Here we go again SOs, should the addict disclose his addiction or hide it?

This analogy makes no sense whatsoever. I stand by my earlier comments.

Dude, if you have fight this hard to try convince yourself and everyone else that you aren't a PA...take another look. You are an addict. Everything you have listed is an excuse to try to hold onto it. You have an addict mindset to use these arguments. Do yourself and your SO a favor and first humbly admit that you do, in fact, have an addiction. Start a journal, ask for advice, and start your recovery. We are all here to support each other.


As for staying or leaving, it's an individual decision. Yes, I have stayed with my husband, but not because I have too much invested after 19 years when i found out. It's because he had too much invested to lose. He knew that if he had refused to admit he was an addict and refused to change, I was gone. I would have filed for divorce and taken custody of our two children. Things would be very, very different than they are nearly 2 years later.

 

Yes, @GG2002 was misleading, in the way I ORIGINALLY wrote my objection: “Once again GG2002 is not telling the whole truth. There are MANY SO’s RIGHT HERE on nofap who admit that they would not date PA’s yet now they are heavily invested in the relationship with them and are not leaving. GG2002 your bitterness for your ex is causing you to continue to mislead guys.”

 

If the analogy makes NO sense to you, I'm afraid the problem isn't with the analogy. ;-)

I wish you had read what I wrote more carefully. Go back and take another look. I wrote: "I don't know if I'm a PA." I really don't. I turn to porn at times, but am I ADDICTED? I don't know.

 

Analogies, by their very nature, perhaps are never perfect. I get your point, but I know you get mine too. I gave an example of something which would be patently unfair to women. I believe the shame tied to porn use is patently unfair to men, because visual sexual stimulation is part of their very nature. Answer me this please then: what struggle is not only mainly a woman's struggle and not a man's, but a struggle where women are routinely shamed for? Can you give me an example?

As I said, I believe it is only fair that we find middle ground here. A man cannot be absolved of all responsibility, but you CAN'T hold men up to the same standard as women, because they are innately different!

How is an innate significant difference between the sexes when one sex is shamed for it not unfair?

 

Dude, you do not know what you are talking about. She doesn't mean anything of the fact to stay or not, of course, no one would wanna start or continue to be with anyone with any kind of addiction. She just gave an advice as a SO, be honest that's all. I wish I was honest with my wife from the beginning. I'm not gonna go into details what I've done, but I have done some bad shit, and now I'm not sure if my wife will decide to stay with me. I'm doing everything I can to change who I was, but I'm afraid it could be too late. If only I talked to her and told her about my addiction, she wouldn't push me away. She would be there to help me with it and it would show her that I can be honest with her, which would improve our relationship. Lying is never is the answer and withholding the truth is the same thing. Longer it takes you to tell you the truth, she would think that's how long you lied. Yes, there is always the chance she would leave, but it would be her choice and not you trapping her. You know when the saying "If you love her, let her go" I look at that "If you love her, tell her the truth." The longer you wait it would be that much worst for her, and it would hurt her that much more. Trust me I see it in my wife's eyes, I wish I was honest with her and reached out to her for help. Now, I really am scared that it's too late.

So, she is not misleading, she's saying from SO's perspective and if you don't see it you need help. I don't know what happened to you, I don't know your story, but most of the PAs on here, who hurt their wives, will tell you the honesty and as soon as possible is THE MOST important thing.

 

There are also people on this site who don't display intellectual honesty. When someone points out what they are saying is factually incorrect, and yet they continue to spread untruths, that is deplorable. To make it worse, these people hold up honesty as much more important than being porn-free, and yet they themselves don't display honesty! Unbelievable hypocrisy.

I have admitted before that I have a problem with porn use. But the truth is the truth, and this is a mathematical, probabilistic FACT: any man who struggles with porn can correctly say "If I were a woman, the odds are that I would NOT have this struggle!" This is not my opinion, this is mathematical fact. @GG2002 and others try hard to deny this fact, but at the end of the day, it remains a fact. They can't change this anymore than they can change the fact that 2+2=4.

I am NOT looking for a green light to continue to use porn without feeling bad about it. But it is so incredibly unfair to hold men up to the same porn sobriety standards as women, because men are more visually sexually stimulated (in general) and because the culture feeds men a steady diet of sexual imagery. And there are many, many more reasons than this, like that men have 10x the testosterone as women, etc.

 

Wade, all I was saying is that @GG2002 has written repeatedly that PAs need to tell their SO up front about their addiction or they WILL leave them once they find out much later. That is untrue, and that's why I said she was misleading guys. Now, SHOULD a PA tell his SO up front? Of course! But I just was telling her (repeatedly, unfortunately) that what she was saying was untrue. Now, if she wants to shame a man into telling his SO upfront that he uses porn, fine, but use these reasons: (1) it is dishonest, (2) it is disrespectful, (3) it is selfish, etc. Do NOT however tell an untruth! That's all I was saying. (I try to write clearly with good English - I don't know why people have trouble understanding me.)

 

Is it fair that women are being victimized as nothing but objects and masturbatory aids by men who refuse to control themselves? Is it fair that children across the world are being sold into the sex industry because men are more visually stimulated than women? Is it fair that wives and girlfriends are betrayed and abused because men have 10x's the testosterone? Is it fair that women have shitty self-esteem because our "culture" (aka men), have repeatedly told them they aren't good enough just the way they are? Is it fair that these sex addicted, testosterone charged, visually stimulated men blame biology, society, and everything else instead of taking responsibility for their own actions? Is it fair that wives, girlfriends, sons, and daughters are constantly being lied to and not getting a whole husband or father because he wants to live a double life? It is fair that wives and girlfriends are living with shattered hearts and the effects of real trauma because their men are selfishly bringing thousands of other women into their relationship and putting those women above them?

This is what all of your "gender unfairness" has done to others around you.

Just. Stop.

It is clear you are a right-fighter. Why do you so badly feel the need to be right?

 

NO! You are not misleading men in advising them to be honest early on... It shows respect. I'm so pissed off that I spent 7 years with this man that I now feel I don't even know. He KNEW that porn was an issue for me because I disclosed this while we were dating... He chose to continue to talk me into marrying him, hiding that he was a porn addict. He KNEW I didn't want my daughter around someone who had sexual integrity problems because of my history. He admitted that he thought I would leave him if he told me... so HIS desire to be with me was more important to him that MY desires as a mother and wife and I was totally disrespected and exactly what I feared would happen if I was with a porn addict happened... to my daughter... so yes... BE HONEST FROM THE GETGO!!! Do NOT wait until your "love" is invested. All it does is show that you love yourself and NOT your SO. Vulnerability and honesty are admirable, lying is cowardice and really a turn off.

 

This seems to be something of a semantics issue, and an irritating one at that. If @GG2002 had said ‘it’s very likely that the SO will leave’ would anyone argue that?

From the opposite side of things, as an SO, I agree with her fully that the SO will leave. Maybe not in body, but in intimacy, in affection, in connection, in trust, in spirit, and in soul.

And at the end of the day, if the addiction and lying continue, an SO should leave. For their own sanity and self respect and to set an example for their kids. Women, especially, are taught to tolerate way more crap than they ought to, ‘for the sake of the family’. As movements continue to balance the equality between sexes (and I hope all people), I am anticipating that will no longer be the case. At that point I think GG’s opinion will be all the more accurate.

Of course this is all my opinion, not fact, as GG herself later clarified. No one knows the future with full certainty. However the plausibility and very real possibility of partners leaving an addict, especially one whose addiction hits partners on such a personal level, cannot be denied.

 

As @TooMuchTooSoon said, this is a semantics issue. I'm saying that @GG2002 has been misleading PAs here when she writes "an SO, once they find out about a PA's addiction, will leave", because that is demonstrably untrue. And she's also incorrect in saying that that was an opinion statement of hers. It is a statement which can easily be proven false. It is a factual statement, not an opinion statement. (I am dumbstruck how she, as an attorney, doesn't understand this simple distinction.)

Now you're objecting to something different. You're saying that it is not misleading to advise men to be honest early on in a relationship. And I agree! No argument there. So you (and others) have just misunderstand my original argument about @GG2002 being misleading.

 

@EyesWideOpen, you say a lot of things which are true. It is definitely not fair that women are victimized so. It is definitely not fair that wives and girlfriends are betrayed and abused so. I hear you. That sucks. It sucks bad for so many women who are victims of male porn use. I will, however, disagree with you slightly when you say that it's not fair that men blame biology and society instead of taking responsibility for their own actions. There must be middle ground here. Is it false that biology plays a factor? NO! Is it false that society plays a factor? NO! Therefore, men must be given some slack, some leniency. As I said already, they shouldn't be totally absolved from responsibility, but they can't be held 100% responsible, and they certainly shouldn't be held up to the same porn sobriety standards as women. If I said it was shameful for anyone to be under 5'6" tall, would that be fair to women as a gender? Now there are some men under 5'6", but there are many, many more women under 5'6" than men. So that would be incredibly unfair to shame women as a whole due to that height standard.

And so there's a difference between the unfairness men suffer from and the unfairness women suffer from. Men are shamed for being porn users, women are not shamed for being victims of porn users. Women may feel bad about themselves, they may feel that they need to measure up to porn stars (they don't), but society does not generally shame them for being victims of a guy's porn use, unlike how it shames guys for being porn users.

I know I am right in my bringing up @GG2002's incorrect statement. She made a factually incorrect claim (multiple times, actually), one which is demonstrably false. It's like asking me if I feel the need to be right that 2+2=4. There's no need to be right, it just is correct that 2+2=4, and incorrect that 2+2 != 4.

But when @GG2002, or anyone else on NoFap, says something factually incorrect which misleads PAs (misleading meaning here that it gives them an untruth), I feel the need to correct things, and if I see it, I'll correct it.

 

Dude, how many guys say they use porn, and guys are like, "All guys use porn" .... that's not guys being shamed for porn use, but embracing porn use as a male right of passage or something.

When women speak up about porn they hear, "You're not having enough sex with him are you?" "Get more adventurous with him" "Well, you did gain X amount of pounds, work out and maybe he won't use"

Women are shamed about porn when they speak out, they are made to feel that their concerns about porn are stupid and they are to blame. Guys using porn these days is "normal" so guys usually aren't shamed, it's not like my husbands guy friends said to him, "Dude you use porn! How could you you sick pervert!" No, they all discussed their porn usage growing up as normal, a male right. Men talk being like, "Yeah, I watch porn too."

Women are shamed, men are accepted.

 

This is exactly what I was thinking. Men are not shamed for using porn at all. But woman are shamed when they speak up about it.

 

YAAASSSSSSSSSSSSS!