Julia’s Story

When my boyfriend and I started dating, we were both fairly new to relationships. Pornography was a part of his life long before I was, and everything he knew sexually, he learned by watching it. He had no sexual experience with a real woman before, so he had just assumed that sex with a woman would be the same was as it was in pornography.

He'd had girlfriends before me, but for whatever reason, they didn't work out.
I cared a lot for this man, but he had no idea how to respect a woman. He kissed me and touched me before he had any kind of personal conversation with me. He also believed that he should receive oral sex basically every time we have sex, and that I should have no objection to it. Pornography never taught him how to care about a woman emotionally; it only showed things you can do physically. I realized that his other relationships failed because he didn't know how to be in one!

Obviously he had a lot to learn, and I had to be the one to teach it to him.
He was a friendly and intelligent person, but his outlook on women was so damaged by porn. He treated me (and his previous girlfriends) like sex objects. I demanded that he respect me, and get to know me as a person. As things were growing more serious between us, he told me that I had changed him for the better. That before I came around, all he ever cared about was what a woman could do for him, and now he was always thinking about what he can do for me. He'd never looked at women this way before.

We were together for six months when he had to move across the country to pursue a degree. The time we had spent together was short, but it was the longest and most important relationship either of us had been in. He asked me to come with him, and together we made the move.

There were many struggles, and lots of adjusting to do. I had never noticed it before, but now we that were together basically 24/7 in a city full of strangers, it became apparent that he was still disrespectful towards women. He'd refer to strangers with derogatory terms. He'd make crude, sexual remarks about females in stores, on the bus, and in elevators. I finally spoke up and asked why he did this. He said he didn't notice he was doing anything, and I was just being sensitive.

I watched it go on and grew more upset. One day, I was looking in the Internet history, and saw that he was still looking at porn. I asked him about it: he said he needed it for when I wasn't around. I didn't understand. I was never gone more than 5 or 6 hours at a time, so why couldn't he wait that long? I explained my views to him, and he said he totally understood. I asked him to stop using porn, and he said he would.

But I downloaded a program that tracked and recorded every site visited on the Internet. During the month after he agreed to quit, I saw that he was still looking at porn just about every day. I lost all my trust in him. I wondered how he could continue to do these things behind my back, while saying he agreed with me on all the issues we talked about together. We'd have conversations all time about various TV shows, movies, and music videos that degraded women. I became very upset and hurt.

We were both hiding things from each other. He'd clear the history to hide his porn endeavors, and I'd use my spy software when he was in the shower or at school. It took its toll on me, and one day I wrote him a letter explaining how I felt. I asked him why he needed to lie to me. Why I wasn't enough for him. And if I wasn't good enough for him, why he kept me around. Why we were even living together, if he needed to use other women to get off.

After giving the letter to my boyfriend to read, I was prepared for the breakup. His reaction actually surprised me. He hugged me, consoled me as I was crying, and apologized. He admitted to being dishonest and begged for my forgiveness. He told me that I have made him such a better person, he had learned so much from me, and he didn't want to lose me. He realized that he was hurting me - the last thing on earth he wanted to do. He admitted that he wanted to stop looking at porn, but couldn't do it. He asked for my help.

I agreed, and it's been getting better ever since. There have still been some struggles between us, and it definitely won't be smooth sailing from now on. But in a relationship without porn (and secrecy and lying and mistrust), we've been getting along much better.

Porn was not created to enhance relationships, it was created to cater to the male fantasy. People who brush off porn and say it's no big deal are being ignorant and just plain wrong.