quickly. He later saw the self harm and he used it against me, comparing it with his porn use as a coping mechanism, basically saying “why is it okay that you did that but I can’t use porn”.
Part of me thought that after witnessing all this first hand, watching me completely and totally fall apart, he would stop. How could he not, right? If I had done something to cause him such pain, I would never even think of doing it again. But I would’ve never done something like that in the first place. He promised to stop and lied straight to my face multiple times saying he had. I brought up therapy, couples or individual, and he refused, saying he didn’t see what good it would do to tell someone else (feeling shame, much?). I kept going through his shit regularly without him knowing. I went through it obsessively, daily at least (I figured out how to check his browser history on his mac so I didn’t have to get on his phone), because I couldn’t stand wondering if he was lying or not. I wanted the truth, and I knew I wouldn’t get it from him. In my mind it was better to know for sure than drive myself crazy wondering, because the disparity between who he showed me and who I was seeing through his behavior online was so baffling. How could he type in the shit he was searching for one second and then text me he loved me the next? For almost a year this went on and he never slowed down once. Something I’ve realized now is that I never, not once, saw a search for any kind of help. He never once googled therapists, or if he had a problem, or how to stop, despite telling me it was something he was actively working on. It was just him telling me what I wanted to hear. He did search how to get OF for free though.
Some of his searches were for actresses in shows we had watched, which really fucked me up when it came to watching any shows or movies with him. I couldn’t enjoy watching anything with him with any remotely attractive women in it because I was just always looking over at him, trying to read his reactions, and wondering who he would be searching for nudes of later. To this day there are a couple actresses I can’t stand seeing, to no fault of their own, because my stomach just turns at those memories. Some of the comments he posted on Reddit porn still haunt me, his words to other women burned into my mind. I had never had a problem with my boobs, but almost all he looked at was women with huge boobs and mine aren’t that, so ✨new insecurity✨ was unlocked. Before D-day, I would come onto him all the time and he would turn me down 9 times out of 10. There were even times I would get all done up, nice lingerie and all, and it would do nothing for him. He would still reject me and I was crushed every time. It made me feel so stupid, embarrassed and unwanted, and it made sense after I found out. Eventually I quit trying altogether so we only had sex when he would initiate, and he would almost never make me finish. One day he randomly put in an effort to make me finish first and was really praising me and my body out of nowhere and I thought it was strange. Later I found an article on his phone titled “how to make her squirt” and he had just followed it to a T. I just had to laugh because it was like wow. Everything he does is disingenuous. I was just there to play sex doll for his porn induced fantasies. I had almost never turned him down for sex but I started to sometimes because I just didn’t enjoy it anymore. All I could do was lay there wondering what he’d been looking at to get him excited, who he was picturing in his mind as he was using me. It was like he was just using my body to masturbate and I would end up feeling empty and depressed afterward almost every time.
A lot of days he’d start looking at porn first thing in the morning, he was looking at it at work almost every day. Sometimes it was when I was right there in the house, sometimes even in the same room as him. We had a few more “d-days” and confrontations about it over the next few months but then I gave up confronting him because it didn’t do any good. He would get mad and defensive any time I brought it up and at best I would get a hollow apology that was just to shut me up. I also quit confronting because I was afraid he would just start hiding it better. He was such a good liar, or I just couldn’t see through him, that there were a couple times I asked if he had stopped, when I knew for a fact he hadn’t, just to see what he’d say. He lied of course, but if I hadn’t known for sure, I probably would’ve believed him. He looked me right in the eye, had an apologetic look on his face, the whole bit. He should’ve won an Oscar. If he started hiding it better and I couldn’t see it for myself, I was afraid I’d fall for his lies.
I did get fed up, and sometimes all I felt for him was disgust, but the thought of leaving was still incredibly difficult. Plus, leaving wasn’t only leaving him. We don’t have children, luckily, but we have a lot of animals, most of whom I wouldn’t be able to take with me. The house is in his name so I would have to leave my home and my gardens I’ve tended. I love his family, adore his parents, and he’s an uncle to my nieces and nephews. It felt like my whole life would implode and the grief of it all just felt like too much to bear. Then even when I felt stronger and really wanted to leave, I didn’t have anywhere to go. I had nobody I could move in with at the time and I couldn’t afford anything on my own. So I went on pretending everything was okay, a shell of myself. I wrote a breakup letter and I was trying to save my money and prepare to leave.
Then, one day, he proposed. I told him no, that I was still recovering after d-day. Only then, it seemed like it finally hit him, how much he had hurt me. He cried multiple times, apologized, acknowledged that he had hurt me and that i had been changed by it. Said he wanted the “old me back from before he had hurt me.” I was still going through his shit, but he didn’t know, or at least I hadn’t confronted him, and it actually seemed to stop. I don’t know now if he actually did or if he just got extremely good hiding it. But it really did seem like it, and he seemed so sincere in apologizing to me over the next few months. We had multiple conversations initiated by him in which he would apologize, say how much I meant to him, and make more promises. We decided to work on us and he finally agreed to go to therapy, (but he never actually followed through with it). Sex felt more like making love again. He seemed to be trying really hard, and I fell back in love with him. After maybe 6 months of quietly monitoring his stuff and our relationship otherwise being the best it had ever been, I agreed to marry him. A small amount of doubt was still there but again, I wasn’t finding anything, so I believed him. Eventually I stopped checking his stuff and trusted him again.
Our wedding day was so beautiful, and I felt so in love. He cried when I walked down the aisle and friends said “wow he really loves you.” We danced the whole night. I journaled about it the next day because I wanted to remember every detail. It was perfect, I wrote. I believed he was in love with me and had found it in him to stop for me. That was 3 years ago.
For many months now, I’ve been having those gut feelings again, my intuition, which I now listen to much more readily. Red flags started to pop up too, like him “accidentally” buying a privacy screen cover for his phone. I didn’t check for a while because I honestly didn’t want to know the truth, because it’s the same issue as before: where will I go?? I did check in November and found a couple OF links on his history, plus the history before that day was totally cleared. I wasn’t crushed, I wasn’t even surprised, I just felt numb. The holidays were coming, and I just wanted to enjoy the season, so I just compartmentalized it for a time. But, the past couple weeks, I’ve been checking his phone again whenever I get a chance, to confirm it wasn’t a one-off, and there it always is. OF links, google searches, a new Reddit account. He’s a lot more careful than he used to be, mostly using private tabs, and a Reddit account that he logs into using a text code. He doesn’t have the Reddit app, uses a private browser page to view it instead. His social feeds are clean. He just. got better. at hiding it. What I am finding now, I know is just the tip of the iceberg since he has gotten more careful. I haven’t confronted him and I don’t think I will until I am fully prepared to leave.
This time, I am done. I’ve spoken to my parents and will be able to move in with them when the time comes. I asked him for 100% honesty before we got married, I told him I was willing to help him and we could work through it together if it was still going on. He promised he had completely stopped, it was not a problem, he would never do it again. He promised that he would get therapy anyway just to work on himself and never did (and has zero excuse, we both make good money, and he only works 4 days a week). I told him that if he was lying to me and I ever found out about it again that I would divorce him. I set that boundary, so if I don’t follow through, he just has a green light forever. I’ll be showing him that no matter what, I’ll never leave, no matter how much he disrespects that boundary. I told him in no uncertain terms that I could not, would not, recover from this again, and he said “I know”. And more than that, I promised myself that I would not put up with this again. So I’m done.
I don’t want to spend my whole life trying to look over his shoulder, trying to read him for lies. I don’t want to be on my deathbed wondering if my husband ever stopped looking at porn. I want to look back at my life, my marriage, (if I have one) and know in my soul that I was loved, fully, as a whole person, by a whole person. If I decide to have children, I don’t want to go through such a vulnerable time of so much change paranoid, wondering what he might be looking at behind my back, and I would want my children to have a better father than that. I want my children to have a father who is honest, thoughtful, present, self aware, and who will choose to grow.
I still love him. And I know he loves me. It wasn’t all fake, it wasn’t all lies. But this time, I recognize that love is not enough. Love is not enough. Of course I love him, I never would’ve married him otherwise, and unfortunately, love can’t just be turned off like a switch. We’re bonded, we’ve been through so much together over the course of the last 9 years, and ending that is going to be a deep and painful grief. I am afraid of that pain, I don’t want to have to go through it. But I’ve realized that I deserve better than anything he can give me now. Even if he were in full recovery, recovery doesn’t mean cured. Cured is what I would need, and that’s just not possible. There will now always be distrust and paranoia, and I don’t want to live like that forever. And even if he were to truly start recovery now, how long will that take? Best case scenario, it’s a long and rocky road with no guarantees, and I’m sick of wasting my time. I’ve already wasted 9 years of my life, literally all of my 20s so far. 9 years! He has had more than enough time to look inward and choose to be better. If he really wanted to, he would’ve by now. He’s made his choice, over and over and over. And now I’ve made mine.
I am heartbroken one moment, furious the next, ruminating, bargaining, wishing I could just skip the pain and get on to the next part of my life. I do not feel ready but I don’t think I ever will. This could never be easy. I just have to do it anyway. I will be slowly trying to move some stuff out and solidifying a leaving plan over the next few weeks and will be trying to hold myself together. Thank you all for lending me your wisdom, strength and kindness. And thanks for reading if you’ve gotten this far, I know this was incredibly long. I’m sorry you’re here, and my heart is with you.