Marie is a middle-aged single working mother with two teenage children who slid into the porn trap when she discovered that masturbating to porn helped her cope with difficult life experiences. Like Hank and Mitch, Ma­rie got involved with porn when she was a teenager, starting with detec­tive stories and pulp fiction that featured something […]

Like other kids he grew up with, Hank, a divorced forty-seven-year-old, began looking at Playboy regularly in his early teens. Although initially he didn’t consider it pornographic, it didn’t take long for Hank to make sexually provocative photos the focal point of his masturbation. At seventeen he had sex with a girl for the first […]

Mitch didn’t think his life could get any better. He was a happily mar­ried man in his early fifties, with three teenage daughters who adored him, and a highly esteemed career as a high school teacher and coach. He served on education committees and boards. Students and parents praised him for his friendliness, talent, and […]

Pornography gives you a false sense of pleasure. It feels good for the moment and then it just takes you down. —Rob W hat happens when a person continues to have an ongoing sexual relationship with porn in spite of the problems and dangers that come with it? For some porn users, the answer is […]

A third strategy, and the only one that can actually really help the part­ner of a porn user relieve her pain, is getting outside support. As we noted earlier, the porn user is usually no longer available as a reliable source of support, so women must turn to friends, family, their church, a twelve-step recovery […]

At the other extreme, a woman may respond by trying to compete with porn. She may believe that by acting like a porn star she can once again be the object of her partner’s sexual desires. It can also be an uncon­scious way of addressing her feelings of sexual inadequacy and rejection. Some women go […]

A common strategy some women use to try to control the situation and feel safe is to become a “porn cop.” She may police her partner’s activi­ties and behaviors, interrogate him unceasingly, or even create elaborate sting operations to try to catch hidden porn activity. Most women don’t enjoy doing this. They do it out […]

Once a woman has experienced the roller coaster of emotions associated with discovering the depth of her partner’s porn problem, she usually feels compelled to take some kind of action. Often she will not leave the relationship, at least not right away. More often, she is likely to do some­thing to try to control or […]

After finally learning that her husband, Bob, had been secretly using porn for most of their twenty-year marriage, Sue said the worst shock now is that she has realized that, in spite of her objections to it, Bob has no intention of giving up porn. She feels unimportant, discounted, and powerless. The experience is leading […]

Many women pull back from having sex for a while once they find out about their partner’s porn use. The sense of betrayal, distrust, loss of respect, and their own sexual inadequacies and anxieties can combine to create a strong deterrent to physical intimacy. “Even though David and I shared an incredible sex life before […]