I genuinely don't know if I'm going crazy or not. Please help. throwaway.
I am a 27 F, and my husband is 32 M. We have been married and living together for 4 years. Everything is great, except that he constantly watches porn, like passively, actively, all the fucking time. If he's on his phone, chances are he's viewing something NSFW. I've caught him multiple times.
We've had discussions on this. We've had fights. I kind of exploded one day a while back when I caught him viewing porn in a public setting. I lost it - I thought it was disrespectful, not only to me, but to everyone else around. We had a discussion afterwards where he agreed not to view porn anymore and that he would try his best to refrain. Since then, I know that he still watches it, but I had kinda grown defeated and stopped bringing it up because it's been mentally draining, constantly feeling like he doesn't care about the boundary he and I established. He had promised many times over that he would try and stop, that I needed to bear with him. And despite all that, he still does it. At some point, I gave up because we still have sex, so I tried to excuse it as him just being overly sexually active or whatever. And for the most part, having that mindset kind of helped. Since then, we developed a lot of trust, and I value other aspects of him and our relationship a lot, which made me value the porn watching a lot less, so honestly, I kind of let it go.
Today, I saw that his Reddit account was up on his laptop. So, thinking back to all the talks about porn that we had had, I folded and snooped a little bit. I know it was wrong. I saw in his history that he had constantly been on pages like pornhub, OF, and others that I don't even really know what their purpose is. I saw that he had messaged an NFSW reddit girl person (idk what to call her; she posts NSFW pics and vids of herself to reddit and links her OF) and said something along the lines of "you are by far the hottest girl on GW, yada yada" (wtf is GW????).
Honestly, that kind of broke my heart. I didn't realize that he was reaching out to people. She didn't respond, btw, but I wonder where the conversation would have gone if she did? I still don't know what to think. I stopped looking at that point because I didn't want to know if that was a one-off thing or if it happened a lot. He came back from work, and I left the message that he sent her on the screen with her page visible. So he knows about it. All he said in response was that "she wasn't real", which I think is an outlandish thing to say when your SO is crying. But whatever. It's been a couple of hours since I discovered this, and I feel really numb. I left the house because i felt too exhausted to even discuss it. I hope he doesn't see this. I know he's pretty active on here.
Am I overreacting to the fact that he does this? I know guys sometimes view porn more objectively than women, and use it as a release. But is it normal that he constantly views it, has actively engaged in conversation with nsfw women online, and also just sees it passively? I feel like I'm going crazy. Maybe all guys do this, and I just didn't get the memo???
Also, I do understand giving someone privacy. I know that looking on his computer was wrong. I hate that I feel like I needed to check. I hate that. I hate feeling like, no matter how many conversations we've had, I'm not as important to him as his freedom to message girls online and view porn. I don't know. Is this thinking wrong? Should I let it go?