There is a definitive art to healing after living with a porn-addicted partner. 

The summer of 2021 brought to the surface so many collective anxieties about entering a world that appeared to be re-opening on the heels of a year-long global pandemic. As awful as those anxieties were, I stepped into the summer wishing that was the only battle I was fighting. The truth was: my relationship of a year-and-a-half had fallen spectacularly to pieces in mid-May. The man I had survived the pandemic with had packed his belongings and moved out of our shared rental home over the course of a weekend. This is not a unique experience.

The real problem was that for the last year we had been struggling with a dead bedroom as a direct result of his severe porn addiction. For almost four months before the breakup, my self-esteem had reached the point that I was unable to look at myself in a mirror without crying. I had not been able to masturbate in over eight months due to it leading to the same frustrating result. While most women experience some level of struggle in learning to accept and love their bodies I had reached a level of loathing that was unparalleled even for me.

When mid-May came and he told me he was moving out, I approached it with the suppressed calm of a person that has undergone so much trauma that the only response left is a numb acceptance. After the obligatory haircut, I walked around my house after he was gone for good in a sort of wakeful coma. I was at a loss and my self-esteem was shattered. I would talk about the experience that led to the destruction of my self-esteem over the course of the past year but that is not the purpose of this piece of writing. A month post-breakup I was, once again, sobbing into the screen during my weekly therapy session when I finally told my therapist that I had not had an orgasm in almost nine months. The look of sheepish shame on my face as I disclosed this piece of information said everything I needed to know. In the before times I had been the type of person that legitimately loved sex, masturbation, and the exploration of someone’s body. You don’t truly realize how much sex means to you until you watch your own libido die a horrific and slow death. I had been experiencing so much anxiety and depression and stress because the pressure valve was no longer available in any way.

I caught a glance of myself in the camera and started crying even harder when I realized I didn’t recognize myself anymore. Who was this blubbering, desperate woman in the camera? When did I become her?

I decided something needed to change. I had THE haircut after all. That day I wrote out in my planner “Tomorrow, Saturday, at 8 a.m. sharp you will look at yourself in the mirror for five minutes without looking away.” I woke up at 7 a.m. with a feeling of dread in my stomach. I made my daily ration of coffee and paced the house for forty-five minutes and when the alarm went off I slowly shuffled my way into the bathroom where the only full-length mirror lives behind the door. I sat on the edge of the tub, took a deep breath, and looked into the mirror. There she was. Puffy-eyed and wrapped in a ridiculous-looking bathrobe. I was reminded of the meme where Daniel Radcliffe is waving a gun outdoors while wearing a bathrobe. The image was so sudden and so ridiculous that I simultaneously burst out weeping and laughing. I cried for the remainder of the time but did not look away. This was my daily task for two weeks. Every morning at 8 a.m. sharp I would anxiously trot into the bathroom and cry for five minutes while staring at myself in the shower. But this was the easiest part.

The next assignment I gave myself began in the third week. After staring at myself for five minutes I would get in the shower, take my morning shower and then pull the shower curtain back to look at myself freshly clean and naked in the same full-length mirror. I will not disclose how many times over the course of the next two weeks this resulted in my sitting in the corner of my bathtub still naked sobbing for hours afterward while my hair air-dried itself into a cloud of anxiety, anguish, and frizz in the post-shower humidity.

After a month came the hardest assignment of all. Having grown up as the daughter of a pastor in an extremely strict denomination, the subject of sexuality, orgasms, and masturbation had always been something I struggled to enjoy without that familiar feeling of guilt. It was something I overcame but not without extreme difficulty and a long amount of time. In the fifth week after collecting myself from the corner of the tub, drying my eyes, and wrestling my hair into a ponytail I walked myself into the bedroom and pulled the massaging wand out from the back of the dresser where it had sat fully charged for months. Many of us have experienced that frustrating moment of losing what appears to be a promising orgasm. I know this was something I had experienced before whenever I accidentally shifted my hips or moved my legs mid-session. What I had never experienced until this year was the horror of touching any part of myself in a sexual way and immediately bursting into hysterical tears. For four days I got as far as the initial touch and then lay naked in bed crying for most of the afternoon. I considered the detachable showerhead but was determined that it was not as intimate as this. So I cried on.

On the fifth day of the second month came a miracle of miracles. My first orgasm in almost ten months happened so quickly and so unexpectedly that you guessed it- I burst out sobbing. I started to realize as this pattern continued on into the sixth, seventh, and second week of the same assignment that it wasn’t the release of the orgasm that I needed so much as the release of the pent-up grief and anger behind my tears. That is what really started to tip the scales of my healing process. By the middle of the second month, I gave myself my fourth assignment. Post orgasm, (or however many I chose to have that day because one of the few benefits of being a girl is being able to have multiple back-to-back orgasms) walk back into the bathroom, look into the full-length mirror at myself (still naked) and stare at myself until I could say five good things about my appearance. The first day I stood in front of that mirror for an hour before telling myself that I had nice eyes five times. On the second day the list had expanded to 1) having nice eyes, 2) having nice lips, 3) well you have legs I guess, 4) you also have a good head of hair and 5) great cheekbones.

It turns out I really love my cleavage, I have excellent cheekbones, the curve of my lips is supremely adorable and my eyes really are that great. These days I’m back to taking selfies to the horror of all of my Instagram followers. I can walk from the bathroom to the bedroom naked without feeling like I’m offending the walls of my house with my body. I have reached a new level of resorting to orgasms when I experience writer’s block (perhaps a few were had while attempting to write this essay) after having read about the practice in Adrienne Maree brown’s book Pleasure Activism. I can say with full confidence that as I walked past my mirror this morning and caught my own reflection in the light from the window (yes, there is a window located in my bathtub because why not) I envisioned myself slow walking while Mariah Carey’s Fantasy played in the background and I smiled while thinking to myself: “damn you’re having a great hair day my love.”

Here are a few things I have learned over the course of the past year: 

  • It is possible to shatter into a hundred thousand tiny pieces.
  • Everything is survivable. 
  • Crying while crumpled in a heap in the corner of the bathtub is deliciously dramatic and therapeutic. 
  • It is possible to experience a great orgasm while crying. 
  • Human beings are beautifully resilient. 
  • I am capable of overcoming even this. 
  • I really do have beautiful eyes.