3 Ways Porn Addiction Hurts the Partner

June 09, 2022

Porn addiction hurts. It hurts the addict, it hurts their family and friends, and it hurts society. Porn addiction is extremely painful for the partner. It is soul crushing to know that someone you love deeply seeks sexual pleasure from outside of your intimate relationship. 

You have a right to feel pain and to grieve the losses that you are experiencing. You might try to avoid the negative emotions because the pain is so intense, but the negative emotions are part of the experience. No one – not you, not your husband, not your family or friends, not your therapist – no one should put pressure on you to look the other way or to get over it. In order to heal from the betrayal, you have to process the emotions.

Three ways his porn addiction hurts you

  1. You lack true support
  2. Blaming yourself for his addiction
  3. Uncertainty about the future of your relationship

Other people probably won’t understand. I have found that the only people who have ever truly understood how my husband’s addiction impacted me were other women who had a similar experience. You know that feeling when you can give a high level synopsis of your experience and the other person just gets it. You don’t have to tell story after story and share detail after detail trying to get them to understand. Other partners get it but most people that you run into can’t possibly understand what you are going through and how painful it is. You feel isolated, wonder if your feelings are wrong, and have little support through a catastrophic time in your life. His porn addiction hurts because you lack true support.

Sometimes we add to the pain by blaming ourselves for not knowing. Remember, he started using porn a long time ago to relieve his own negative feelings. When you met him, there weren’t any real signs that you could point to and say – he’s got a porn addiction. Addicts are so good at hiding it from everyone. Looking back now you may see signs but at the time they were probably just as easily missed or explained away by something else. If you asked questions, he probably even gave you other explanations for staying up late, working longer hours, or a decreased interest in sex. As a loving and supportive wife, why would you assume that he was lying. Porn addiction hurts because you blame yourself for not knowing that he was compulsively using pornography.

Being in a committed relationship and faced with uncertainty about the other person or your future together adds to the pain. You question who he really is and whether or not you will ever be able to trust him again. You worry about how you will know if he relapses and what consequences may happen if he does. You wonder if he ever really loved you or if he ever really can. The mental stress and strain is part of why his porn addiction hurts so bad.

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