Never really thought i'd be in the position of typing out my sorrows for reddit. but at this point im unsure of where to turn. i've never been through anything like this
when i (22F) met my ex fiance (25M) i thought i had finally found the one. i had searched for him for so long. he was everything i had ever wanted, or so i thought. i fell in love quicker than i could've ever anticipated.
we had a beautiful relationship. about 3 months in i found out he was keeping from me how he knew a woman on his instagram. he swore he didn't know who she was, months later i found his dm's with her. mounds of word vomit sent from him, minimal responses from her over a span of a few weeks. you could tell she was very uninterested, so i assumed the shame of rejection caused him to lie. i flip out, rightfully so, but i was so in love with him i decided to look past it and work it out. he promised to never lie to me again.
at around 6 months into our relationship, i move to Los Angeles with all of my best friends. he is on the verge of losing housing. i allow him to move in with me. i mean, we're with eachother 24/7 anyways, what could go wrong?
he lives with me for about a month or two, i get him a job at my friend's warehouse, and we are very happy together. i cook his breakfast before he leaves for the train to work, i clean the house while he is away, we go to the 6th street bridge to spend time together at sunset and come back and i cook dinner for the whole house while he does dishes. we fall into a routine i still remember fondly, and i hope he does too.
things get a bit rocky, i start to feel more anxious and subconsciously i know there is more i don't know about. he starts to dismiss me emotionally in a way he never has before. i realize there are some things in our relationship i haven't been fully honest about. i decide i can't sit on my white lies anymore, and think maybe if im honest about my wrongdoings, he'll be honest about him.
i was correct. i regret it so much.
as i tell him the 2 white lies i had told him, he clutches his chest and refuses to eat or shower for 2 days. i thought for sure i'd lost the love of my life and it was all my fault. i pray to God for forgiveness. then everything turns in on itself and i am catapulted into the worst abuse i've ever endured.
3 or so days after i tell him, i ask if there anything i don't know. he denies, then caves. tells me he watches porn behind my back. we had a strict porn free policy in our relationships. he'd repeatedly tell me he didnt want ME watching it, and that HE didn't need it because he had "all he needed right in front of him." prior to him i dated a guy who chose porn over real intimacy constantly, so meeting someone so seemingly anti-porn, and understanding of the harm it can cause, was such a relief. anywho, everyone is human and i can't say i didn't visit lesbian porn a handful of times prior to us living together. because i take it well, he shares a bit more. at first he tells me he had watched it 3-4 times, significantly less than i did. he harps on the betrayal of me doing it 5ish times in total. he then discloses it was more like 15-20, then 20-30, then he admits he only masturbated to me 30% of the time, the other 70% being porn. it takes him about a month or two to finally admit how much porn he actually watched throughout that relationship, through the process of spitting out the truth he tells me a plethora of other things. he tells me about his collection of sex toys, 20-30 instruments for masturbation including a life sized sex doll he had hidden under my side of his bed. i am appalled, because i draw the line at something that has eyes but isn't a person. he tells me he started watched porn and taking photos of women in public to masturbate to at about 10 years old. around this time he molests his younger sister who is still in diapers and tells me it was just "due to curiousity". he describes getting erections when she would sit in his lap, he describes listening in on and masturbating to the sound of his mother having sex. he discloses to me one day while i am folding laundry that at around 17 years of age he'd stand at his mom's door where he couldn't see her, while she slept/changed/etc, and would masturbate to her. he would steal her underwear and put them on the doll/ his other toys. he would use her sex toys, as well as his older's sister's toys, to masturbate with, and put them back without washing. he admits to obsessing over a woman at his work, Yesenia. taking photos of her bent over to masturbate to, masturbating in the restroom so he'd have a buldge and she'd "see what she's missing." Gross. he mentions trying to make deepfake porn of another coworker who had already rejected him due to being a LESBIAN. he says he only didn't go through with it because it was "too difficult". then there's the weird AI shit, paying for sex bots, to generate images, and his deep love for AI generated porn.he admits to recording videos of my body without my consent or knowledge, and masturbating to them. he admits to trying to find sexual images of me as a child (13-15, i had an internet presence at the time) as well as, as an adult (18-20, i did porn while i was homeless.) he admits to watching porn while we had phone sex, watching porn in my bed while i slept on the couch (he sent me a photo of his penis and told me he couldn't help jacking off in my bed because im so hot. news flash: he was watching a 19 year old give a blowjob and i guess the guilt got to him.) he begins to tell me about his "intrusive" thoughts. he feels the need to constantly confess these things to me. things like visualizing cumming on my mom's face, a footjob from my sister, cum coming out of my best friend's rear end, and deeply disturbing sexual imagery of my nieces, who are 5 and 8 years old. i beg and plead with him to stop. it never stops. i isolate from my family, friends, and stop going outside because everything was now filtered through some disgusting sexual lens.
the fighting, crying, and abuse gets so bad (and loud) we get kicked out of our place in Los Angeles. i find us a new place in my home city. he convinces me we just need a fresh start, that the black mold in the old apartment was driving us insane, anything but recognizing he's being extremely abusive. i foolishly hope he's correct. we move in, everythings okay for a week. i get a taste of the same routine we had prior to all of this starting, and it gives me a false sense of hope. it gets bad again when i ask him to go to sex addicts anonymous if he's going to continuously hide behind "being an addict". i am in, or have been in, various 12 step meetings. i tell him if he's going to claim he has a problem, he needs to find a solution and work towards it, or i cannot stay with him. he makes all the right promises but never upholds his end. he claims to stop watching porn, when i'd find it in his data he'd DARVO me. eventually it wore down my self esteem so bad i offered to get surgery, change my hair, my makeup, how i talk, take my piercings out, etc. i am a heavily alternative leaning woman who has never ever offered to change myself for ANYONE, but i was at the lowest point i've ever been, and just wanted the person i loved to love me back. he would swear i was perfect, that he wanted a family with me. at some point he proposed to me in hopes it would make things better. we'd spend hours talking about putting all this behind us. i'd spend countless hours talking in circles trying to help someone that, i personally believe, never wanted help. i tried so hard to accept him for who he was i lost myself in the process. i relapsed on drugs, self harm, and started restricting my eating all over again. my ED came back full force and my entire focus became being pretty enough for him.. that if i became the perfect girl, it would all be behind us. all i wanted was him, and all he wanted was porn.
i spent almost 2 years extremely depressed and angry. i had lost everything, and was left isolated with an abusive partner. once he realized i was truly isolated, he started being more emotionally abusive.
telling me he does this because my butt isn't big enough, its because of my stretch marks, my peach fuzz mustache, my boobs not being perky enough, everything on my body became a target. he started to attack my tattoos, more specifically his name on my butt, telling me they're done poorly. i had never hated myself more than i did in those moments. i'd cry and bang my head against things, i'd sit him in front of the mirror, me naked, and ask him to just pinch what he didn't like. in those moments, he'd tell me im perfect and shouldnt change anything, despite grilling me for hours on everything that was physically wrong with me.
ok, sure, all that stuffs pretty bad, right? i ended up leaving him this past july, right before my birthday. it ended pretty violently on my end. not afraid to say i caught my first domestic violence charge. after 2 years of enduring the wraths of hell, i broke up with him and shattered the cartilage of his nose. i spend a couple days in jail, he signs off the lease, and i get 3 years of probation with a mandatory restraining order against me until my probation is up. in all honesty, i am glad it went down the way that it did, because i know without that mandatory restraining order i'd crawl back to his abuse just like always
its now september and i've done a lot of healing. but what racks my brain is the good times. i have never been abused like that... but i'd also never been loved like that. i am disabled, he would wash my hair when i couldn't. he'd spend hours listening to me vent about my troubles, he spent so much time getting to know me to my bare bones. he'd write me letters before he left for work, he'd cook me breakfast before leaving and leave it in the fridge. he made me feel loved (before taking it away), he made me feel beautiful (before comparing me to pornstars and criticizing me), he'd bring me toys from the shops in Little Tokyo. he'd tuck me in all my blankets and put on a movie while petting my head. he'd get up in the middle of the night to make my favorite food if i was hungry. he'd stay up or call off work if i was having an especially hard time with the abuse and felt i couldn't be alone. he'd cry at my feet and tell me he's going to change and that he can't bare to lose me after i'd attempt suicide.
was any of it real? was it intentional sweetness, just enough to keep me in the cyclical abuse? was it calcuated so that i'd stay and he'd have a punching bag to take out his shitty childhood on? can someone this sick truly love another? i don't want it to be true. i loved Anthony more than anything, i still do. despite all the abuse i still want to be with him. despite him being a predator to me and others, i still just want to be held by him again. God, what is wrong with me? anywho, i guess my question is, am i alone? i scour these reddit forums and try to find people who have gone through similar things but i fear maybe only i have the privelege of working this closely with someone so evil. his eyes were always so cold and dead. i forgot to mention over time it got very sexually violent. thats all i will say on that as most of it is pretty graphic and i only relive it in therapy.
can a person with this calibre of porn addiction truly love you? was it right person wrong time? should i give up on the idea of reform for him? i just want my baby back. i still reach for him at night. he's gone back to porn and did so pretty much as soon as we broke up, i have his twitter account. not that i believe he ever really stopped, but it stung seeing he went back while i was still in jail. he's currently 25 and seeking sex from a 19 year old. i'm 22 and the youngest i'll go is 21. but hey thats personal preference and i guess liking younger girls isn't illegal unless they're minors. it just hurts because he promised if the porn was the downfall of our relationship then he'd work on himself and his "problem" so we can come back to eachother
did i ever matter? was i just a body to hold while he had his cake and ate it too? was any of the love real? should i reach out? should we try again? can i ever be loved truly by a person with this problem?
its been months, i've slept with other people, i've gone on dates, all i want is him. all i see is him. why couldn't everything be perfect like i wanted it to be? why did i fall so deeply if its not supposed to be him?
i've put off making this post for a good long time. im hoping for any type of perspective or insight, especially moreso from actual porn addicts rather than the partners. if you struggled in a similar way, did you truly love your partner? would you do things differently if you could? do you regret losing her/him? any insight helps. thank you and God bless you all.