Ella Hutchinson specializes in counseling wives of sex addicts. In this 3-part blog series, she looks at common questions these wives ask. (Read Part 1 of the series.)
#3: Why am I not enough if I am sexually available to him?
Beyond the intimacy issue, pornography offers the thrill of what is forbidden. The more taboo, the more exciting. This is why a porn addict may progress to looking at more hardcore porn and even pornography involving aspects that a healthy person would consider offensive and grotesque.
Gary Wilson, human sciences instructor, and Marnia Robinson, author of Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow: From Habit to Harmony in Sexual Relationships, state,
The uniqueness of Internet porn can goad a user relentlessly, as it possesses all the elements that keep dopamine surging. The excitement of the hunt for the perfect image releases dopamine. Moreover, there’s always something new, always something kinkier. Dopamine is released when something is more arousing than anticipated, causing nerve cells to fire like crazy. In contrast, sex with your spouse is not always better than expected. Nor does it offer endless variety. This can cause problems because a primitive part of your brain assumes quantity of dopamine equals value of activity, even when it doesn’t. Indeed, porn’s dopamine fireworks can produce a drug-like high that is more compelling than sex with a familiar mate.
#4: He says he looks at porn because I don’t have sex with him enough, am not pretty enough, am too fat, etc. What can I do?
I hear this a lot and it is called justification. Your husband doesn’t want to believe he is sick. If he is not ready to admit he is an addict and take responsibility for his own behavior, he will say anything to convince you, and even himself, that he does not have a problem. Blaming you is an easy way to save face.
As I said earlier, there is nothing you could do to be appealing enough to make your husband stop looking at porn. I see very beautiful women whose husbands no longer desire them. I am currently working with a couple where the wife looks like she belongs on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine or on a model runway. Her husband has finally admitted to her that he is physically repulsed by her. I have another couple who has sex every day, yet she still catches him looking at porn and frequenting adult bookstores. There is simply no credibility to the argument that a wife causes or contributes to her husband’s use of pornography.
#5: My husband says all men do it. Am I making too big a deal out of this?
It is unfortunate, but true, that pornography use is overwhelmingly common. This does not make it okay or mean you should turn a blind eye. I often hear women say that their husband’s porn use makes them feel cheated on. This makes sense. When a man uses porn he is finding sexual satisfaction from someone other than his wife. So the betrayal a woman feels is natural. God created sex to be between a man and his wife. Jesus said that looking at a woman with lust is the same as committing adultery with her in his heart. Looking at porn is purposely choosing to lust.
#6: My husband refuses to get help or admit this is a problem. How can I make him stop? What are the risks if he doesn’t stop?
In short, you cannot make him stop. It usually takes something significant to get a man to the point where he is ready to admit his porn addiction. This is what they call “hitting rock bottom.” Sometimes, for a man who has hidden his porn use for years, just getting caught is enough. But more often, it takes losing his job, his wife leaving him, or another monumental event to shake him to the core and wake him up to reality. It may be his porn use progressing to acting out with another person or other people and facing the multiple possible consequences of this, to cause him to recognize his need for help.
You can insist your husband stop his porn use and you have every right to do so. The compulsive use of porn will, without exception, do damage to your marriage and your family. It affects a person’s sense of right and wrong. It can cause your husband to lose respect for you. You will likely feel him pulling further away from you and your family as he gets more entrenched in this sinful lifestyle. If he refuses help, it will only get worse. Your pleading that he stop will fall on deaf ears if he isn’t ready to hear it. This is a harsh reality, but one too many women just do not get. Some women beg and plead for decades until they grow cold and bitter. Then they tell me that they wish they had left years ago and feel they have wasted most of their life.
When porn is an issue, it is likely that extramarital affairs are or will become an issue. This means you are at risk of more than the heartache of discovering your husband has been sexual with another person. You are also at risk of STDs or your husband fathering another woman’s child (something I have seen happen several times). Additionally, your children are almost guaranteed early exposure to porn, something that was likely a contributing factor in your husband’s addiction.
Read Part 3 for the answer to the last question:
Question #7: Is there hope? Can a man like this change?
All of these stories are so very similar to mine. I clued into my husband’s addiction to porn and masterbating when he started spending 2 to 3hrs taking a shower. His first excuse was he was just masterbating and wasn’t able to keep an erection or reach climax so he was frustrated and continued to try. He then promised me he would stop doing that. At this point I had no idea he was looking at porn. 3 days after the promise he started up again and the battle continued. He would do it no matter what! He didn’t care who was home. My boys were starting to make smart alec comments about dad showering Shaun taking all day. He would even get up 2 hours earlier then needed for work to try to avoid me to do the deed. I caught on of course. Then one Sunday the kids and I were gone all day leaving him home all alone. When i get home i go to my closet to undress and get ready for a shower. I find an empty condom wrapper on a shelf in my closet. I confronted him. All he could say is “no i didn’t use it with anyone but myself and you don’t want to know details”. He then went to sleep. I was devastated! I started snooping in everything in our closet bc i knew there had to be more condoms or the empty box. I found more than i expected. I found a stash of mens masterbating toys, the box of condoms with only one unopened condom, and various other sex toys that i had never seen before. I was irate out of my mind crazy upset. I lost it! I taped everyone of them to his bathroom mirror and wrote ugly words to him with a grease marker. He got up like usual that next morning for work and saw it all. He didn’t say a word and crawled back in bed and stayed there for 4 days and didn’t go to work. He was accusing me of humiliating him at his job and broadcasting his personal life to the public. I did none of that! I only discovered his addiction and made it known to him that i did. He finally went back to work. After the discovery of the toys i then searched through his phone. This is where i discovered him looking at porn obsessively, Just as much as he was masterbating. I also discovered several email accounts and several online chat sites he had registered with as well as “hook up sites” like lonelywives.com during that whole discovery i found that he had paid for an app to be placed on my phone that gps tracked my whereabouts, my phone logs, text, emails, voucemails, camera, facebook basically anything i did on my phone he had record of it going to his phone. During all this he has constantly been accusing me of being a cheater and questions me all the time. I assume its bc he’s so full of guilt. We continue to argue over his chronic masterbating bc he is standing firm that every git does it, it’s natural, its his own body, his private time that I’m stripping him of, and every other excuse that the typical porn/masterbating addict uses. I’ve caught him lyeing about having to work but instead he sat in a grocery store parking lot looking at YouTube videos on erotic hypno porn bc he couldn’t do it at home. Never would he ever dare do something like that in public. I think he met someone there and left his phone in his truck and got in their car. Maybe a prostitute. Then a few weeks later were fighting and he leaves and goes to stay at a hotel. But before ge did that he filled his cialis rx and made a stop at the adult toy store. Says he was at the hotel all night alone. We continue to fight bc he continues to erase his phone history and continues to fight for his rights to be an addict. Then he tells me he will stop it blah blah blah. Well i notice something weird on the access doors to our jacuzzi bathtub. He had made a make shift toy and hid it under the bathtub. All hell breaks loose again. This all continues until recently when he supposedly is done with porn and masterbating. He says he was just going through a rough time and doesn’t understand himself. One day i had a gut feeling about his phone. He’s been going to sleep with earbuds in his ears while supposedly listening to meditative type music. One night i and to if he could show me all the downloads he has on his phone. He immediately redirected everything to be about me and him needing to see my phone, which i glady gave him. He reluctantly showed me what was on his phone. He had about 12 different erotic hypno voice porn downloaded. Big fight erupted and so we continue. He was left home alone 2 weeks ago to pack to go out of town. I get home later from work after he’s long gone and i find my electric toothbrush and his on the shower but his is covered with one of my unused tampon wrappers sealed at the bottom with a rubber band. I confronted him over the phone and he said he just wanted to try it!
It’s never going to stop with him. I never want to leave him home alone! I left him home alone Sunday bc he wanted to be so he could rest. I had a gut feeling he was up to no good bc i politely asked him to please not masterbate while i was gone. He erupted with anger and said ” ok your telling me i can never masterbate? I’m not looking at porn anymore! ” so are you going to have sex with me everytime i want it?” I just said whatever do what you want. You know how i feel and how it hurts me. His behavior was odd when i got home kind of like someone that was ate up with guilt. Well yesterday i discovered that he had two cialis missing from his pill bottle. His excuse was that he took them everyday just incase we ended up being intimate. That’s never happened! He doesn’t waste them like that! Insurance doesn’t cover them so we have to pay cash for them and their not cheap. I don’t notice that he suffers from ed but be says he does and two of his medications do have ed as a side effect. Who knows if he really has it.
I am at my witts end with this mess. I can’t even focus on my kids bc im to unbalanced and wrapped up trying to keep him from his addiction to save are 18 year marriage. And remember during all of this I am being constantly accused of having a boyfriend. I go to important meetings concerning our children and he blows my phone up accusing me of not being where i said i was going to be if i don’t answer his phone calls or text.
He’s very sick! I am very happy to have found this site. I just needed to vent. I’m sure this is hard to read. I’m typing it from my phone and can’t see what I’ve already typed to proofread. There is a lot more details i left out but there is enough here that you get a clear picture to maybe give me some advice or prayers.
Oh Traci, if even half of the stuff you say about your husband is true, he is in over his head with sex addiction. He needs help, and there is help available for the person who is willing to receive it.
Your husband should take this Sexual Addiction Screening Test.
Now is the time for you to set some very clear boundaries with him. You might say something like this: “We have had many conversations about your masturbation, porn, and other sexual experiments, and I recognize that I cannot make you want to change. But I can change how I react to this. It is clear to me that you are addicted to this kind of behavior. You may not agree with me, and I hope some day you will, but if not, it does not change the fact that your hiding and lying has completely shattered my trust in you. You need to get help. I cannot give myself to someone sexually who continues to destroy my trust or someone who sees me merely as a thing to be used whenever he wants so he won’t run off and look at porn. Until you start showing me your willingness to get help, we cannot [insert condition here: sleep in the same bed, sleep on the same floor, sleep in the same house, etc.].”
Please write back and let me know how things are progressing with him. And please, please find someone you can talk to in your own area about this: a counselor, a pastor, or even a good friend. You keeping this a secret in order to protect him is doing him no favors.
I must first start by saying that I have never responded to any article posted online but this one has hit so close to home that I feel compelled. My boyfriend and I have been together for 6 years and are engaged. I will admit it was early on that I discovered he had an addiction to pornography. Every time after discovering the porn there would be a big fight, I would threaten to leave , he would promise to change and then it seems the cycle would always start over. I know that I should not have continued to threaten to leave for so long but in my mind I always thought each time would be his wake up call to stop. We have a four year and I have sometimes made excuses that I have not left yet because it is harder to do so when there is a child involved. As I have tried to plan a wedding, I have kept asking myself one simple question…. Can I continue to do this for the rest of my life? Though I have not found porn recently there have been numerous times I have discovered that he has gone to websites featuring women barely clothed or not clothed at all. After many months of this I told him to get a plan to stop the addiction , gave him a date to give me his plan or I would work on finding my own place. At first he wanted me to come up with the plan but I refused. As with any addict, I feel like he needed to take responsibility by coming up with his own plan for it to truly work. Late that night that I had said he should have a plan, he suggested we go talk to a pastor because “we were going to have to do that anyway since we were getting married. ” I was crushed!! He has openly admitted that he is not religious and often mocks what the pastor teaches in church so deep down I feel like his “plan” wasn’t so much to stop his addiction but say enough to get me to forget about it for now. I have felt very alone in this struggle over the past 6 years though I know I am not. I thank you for sharing as this was a huge eye opener for me and gave me some peace in knowing that I am heading in the right direction. Thank You
Michelle
Hi Cheryl,
For your sake and for your husband’s sake, I hope this is a major turning point in his life.
But recovery is as much about you as it is about him (or at least it should be). He is trapped in this addictive cycle. You have been traumatized for nearly four decades. Both of you need healing, regardless of what happens to your marriage. Your marriage and intimacy also needs healing, if that is a road you are willing to walk with him.
You said he is engaged in a recovery program. Do they have another one for wives? Have you sought out counseling for yourself?
Hi Ms. Ella,
I need your advice, please. It took me a couple of years to figure out that my husband is a porn addict, though something was off from the start – even though he is a healthy, well build, attractive 39 year old. We got married 3 years ago and when I was 7 months pregnant with our daughter, I found Viagra pills in his desk. Sex is once a week and his prep work includes Viagra, porn and no foreplay whatsoever. No one ever gave him “erectile disfunction syndrom”. Have you ever heard of it? Does this mean that my case is even worse that most? It feels like it is a duty for him, really. Initially, he blamed it all on low testosterone. So, we went through treatment. Nothing changed. We also did church counseling and professional counseling and nothing changed. I don’t know where to turn to and I am seriuosly thinking divorce. We have been sleeping in different bedrooms for a long time now and we are nothing more than roommates and business partners at this point. I am 35 years old. This is really sad. Is there still a chance to fix this marriage for the sake of our 18 months old daughter?
Why is it they? The comments within this site are, “as I’ve heard”, perception without discussion between a couple is where the problem lies. Every couple needs to be honest and not say every man is like this, explain why you as a person want to watch porn. People say he or she prefers to masturbate or watch porn, rather then be with significant other, but it may just be they prefer a different intimate experience. Experience that someone isnt comfortable with, these things have to be discussed. Every person feels different about intimacy and what makes them happy.
wow……..overwhelmingly…….if most people do something……i guess that makes you a bad person……not once did i hear the counter about the wife reading romance books, then coming back after and expecting disneyworld from her husband……does anyone else feel like there may be a double standard here?
It’s true…we don’t address that much. That’s partially because our software can’t monitor the physical books people pick up. If you’re interested, we do have a commentary on 50 Shades of Gray. You might also be interested in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s upcoming movie Don Jon, which looks like it will address both the fantasy of porn and the fantasy of romance books.
Yes man feels that is ok to look at porn but if we woman receive a compliment from another man or start looking at another man in porn because their private parts looks bigger then our husband s feel offended and mad at us women for looking somewhere else because what we are willing to give they’re not trying to relate back to us.And I believe as a woman we also enjoy the fantasy the trill the wishful list but I guess that because we are woman we are require to keep or place because two wrong don’t make two right an to be honest we have as much desired and I MEAN AS MUCH AS THEY DO.
AMEN
I found out after about 10 years of being married that my husband was viewing porn. He seemed never to be in the mood to be with me and even got angry sometimes when I would try to initiate it. Then I found out why. I was devastated. But I lived with knowing about it for years. Fast forward 30 years. I was feeling so down about his problem and feeling so unattractive to anyone! Then one day I received a text from a man I had worked with a year prior. He said he had been thinking of me and had been wanting to contact me. He told me how attractive I was to him and that he really wanted to take me to lunch. Due to my very low self esteem the porn had caused me I fell for it hook, line and sinker. I ended up having a short affair with this man but what I really wanted and enjoyed were his many texts giving me so much attention. I really didn’t care about having sex with him. I just wanted to feast on his attention and his compliments. My husband found out and we went through months of recovery. He forgave me. I thought for sure the porn would be gone. He’s a Sunday School teacher for goodness sake! But he travels and he is still viewing porn and obviously masturbating because he has trouble having sex with me on the weekends and I’m sure if he really enjoys it. i don’t think he likes how long it takes me and I can never get the porn off my mind, wondering what he is really thinking about. YES! There is a double standard! I screwed up all because of what he did, yet I’m the one paying for it now.
Hi Kathy,
In light of your husband’s unrepentant porn use over these many years and the impact it’s had on you, it might be time to think about what healthy boundaries would look like. Here, here, and here are some articles to consider. You are not required to be a slave to anyone’s sin, not yours, and certainly not his.
Peace,
Kay
Please read my response to Laura on part one of this article. As for you going through his phone. Addicts will often try to deflect the attention on you when you bring up their addictive behaviors. So of course it will be tempting to focus on your invading his privacy instead of the reason you did it. As his fiance, you need the truth. He wasn’t giving you that. You had to get it on your own. I wonder why you are worried about YOU breaking HIS trust? Don’t engage in that kind of silly discussion. If he tries to focus on what you did, tell him you will not discuss that with him and allow him to ignore the real problem. Then leave the room if you have to. Trust has already been broken, but not by you. If you have never had an argument in three years I have to wonder if it is because you have not set any boundaries and give in to whatever he wants to avoid conflict. Every relationship has conflict. Trying to avoid dealing with the conflict is what causes serious issues. I do not recommend couple’s counseling. You need counseling for your lack of boundaries, fear of conflict, and most likely abandonment issues. He needs counseling for his porn addiction (a Christian counselor who has not been warped by society’s belief that porn is normal and okay) and the underlying reasons for the behavior. Don’t find the counselor for him. He has to do it for himself. If he won’t, then he does not place a high enough value on the relationship. His job will make overcoming his addiction even more difficult. By the way, having sex with a sex addict does not affect his addictive behaviors. He will still act out. I’d consider stopping sex altogether until you are married, whether to him or someone else who is not addicted to pornography.
Ms.Ella, I am in need of some advice. I have been with my fiance for almost 3 years and we have never even had an argument. He has been married 3 times and I know his last wife an understand why that didn’t work. To give you more understanding of his life, he works on a barge and is gone 28 days and then home 28 days. When he is home I give him sex ANYTIME he has EVER asked for it. In 3 yrs I have NEVER once said no. However, he still continues to look at porn almost all day everyday. He doesn’t know that I know that I broke the code on his phone and went through it. How do I let him know that I know without breaking the whole trust issue? Like I said we have NEVER had so much as an argument but I am scared this will destroy or relationship if I bring it up. He constantly tells me how much he loves me and how great I am even while he looking at the porn. I am so hurt and confused. Please help me.
He has an excuse for everything. I give reasonable doubt. I know the truth. I would love to go to dinner with him and his partner or girlfriend. I seriously just want to keep my friend.
I agree with your article that there is no justification or excuse for men to view pornography. Having said that, there are many men who would never turn to pornography if their wives were available to them sexually and intimately. I’m not talking about the wife becoming a sex slave to an over sexed husband. I’m talking about normal and regular sex between a man and wife. A lack of availability (talking about months and years) will often drive men places they would never normally go. For all of the women who ask “why am I not enough,” there are a number of men who say “you are enough, but you aren’t available.” Again, not justifying sinful behavior, but some of it could be stopped through normal, regular intimacy. Thanks for listening
I find that men often want sexual availability but have no idea how to reciprocate with emotional availability. If you’re interested in having a whole, successful relationship and not just the sexual hookup that your wife gets bored with eventually, check out John Gottman’s The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.