Dealing with Someone who is a Compulsive Porn User
Whether most people admit it or not, they have looked at or watched pornography at some point in their life. The normal person can watch it, read it, or look at it from time to time and not really have it affect their life in a profound way. While this is true for most people, there are some people who have a compulsive need to look at pornography every day or quite often. This wouldn’t be an issue if they weren’t compulsive about it, often putting their jobs as well as their relationships at work. Unfortunately it is the people who are in a relationship with a compulsive porn user that suffer the most.
If your mate is a compulsive porn user chances are they didn’t just come up to you and start telling you about it. Many people find out because their mate acts secretive or they are very private about their computer. This wouldn’t be bad if the person was alone, but when you are in a relationship and you find out about compulsive porn use it feels like a betrayal, not only because they are looking at the porn but because they lied about it or hid it from you.
The first thing that you should know is that someone who looks at or uses porn compulsively often does not know how much what they are doing affects you. They know rationally that they are hiding something from you and probably the rest of the world, but they cannot think beyond their need to consider how it might affect you and how you might feel about it.
The compulsive porn user does not look at the porn because their partner is not fulfilling a sexual or physical need. In fact, chances are that the compulsion has been around longer than you have been. Many people, especially women, tend to feel as though the compulsion is somehow their fault, a short coming that they have that has lead their spouse to this compulsion. The fact of the matter is that it has little or nothing to do with the person in the porn user’s life.
You need to be open about it when you find out about their looking at the pornographic material. It is really hard to call someone out on this, especially if you are hurt and confused, but it needs to be done. You can just sit down and talk about it or even write them a letter, but you need to let them know how it makes you feel. If you’re angry or hurt or sad, let them know this since they probably don’t think about it at all.
You might want to create some sort of plan for the future. Either have your mate share their interests with you, tell you when they look at such material, or have them go talk to someone about how they can eliminate the need to look at porn compulsively from their life. The worst thing you can do is assume that after you talk about it that it will go away, because if it is a true compulsion they will simply fall back into looking at such things.