How do we move forward?
After I married my husband about a year ago (we are both 21) I have discovered time and time again the amount of sexual content he has consumed.
What really hurt was that I had discovered he joined porn discord servers, private messaged some girls for photos & such. He has essentially cheated on me sporadically throughout our entire 5 years together. That broke me, and that confrontation was really hard for me to muster up the courage to do. He had apologized & promised to not do anything like that again.
When we were still dating we both agreed that porn is fine when we were apart, but after we got married it really hurt my feelings when I would be home with him & he would masturbate in the bathroom. I have told him that I am perfectly fine with him asking to have sex with me if he felt the need to but he had still done it in the bathroom. He resorted to porn games, which is whatever I do that too. But I do it when he was away, meanwhile he does it when I am just in the other room. When I talked to him about it he apologized & said he just didn’t want to bother me. Whatever.
The most recent incident just broke me and I’m at a loss of what to do. I had gone through his photos (I’m allowed access to his phone) and had discovered porn clips. But not just that. Just normal pictures of people in his life. Other girls. A coworker, an ex, and his friends’ girlfriends. Photos that they themselves have posted. When i confronted him about it my gut feeling was right. He had been masturbating to them while away doing training.
If it had just been the porn I could have maybe moved on from it. But these are people I have personally met & have liked. I had been an insecure person before because I was immature & jealous. But now I just can’t believe I had every right to have had that funny feeling about him being around them. It SICKENS me that he violated those poor girls behind their backs like that, disrespected his friends & their relationships, and completely jeopardized our marriage to just- masturbate.
I had told him “I just need you to figure that out and fix it. I’ve given you SO much of my trust to be better for me for the bare minimum of not hurting me over stuff like that again but it keeps happening. The amount of times you’ve cheated on me is absurd & now this comes up after all the other times you’ve hurt me is insane. What hurts the most is that you preach all these things about cheating & men need to be better & need help but you do this. And now you not only have done something awful to me you’ve now done it to your friends. It’s disgusting. You need help & fix whatever you got going on because it isn’t normal to jerk off to regular photos of girls like that. I’ve loved you through every single time you’ve hurt me and I’ve given you chance and after chance & it hurts that you keep doing things like this like it really means nothing to you that you hurt me like this and wonder why I don’t think highly of myself. Are you really that unattracted to me that you’d do this? Why? Why would you do this? What drove you to do this. What compelled you to lay everything out & just do it”
He apologized & admitted he needs help. He’s seen that I’ve gotten better in this relationship & he appreciated all the effort and change I’ve done and that he needs to do the same. We then spent the day together & he had been attentive trying to make it up for me before he had to go back to training again.
I want to believe that he’ll be better, I just don’t know what steps we can take to move forward from this. I love him so much so unfortunately I can’t bring myself to hate him despite everything… I love him & I want to help him be better. If I could get advice on how we can make that happen I would really appreciate it.
I don’t exactly have support I am willing to share all this with, so I turn to you strangers online to help me navigate this mess.
I do think this is just an addiction & he does sincerely recognize that now & wants to be better. I just think we both just have no clue how to.