The Red Berets ride to the rescue of New York subway commuters, 1979
‘Chivalry has returned to New York,’ proclaimed the Observer on 15 July 1979, as it descended into the lawless New York subway underworld, accompanied by the Magnificent Thirteen Subway Patrol, AKA the Red Berets. The group had formed that February, in response to a violent crime wave. From an initial 13, they now numbered nearly 100 and their mission was to make New
Yorkers feel safer. ‘They are in their late teens or early 20s, most of them have some training in the martial arts and all are as streetwise as alley cats.’
Working-class and from diverse ethnic backgrounds, most worked or studied during the day. Their leader was the charismatic Curtis ‘the Rock’ Sliwa, ‘a poor 23-year-old Polish-American who graduated in garbage collecting and street fighting’.
The Red Berets patrol ‘the worst routes, the least well-lit stations and the poorest, most violent neighbourhoods’. The Observer sensibly tagged along for the first 8pm to midnight shift when the police were still on duty. ‘When the cops go off at 2am it’s looneyville,’ explained Sliwa. But it proved uneventful and there’s a palpable frustration at the lack of action: barring an anticlimactic encounter with a drunk man at 8.40pm, and a giggling gang of girls asking for the Red Berets’ autographs, it’s mainly colourful descriptions of menacing stations (‘water drips, shadows tremble’) and recounting of previous skirmishes. ‘One of them, a giant, picks up Keith by the neck, strangling him. I kick him in the head – left my footprint on his face.’ For all that, Sliwa wanted to clarify the group were ‘not vigilantes. We’re out here to protect people, not lynch them.’
Clocking off at 12.34am without even a sniff of action, the journalist was nevertheless impressed. ‘The youngsters who do it are – there’s no other word for it – amazing.’
It was important to know that the group were ‘not vigilantes. We’re out here to protect people, not lynch them’
like a medieval apparition.” Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones were there, as well as a court including Anita Pallenberg, Cecil Beaton, Robert Fraser, Christopher Gibbs and Michael Cooper. Urged by his companions, Nick took his guitar when they sallied forth the next evening. “Hoping to make contact with them, we went down to their hotel, the celebrated El Minzah,” he wrote home.
“Having seen them going in, looking quite extraordinary even by their own standards, we marched in and I made a request to play in the bar. After I had been turned down very politely, Bob [Drake’s friend Rick Charkin, so nicknamed because he was thought to resemble Bob Dylan], whose nerves seem to stop at nothing, proceeded to ring up the Stones’ suite and ask if they might be wanting a little musical entertainment! This was unfortunately refused in a similar fashion, and it was decided that my fortune should be made elsewhere. So we made a quick tour of the nightclubs, asking if I could play.
“Fortunately, one of those which accepted the offer was the Koutoubia Palace, Tangier’s most exclusive nightspot, which is done up in the style of a Moorish palace. I couldn’t help feeling a little out of place, but all the same I played for about quarter of an hour. The reception was extraordinarily good and we all got stood rounds of drinks, which was rather pleasant.”
It’s notable that – albeit egged on by his friends – Nick had the confidence to perform spontaneously. The following morning Mike [Hill, usually the driver on the trip] whisked them the 370 miles to Marrakech. He was overwhelmed by its souk, calling it “a huge, crowded gathering place where one finds musicians, magicians, soothsayers, acrobats, snake-charmers, dancers, and various other oddities which I am unable to find a name for. Best of all was a set of African drummers and dancers, who produced about the most infectious rhythms I have ever been infected by.”
By coincidence the Stones were also in the crowd, making a field recording. The friends revived the idea of getting Nick to play for them. Having established that they were staying in an old French colonial hotel, La Mamounia, they went there that evening. Upon discovering that they were in its grand dining room, says Julian, “Rick went in with Nick and told them how great Nick was at the guitar. Nick then played for them.” It’s striking that Nick was willing to perform alone and at close quarters in front of such an intimidating audience. Rick does not recall what he played, but when he stopped, continues Julian:
“We all sat down. It was a large room with a long table immediately on the left, deserted but for the Stones and their entourage. Mick Jagger was at the head, and in my memory Nick sat at the opposite end. It was like a scene from The Decameron, with food everywhere, which they invited us to help ourselves to. We were very grateful, because we were starving. They were bombed out of their minds yet clearly impressed by Nick. At the end of the encounter Mick said to him: ‘You must come and see us when you’re back in London,’ which I doubt he said to everyone.”
Young musicians all over the world would have envied Nick, yet by Julian’s account, “He was so congenitally mellow that it seemed normal for him. He seemed to internalise it all.” His own vague account to his parents ran: “I went in and did them a few numbers. We in fact got quite chatty with them, and it was quite interesting learning all the inside stories.”
An exchange of letters between Drake and his father, Rodney, during Nick’s university years hints at his growing turmoil and confusion. His father’s reply is patient and kind but provides a sadly prophetic foreshadowing of the problems that were to undermine Drake’s musical career and overtake his life
Nick wrote to his parents on Thursday 23 January 1969.
“Cambridge has been quite pleasant this term, but here I am, becoming increasingly sure that I want to leave soon. I’m sure that our various conversations have made clear my general feelings … As far as performing is concerned, I am certainly no more than amateur. However, with regard to my songwriting, I can only progress from the stage that I have reached so far by developing a purely professional approach … I know for a certainty that I must make this progression with my music in order to achieve any sense of fulfilment.
“I hope you can perhaps appreciate that the idea of having my music as a ‘vacation hobby’ for another yearand-a-half is not a particularly happy one. It seems that Cambridge can really only delay me from doing what at the moment I most need to do.”
Having discussed the matter at length with [his wife] Molly, Rodney sent him a considered reply the following week. “Obviously it is a step which we have to consider carefully, because it is an irrevocable one,” he began, going on to pose two vital questions: “Are you more or less likely to succeed at your chosen career if you leave now? Secondly, what advantage unconnected with your career may you be throwing away if you leave now.”
He continued candidly: “We are slow developers in our family and you, I believe, are no exception. I would go so far as to say that you will surprise yourself in the next two years by the changes and development that will occur in your personality, your understanding and your outlook. In addition to this, any career involving selfemployment demands a high degree of self-discipline and a will to overcome one’s weaknesses, and making the effort required to tackle problems which do not come easily. I think you have a long way to go here.
“You believe that the problem of turning yourself from an amateur into a professional can be solved merely by transferring yourself from Cambridge to somewhere where you are surrounded by, and under the influence of, professionals in your chosen field. From what you say I take it that you must believe that it was the prospect of returning to Cambridge for eight-week periods during the year that prevented you, in the long summer vac, from getting into the swim, so to speak, and of starting to acquire the professionalism which you are rightly seeking.
“But I doubt this very much and I would regard as far more likely reasons your reticence (which you must overcome), your difficulty in communicating (which you must overcome), and your reluctance to plunge in and have a go (which you conceal from yourself by self-persuasion that more solo practising and solo listening are required before the move is made) … If I am right in what I say, and the real trouble is that you have not yet overcome your weaknesses (and God knows we all have them), then you may well find that you have thrown over Cambridge simply to continue indefinitely on the outskirts of what you are looking for.
“At Cambridge you have a chance to fight your weaknesses and overcome them (and fight like hell you MUST), to discipline yourself from inside, and take a more active interest in your fellows (another weakness of yours – I am being very blunt, aren’t I?) and generally to prepare and develop yourself to make a real success of what you want to do. And, in the meantime, your creative powers will be developing, not stagnating, do please believe me. On the second aspect – what advantages unconnected with your career may you be throwing away – there is not a great deal to say except that it is a rounded personality which is most likely to lead its owner on a happy and full road though life. To specialise too early and to have interest in only one activity makes Jack a very dull boy. One-anda-half years may seem a long time to you. Allow me to assure you it is not – but it is a terribly important time in the development of you as a person into something that you are going to start to be at about the age of 23.
“The winning of a degree may seem to bear little significance to you, and the argument that it is a safety net if you come a cropper with your music will doubtless evoke the response that a safety net is just what you don’t want. I would say to you, however, that the self-discipline which it involves, apart from anything else at all, is a priceless asset in whatever you want to tackle during the rest of your life. So there we are, Nick – there’s my view. I urge you to resolve to see Cambridge through.”
It was indeed a blunt statement, but Nick knew it was written out of love, recognised the truth in it and did not take it amiss. Rodney had written nothing that any concerned parent wouldn’t have thought under the circumstances, but he and Molly perhaps didn’t grasp the intensity of their son’s commitment to his music or – as they later conceded – his brilliance.
Drake’s third and final album Pink Moon is ableak, minimal affair, seemingly wrenched from the depths of mental illness. As shown by the reactions of his family and contemporaries, it’s a reflection of his brilliance and the uncomfortably intimate nature of the material
Nick’s relationship to the finished album is unknown, and it’s likely his family and friends were unaware of it until it was released. [His friend] Brian Wells is convinced Molly and Rodney didn’t listen to it closely, and Gabrielle [Drake, Nick’s sister] doesn’t recall doing so, either; by the time it appeared they were more focused on his day-to-day condition than on his musical output. Rodney later wrote that it was made “when Nick was getting pretty bad, and it’s rather ‘way out’, as they say”. In another letter he admitted: “The material on Pink Moon has always bewildered us a little (except From the Morning, which we love).”Joe Boyd [who produced Drake’s first two albums] had nothing whatsoever to do with Pink Moon. The first he knew of it was when Island sent a copy to him in Los Angeles. “When I saw the cover I was horrified, and when I played it I was even more horrified. I interpreted its starkness as a rebuke to me. I thought it was self-destructive, a capitulation, as if he were saying: ‘Fuck it, I don’t care whether people listen to it or not.’ I listened to it once.”
Nick’s close friends were upset by it, too. Wells says: “I wasn’t around when he was making Pink Moon, and when I heard it I found it bleak. I remember a friend from Cambridge describing it as ‘music to commit suicide to’.” Alex Henderson and Ben Laycock were taken aback by it after Bryter Layter. “We found its atmosphere dark and depressing, knowing how Nick had become,” says Alex. “We had no idea what musical direction he would or could take after that.”
“I was appalled by Pink Moon,” remembers Drake’s university friend Paul Wheeler. “I found it incredibly upsetting. I thought the songs were frightening. To this day I cannot ever imagine listening to it for pleasure. It’s like opening some terrible Pandora’s box.”
Folk singer Beverley Martyn had similar concerns. “I thought: ‘This boy’s gone, we’ve lost him. We can’t reach him any more, and he can’t reach us.’ I wondered why he’d bothered to record some of the tracks, and who had thought it was a good idea to let him go into the studio and do so. They were so dark and sad, and telling about the state of his mind: doom, gloom and despair, with apocalyptic elements. People listen to it and say: ‘That’s a great line!’, and talk about the songs and the surreal cover like they’re a puzzle they can solve, but Pink Moon is like the Book of Revelation. It doesn’t make sense and it’s a manifestation of illness, of madness. When people are really ill they don’t know what they’re saying, they don’t hear what’s coming out of their own mouth. I thought those songs, those words were the product of a sick person.”
Musician Richard Thompson, who had collaborated with Drake, heard Pink Moon when [producer] John Wood played it to him in Sound Techniques: “I was disturbed. Part of what had made Nick’s earlier music so appealing was a balance between dark and light. The sadness inherent in the music had been veiled behind beautiful arrangements and an intriguing voice that drew you in. However, his third album seemed a stark cry for help, the voice of a man teetering on the edge of sanity.”
Not everyone felt that way. “I find it’s got some of the most optimistic songs of his,” said [arranger] Robert Kirby. “I think Pink Moon is in fact my favourite, as far as the songs are concerned.” Despite his disappointment at not having worked on it, he supported Nick’s prerogative in eschewing arrangements and later stated: “I think it’s his greatest work, by far.”
He was so congenitally mellow that hanging out with the Rolling Stones seemed normal to him
Julian Lloyd Raby
that has forced on him a disconnected understanding of sex and masculinity. It’s so unfair that he’s experiencing this, I tell him. What makes him feel like his relationship with pornography is out of control?
“The frequency, the compulsions that draw me to viewing it,” he says. Porn has never really interested me, and he knows that – is that why he felt he couldn’t tell me until now? Perhaps.
The conversation seems to go on for hours, as if time were being dragged through thick sediment. He speaks about his insecurities; I tell him my deepest and darkest vulnerabilities. It feels like the most open conversation we’ve had in years. Later, I find out that nothing he’s told me here is true.
* * *
The next morning, the vacuum cleaner is still unravelled on the floor. There’s a sickly feeling rising from my belly. I didn’t sleep much last night, kept awake by questions: how did he manage to keep this secret from me for so long? Was there anything else he hadn’t told me?
There is – so much more. Again, we’re sitting on the sofa. I’m holding his hand, although less quietly this time. My tears seem almost cartoonish. He’s not only addicted to porn, he tells me, but addicted to sex. He has been seeking sex elsewhere, online and physically, for years. I never knew a thing.
The pain is immediate and brutal. I’m hit by all the cliches of shock at once: punched in the stomach, the carpet ripped from underneath me. It is almost impossible to understand the lengths he has gone to to keep this from me. And why he even agreed to pursue a monogamous relationship.
He tries to describe his addiction as an uncontrollable desire, compulsive behaviour that has an overbearing hold on his life. “You know the movie Shame?” he asks. Yes. I remember the Steve McQueen film which stars Michael Fassbender as a man desperately hiding his addiction to sex and porn, behaviours that have taken a destructive hold on his life. “That’s what it’s like.”
But Fassbender’s character was single, I think. For a moment I catch myself wondering: is he just using the term addiction to excuse bad behaviour?
I decide to end the relationship almost immediately.
* * *
WWe’d met in our early 20s – both young, haphazardly trying to seek out our direction in the world. I had dreams of moving abroad to reconnect with my family, and I had hoped my work would take me there. He had his mind set on developing his craft in England, so we built a life together in the UK. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but I was almost trapped in the assumption that our relationship would last.
Both of us had admitted to cheating on one another about a year into the relationship, and after that I knew I could never judge other people’s mistakes. We made up, as couples often do after a brief fling, agreeing on monogamy and honesty. What I didn’t realise, obviously, was that he had kept up sexual relationships with women from before we had even met. I know this only because I asked him directly, after pleading for the truth one Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks after the first revelation. Why he wanted to share all this then, I don’t know – maybe it was healing, repentance, or maybe he just felt he had nothing to lose.
I know now that what he told me then was still not the full truth. New information would be leaked out in dribs and drabs. I still have the note on my phone with a list of questions – it’s there, tucked among shopping lists and music and film recommendations. Who were these women you had relationships with? When did you realise you had a “problem”? Was it always consensual? When did the webcam chatrooms start? When did it become physical? Did any of this happen while I was around? Why did you continue this relationship if you knew you were doing something wrong?
Throughout those years we were together, he had managed to have sexual relationships with other women, both one-offs and longer term,without me suspecting a thing. I lived in ignorance, not knowing that he’d brought women back to the home we shared, that he’d been sexting other women while I was asleep next to him. The reason he didn’t post pictures of us together online was because he used social media to connect with women and wanted to appear single. He admitted to cyberflashing someone he worked with – a violation that will be illegal in the UK’s proposed online safety bill. I don’t know who she is, but I hope she’s OK and has been able to seek support for this harassment.
***
About a week after the discovery – which is known by partners of sex addicts in support groups as D-day – I’m packing my mugs into boxes. I get the tape stuck around my finger and can’t get it off. I see myself now, fallen to the ground, surrounded by half-packed boxes. My body hurts from crying. I have never felt emotion so physically before.
It will take weeks, months even, to fully come to terms with what has happened. I feel so foolish for not knowing what he has been doing. Therapy and conversations with friends will help me understand that he has deceived everyone, that there’s no way I could have known what he has hidden from me so well.
There’s no doubt that compulsive sexual behaviour can be destructive, isolating and all-encompassing for the person involved, with a severe impact on their physical and mental health. But in trying to research and understand what sex addiction is, I found little information or discourse surrounding the experience of partners – people who, like me, had just discovered their loved one was effectively living a double life. It can be lifechanging for them, too. A study from 2012 found such partners experienced stress, anxiety, depression, inability to trust and loss of self-esteem, and struggled to enjoy sex and romance. Another study, back in 2006, of women married to sexually addicted men, found that after learning of their husband’s serial infidelity, many felt the acute stress and anxiety characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorder.
My mind was having to process a nine-year betrayal. My close friends dropped everything to reach me at my lowest moments; my family helped unpack the boxes in my new flat and cleaned up when I couldn’t. I even got a pet goldfish to help me feel less alone.
But it was a long struggle. The fabric of what I had understood to be my life and this relationship was, in fact, not all true. I had lost a relationship, a partner, a friend. But I had lost memories, too – happy moments now tainted with deceit. My ability to trust myself and other people was gone. I couldn’t work out what was real or not. It was frightening and debilitating to be constantly questioning my own judgment.
It was all so confusing. In those first weeks, I couldn’t be angry at him. His addiction was to blame, society was to blame. Even I was to blame. Maybe I wasn’t sexy enough, open enough, wasn’t there enough. Maybe I had done something wrong.
The anger would come later – anger at his behaviour that constituted harassment, at the way he had risked my sexual health, at the years of manipulation, when I would blame myself for the months of sexlessness and lack of attention.
For so long, my sexuality had been lost, irrelevant. We would sometimes go weeks, months even, without having sex; at times it felt more like a friendship than anything else. I blamed myself, and as time went on I lost confidence in myself and my body. One day, as summer approached during the first lockdown, he had forwarded me an email about a sexual awakening course and told me to go on it. I paid £150 for weekly sessions and meditations on how to reconnect with my sexuality. But things between us remained the same and, trapped in self-doubt, I felt the fault was mine. He did nothing to help me think otherwise. And whenever I thought about leaving him, he would shower me with adoration and I’d find a way to forget my hurt.
***
In the weeks after the breakup, I needed answers. I began to go down internet rabbit holes in an obsessive desire to understand sex addiction and what had happened to this relationship. I came across online support communities for partners of sex addicts seeking advice and comfort, and joined groups on Facebook where, each day, hundreds of people would share story after story of betrayal.
These groups are largely made up of women in heterosexual, monogamous relationships describing scenarios of gaslighting, lies and severe mental health consequences. One woman found hundreds of sexually explicit images on her partner’s phone a year into their relationship. Another had been with her husband for seven years before she discovered he’d been having affairs; she’d been suspicious, questioned him, but was berated for being jealous and not trusting him. Another had contracted an STI through her partner’s cheating.
It made for incredibly distressing reading. Many of these women decide to end their relationships immediately, others after a period of months or years. I learned that many try to support their partner through addiction. There are groups based on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. The term “acting out” is used when the addict turns to porn or sex again. Some go to specialist sex therapists, others to couples therapy. Those who end the relationship use these groups not for support as a sex addict’s partner, but for comfort – comfort in knowing it is possible to trust again and to regain your self-esteem. I learned that I had gone through betrayal trauma – and that it is OK to focus on healing myself, not my partner.
“I want to put it out there for women that it’s really quite common,” says Eleanor, who discovered her boyfriend had been seeking sex elsewhere after they’d been together for a year. “I remember the feeling of being very, very alone. Just complete disillusionment.”
The couple were abroad for new year when Eleanor received a message from a woman in her friendship circle who said she had been sleeping with Eleanor’s partner, with screenshots of their conversations. “I remember just feeling that my world crashed,” she says.
Eleanor’s partner believed he was a sex addict and that this was causing him to seek out sex with other women. He agreed to go to counselling, so she continued the relationship, until she came across more infidelity and lies. “It made me feel that I’m not going to be enough for anyone,” she says. “And undoing that has been the hardest bit of work I’ve had to do.”
***
As sex and relationship psychotherapist Paula Hall, author of Sex Addiction: The Partner’s Perspective, puts it, it’s the degree of “hiddenness” that makes this discovery so painful for partners. “It is such a shock because they have absolutely no idea what has been going on for so long – and when you find out you don’t really know the person closest to you, you end up not trusting the ground that you walk on,” she says. “When there’s an affair, usually it’s a symptom of a problem within a relationship. But not with this.”
Sasha believes she completely changed after discovering her husband of almost 30 years had been seeking sex outside the relationship for at least two-thirds of that time, eventually owning up to his behaviour as a sex and porn addict. “I was the most trusting person, but I don’t trust anybody now. I have always been a very secure and confident woman; I’m not any more. I think these men destroy women,” she says.
It was only in the past eight years that Sasha noticed what she felt to be excessive porn use. “I’d wake up and find him masturbating in bed, and I would pretend I wasn’t awake,” she says. “I always had this sneaking suspicion, once I started to notice the porn, that there was more. Then I found a pack of condoms – he’d had a vasectomy when our youngest was one, so I was like: ‘What the hell is he doing with condoms?’ I believed he was faithful and wouldn’t hide anything from me. But after all this, I started becoming obsessive and searching everything.”
Unbeknown to Sasha, her husband had been seeking counselling for porn and sex addiction. He eventually revealed to her that he had had an affair with a woman at work, then that he had regularly frequented massage parlours to have sex with women. What hurt the most, she says, was when she worked out he’d visited a massage parlour while they were on a family holiday with their children and when she was away visiting her mother, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
She learned about her husband’s secret life about a year ago, and has decided to stay with him for the time being at least – as many partners do. She says: “To a certain extent I have come to terms with what has happened. I try to make myself live in the moment, but it’s hard. When it’s really bad, I’ll go for a walk or a ride, and just crank up really good music and sing and scream in the car – that helps me a lot.”
But the pain is still raw, and the betrayal – especially the sexual nature of it – leaves deep wounds. “My grandson was four months old when I found out, and I swear it was the thing that saved me, because I would have been gone,” Sasha says. When I ask why discovering a partner is a sex addict leaves such a lasting pain, she says something that speaks directly to my own experience: “It’s so personal, so raw. It’s almost like you’re standing there naked in front of people. And they’re critiquing you and comparing you.”
Eleanor has not been in a romantic relationship since her discovery, six years ago. “I think I just completely separated sex and love,” she says. “I miss romantic entanglements now and I’m probably ready to have another, but it would be really hard to trust someone.”
Partners can be left with feelings of inadequacy, empty of trust. But there is also a burning, uncomfortable question: was the term sex addiction just an excuse?
“If you want to be someone who goes off and has a lot of sex, more power to your elbow – just don’t do it while lying to someone in a relationship,” Eleanor says. “When you say it’s an addiction, what you are saying to your partner is: ‘It’s not really me.’ The more we pathologise normal human behaviours that are bad, the less we take responsibility.”
Indeed, there are still differing views on whether this behaviour can even be classed as an addiction. The term itself is complex, and the interpretations of it are clouded in shame and societal pressures. A 2017 open letter from three sex-positive US notfor-profit groups – the Center for Positive Sexuality, the Alternative Sexual
ities Health Research Alliance and the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom – suggested that to refer to someone as being addicted to sex or porn implies that their drives or interests are “normal” or “not normal”, which can unfairly demonise or stigmatise their practices. Researchers also noted that religious and moral disapproval has contributed to perceptions of what constitutes porn addiction, sometimes shaming what is “normal” behaviour.
* * *
Sex addiction was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), used widely in the US, in 1994, because the clinical components that define an addiction, such as withdrawal or risk of death through overdose, had never been observed.
Some research has claimed there’s no evidence that hypersexuality is a disorder like an addiction, with one author from a 2013 UCLA study stating that it “does not appear to explain brain responses to sexual images any more than just having a high libido”. On the other hand, in 2014, researchers at Cambridge concluded that viewing pornography does trigger brain activity similar to that triggered by drugs in the brains of addicts.
“Addiction itself is a controversial domain of research,” says Joshua Grubbs, associate professor at Bowling
Green State University’s Department of Psychology. “But at the public-facing level, there is a very basic agreement among scientists that, as with a lot of these substances, people can become addicted to them in the sense that they cannot stop using them, and there are consequences associated with not being able to stop.”
Scientists have so far landed on a clear clinical definition only when it comes to compulsive sexual behaviour. In 2019 it was characterised by the World Health Organization as “a persistent pattern of failure to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses or urges resulting in repetitive sexual behaviour”. In 2018, scientists had argued that there was “growing evidence” that compulsive sexual behaviour disorder was an “important clinical problem with potentially serious consequences if left untreated”.
“When someone comes to me and says: ‘I have a sex addiction – I need help,’ what I understand them to be saying is: ‘I feel like I can’t stop this behaviour, and it’s causing me problems,’” Grubbs says. “Now, is that a true addiction? Is that a compulsive behaviour disorder? These are all important debates for a scientist to have. But from a practical perspective, I don’t think they carry much weight. When someone says: ‘I have an addiction,’ they’re telling me they feel out of control.”
What many therapists do agree on is that this behaviour is deeply rooted.
It becomes a coping mechanism, widely believed to relate to an early emotional or physical trauma, neglect, depression or anxiety. Paula Hall says the addiction is linked to how sex makes you feel rather than the act itself. It’s the escape. “For some people, there is also a desperate need for constant validation. But often it’s a way of escaping life, a life that is just not being managed very well.”
It may say something about the age we live in that the number of people seeking help for sex addiction has increased in recent years. Though Grubbs doesn’t have clear figures, he says the number of referrals he’s received for sex addiction therapy has risen, while Hall, who runs the Laurel Centre for sex and porn addiction therapy in the UK, says she had a 50% increase in referrals during Covid-19 lockdowns.
The lack of a clear definition of what constitutes a sex addiction or sexually compulsive behaviour may have contributed to this rise. It’s allowed for self-diagnosis, blurring the lines between what could be a disorder and people simply choosing to seek out sex or porn regularly. “There is some speculation that people are using the term sex addiction to avoid accepting responsibility for doing sexually gratifying things that other people have a problem with,” Grubbs says. Experts do of course insist on the need to distinguish nonconsensual behaviour from classifications of sex addiction, as Hall told the Guardian in 2018: “It absolutely in no way excuses the offending and is a completely separate issue.”
So it feels especially sinister and dangerous when terms such as illness and disorder are adopted to excuse bad behaviour. Tiger Woods cheats on his wife? He’s a sex addict. James Franco is accused of inappropriate behaviour and admits to sleeping with his students? He’s a sex addict. And, most harrowingly, Harvey Weinstein, after sexually assaulting and raping women for decades, publicly checks into a rehab centre for sex addiction.
“It strikes me as someone looking for a reason that people should not be angry at them for the things they choose to do,” Grubbs says. But that is to discount the experiences of those who bear the consequences.
***
The sun feels softer, the warmth of the room less suffocating. It is now hours after the first revelations began to crack my version of reality. Each minute brings some relief, with the understanding that I could not feel worse than I did just before. I sit quietly, feeling empty of tears. I look at the man beside me and have difficulty seeing my partner, the person I’ve shared so much of my life with. It is someone else, a stranger. He is someone I don’t want to know.
For a long time I struggle with my ex’s claim that he is a sex addict. I swing back and forth between believing fully in this disorder and thinking he adopted the idea of an addiction to avoid scrutiny or blame. If he does indeed believe he has a problem, I hope he’s seeking help. More than anything, I hope no one else has had to be on the other side of it.
I settle on this understanding: whether or not it is framed as addiction, decisions were made in order to deceive me, and that knowledge is painful to this day.
I cannot be more grateful for therapy, but mostly for friends and family, the people who made me dinner, dropped off packages of chocolate and bath bombs, always listened openly and sensitively; for the hugs, the late-night texts checking in. Time heals, but time with loved ones makes it bearable.
Sasha tells me: “I felt like my world was crumbling – but we’re strong, and we can get through this.” I know that to be true.
Names and details have been changed.
In those first weeks, I couldn’t be angry at him. His addiction was to blame, society was to blame. Even I was to blame