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Your problems solved by The Midults

Q:Dear A&E, my husband watches pornography most evenings. At first I thought something was lacking between us, but he said it was normal, making it sound like a hobby – even though he’s 72, not a teenager. He’s never hidden it from me and is strangely unashamed. For years, I turned a blind eye, despite how repulsive I find it, but in recent months it has become a nightly activity, the same way other husbands might, say, read a novel before sleep. When I object he calls me a prude. Could you advise me whether it is normal – and if not, the best way to proceed. — Mortified

Dear Mortified, to our minds there are three things at play here. One is the communication at the core of your relationship. Two is whether or not his porn hobby is more than just a hobby, and three, the hard fact of porn and all its myriad complexities.

Let’s start with porn itself. Most married women we know accept that their husbands watch porn and many of them check the porn their husbands are watching. Because a lot of the ‘can-you-believe-it’s-so-easilyaccessible?’ porn out there is not exactly friendly, cosy, romantic porn. It’s not a French magazine or bootleg VHS under the mattress situation. It’s all there at the click of a button and there are endless amounts of it on a loop in increasing gradations of degradation. Frankly we are more worried about teenage boys and their sexual futures than 72-year-old men. But his nightly pastime?

We spoke to relationship and sex addiction counsellor Mig Bennett (migbennettrelationshipcounselling. co.uk) about your problem and she initially wanted to reassure you of this: ‘Men of all ages can require porn to become aroused and, in talking to them, they say it has nothing to do with loss of desire for their partner or wanting younger (or older) bodies or different sex.’ So your husband’s protestations could well be sincere.

‘This whole process is a selfsoother (for women too), and is a way of anaesthetising bad feelings, historic or current,’ she suggests. ‘Some of us take a two-hour bath, some play loud music, some masturbate to porn.’

The question is, has it tipped over into something more sinister? Billions of men access porn sites daily. Not all of them are addicts. So Mig went on to provide some general tests for addiction that you can mull over: ‘Has he tried to stop and failed? Is he needing more and more extremes of the activity to get the same feeling? Has he struggled with other addictions? Is there an addictive pattern in the family? Is the behaviour affecting

One of the biggest questions is, is his porn hobby more than just a hobby?

his job, finances, sexual performance, relationship?’

Obviously, this is affecting your relationship. We relate to your irritation. It’s annoying that it’s every night in the open, and that you are watching Netflix or reading a novel, thinking, ‘Must you? Really, must you?’ But as Mig suggests spending hours in the bath or playing loud music rarely challenge our moral code or cultural beliefs. It seems that your husband’s use of porn falls into this challenging category for you, Mortified. His behaviour is not OK for you. And it is not OK that it is making you miserable. He has made you feel like a prude. That is not OK. He is dismissive of your concerns, also not OK. There are lots of things that are not OK here.

The difficulty is in the approach. You feel a lot of shame, which is such a corrosive and warping condition that affects everything. The answer is not to shame him in return here – you think you can shame someone into healthy behaviour, but the opposite is true. Shame will only exacerbate it, accelerate it. And clearly there is only so much porn you can take. So our advice is get in touch with a sex and relationship expert like Mig. Explore your own feelings around the matter and get a road map on how to talk to your husband about how it makes you feel. The working through of differences is the cornerstone of any relationship and addiction is a family disease. One small positive out of all this – at least he’s still interested in ‘bedroom activities’. Every cloud…