is pornography cheating?

I am searching around the blogosphere for other partners of addicts... other recovery blogs... it helps so much to feel less alone with this. Weird how reading posts by people you have never met and will never know the identity of can help heal so profoundly... so thank you to all those writers out there that have helped me without even knowing it over these last few months. Links to the blogs are on the right hand side of this page, check 'em out!

A post that really got into my head this afternoon was over at Margaux Meade's blog: Love In The Time Of Addiction on the issue of whether masturbating to porn is cheating if you are in a relationship. It links to an article from 2008 that is worth a read.

I feel that it is cheating. My instincts tell me that it is cheating. It feels like a redirection of sexual energy towards someone that isn't me. That is infidelity. The lack of ability to connect intimately when using porn looks and feels exactly like the way someone who is having an affair comes across sexually (I know because I've experienced that little charm of life too back 8 years ago). When I asked my partner why he had bothered subscribing to a particular porn site that required an email address, rather than just using the myriad resources for totally anonymous porn viewing, he told me that it was because the site had user photos. That made my heart feel like a knife was working its way into it... and when I write it now still hurts just as much. It was infidelity. It was wanking to real people... not Debbie Does Dallas or a centrefold in Playboy, which still would be infidelity to me... but it is a few levels higher than that... it is your girlfriend leaving the bed that you share together and have just slept naked next to each other in, to go and have a shower... and you log on to a site to look for other real girls that turn you on because they exist in the real world and you get to wank to them.

That. Is. Infidelity.

My partner and I haven't really talked extensively about porn being cheating, partly because his shame about his addiction is so overwhelming and he is really working through everything bit by bit, that I really don't want to compound his guilt any further right now. At some point we will talk about it. The rule he has always had for himself is that he doesn't cheat. So to realise that actually he kind of has been cheating as much as he thinks he can get away with, is pretty hard to come to terms with. If it had been a real girl in the room with her legs spread whilst he masturbated in a chair, that would be broadly seen as cheating... even if he had never met her before, didn't know her name, she had just walked in off the street, for free, no strings... it would still be cheating... so why is it different just because it's on a screen?

That said, I don't feel the same absolute devestation with his porn addiction that I would have felt if he had actually had sex with someone else, so I absolutely recognise that there are different levels of sex addiction. It isn't healthy fidelity within a relationship though. It feels like a betrayal. Knowing that a site appealed to him because it was 'real' people is so so so painful to me. It feels like he has been unfaithful... to a lesser degree perhaps, but it still feels like a betrayal. He would wince at the thought of sex with me because he would have spent all day masturbating to porn. How is that not a betrayal of your partner? How am I supposed to feel knowing that other women were getting his sexual attention? I realise it has nothing to do with intimacy or love... but making light of the role of sexual focus within a relationship is, I think, skating on extremely thin ice.