My cheating boyfriend told me he was a sex addict. Was it a disorder – or just an excuse? | Relationships

The vacuum cleaner is laid out like a snake on the living room floor – an image of domesticity I will come to remember as representing the unravelling of that home. I have always loved this room for its large, south-facing windows that could bring warmth to my face even on the coldest of winter days, but the summer sun today is suffocating. It is one of those mornings when the leaves are perfectly bright and the sky clear light blue. The outside world is beautiful, but mine seems to be breaking apart.

Just moments earlier, I was arguing with my partner about the division of household labour. Frustratingly, I have fallen into a stereotype – vacuuming around him while he’s on his phone. But this morning is different. He asks me to sit with him on the sofa; he wants to tell me something big, something personal. I leave the vacuum cleaner on the floor.

I sit beside him, listening quietly, holding his hand as he explains that he’s been addicted to watching porn since he was a teenager. His behaviour is out of his control, he says, and he’s been hiding this from me throughout our whole relationship. At this point, we’d been living together for nearly nine years.

I feel sorry for him. The word “addiction” instantly makes me think of struggle and suffering. Indeed, my initial reaction is one of empathy – that perhaps he has simply suffered in a society that has forced on him a disconnected understanding of sex and masculinity. It’s so unfair that he’s experiencing this, I tell him. What makes him feel like his relationship with pornography is out of control?

“The frequency, the compulsions that draw me to viewing it,” he says. Porn has never really interested me, and he knows that – is that why he felt he couldn’t tell me until now? Perhaps.

The conversation seems to go on for hours, as if time were being dragged through thick sediment. He speaks about his insecurities; I tell him my deepest and darkest vulnerabilities. It feels like the most open conversation we’ve had in years. Later, I find out that nothing he’s told me here is true.

The next morning, the vacuum cleaner is still unravelled on the floor. There’s a sickly feeling rising from my belly. I didn’t sleep much last night, kept awake by questions: how did he manage to keep this secret from me for so long? Was there anything else he hadn’t told me?

There is – so much more. Again, we’re sitting on the sofa. I’m holding his hand, although less quietly this time. My tears seem almost cartoonish. He’s not only addicted to porn, he tells me, but addicted to sex. He has been seeking sex elsewhere, online and physically, for years. I never knew a thing.

The pain is immediate and brutal. I’m hit by all the cliches of shock at once: punched in the stomach, the carpet ripped from underneath me. It is almost impossible to understand the lengths he has gone to to keep this from me. And why he even agreed to pursue a monogamous relationship.

He tries to describe his addiction as an uncontrollable desire, compulsive behaviour that has an overbearing hold on his life. “You know the movie Shame?” he asks. Yes. I remember the Steve McQueen film which stars Michael Fassbender as a man desperately hiding his addiction to sex and porn, behaviours that have taken a destructive hold on his life. “That’s what it’s like.”

But Fassbender’s character was single, I think. For a moment I catch myself wondering: is he just using the term addiction to excuse bad behaviour?

I decide to end the relationship almost immediately.

WWe’d met in our early 20s – both young, haphazardly trying to seek out our direction in the world. I had dreams of moving abroad to reconnect with my family, and I had hoped my work would take me there. He had his mind set on developing his craft in England, so we built a life together in the UK. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but I was almost trapped in the assumption that our relationship would last.

Both of us had admitted to cheating on one another about a year into the relationship, and after that I knew I could never judge other people’s mistakes. We made up, as couples often do after a brief fling, agreeing on monogamy and honesty. What I didn’t realise, obviously, was that he had kept up sexual relationships with women from before we had even met. I know this only because I asked him directly, after pleading for the truth one Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks after the first revelation. Why he wanted to share all this then, I don’t know – maybe it was healing, repentance, or maybe he just felt he had nothing to lose.

I know now that what he told me then was still not the full truth. New information would be leaked out in dribs and drabs. I still have the note on my phone with a list of questions – it’s there, tucked among shopping lists and music and film recommendations. Who were these women you had relationships with? When did you realise you had a “problem”? Was it always consensual? When did the webcam chatrooms start? When did it become physical? Did any of this happen while I was around? Why did you continue this relationship if you knew you were doing something wrong?

Throughout those years we were together, he had managed to have sexual relationships with other women, both one-offs and longer term, without me suspecting a thing. I lived in ignorance, not knowing that he’d brought women back to the home we shared, that he’d been sexting other women while I was asleep next to him. The reason he didn’t post pictures of us together online was because he used social media to connect with women and wanted to appear single. He admitted to cyberflashing someone he worked with – a violation that will be illegal in the UK’s proposed online safety bill. I don’t know who she is, but I hope she’s OK and has been able to seek support for this harassment.

About a week after the discovery – which is known by partners of sex addicts in support groups as D-day – I’m packing my mugs into boxes. I get the tape stuck around my finger and can’t get it off. I see myself now, fallen to the ground, surrounded by half-packed boxes. My body hurts from crying. I have never felt emotion so physically before.

It will take weeks, months even, to fully come to terms with what has happened. I feel so foolish for not knowing what he has been doing. Therapy and conversations with friends will help me understand that he has deceived everyone, that there’s no way I could have known what he has hidden from me so well.

There’s no doubt that compulsive sexual behaviour can be destructive, isolating and all-encompassing for the person involved, with a severe impact on their physical and mental health. But in trying to research and understand what sex addiction is, I found little information or discourse surrounding the experience of partners – people who, like me, had just discovered their loved one was effectively living a double life. It can be life-changing for them, too. A study from 2012 found such partners experienced stress, anxiety, depression, inability to trust and loss of self-esteem, and struggled to enjoy sex and romance. Another study, back in 2006, of women married to sexually addicted men, found that after learning of their husband’s serial infidelity, many felt the acute stress and anxiety characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorder.

My mind was having to process a nine-year betrayal. My close friends dropped everything to reach me at my lowest moments; my family helped unpack the boxes in my new flat and cleaned up when I couldn’t. I even got a pet goldfish to help me feel less alone.

But it was a long struggle. The fabric of what I had understood to be my life and this relationship was, in fact, not all true. I had lost a relationship, a partner, a friend. But I had lost memories, too – happy moments now tainted with deceit. My ability to trust myself and other people was gone. I couldn’t work out what was real or not. It was frightening and debilitating to be constantly questioning my own judgment.

It was all so confusing. In those first weeks, I couldn’t be angry at him. His addiction was to blame, society was to blame. Even I was to blame. Maybe I wasn’t sexy enough, open enough, wasn’t there enough. Maybe I had done something wrong.

The anger would come later – anger at his behaviour that constituted harassment, at the way he had risked my sexual health, at the years of manipulation, when I would blame myself for the months of sexlessness and lack of attention.

For so long, my sexuality had been lost, irrelevant. We would sometimes go weeks, months even, without having sex; at times it felt more like a friendship than anything else. I blamed myself, and as time went on I lost confidence in myself and my body. One day, as summer approached during the first lockdown, he had forwarded me an email about a sexual awakening course and told me to go on it. I paid £150 for weekly sessions and meditations on how to reconnect with my sexuality. But things between us remained the same and, trapped in self-doubt, I felt the fault was mine. He did nothing to help me think otherwise. And whenever I thought about leaving him, he would shower me with adoration and I’d find a way to forget my hurt.

In the weeks after the breakup, I needed answers. I began to go down internet rabbit holes in an obsessive desire to understand sex addiction and what had happened to this relationship. I came across online support communities for partners of sex addicts seeking advice and comfort, and joined groups on Facebook where, each day, hundreds of people would share story after story of betrayal.

These groups are largely made up of women in heterosexual, monogamous relationships describing scenarios of gaslighting, lies and severe mental health consequences. One woman found hundreds of sexually explicit images on her partner’s phone a year into their relationship. Another had been with her husband for seven years before she discovered he’d been having affairs; she’d been suspicious, questioned him, but was berated for being jealous and not trusting him. Another had contracted an STI through her partner’s cheating.

It made for incredibly distressing reading. Many of these women decide to end their relationships immediately, others after a period of months or years. I learned that many try to support their partner through addiction. There are groups based on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. The term “acting out” is used when the addict turns to porn or sex again. Some go to specialist sex therapists, others to couples therapy. Those who end the relationship use these groups not for support as a sex addict’s partner, but for comfort – comfort in knowing it is possible to trust again and to regain your self-esteem. I learned that I had gone through betrayal trauma – and that it is OK to focus on healing myself, not my partner.

“I want to put it out there for women that it’s really quite common,” says Eleanor, who discovered her boyfriend had been seeking sex elsewhere after they’d been together for a year. “I remember the feeling of being very, very alone. Just complete disillusionment.”

The couple were abroad for new year when Eleanor received a message from a woman in her friendship circle who said she had been sleeping with Eleanor’s partner, with screenshots of their conversations. “I remember just feeling that my world crashed,” she says.

Eleanor’s partner believed he was a sex addict and that this was causing him to seek out sex with other women. He agreed to go to counselling, so she continued the relationship, until she came across more infidelity and lies. “It made me feel that I’m not going to be enough for anyone,” she says. “And undoing that has been the hardest bit of work I’ve had to do.”

As sex and relationship psychotherapist Paula Hall, author of Sex Addiction: The Partner’s Perspective, puts it, it’s the degree of “hiddenness” that makes this discovery so painful for partners. “It is such a shock because they have absolutely no idea what has been going on for so long – and when you find out you don’t really know the person closest to you, you end up not trusting the ground that you walk on,” she says. “When there’s an affair, usually it’s a symptom of a problem within a relationship. But not with this.”

Sasha believes she completely changed after discovering her husband of almost 30 years had been seeking sex outside the relationship for at least two-thirds of that time, eventually owning up to his behaviour as a sex and porn addict. “I was the most trusting person, but I don’t trust anybody now. I have always been a very secure and confident woman; I’m not any more. I think these men destroy women,” she says.

It was only in the past eight years that Sasha noticed what she felt to be excessive porn use. “I’d wake up and find him masturbating in bed, and I would pretend I wasn’t awake,” she says. “I always had this sneaking suspicion, once I started to notice the porn, that there was more. Then I found a pack of condoms – he’d had a vasectomy when our youngest was one, so I was like: ‘What the hell is he doing with condoms?’ I believed he was faithful and wouldn’t hide anything from me. But after all this, I started becoming obsessive and searching everything.”

Unbeknown to Sasha, her husband had been seeking counselling for porn and sex addiction. He eventually revealed to her that he had had an affair with a woman at work, then that he had regularly frequented massage parlours to have sex with women. What hurt the most, she says, was when she worked out he’d visited a massage parlour while they were on a family holiday with their children and when she was away visiting her mother, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

She learned about her husband’s secret life about a year ago, and has decided to stay with him for the time being at least – as many partners do. She says: “To a certain extent I have come to terms with what has happened. I try to make myself live in the moment, but it’s hard. When it’s really bad, I’ll go for a walk or a ride, and just crank up really good music and sing and scream in the car – that helps me a lot.”

But the pain is still raw, and the betrayal – especially the sexual nature of it – leaves deep wounds. “My grandson was four months old when I found out, and I swear it was the thing that saved me, because I would have been gone,” Sasha says. When I ask why discovering a partner is a sex addict leaves such a lasting pain, she says something that speaks directly to my own experience: “It’s so personal, so raw. It’s almost like you’re standing there naked in front of people. And they’re critiquing you and comparing you.”

Eleanor has not been in a romantic relationship since her discovery, six years ago. “I think I just completely separated sex and love,” she says. “I miss romantic entanglements now and I’m probably ready to have another, but it would be really hard to trust someone.”

Partners can be left with feelings of inadequacy, empty of trust. But there is also a burning, uncomfortable question: was the term sex addiction just an excuse?

“If you want to be someone who goes off and has a lot of sex, more power to your elbow – just don’t do it while lying to someone in a relationship,” Eleanor says. “When you say it’s an addiction, what you are saying to your partner is: ‘It’s not really me.’ The more we pathologise normal human behaviours that are bad, the less we take responsibility.”

Indeed, there are still differing views on whether this behaviour can even be classed as an addiction. The term itself is complex, and the interpretations of it are clouded in shame and societal pressures. A 2017 open letter from three sex-positive US not-for-profit groups – the Center for Positive Sexuality, the Alternative Sexualities Health Research Alliance and the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom – suggested that to refer to someone as being addicted to sex or porn implies that their drives or interests are “normal” or “not normal”, which can unfairly demonise or stigmatise their practices. Researchers also noted that religious and moral disapproval has contributed to perceptions of what constitutes porn addiction, sometimes shaming what is “normal” behaviour.

Sex addiction was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), used widely in the US, in 1994, because the clinical components that define an addiction, such as withdrawal or risk of death through overdose, had never been observed.

Some research has claimed there’s no evidence that hypersexuality is a disorder like an addiction, with one author from a 2013 UCLA study stating that it “does not appear to explain brain responses to sexual images any more than just having a high libido”. On the other hand, in 2014, researchers at Cambridge concluded that viewing pornography does trigger brain activity similar to that triggered by drugs in the brains of addicts.

“Addiction itself is a controversial domain of research,” says Joshua Grubbs, associate professor at Bowling Green State University’s Department of Psychology. “But at the public-facing level, there is a very basic agreement among scientists that, as with a lot of these substances, people can become addicted to them in the sense that they cannot stop using them, and there are consequences associated with not being able to stop.”

Scientists have so far landed on a clear clinical definition only when it comes to compulsive sexual behaviour. In 2019 it was characterised by the World Health Organization as “a persistent pattern of failure to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses or urges resulting in repetitive sexual behaviour”. In 2018, scientists had argued that there was “growing evidence” that compulsive sexual behaviour disorder was an “important clinical problem with potentially serious consequences if left untreated”.

“When someone comes to me and says: ‘I have a sex addiction – I need help,’ what I understand them to be saying is: ‘I feel like I can’t stop this behaviour, and it’s causing me problems,’” Grubbs says. “Now, is that a true addiction? Is that a compulsive behaviour disorder? These are all important debates for a scientist to have. But from a practical perspective, I don’t think they carry much weight. When someone says: ‘I have an addiction,’ they’re telling me they feel out of control.”

What many therapists do agree on is that this behaviour is deeply rooted. It becomes a coping mechanism, widely believed to relate to an early emotional or physical trauma, neglect, depression or anxiety. Paula Hall says the addiction is linked to how sex makes you feel rather than the act itself. It’s the escape. “For some people, there is also a desperate need for constant validation. But often it’s a way of escaping life, a life that is just not being managed very well.”

It may say something about the age we live in that the number of people seeking help for sex addiction has increased in recent years. Though Grubbs doesn’t have clear figures, he says the number of referrals he’s received for sex addiction therapy has risen, while Hall, who runs the Laurel Centre for sex and porn addiction therapy in the UK, says she had a 50% increase in referrals during Covid-19 lockdowns.

The lack of a clear definition of what constitutes a sex addiction or sexually compulsive behaviour may have contributed to this rise. It’s allowed for self-diagnosis, blurring the lines between what could be a disorder and people simply choosing to seek out sex or porn regularly. “There is some speculation that people are using the term sex addiction to avoid accepting responsibility for doing sexually gratifying things that other people have a problem with,” Grubbs says. Experts do of course insist on the need to distinguish nonconsensual behaviour from classifications of sex addiction, as Hall told the Guardian in 2018: “It absolutely in no way excuses the offending and is a completely separate issue.”

So it feels especially sinister and dangerous when terms such as illness and disorder are adopted to excuse bad behaviour. Tiger Woods cheats on his wife? He’s a sex addict. James Franco is accused of inappropriate behaviour and admits to sleeping with his students? He’s a sex addict. And, most harrowingly, Harvey Weinstein, after sexually assaulting and raping women for decades, publicly checks into a rehab centre for sex addiction.

“It strikes me as someone looking for a reason that people should not be angry at them for the things they choose to do,” Grubbs says. But that is to discount the experiences of those who bear the consequences.

The sun feels softer, the warmth of the room less suffocating. It is now hours after the first revelations began to crack my version of reality. Each minute brings some relief, with the understanding that I could not feel worse than I did just before. I sit quietly, feeling empty of tears. I look at the man beside me and have difficulty seeing my partner, the person I’ve shared so much of my life with. It is someone else, a stranger. He is someone I don’t want to know.

For a long time I struggle with my ex’s claim that he is a sex addict. I swing back and forth between believing fully in this disorder and thinking he adopted the idea of an addiction to avoid scrutiny or blame. If he does indeed believe he has a problem, I hope he’s seeking help. More than anything, I hope no one else has had to be on the other side of it.

I settle on this understanding: whether or not it is framed as addiction, decisions were made in order to deceive me, and that knowledge is painful to this day.

I cannot be more grateful for therapy, but mostly for friends and family, the people who made me dinner, dropped off packages of chocolate and bath bombs, always listened openly and sensitively; for the hugs, the late-night texts checking in. Time heals, but time with loved ones makes it bearable.

Sasha tells me: “I felt like my world was crumbling – but we’re strong, and we can get through this.” I know that to be true.

Names and details have been changed.