‘My husband became addicted to porn while I was pregnant’

Rachel advises a wife whose man is recovering from a porn habit (or is he?), and a man who wants to take the lead in the bedroom

If you want to make yourself desirable to her, change a tyre. Put up a shelf. Take the bins out

QI’m turning 30 soon and I love my husband to bits. However, we barely have sex: it can be once in several months, or once a year. We’ve been married for more than four years and have two babies. Things have been dull from the beginning. It got worse when I first got pregnant. I still fancy him and he says he loves me but he is not excited about having sex with me and doesn’t find me interesting that way. However, he is not ready to let me go either. The problem is that during my first pregnancy he became addicted to porn and sexting (which came to an end after I found out about it – or at least I think it did). Thereafter, it was me who usually made the first move when it came to initiating sex.

—Miranda

AIn your longer letter, you reveal you come from a “conservative culture” and that sexual problems and divorce are both taboo subjects in your community, which makes it all the harder – so well done reaching out to me. This is an important first step. There’s a lot going on here. First, porn and sexting. Maybe he’s stopped doing this; maybe not. Either way, he directed whatever physical desire he felt for you elsewhere. The overuse of porn can have negative consequences for “normal” sex. It reshapes the user’s response in favour of augmented breasts, hairless vulvas, unfeasible penises and sometimes “kink”: practices such as choking and hair-pulling (don’t get me started).

Plus, my therapist tells me that a man who uses porn a lot can get “dependent on his own grip” and can engage in something called “edging”. I hadn’t heard of this either but edging means – and I’m quoting her now – “keeping himself in the ‘plateau stage’ for yonks before orgasm, so sex with an actual woman (with her own orgasmic agenda) can be problematic.”

You’re very young. You have so much ahead of you and 30 is far too young to give up on sex or have it once a year with the man you say you love to bits. As he doesn’t want to discuss this, and you don’t want a divorce, your options are limited. It seems to me that you have to be discreet. If you can’t get help or see a couples counsellor with him, you will have to find satisfaction and intimacy outside the marriage – or leave him.

You don’t say whether you had sex before your marriage, but you reveal it has been “dull” from the off, which could explain why he turned elsewhere and you are now climbing the walls.

“Can they together change the script so that sex becomes more satisfying for both? Can they share their fantasies?” asks therapist Sophie Haggard, after I showed her your letter. “Show each other what they like? Watch porn together?”

She also says you are choosing to be with someone who rejects you, which is repetition compulsion. “Can she see how her choice may have links to her past? Insight can sometimes be liberating. If divorce is possible in her culture she might, with increased awareness – i.e. through individual therapy – find herself able to choose someone who doesn’t reject her.”

Good luck, young woman. Remember what my father always says when you think about your marriage and the future – you are a long time dead.

Dear Rachel

QI agree with your advice to the woman writing in last time wanting “caveman sex”. My dilemma is somewhat different in that I’m probably a caveman, albeit an older one! My dilemma is that my wife has lost all interest in sex. She is postmenopausal. This started in March 2020. I was abroad, for two weeks when the panic started. When I returned home she had moved into a spare room as she was distraught at the possibility that I may give her Covid, and she has remained there ever since (she’s multiply jabbed, whereas I’m not).

So what do I do about my ongoing sex drive? I don’t want to leave her so an affair is too risky, but I crave the warm intimacy of having sex.

—Stephen

Dear Stephen

AI’m so glad you asked as there’s plenty more to say about Caveman Sex. I have to say I get many more letters from men wishing their wives and partners lusted for caveman sex – or any sex, frankly – than I do from women who want it and never get it, as per my last column, and that letter from a woman who wanted her chap to initiate sex, which he never did.

According to my experts, women blame themselves if their man doesn’t initiate sex; men, not so much – they blame the woman! “They will not usually blame their own unsexy or slobby appearance or poor sexual technique,” says Marian O’Connor, a therapist. If you are a woman wanting caveman sex, she has this to say. “For all sorts of historical reasons within their own families, some men are unable to get in touch with the more demanding or assertive side of their personalities, at least when it comes to sex.

“I have worked as a sex and relationship therapist for over 30 years and I have seen how hard it is for some men to change in this respect. Enjoy the great sex you have and enjoy being a sexually assertive woman. Keep your fantasies of being dominated for your own sexual pleasure or suggest to your partner that you act them out in role play. He might be willing to act as the caveman – providing you do the directing.”

Now to the above – for a man wanting to act out his caveman sex fantasies more often (I have a vision of a man in a loincloth clubbing a woman over the head and dragging her into his lair), I suggest this: make yourself desirable to her as a man and get her You Tarzan Me Jane juices flowing. Change a tyre. Put up a shelf. Take the bins out. Join the Army Reserve.

I’ve said it before but one of the great passion-killers of modern life is that men and women have become so interchangeable. If you want to heat things up in the bedroom, you may have to get out of the kitchen.

Why do steamy films always feature plumbers or builders, and never weakchinned men from the ministry in navy suits who say: “I’m from the government and I’ve come to help”? Because women go weak at the knees at the idea that a man with a tool belt or in a uniform has come to fix something or save them from harm (I refer you to the sexual chemistry in The Bodyguard).

Recite to yourself, if in doubt, Liam Neeson’s speech to the kidnapper in Taken: “What I do have is a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career…” Works every time, I can promise you.