I LEFT THE MAN I LOVE because he is obsessed with pornography.
It was difficult leaving him after nine years of friendship before we became a couple in the last two years. But I had to walk away to stay sane and keep my self-respect.
I did not come to my decision lightly. What forced my hand was the feeling that I was beginning to condition myself to accept what he wanted as normal and was suppressing my thoughts and true feelings.
The more I did this, the more I felt like crap, but when I tried to express why I was hurting, we would clash.
What hurt me so much was that he did not even seem to recognize how watching these movies had taken over his life and changed him, so much so that I couldn’t get through to him. I couldn’t get him to see that he was no longer the warm, loving, affectionate person who drew me to him.
Instead he’s all about sex, and for his own gratification too. We no longer made love; you know, just kissing and caressing each other to show how much you appreciate each other.
After suffering in this way for the last few months, I could not take it anymore.
I really could not understand why he felt the need to look at naked white women having sex, especially with well endowed black men.
When I asked him, he said it was because it excited him and he liked to look at it.
Though I explained to him that he made me feel inadequate, he used to dismiss my feelings as silly. He used to say, I was alive while they were on a screen, so I was more important.
But since he could not pull himself away from looking at them I figured that though he was having sex with my body, he was wishing it was theirs he was having sex with.
Fake
He denied this, but I could not stop thinking about it.
Even when we had sex, sometimes I felt so badly that I could not enjoy it. I would try to make some noise as he always wanted to hear me do this, and fake that I was enjoying it, when I just wanted him to finish.
But I know who I am and what I want from life. I also know the type of man I want to build a relationship with, to nurture a family with, and to grow old together. And for sure, it can’t be with a man who sees sex as the be all and end all of having a partner.
For me it is also about self-respect. I may love him and did certain sex acts with him because he wanted it. But why should a healthy woman and man be engaged in oral and anal sex as well as three or four positions during intercourse each time they are intimate?
We were not on show, so why did we have to do that each and every time?
Yet, that was what he expected. He quarrelled when he did not get this and showed his dissatisfaction afterward by hardly saying anything to me, or by dropping remarks.
How could any self-respecting person live with that? I couldn’t.
The only one I could confide in about what I was going through was my best friend. And she told me something that made pure sense. She said if porn was more important to him than making me – the woman he sleeps with – feel good, then he really did not love me.
She showed me that porn was so important to him that he was willing to sacrifice my feelings. It meant that I wanted to be with someone who didn’t care much about me.
She pointed out too that if I didn’t care for porn and how our life together had become based on the depravity created by those movies, that was okay. At the same time, it was okay for him to have whatever reaction he had. There was no right or wrong about it, and that the two of us should respect each other enough to be honest about our feelings, talk with each other and if need be, separate rather than make each other miserable. Baffled
After some hesitation I finally dumped my boyfriend, but I feel so lost without him. You can’t be living and breathing with someone for a few years and then all of a sudden not have them around anymore and not miss them.
It’s really tough.
What has me baffled though is how such a smart man with so much going for him could get hooked on just watching sex in movies? I can’t help but wonder if something is wrong with him. But more so, why I didn’t see this in him all those years ago.
That’s why I say you never really get to know and understand someone until you start living with them.
