Sex addiction and it's effects

Hi, Mental Healthy,

In response to the article on sexual addiction, I would just like to say that although I was very happy to see you cover this subject, I was disappointed that it wasn't more extensive.

I found myself dealing with this problem unexpectedly in my marriage, finding out after 33 years of marriage that my husband was accessing gay sex porn, but by the time I learned about it, he became totally addicted to it.

I know that sexual addiction can cover multiple areas, but I would love to see the site deal with this issue in an in-depth way, perhaps doing the individual areas over a period of time. I was aware that my husband was on-line all the time and in chat rooms, and very irritated with me after he finished on-line, but I had no idea why. I was also unaware that he was lying to me until the whole issue finally came out.

Despite counselling, and other methods, he could not, and did not want, to stop. This had devastating consequences on our marriage and our family, and in the end, I separated from him, as I could take no more.

He has since died, and I have learned to re-appreciate the man he was before the addiction, but there will always be the tremendous sadness because he did not get victory over the addiction. I now know how to deal with it, but at the time I had no idea. I am sure that there are many women out there going through this very problem, but don't know what to look out for.

Would they even consider that it might be another man in the marriage? I didn't. It wouldn't have crossed my mind. I was, however, saying to my friends that something was wrong with my marriage, but I didn't know what. I found out much later that this problem came up from my husband's past, but he never felt free to tell me about it. That also makes me sad.

May I suggest that you deal with the issue of porn and it's power to addict, and why, and the things to look out for in a marriage that might point to sexual/porn addiction.

Sincerely,

Gladi

Response

Dear Gladi,

Thank you so much for sharing your experience with us and our audience. We are sorry to hear of your experiences and hope that more people talking this openly about their real-life stories will indeed touch those out there experiencing these trials.

We are doing a whole series on addictions and as you can see we continually update our resources, pornography is pencilled in as one of our next topics. We will be looking at how best to show the reality of this and other addictions for the sufferer and their families.

We will take your comments on board and hope that us opening up these isuues in the media coupled with brave people like you giving honest accounts, will enable others to cope better with struggles of this sort.