EVAN has agreed to collaborate from time to time with Porn Recovery UK about his process of working with a 30-year porn habit. Here’s his ninth blog post.

The kids haven’t really been aware that I’ve been sleeping in the spare room every night, and any discussions about my therapy or what I had been looking at and doing have been kept to late-night conversation or when the girls have been out of the house.

We’ve just come back from our annual family holiday. Obviously we booked it before all of my porn activities blew up, and so Jessica and I have had to spend the last week in the same bedroom. Thankfully, she didn’t ask me to sleep on the floor and also thankfully, as the week went by, we began to get physically closer to each other. Lucy and Maxine are getting older so quickly, I think we’ve both been aware that family can’t be like this so much longer. Call it holiday romance but by Thursday evening Jessica and I were cuddling in bed together and talking – really talking to each other.

Therapy seems to have allowed me to break down many of my barriers to talking about my problems (and not just with porn), and I felt able to tell Jessica all about how I first got into porn and how I was already quite a user before we got married. Just before we left for our holiday my first few blogs had been posted on to the web.* Reading them back I could already see how conflicted I was about facing my stuff. The truth is that my use has been much heavier for much longer than I’d said. It was the Internet going broadband that brought the genie out of the bottle, but I have been a much more frequent user for much longer than I said in the early blogs. That’s the sort of secret that porn is. Even when you think you are being truthful, another part of you is playing games and still trying to hide some fact or other. On holiday Jessica and I faced some hard truths. We talked a lot about how we had got so distant from each other, I know I could sink back into porn late nights and leave her in bed alone. (I’m just so thankful that she thinks we have both had a part in this distance and she now really seems to be understanding that porn has been a problem long before we got together.)

The joy of touching my wife again has been so great that I’m so strongly aware of what a pale imitation of the sexual world porn is. Jessica has now asked me to come back into the marital bedroom. You can’t believe what a step that is for me. At least this week my fantasies are all about a real loving relationship with my gorgeous wife and not about plastic-enhanced blondes.

* It was agreed that blogs wouldn’t be posted until at least three months after I’d written them.

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