Thank you for sharing your experience with us, it certainly verifies what we believe about the effects porn can have on a relationship.

I hope you and your partner find a way forward but I do feel you need to say all this to your partner, he needs to be aware of how much damage his porn addiction has done to you and your relationship.

I am quite worried by the above mentioned post. I am a very sexually open woman, and on meeting my partner I discovered I had finally met a man who was on my ‘sexual wavelength’. When I met my partner we discussed the issue of pornography, and i told him I didn’t have a problem with it, providing he was open and honest about it and didn’t feel the need to hide it from me. It was at that point tat we began watching it together. We both found this exciting and it certainly had its advantages at the time.

However, I quickly found that I wasn’t always excited by it, and much preferred the physical contact and foreplay that led up to our sessions rather than sitting in front of the laptop. Over a period of time this became a problem, as as soon as the laptop was switched off, my partner was ‘ready to go’. I, on the other hand, was not, and it ended up that most of our sessions began with my partner playing with himself, or me doing it for him. So, I started going to bed earlier than him, knowing what he was doing downstairs alone.

This started to leave me feeling cold and turned off, and I would often ‘pretend’ to be asleep when he came to bed. This would always end up with my partner arousing me whilst i was static. This is a very nice feeling, but as this happened everytime we went to bed I started to feel as though i was being a lazy lover, and not reciprocating. In other words, I was blaming myself for the problems caused by our over exposure to porn. once or twice this issue was raised in an argument, which left me feeling very inadequate and sexually unattractive.

I need to add at this point, that my partner was not watching pornography every night, and our sex life on other occasions was very fulfilling for both of us.

However, I did notice that the content of the material he was watching was becoming more and more extreme, and as pointed out above, the ‘actors’ appeared to be getting younger and occasionally performing acts that I felt uncomfortable with.

recently things took a turn for the worse. We’re not television people and often spend the evenings browsing the net on our individual laptops and, certainly in my case, chatting on social networking sites. I noticed over a period of time that my partner was becoming more and more engrossed in what he was doing/watching. On occasion I would ask him what he was looking at. He would often tell me that he was viewing porn sites, but often he would say he was doing something else, and would close the screen down if he left the room. In the end I took a peek at his laptop and realised that his porn viewing had moved away from movies to live streams and webcam views. Although I was slightly uncomfortable with this, i didn’t make a fuss about it. However, one evening I asked to use his laptop whilst he showered, because it is much faster than mine, and I decided to peruse his history. This was when things went sour for me, because I realised he had now moved onto adult dating sites and appeared to have looked at quite a lot of them.

Now, on occasion we had both looked at swingers sites, etc, for the amusement value, and we had discussed this as being an option when we were older and things had become stale, as they often do, but I was shocked to see that he had set up profiles on many of them. The next day I decided to play Private Detective and logged myself onto as many of the sites as I could remember seeing on his PC. I was mortified when I saw the profiles he had set up for himself, and for us both as a couple without my consent. Generally speaking, I am not a jealous or possessive woman, although my partner very often is, but I became very upset about it, as I felt it paramounted to a form of cheating. I was also suspicious that he may have been logging into these sites to ‘look for me’. However, the profiles he had set up were graphic and inviting responses of a sexual nature from both sexes. Whilst i was not concerned about the bi-sexual side of it (I have dabbled myself in this area) I was disappointed that he had not been able to discuss this with me. I was also very disturbed by the extreme content of the pornography he had been viewing, although i put that to one side for a while.

I confronted my partner in a very calm way about the dating sites, and informed him I was not angry with him, but was disturbed by the implications of this, and told him I had no problem with him using the sites for fun, but felt it would be a lot better if he had been honest about this and suggested it was something we could do together. he became quite emotional at this and also defensive, so I brushed it off, and reassured him again that I was not angry, but asked him how he would’ve reacted if the roles had been reversed. He agreed that he would’ve been upset but informed me that most of the sites registered where ‘pop up add ons’. I already knew this not to be the case, but I let it go and we were both okay.

However, the next day I saw him hide his laptop under the bed before leaving for work. On his return he started browsing and accused me of hacking into his network sites, which I had not done. I became upset at the accusation and eventually I disclosed to him that I was shocked by the content of the porn I had found, as some of it was violent, degrading and the ‘actors’ appeared to be very young. This led to an explosive row, and as I suffer from depression, this left me in a very upset state, and my partner walked out on me. He did return and we discussed the issue calmly and he apologised and told me he was shocked himself by what he had seen and that most of it was ‘pop ups and add ons’.

A few days later we decided to have a bit of fun and set up some profiles for ourselves, and we had a good laugh about it. However, whilst on the Adult Friend Finder site, I noticed several profiles that appeared to be ‘him’ or ‘us’. I asked him if this were the case and he denied it. However, the next day I again ‘snooped’ (I’m not proud of it) and discovered that the profiles had indeed been created by him and he had deleted them. I was crushed by this, as I felt the sites were set up to ‘entrap’ me, and this eventually left me feeling colder than cold, to the point that I was not going to bed when my partner did, and he was taking the laptop into the bedroom with him instead of me.

The upshot of it all is that my partner then became very cold towards me and often snapped or even shouted at me, and it has resulted in us breaking up. Since breaking up I have discovered his profile on many, many other sites, including sites specifically for married/partnered couples. This has left me very shaken and lacking faith in myself as well as him.

So, I very much agree with the above posts that pornography does indeed de-sensitise one, and unless it’s viewed together and in a controlled manner it can have devastating effects on a relationship. We have discussed some of the reasons for our break up, and are currently in talks, but I have not mentioned this issue yet. We have decided that we can no longer live together and my partner thinks this will work for us. I however, have my doubts. If my partner is not by my side at night, I will always be wondering to whom he is chatting on the net, and he will wonder the same about me, and I will be wondering if it has gone any further. I have always trusted my partner 100%, but I now feel that this is an issue I will worry about in the future.

Does he do this when you are in the house or when you are out? Also does he use porn as a visual aid?