My porn addiction almost ended my marriage – JT’s story

I am a 30 year old male with a loving wife who has been my partner for over 10 years and I have nearly destroyed on numerous occasions with my pornography addiction. The latest time almost ended our marriage which has caused me to look seriously at what I am doing and sort myself out. I never considered myself as having a problem before or that there was even such a condition as pornography addiction. This is the story of how I got here.

My first experience with pornography was as an 8 year old when a couple of friends and I found an explicit magazine on a beach whilst on holiday. I did not really understand it but there was something fascinating about it, my parents were fairly relaxed about it but I remember feeling an incredible guilt and a need to prove to them that I did not look at what was found.

In my early teens I started masturbating to ‘Page 3’ girls and lingerie catalogues I removed from relatives paper recycling I’d collected for my scout troop. My parents confronted me about this but I was unable to stop myself collecting more once my ‘stash’ was destroyed. It was never really spoken about again. This behaviour continued into my mid teens when I began to notice ‘top shelf’ magazines after one was found on a school trip. I would buy one or two a month sporadically and keep them. I would throw them away periodically, afraid of being found out but always replace them with more. I would plan what newsagent to use and what magazine to buy, I was fairly confident when buying and this seemed to contribute to the rush I felt.

I had a relatively trouble free adolescence, a loving but sometimes overbearing family, a small group of good friends and a few long term girlfriends. I did not see my porn usage as a problem in my daily social life and just thought it was a rite of passage for a young man. However I now realise that I would crave attention and recognition from my peers, developing a sarcastic sense of humour and always trying to be the coolest in the group, developing a persona which was different from my usually quiet, shy nature away from them.

When I went to university my porn usage seemed to develop at a more rapid pace. I was buying magazines on a weekly basis and keeping them. This seemed to coincide with the end of a long relationship and an increased feeling of guilt about under performing at my studies and letting my parents down. Again I would clear out my stash on a yearly basis resolving not to buy so many but never to stop outright.  I was fairly social at university, involving myself with various societies and had a reasonable if small group of friends.  If anything I noticed myself becoming a bit more reserved but I never really talked about my porn use to anyone, keeping it secret and it never occurred to me that what I was doing was excessive or even a problem.

I started dating my present wife at this time who found a drawer full of magazines under my bed and told me in no uncertain terms that she disapproved. I again ditched the stash, this time rather than confronting myself I focused on how not to get caught in future.

Then the internet found me, well not true, I fount it. I was not particularly technologically savvy but could use computers a bit and through the internet connection at university found a number of free porn websites, returning to those offering Asian or anal material. I would download and store images on floppy disks, revisiting them at late night sessions on my own computer. I realise now that this was a high risk strategy but I was never caught.

When I returned home after my studies I continued this routine on my parent’s PC, first storing images on CD ROMs and crudely cataloguing them and then after my sessions deleting my browsing history.  Neither my parents nor my wife were particularly computer literate so it was easy to hide my behaviour from them. ‘Sessions’ could last for 2 or 3 hours, searching for that perfect image, returning to it and then looking for the next one.  Covering my tracks in the early morning and getting up for work tired and cranky a few hours later.

All this time I was in an increasingly committed and intense relationship with my current wife. My usage was totally at odds with her views on female welfare and rights and to some extent my own, which should have made it a prerogative to stop but seemed to push my behaviour further underground, I still really did not see my usage as a problem, just something ‘she would not like if she found out.’

We moved into a house together and once more I destroyed my stash of CDs but somehow developed a new strategy of keeping the web address of particular photosets copied into a notepad file to revisit later, that way my wife would not be confronted by the images I was looking at.

Shortly after moving we bought a computer and my behaviour began to escalate. I was working a highly stressful job with long hours, I explained to myself that porn was a way of relieving the stress of the job and our new situation, that I deserved it.  I was surfing for hours at a time or watching adult TV chat programmes (one seemed to reinforce the other), often 3 or 4 times a week, not getting enough sleep, working long hours, coming back home and not investing as much time and effort into our relationship as I should have and became less active, watching TV rather than getting out and doing constructive activities with my wife.

Out of guilt and tiredness our sex life began to falter as I spent more time acting out and paying less attention to my wife.  Despite enjoying our love making I did not feel deserving or thought I was being unreasonable.  On a number of occasions she grew suspicious of my behaviour and I came clean and told her I was looking at porn on line.  The proverbial really hit the fan and had major repercussions on our relationship, we were engaged at the time she almost decided to call things off.  I reassured her that I would stop what I was doing and become a better person.

After a few weeks things returned to near normal but I was constantly wracked with guilt and she suspicious of what I was doing.  We went through cycles of argument and depression and I would go back to using porn on line again after vowing to change.  Throughout this time I became more withdrawn, more fearful of exposing my weaknesses to her, becoming less emotionally intimate and developing a more immature ‘laddish’ persona to cover this, to avoid issues such as our long term future, getting married and having a family of our own. This further compounded my issues as I was not acting in accordance with my true values and morals.

Each time we had the ‘porn argument’ I’d try to change things to carry out my promises, doing more things together and planning career changes but never tackling the porn issue head on.  I was becoming trapped in my own verbal reality.  I wanted to change but was unable because I did not have the right information or tools to do so and so diverted this energy to tackling the other things that were contributing to the trouble in our relationship.  I even destroyed our PC which stopped my surfing for a few months but only made me more aware of nude chat programmes on TV.   Eventually we bought a new laptop and after a few months I began surfing again.

With each change I was making my porn habit was still resilient and lurking in the background.  I still planned my sessions, what I was going to look at and how I was going to cover it up.  This became my sole reason for getting up some mornings. By now each session was accompanied by a strong feeling of guilt that I gradually became resilient to towards about my behaviour and what effect it was having upon my relationship.  But still I continued, thinking I had everything in hand.

Then I really bottomed out.  We had moved and changed careers for a new life together after another argument.  Unfortunately this meant I had more time to search for porn.  I was now looking at websites during the day as well as the evening.  Covering my tracks became easier with the advent of ‘In Private’ browsing.  I became more complacent and left a web address in the clipboard of our laptop.

My wife followed the link and was confronted with what I was actually looking at, before now she had never seen and I had never discussed the images I was looking at. I had always used soft core ‘girl only’ images until the internet made hardcore images easier to access.  Sometimes I would look for harder, more extreme BDSM or bestiality photos but became increasingly uncomfortable about these and reverted back to ‘regular hardcore’ but still did not think of these images as wrong.  Porn was eroding my morals and I became oblivious to the treatment of the women in the images I saw, focusing only on the image in front of me and not of the suffering or what could be happening in real life for these people.

So my wife is now seeing a hardcore photoset for really the first time, which may not have been so shocking had it been on a ‘regular’ site. There were the usual elements to a hardcore set, there was no apparent violence or lack of consent and the models were not underage in any way. However the title of the host site implied an incestuous relationship between the models. To me it was just a regular hardcore scene, to me it was obvious it was a staged set and highly unlikely to be reality. I wasn’t interested in that at all, I was focused upon the acts, porn had eroded my sense of acceptability.

My wife was shocked to the core. I then made things worse by trying to explain myself and showing her the ‘normal’ things I looked at, bombarding her with images adding to her feelings of self doubt and worth.  She felt she did not know who I was.  I was trying to justify not only to her but to myself my actions. I do not think I could ever feel so guilty, ashamed and sacred.  She insisted that I was sick and had a problem and that until I did something about it she would leave.  And she did.  And I hit rock bottom.  My porn addiction had taken everything from me, and still I did not know I was addicted yet.

So after a lot of self pity, then anger towards myself I finally accepted I had a serious problem which needed to be cured and fast.  As I mentioned earlier I never considered myself as having a problem before or that there was even such a condition as pornography addiction. I started researching and was surprised to find out that I seemed to fit almost all the criteria but the real wakeup call was what leads on from there. I felt sickened with myself that I seemed to be following a course suggested by literature to be a paedophile or rapist in training. I know that I am not capable of those kind of hideous acts in any way and those I had read about in some of the life stories but some books insisted it was inevitable.

I am trying to come to terms with my addiction but this seems only to add an extra dimension of guilt to the condition and for me makes it harder to talk about, that people would already be thinking the worst of me.  This is the reason I found your guide so helpful.  Since I have recognised and committed myself to recovering and kicking this habit for good I have been able to abstain from masturbation and porn about a month at a time but keep having relapses on ‘porn lite’ materials such as music videos which make me reach for the computer and start to browse, innocently at first. I had installed parental controls and used a DNS filter on our laptop and was making good progress but I gained use of another computer once I returned ours to my wife which made me lapse into old ways again once those controls were removed.

I have found that my at risk times are when I am tired, lonely or bored and surprisingly when I think I am doing well or proud of what I’ve done or making progress.  I never really stopped to think before how ingrained porn was with my psyche. I am keeping a recovery journal, paying more attention to my feelings and what I really want out of life and this is my first attempt of ‘confessing’ my situation outside of relationship therapy with my wife as I do not like the idea of ‘12 step’ plans.

Some plans made me feel like I am being labelled for the rest of my life, I do not like the idea of living the problem all the time, of living in fear, of not trusting myself and that I am helpless to conquer my urges.  How can I start to recover when I make recovery the sole purpose of my life, how can I ever break free to live a life beyond porn?  There are other things in life and I do not think that these plans help encourage enough personal growth and development after or during recovery as you are always reminded of what got you here and that you can easily end up back in the habit.  I feel that there is an economic immorality about some plans, follow the 12 steps and paying us x £/$ a month, but you’ll never be quite recovered so you’ll have to stay with us and keep paying for life.

I am not in denial about how serious this is and how high the risk of relapse or not getting treatment. My story is testament to how deep I got into this problem and how much I was depending upon denial as much as porn.  I have found relationship counselling the way forward for me, through understanding my feelings more and learning how to express and vocalise them more I have felt a greater sense of self control.

For me porn is very much a control issue.  I used it as it was the one situation I had total control over.  But I feel I need a degree of control over my recovery or what use is trying if I am only going to act as I want anyway? Those things I cannot control as my brain is trying to protect it’s habits I am trying to physically control in different ways by not using a computer as much, volunteering, being more active (bearing in mind my at risk times!) and now becoming accountable to myself and being more open with others about my situation.

I am finding it very hard to break my porn addiction, some days it is all success, others I flirt dangerously close to relapse.  I have the goal of getting back to my normal life without all the crap that distracted me in the past from what I really want.  Porn has denied me a loving and intimate relationship with my wife for many years but recovery is going to make our future together so much better and me more the person I want to be.

Thanks for your help in PGO, I am hoping that sharing my story is the catalyst to breaking out of the first cycle of recovery and away from relapse, towards a brighter future.  Any further advice you could give would help me immensely.

Thanks

JT

Related posts:

1. Life becomes unbearable and the guilt eats me up – T’s story
2. Porn addiction and the mindset of shame – TR’s story