Conflicted

I am totally conflicted, I have been telling myself I am an addict then not really believing myself. I was found by my wife looking at porn. I have been looking at porn or celebrity pictures and videos on and off for the last 25 years. I have been married for 13 of those. I had kept this all secret from my wife. I knew she didn't like it but I never considered myself cheating or lying which she fully believes is what l was doing. As it goes I pride my self on being open and truthful about just about everything. I always own up to my mistakes and when I am wrong, I always try to keep an open mind and be a realist about things so it is hard to accept all these bad qualities I now seemingly have. Am I a liar and a cheat? Is keeping a secret the same as lying? Is masturbating over porn the same as cheating? Can somebody give me some advice so I can move on with my life and marriage.

You might not be an addict, but does the distinction really matter?
Perhaps omission is different from lying, but is either any more or less hurtful and dishonest?
Perhaps watching porn isn't the same as cheating, but different people have different ideas of what cheating is. Some people are concerned with emotional cheating, some with physical cheating, and yeah some people consider porn to be as bad as cheating. Some people even take issue with so much as looking at another clothed person sexually, I'm not saying they are morally/ethically correct (it's all relative), but they have the right to their preferences in any case.


If you felt the need to hide it from her because you thought it would hurt her, then yeah that's not honest, and it will take some work to repair, whether you are "addicted" or not.
It isn't so important to find labels/comparisons for this or that, the fact is your wife believes you have been dishonest with her, and has a moral stance that is at odds with porn. You'll have to decide if her terms are fair. If you decide she is right then you can ditch the porn and work on sharing anything with her that you have felt the need to hide, if you decide she is wrong then it would still be a good opportunity to sort out your ground rules regarding sexuality and honesty.

If i can provide an example. If your wife went to a male strip club once or twice a week, would you be okay with that? Sure she isn't physically or emotionally cheating, but would it bother you? What if she knew it might bother you but chose to hide it from you so she could have her cake and eat it too?
Or even if it doesn't bother you, wouldn't you prefer that she didn't feel the need to hide it from you?

Know that i'm not just crapping on you here. I'm a young guy who is lucky enough to be finding out now that many women have a problem with porn. If I hadn't read some of the accounts from partners here, I might have wandered into a relationship with porn as a trusty sidekick, and never have thought anything more about it.
So I get why a lot of guys don't consider it to be a problem, and if you weren't trying to hide it from her then it wouldn't dishonest so much as naive. As well, someone who has a problem with porn and doesn't make it clear to their partner, is failing to hold up their side of the honesty agreement. Honesty is the responsibility of both individuals in a relationship, and purposeful omission is just as dishonest as lying. There are many things that make up the spectrum of dishonesty, not just lying

On another note, it's rather interesting that you and a partner who recently posted here have both been married for 13 years...

Sure I have a problem, I know that. I never considered myself a liar or a cheat. I wouldn't have done what I did otherwise. Only now I am realising it, looks like it is too late.

BKM said:

Sure I have a problem, I know that. I never considered myself a liar or a cheat. I wouldn't have done what I did otherwise. Only now I am realising it, looks like it is too late.

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Why is it too late? Tell her that she is right, tell her that you are sorry, and do everything you can to regain her trust. You can fix this, you can rebuild the trust, it's not too late.
Don't let shame get in the way, shame is the belief that you are a bad person for your actions, it is long term and it is useless. Guilt is useful, guilt is what can propel you forward to rebuild your relationship.

Think back to the person you were before all of the omissions, and become that person again, take her out on a "first date", start over from scratch and make her remember who she fell in love with, make her see that your bad actions do not make you bad, and good actions can heal the wounds. Do not fall into the trap of shame and inaction, it only leads to regret.

I speak from experience, though not related to porn addiction. I hurt family members emotionally beyond repair, and I let the shame take over and prevent any action I could have taken to make things right. It has been 5 years, and my immediate family members are little more than acquaintances to me now, because I never took action to rebuild the trust, and taking action gets more and more difficult the longer it is avoided.

As a partner of a PA I will say the thing that I personally found the hardest was the lying. Honestly I don't care if he was hiding and lying about eating Oreo's. A lie is a lie. In my personal opinion hiding is the same as lying. No matter your stance on porn you marriage will always be healthier and happier with complete honesty! I wish you the best!

My wife came home today and said that's it, it's over. In my mind all i did was masturbate in secret. I suppose the secrecy is lying in itself, which I never considered up until now. And the masturbation she took as me being a cheat which I didn't think I was. I wasn't a serial killer, or a rapist or thief or pimp or drug dealer. I never beat her, I,m not a drunk, I had never directly lied to her to about anything else and I never cheated on her with another women either. I masturbated about other women but I had no emotional involvement with them and I only watched porn to masturbate which might only take 10mins sometimes half an hour at the most. For me it was a means to an end, if anything I was addicted to the orgasm feeling then anything else. I have insecurities and self image issues that I have always had and I am only now discussing them because of the porn issue. Obviously I did not think what I was doing would break us up. She pointed out that I was keeping this secret before I knew she wasn't ok with it. So some part of me did know I was being naughty and not only keeping it secret because she didn't like it. But that's all I thought, I was being naughty, which also heightens the masturbation experience. I did lie when I was caught so that it would not come to this. She kept telling me to be honest with her and will be ok. But will it really, it is incredibly difficult to be honest about things that you know are going to make everything worse. And it has. The more information she knows the worse it has become. I was trying to save our relationship but I have done the exact opposite. I don't think there is anyway back from this now. I don't think I was ever really built to have relationships, I'm antisocial, OCD , I have a fear of just about anything public. I can't make friends, I feel people only really like me as a work mate but not to hang out with. I never really had any relationships before I met my wife and I thought I was destined for loneliness. Turns out I was right.

Porn is not masturbation. Although if we could see into the average woman's sexual fantasies it might change the argument a bit.
Here we are watching all these women on a screen, while they might have a few dozen men in their heads on rotation.

BKM said:

My wife came home today and said that's it, it's over. In my mind all i did was masturbate in secret. I suppose the secrecy is lying in itself, which I never considered up until now. And the masturbation she took as me being a cheat which I didn't think I was. I wasn't a serial killer, or a rapist or thief or pimp or drug dealer. I never beat her, I,m not a drunk, I had never directly lied to her to about anything else and I never cheated on her with another women either. I masturbated about other women but I had no emotional involvement with them and I only watched porn to masturbate which might only take 10mins sometimes half an hour at the most. For me it was a means to an end, if anything I was addicted to the orgasm feeling then anything else. I have insecurities and self image issues that I have always had and I am only now discussing them because of the porn issue. Obviously I did not think what I was doing would break us up. She pointed out that I was keeping this secret before I knew she wasn't ok with it. So some part of me did know I was being naughty and not only keeping it secret because she didn't like it. But that's all I thought, I was being naughty, which also heightens the masturbation experience. I did lie when I was caught so that it would not come to this. She kept telling me to be honest with her and will be ok. But will it really, it is incredibly difficult to be honest about things that you know are going to make everything worse. And it has. The more information she knows the worse it has become. I was trying to save our relationship but I have done the exact opposite. I don't think there is anyway back from this now. I don't think I was ever really built to have relationships, I'm antisocial, OCD , I have a fear of just about anything public. I can't make friends, I feel people only really like me as a work mate but not to hang out with. I never really had any relationships before I met my wife and I thought I was destined for loneliness. Turns out I was right.

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I'm sorry to hear that things aren't going very well at the moment. Have you been in marriage counseling before? While most of us who have partners have been faced with potentially gutting a relationship, I believe that a majority of us are still taking it day by day. It's not easy on relationships, at all - just ask my girlfriend - but I don't recall reading about a marriage that disintegrated to nothing at the first instance of being caught using porn. Perhaps marriages here are struggling after repeated attempts but this seems a bit - abrupt.

I'm not an expert at this sort of thing, but it seems that there is a history of a lack of communication already in your relationship. As an outsider, it seems that porn is just one thing that's wrong here.

If you want your marriage to last, my advice would be to get into counseling for yourself - you need to deal with all your issues, not just porn. You also need to get into couples counseling and start talking. I have a gut feeling that porn addiction is going to be a mere bullet point in a list of things that need to be resolved.

Good luck, OP.