My boyfriend won’t stop watching porn
Question
I’m 27. My boyfriend is 25.
I have looked through his browsing history and found porn many times.
What hurts me the most is that the kind of porn that he watches, features bigger, curvier women, who tend to have large breasts. I don’t look anything like that. I am pretty average. I don’t have such curves.
I’ve spoken to him about it and told him that I feel like him watching porn is cheating, and that it makes me feel like I’m not enough.
What’s weird is that, over the years, he has made comments about other woman showing off their bodies in public with revealing clothing, and has criticized me for doing the same. Yet despite that, he is looking at other women online.
At one point I caught him on OnlyFans. He was texting girls on there (as well as on Snapchat). He claims that he has stopped doing that, but then his Instagram and Facebook feeds were suddenly full of these women in bikinis with big breasts. I told him that it’s obvious that he was still looking at other women, because the algorithm was just giving him what he was looking for. He told me that I’m delusional and he swore that he wasn’t. This went on for months.
Eventually I found out that he was looking at other women on social media apps we don’t even use to commmunicate with each other on. He just kept deleting these apps behind my back. I later saw on his phone that he logged on every night at a specific time. It made me think that he was texting someone on an app (through the browser this time). He did that whenever I wasn’t with him. I confronted him about it and he promised me that he wouldn’t do it anymore.
I still see him acting suspicious here and there, but now I think that he just got better at hiding whatever he’s doing.
I don’t want to continue to keep tabs on him. I asked him to be loyal to me and told him that he was crossing a boundary for me.
If he can’t control himself now, what will happen if we get married? I fear that it will only get worse. Do I just trust that he miraculously isn’t lying to me after all that he’s done and said?
Answer
I’m really sorry that you’re in this situation.
Your questions at the end are very pertinent. Deep inside, you can already tell that he won’t change his behavior, even if the two of you get married.
The problem here is not so much that he’s addicted to porn (though, that is a problem), as pretty much all men who you could possibly meet today struggle with that addition.
No. The more serious problem is that he doesn’t seem to believe that he is addicted, nor does he seem to think that there is any problem with him watching porn while he is in a relationship.
This means that he won’t want to stop. He’ll only ever continue to find more sophisticated ways to hide his habit from you.
He won’t ever ask you to help him to get rid of this addiction, and a person who doesn’t want to be helped, cannot help themselves.
You may have considered breaking up with him, since you’re questioning whether you should marry him or not. You may feel afraid of ending the relationship and going back out there, back into the crazy “dating market”. You may be worried that you will waste even more of your time, given that you’re 27 already and that you feel that the time for you to find a long-term partner is running out.
However, you will not be happier being in a bad relationship, with a man who cheats on you using porn (and maybe someday cheats on you for you real), than you would be if you were single. It’s more painful to be hurt by someone who you are together with, than being alone.
Besides, you still have plenty of time.
So, ask yourself if you still want to be in this relationship? Do you want to live this life where you can’t just trust your partner and have to constantly, as you said, “keep tabs on him”?
He is not going to stop watching porn. In fact, the longer you stay with him, the more he’ll convince himself that he can get away with it. If you broke up with him and cut ties with him, forever, then you would be doing him a great favor, because you’d give him an opportunity to suffer the consequences of his behavior for once, and then maybe (hopefully), he would wake up and realize that he’s in a really bad mental state, and do something about it, to end his addiction. He would then, maybe (hopefully) mature and become a good partner to another girl.
I know that this doesn’t exactly benefit you in the way that you would like, but freeing yourself from this pointless relationship, would give you the opportunity to find a batter one, so a breakup would be a win-win.
Right now, it’s just a lose-lose. He stays addicted, and you stay miserable.