Is your relationship with pleasure complicated?

1. Check out my new pleasure course which is enrolling now through April 22, 2019 (we’ll enroll again in June!). It’s called Power in Pleasure: Reconnecting with Your Hunger, Desire, and Joy and runs for five weeks online. I’d love to see you there.

On with the show!

I received a doozy of an email recently all about a partner who watches porn and the damage that’s caused to their relationship.

The story of their relationship is long, complicated, and full of problematic behaviors, so this week, I spend a large portion of the episode slowly breaking down the email and what it looks like when we try to control our partner’s behavior.

We’ll explore:

• Why snooping and looking at a partner’s phone and emails never OK
• What to do when a partner comments on our bodies and tells us to make them look a certain way
• What to do when we are doing things we don’t want to do sexually for a partner without receiving anything in return
• Why asking a partner to stop watching porn actually causes more harm in the long-run
• Why the science doesn’t support sex “addiction”, porn “addiction”, or food “addiction” and who is profitting off of us thinking otherwise
• Unhealthy relationship dynamics
• And why we NEED to start our relationships with our values and dealbreakers so that people can enthusiastically opt-in rather than being forced to opt-out later

Plus, a sad and confused email from Heart Broke Sex Freak. He cheated on his wife and left his marriage to be with the woman he cheated with only to have the new partner cheat on him. He feels lost and scared and like karma came for him.

Can a relationship survive cheating? What’s on the other side of infidelity?

We’ve got some BIG questions this week, so tune in and see what you think.

Want to support the show and get rad bonuses? If you support the show on Patreon at $3 per month, you get exclusive weekly bonus content you can’t find anywhere else. If you support at $5 per month you get the weekly bonus content AND a chance to help me answer listener questions. Check out this week’s bonus and support the show by heading to patreon.com/sgrpodcast.

Follow Sex Gets Real on Twitter and Facebook and Dawn is on Instagram.

About Host Dawn Serra:

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Episode Transcript

Dawn Serra: Happy Day of Trans Visibility. I also just wanted to acknowledge that this show is always and forever in support of trans visibility, trans rights, trans access, and overturning all of the oppression that trans and nonbinary people face. So to all over the trans and non-binary and gender fluid listeners out there, know that I appreciate you, I see you and this show is here for you.

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra. That’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships, from a place of curiosity and inclusion. Tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics, and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here inservice to joy, connection, healing, and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.

Dawn Serra: Hey, you. Welcome to this week’s episode of Sex Gets Real. I’m recording from my bedroom. Normally, I record in my office but my office gets so fricking hot and it’s the middle of the day, and now that spring is here and it’s sunny and amazing. My office gets so hot and the bedroom is one of the coolest rooms in our place so I thought I would record from our bedroom, which if it sounds a little different it’s because the acoustics are different. But hey, you’re in my bedroom with me. Yay. So I will be nice and cool while we do this week’s episode. 

I also wanted to remind you I am enrolling still for my Power in Pleasure course and I would love to see you there. We’ve got a whole bunch of folks signed up already and I think it’s going to be amazing. It runs for five weeks entirely online. It starts April 22nd and goes for five weeks and not to worry if you can’t attend this one. I’ll be running it again probably sometime in July. But it’s called Power in Pleasure: Reconnecting with Your Hunger, Desire and Joy. It’s going to be an online course and community that is all about helping you to discover, befriend, and prioritize your pleasure and your body. 

We’re going to be unpacking all of the ways that we got disconnected from our bodies and our pleasure. All of the things that disrupt our understanding of our wanting and our urges, and our hungers and ways that we can start to savor, feast, delight and find satisfaction and enoughness. And how that ties directly to our experience of power in our lives. So if you want to join me or check out the details for the course, you can go to dawnserra.com/pleasurecourse All one word and I would love, love, love to have you in that course. So please go check it out and be a part of it with me. 

Dawn Serra: Patreon supporters, I have a really exciting bonus for you this week. So be sure that if you support at $3 and above, you head to patreon.com/SGRpodcast to hear the bonus from this week and all the previous weeks. If you support it $5 and above, you get to help me answer listener questions and I’ve posted three new questions within the past week and a half or so. So if you want to potentially have some of your advice or some of your experiences read on air, you can support at $5 a month and above gets you access to the weekly bonus content and those listener emails that you can weigh in on. Every single dollar makes such, such a difference for me in this self-funded venture of many years. If you can spare even a dollar, I would appreciate it endlessly. And, of course, don’t forget you cannot search for the show on Patreon because they have coded me as porn. And even though all we do is talk about sex and we’re not actually engaging in sex on the show. They refuse to change their position on that. So the only way to find the show is to type the URL in, which is patreon.com/SGRpodcast for Sex Gets Real. So head there and check out your bonus content. 

I’m going to be fielding two listener questions this week. One of the questions is really complicated and there’s a lot going on in it and instead of just picking one or two things to pull out, I really wanted us to go deep into what this email has to offer us. Because I think many of us have had experiences of one version or another with several of the things that are in this email and I think it deserves some attention. So before I read the email, I just want to say a couple of things. The relationship, as it’s described in this email at least, is what I would consider definitely dysfunctional and both people are behaving in abusive ways towards the other. I’m going to read it and then I’m going to break it down piece by piece because there’s a lot that deserves to be discussed. 

Dawn Serra: So here is the email from Christina. The subject line: “Is watching porn cheating?” Hi Dawn, this is a bit of an essay and I hope it’s not too much. Thank you ahead of time. Your podcast give me hope and I look forward to them. So from what I gather, you are pretty porn positive, feminist porn positive. And I’m here to ask your thoughts on something I’ve been struggling with for well over a year. I cannot move past my partner watching porn, as far as I know from what he tells me he hasn’t been. 

However, I’m suspicious still. I’ve been dating a cis het man since June of 2017. On Christmas day of 2017, I became aware of the fact that he had been watching porn the entirety of our relationship that far. his porn consumption wasn’t once a week or one video each time. It was every day, sometimes twice a day with 40 minute sessions, even sometimes an hour before I came over. He admits his porn consumption even intervened in our sex life because there were times he wanted to have sex but physically couldn’t because he had watched so much porn already. 

I was so lost and hurt. It’s not like our sex life was lacking. To be honest, there was an apparent orgasm gap at the time. He was the only one orgasming when we had sex, and he still needed to watch porn? At this point in our relationship, our sex life was me bending backwards and doing stuff I didn’t even want to for his satisfaction. I was the only one performing oral, which he demanded and whined about. And we were only having penetrative sex as well as essentially, a nothing for me. How is that not enough? It was a slap in the face and it made me begin to question everything: who he was as a person, a partner. I was devastated, mortified, and angry. I had assumed any porn consumption would’ve stopped at the start of our monogamous relationship. I never even communicated it because it seemed so automatic.

 

Dawn Serra: I mourned in the days to follow and even considered breaking up with him. I expressed to him that I wasn’t comfortable. Hell, I was outright hurt with him watching porn. I felt insecure and like I wasn’t enough. He told me he fantasized about having sex with the women, which made it worse. After numerous arguments, he finally agreed to stop watching porn. Two weeks later, I noticed that an old tablet that he never uses was dusted off and sitting on the TV stand. I turn it on, go to the Bing history. And to my surprise, he had been watching porn for the last two weeks. At this point, I was done. He went against my wishes and lied straight to my face.

I messaged him and he tried to say Bing fabricated his very specific porn searches. I confronted him and he promised that was it. He wouldn’t watch it. I tried to compromise and started researching healthy porn. I told him I would be fine with feminist porn. However, he refused and said he only wanted to watch mainstream porn. This infuriated me in all honesty because I was trying to reach a middle ground, but he was set on watching sexist, harmful, and sometimes downright unethical porn. Honestly, it’s not just the insecurity I feel, it’s also the porn he was searching. A 24 year old man searching for teen porn or rape porn. When I caught him on his tablet, he had been searching Danielle Bregoli look alike porn. She was 14 at the time. This all upset me. Not to mention the toxic and entitled behaviors he displayed during sex degrading comments he said to me in the past as a result of watching porn, I believe, i.e. insisting that I had to wear a bra and public because if I didn’t quote, “Everyone would see my saggy breasts and that would be embarrassing for him” unquote. 

I truly believe his perception and expectation of breasts at the time was clouded by his porn consumption. Obviously in the wake of him lying even after over a year later, I do not trust him. I think he’s watching it secretly. I guess I’m here to ask if you think it’s wrong to ask him not to consume porn. I get so frustrated and emotional about this topic because I do not believe he would simply be entitled to watch others and fantasize about other women. Why is it an entitlement in our culture? Why even be monogamous if you’re going to go behind your significant other’s back and watch porn or fantasize about other women? Why not just be in an open relationship? For my partner, it would make him too jealous and he wouldn’t be able to handle me having other sexual partners. But I’m supposed to just be okay with him fantasizing about other women? Why should I accept that it’s just what men do with a shrug? 

Dawn Serra: I view this as a boundary I’ve asked him to respect. And yet so many people I love and care for who are aware of the situation, mainly my sister, accused me of being controlling and unfair. I can’t fathom why all these people argue he should be allowed to fantasize about having sex with other women. Why do women argue with me that my partner should be able to watch porn? How is this boundary any different from others? I believe monogamy is a spectrum and what I consider cheating, others might not and vice versa. I consider watching porn and fantasizing about other women a form of cheating. It feels like the only thing stopping him from doing it is access. People don’t fantasize about living under a freeway. They fantasize about the things they wish they had access to, then add on the lying and the hiding. How isn’t this cheating? I did not consider dancing with other men cheating, but my boyfriend does. So I respected him and stopped doing it.  I didn’t question him our insist that I was entitled to do it. No one has stood up for my right to do that, defending that it isn’t cheating. Yet, so many do with porn. Could you possibly provide some insight and opinion on whether it’s okay to ask your partner to abstain from porn consumption? Thank you so much. 

Dawn Serra: Alright, so there’s a lot in here that I think is really relevant for a lot of different reasons. I have six different sections that I want to address so we’re going to spend some time here. Because it’s fascinating and it’s important and it’s common and I want better for all of us.

So first up, anyone who makes comments about your body such as insisting that you wear a bra because of your breast shape or weight or anything else is someone that does not deserve your time or energy. Exit that relationship immediately. I have all of the patience in the world for people who are trying to do better, who are interested in learning and growth, who get things wrong and make mistakes. That’s part of growing together and being human. But I do not have room in my life whatsoever for people who are disrespectful, who tried to invalidate my experiences or who expect access to my body either for sex or in the way that it looks. If you’re in a relationship with someone who says things like this about your body, you deserve better, and I am so sorry. It’s not right. It’s not okay and I recommend leaving.

The second thing is if you have a boundary of no porn that needs to be made clear from the get go. We have to allow people to opt in to a situation beforehand, and we’re going to talk more about that in just a minute. But if you feel that strongly about something, it has to be something that you explicitly address before entering into a relationship. Because if you don’t do that and you’re punishing someone for something that they didn’t consent to in the first place, that just sucks. You’re both going to be hurting and struggling. And yes, you can work through that. And yes, lots of people do and find themselves stronger on the other end, but it does mean there’s going to be a lot of hurt and confusion that happens. If you say, “I don’t want to be in a relationship with someone who watches porn,” and they will opt in to that relationship and then they still watch porn. It’s up to you to decide if you can live with that behavior or not. If not, then end the relationship and move on. Trying to control someone and making demands is manipulative and unfair. They’ve shown you who they are and what they need. So now it’s up to you to decide whether or not you can accept that. 

Dawn Serra: You are allowed to view porn as cheating. We are all allowed to have our own boundaries and expectations and beliefs of how we want to move through the world and be in relationship with others. But if you do, you have to communicate that upfront and you have to tend to yourself around that boundary. So you said, “I had assumed any porn consumption would have stopped at the start of our monogamous relationship.” So building on this, something that I wish for all of us is that when we enter relationships we do so with more intention. 

We don’t want to just fall into a relationship and then all of a sudden realize we’ve got all of these things that aren’t working for us and it’s actually causing us harm. Maybe worse. What are our unspoken assumptions? What stories do we bring to this relationship and how we do relationship? How do I want feedback? How do I address or avoid conflict. What, for me, is the definition of monogamy, polyamory, relationship anarchy? What it means to be in a committed relationship or a casual one? 

The things that go on spoken are so often, any therapist will tell you this, any coach that works with couples will tell you this, that things that go on spoken are usually the things that then contribute to distrust and betrayal down the road. And we have all been indoctrinated into this false romantic ideal that we see in movies and we read about in books where people meet and they fall in love and then magically, everything just fits. And if you love someone enough, then they’ll automatically know what it is you want and what you need, and what you believe they can mind read. But that’s not real life. Especially not in these times when we’re all so busy and so distracted and so overwhelmed and carrying so much hurt and trauma and disconnection. 

Dawn Serra: I know that this doesn’t help you at this point, Christina, but I want to name it and offer it up to anybody who’s listening. When you start a relationship with someone, talk about these things. It might be awkward, but it’s so much better to have those awkward conversations right up front and to realize you are or not a match, that you can opt in or you don’t want to opt in to things, than to get into a relationship and potentially entwine your lives together and then find out we have some pretty big disagreements about how we want to be in life. That creates a lot more pain. 

Talk about the things that seem so obvious, you wouldn’t even think to say them. If you’re not sure what those are, ask your friends to help you discover these things. What are the things that you always talk about or make jokes about or I can’t believe they did that? Those are the things that we often bring in that are those unspoken assumptions. And inevitably, this is going to happen where we aren’t sure we even needed to articulate something until the thing happens. So part of the work that we all need to do is to increase our capacity for tending to miscommunications and misunderstandings. People are allowed to make mistakes. People are allowed to have different values and understandings of what it means to do life and to be human and to be in relationship. And sometimes it means, you won’t find that landmine until you step on it and it goes off. That is inevitable. Anytime you’re in any kind of relationship with any other human being, whether it’s work or friends or family or lovers, there are just certain things that we didn’t know we needed to articulate until it’s too late. And then we have to start deciding what kind of repair work do we want to do, but that’s not the point to then turn it into a punishment, to try and manipulate someone into something.

Dawn Serra: We’re allowed to have feelings. We’re allowed to hurt. We’re allowed to say, “Ouch, I didn’t like this. Ouch, I don’t want this. I don’t know where to go from here,” and then to make some decisions. And also on this part about porn and relationships, in my experience, porn can be a really healthy part of any relationship. If you expect porn to stop when you enter into a monogamous relationship, then do you expect them to stop masturbating? To stop having an erotic relationship with themselves? If so, those have to be communicated right upfront as core values. What you want is to find someone that enthusiastically and happily signs on for that. That’s when you know you’ve found people who are really values aligned. And we’re not going to align on all of our values. We’re not going to completely agree on how to do relationship. But what we can hope for is that for the things that most matter, senses of humor, equitable labor in the relationship, a desire to learn and grow, whatever it is that we’re both really excited to create relationship and to cocreate around these values. 

So in my opinion, it would be so much more spacious and generative to be in relationship that honors and encourages the people that we’re with to continue to nurture their erotic selves. And for some people, that’s masturbation, fantasy porn, whatever it is. Maybe writing erotica, whatever it is that helps them to feel fed so that they’re more connected to themselves and their needs. And yes, we can engage in behaviors that harm any relationship. Yes, we can use porn and masturbation, and food and exercise and other relationships and any number of other things that we experienced as pleasure, as a way to disconnect, to hide, to avoid important truths. But I just want to say that if your expectation is that a partner gets 100% of their sexual, physical and erotic needs met with you, that’s putting an awful lot of pressure on you to always be available and willing, and ready and eager, whenever your partner wants to feel into their sexuality. And that seems also like a big recipe for disappointment and hurt. 

We should be able to want to have sex at different times. And if I can’t because my body is a certain way or if I just don’t want to because I’m tired or I’m stressed, wouldn’t it be a lovely thing to be able to say to a partner, “Why don’t you do something delicious for yourself? Go Masturbate, watch some porn, have an amazing orgasm. Maybe I can lay beside you and rub your back or talk dirty to you. Or maybe you just want to go do it on your own in the shower?” But that way, we’re both tending to ourselves. That’s what I hope for all of us, you don’t have to want that same thing. But you do need to be able to communicate that ahead of time if it’s this important to you. I think trying to control someone else’s behavior can become really problematic really quickly. If you say, “This hurts. I don’t want this to be a part of the relationship I’m in,” and then he chooses not to do that, even if it kind of sucks for him, that’s his choice. We all make choices. We all compromise in certain ways. Maybe we really wanted to go to a thing but something else came up and so we don’t get to go to the thing and we’re disappointed about it. But we’re opting in to this other experience that’s part of being alive and human on this planet.

Dawn Serra: We get to choose to do things even if it’s not the most ideal choice. Part of being in relationship is knowing that our desires are going to be bigger than our lives can hold, that we’re not going to overlap 100%. We’re a venn diagram. The things I want and need sometimes overlap with the things you want and need, sometimes overlap with time and context that it’s all happening at the same moment. And to demand that someone be different, that is where it becomes potentially really problematic and abusive and it’s just going to end and everyone feeling more hurt. 

So I also just want to take a couple of minutes to talk about restriction and how restriction leads to constriction, which leads to obsession and unhealthy behaviors. Because this is something I hear from lots of people around, lots of different things. And it just creates so much hurt and disconnection. I’m going to start by talking about food because there are lots and lots and lots of studies around food and restriction that are going to help us to unpack this question around porn. So I’m nearly done with my body trust certification through BeNourished. I’m so excited. I’ve been doing it since October. I’ve got a couple more months to go of some supervision groups, but it’s so close. I’m so close to the end and it’s been so rewarding. And so much of that work has been diving into countless studies about health, wellness, weight, eating and behavior. If you attended the Explore More Summit this year, then you know there were also several talks that really explored this space beautifully. So essentially, we are drawn towards that, which we are told we cannot have. Either by our own internal voices and monitor or by the culture at large.

Dawn Serra: Let’s go back to how we’re born. Babies are born with a very clear sense of enoughness. They know when they’re hungry and then they know when they’re done. They know when they’re satisfied, and it’s a really easy, effortless, inherent, intuitive process. We’re all born with that skill. Then along the way, things like trauma and family culture, and community culture and pop culture, and diet culture and so many other factors start to impact the trust that we have in our body, in our hunger and we start to doubt them. We start to disconnect from them. We start to distrust them. We actively deny ourselves the things that we want. And when we deny ourselves something that we want, it starts to create tension. 

This tension then creates a desire and that desire creates shame, and then we try to deny it even more and then we fall into this cycle. And what they’ve found, and I have absolutely lived my way to this over the past few years and it feels, it truly feels like magic, is that when we have plenty of access to the things we want, when we come from a place of abundance, we often want less of them, none of them, or we develop a very trusting and intuitive relationship with them. 

Here’s an example, I have had a lifelong love affair with Doritos, especially the original like cheese flavor and then the spicier Nacho flavor that came along a little couple of years later. From, I don’t know how young, from a such a young age, I was put on diets. My food was policed and because of that I knew Doritos were something that I should only have when I earned them. I had to prove to my family that I deserved certain kinds of snack foods. So this created a lot of tension because I was constantly trying to find ways to earn the thing that I wanted and that resulted in a lot of disordered behaviors.

Dawn Serra: I’d sneak them, often hiding them in my room. I try to eat way more than I actually wanted because I wasn’t sure when I get another chance to eat them. And then I’d feel really guilty and I’d swear off Doritos, and I tell myself that I couldn’t be trusted around them so I shouldn’t have them at all. And inevitably, a friend would offer me some, I’d be at a party or I’d be at a store alone and that craving would come up. And I’d try and reason with myself, “Okay, just one bag and I’ll just have a few chips at a time.” I’ll even put them in baggies so that they’re pre-portioned out so that I won’t be tempted to eat the whole bag. I’d do this reasoning and the storytelling with myself. And, of course, inevitably within minutes or hours of getting home, the entire bag would it be gone. We do this with all sorts of things because we’re taught that our bodies and our hungers, and our desires can’t be trusted and then were shamed for the things that we like and for the things that we want. 

This creates a deeply disordered and understandable behavior where maybe the things that we used to like become things that all of a sudden now we feel very compulsive around needing because we’re trying not to like the thing. That is a horrible cycle to be in and so many of us are in it around so many things. Deb Burgard who’s a Health At Every Size expert likes to say that we go from diets to donuts to discernment. And so it’s this pendulum swing of, “I’m going to restrict, restrict, restrict, restrict, restrict,” and then when we can’t do that anymore, we rebel and waste swing all the way to the other side, and we do the Fuck It plan where we just do as much of all the things as we can; because we’re angry and we’re tired and fuck you for making me feel this way. And then eventually, we slowly swing down into discernment. 

We can start asking questions like, “Am I eating this doughnut because I really want a donut? Because I want to slowly savor the textures and the smells and the flavors. I want to bask in the deliciousness of this donut and it would just nourish me on some level? Or am I going to inhale it because I feel like I shouldn’t be having it, maybe because I feel ashamed? Am I going to do it where people can’t see me because I’m afraid they’re going to judge me? Am I rebelling and eating the doughnut as a big fuck you for all the Times that I didn’t get to have donuts?”

Dawn Serra: It’s taken me years of gently stretching into this space, but here’s where I am now. I can literally have an opened bag of Doritos in my cabinet for weeks at a time and I even will forget that I have them. And I was just marveling about those with Alex in the car really recently. Because it’s completely foreign to me still that I’m not tempted to sneak them in the middle of the night or to just finish the bag mindlessly while I’m doing other things. The response to that when I finally gave myself permission, “I’m just going to eat the things that I want to eat.” 

There was a lot of eating of the Doritos. But I eventually ate enough of them that I started to feel a little bit sick about them and then I was able to even ask, “Do I actually like these?” And surprisingly the answer is not that much. Just sometimes, which is a far cry from how I felt as a teenager and in my early twenties where it was like, “Oh, my god. That’s one of my favorite foods ever and I want to eat it whenever I have access to it.” Now, Doritos are like, “Eh, sometimes.” But I can walk up and down that chip aisle 20 times and never once want Doritos. And it’s the same with ice cream.

 

In the past, I would have polished off a tub of ice cream in secret a spoonful at a time when no one was looking in just a day or two. And now, I can have ice cream in the freezer for months without having a bite. Not because I’m not trying to, it’s because it just doesn’t have that charge. If I want ice cream, I have ice cream. Maybe for breakfast, maybe for lunch. If I don’t, I don’t. And I have this space to ask, “Is this what I really want? What do I really want? What would nourish me? What would taste good?” Maybe sometimes I do want ice cream because it’s comforting and that’s okay. 

Sometimes I want ice cream because it’s a hot day. Sometimes I want a certain flavor of ice cream and not another. Sometimes I don’t want ice cream at all. But there’s all of this abundance, spaciousness. And through all of that, Alex and my friends, and my colleagues supported me so beautifully. They never policed me in any way. They never tried to monitor how much or when. They just trusted that I was finding my way towards discernment. So let’s take this whirlwind lesson about restriction around food and apply it to something like porn or like sex.

Dawn Serra: This culture simultaneously sells us endless sex and shames us for it. Culturally, we have really abusive, toxic, confusing, oppressive messages about sex and porn. And then when you mix that in with patriarchy and toxic masculinity, where so many men feel like the only way to experience touches through sex, it can create a really nasty story about sex and porn. If we’ve been shamed for watching porn at any point, if we were encouraged to hide our porn use or made fun of or even punished for masturbating; both of which are totally normal and healthy impulses to have fantasy and to want to enjoy the pleasure our body brings us, then we start to get into this cycle around restriction, bingeing, shame and secrecy. And the deeper we go into that cycle, the longer it can take to find our way out. Because we’ve created such distance from who we really are and what we deserve and what we want.

There’s just all of this restriction, constriction, shame, compulsiveness, and it feeds itself with shame. So the more we resist, the deeper and more profound the impulse becomes. And then when we tell ourselves not to think about the porn, to avoid the porn, that we’re bad for wanting to watch it, we start sneaking it so now we feel like liars. All we’re doing is constantly thinking about it, which makes it that much more intense. And then we lose our ability to experience our true wanting and instead move into this place of bingeing, which is such a normal reaction to restriction, right? It’s such a normal reaction. 

I do not believe in food addiction and the peer reviewed science totally backs that up. There’s lots of bullshit studies run by the diet Industry and by pharmaceutical industries that quote unquote prove food addiction but it’s shitty science. And there’s lots of really great articles by lots of scientists and psychologists that debunk all of those things, and I don’t believe in porn addiction or sex addiction. Just like food addiction, there is a huge, huge money and convincing people that they’re addicted to porn or to food or to sex, and then selling them on these prescriptive restrictive treatment models that are all about forcing a very narrow version of conformity. It’s all about pathologizing and there’s huge– I mean, so many of the people that run sex addiction treatment programs, porn addiction treatment programs, and food addiction treatment programs, are multimillionaires many times over. Follow the money always. So what I think is happening instead of addiction is a really healthy impulse in response to an attempt to control or deny a human desire, that leads to a behavior that creates a lot of distress. 

Dawn Serra: So going back to your email, Christina, I just want to bring that in because it sounds like your boyfriend came into this relationship already feeling a lot of shame, otherwise he would have been really up front about it from the beginning. And then to have this cycle of shame and blame and demands put on top of it is making everything so much harder and so much more challenging for him. When instead, what we need is space, time, support. A chance to feel into our desires. Knowing we might do a thing a lot while we’re trying to figure it out. 

One of the things that Dana Sturtevant from BeNourished has talked about is she’ll see parents who are worried about their kids because their kids are starting to sneak candy. And there’s obviously lots of nuance in the situation that make this answer a little different depending on each situation. But in general, some of the things that she’ll offer are then make candy as available as it can be. Set it out on the counter in bowls. Let it be something that they take and almost always, what they find is that after they’ve kind of gorged on the sugar, and there’s no charge, there’s no punishment, there’s no shame, it’s just a thing that’s around; the desire changes. And they started to want other things. But again, that takes time and space and a belief in abundance and worthiness through it all.

Dawn Serra: Something else from your email that I just wanted to extract was you said, “At this point in our relationship, our sex life was me bending backwards and doing stuff I didn’t even want to for his satisfaction.” I hope for anyone who is listening and who is in a situation like this that you stop and you really consider why. Maybe you’re doing things like that for safety reasons because you can’t leave the relationship right now, and it’s about survival. And if that’s the case, your survival always comes first. But if it’s not about survival, sex is not about tolerating and overextending ourselves unless we are very consciously and deliberately choosing to do so, knowing that we can opt out at any time. 

If you’re doing all kinds of things that you don’t want to do for someone else’s satisfaction and they aren’t generously creating space for you to also explore those things, this is not a person who has your best interests or your pleasure at heart and you deserve that. If someone whines when you don’t give them a blowjob or pouts and gets passive aggressive when you don’t have sex with them, that is abuse. You never owe anyone access to your body. And if they get shitty and behave badly when you say, “I’m really not up for that.” They need to do better and they need to figure out what’s what’s going on for them outside of making demands on you. 

Something else I just want to point out, too, is you said you turned on that tablet and you went to the Bing history and to your surprise, he had been watching porn. I hope everyone hears this snooping in a partner’s phone or browser history or email or device is not okay. It is a violation of their privacy and a betrayal of trust. If you suspect something is happening, ask directly and if you don’t trust their response, then there’s your answer, “I’m in a relationship with someone that I don’t trust. Do I want to be in a relationship with someone that I don’t trust? Where my temptation and my impulse is to go behind them and to verify everything that they say?” That’s probably not a relationship you want to be in. You either trust them or you don’t. And if you’re working on rebuilding trust because of a betrayal, then there might need to be some discussions around transparency and how you can start to rebuild trust, but it is not snooping and violating the privacy of someone that you’re in a relationship with; who is a fully realized human who has autonomy and choice in deciding what they do. All you can do is respond to what they give you and then decide, “What do I do with this? I don’t trust you. I don’t know if I want to be in a relationship with someone that I can’t trust. And whether it’s real or imagined, I have to decide what to do with that.” Not, “I’m going to start looking for all of the ways that you are untrustworthy. I’m going to start looking for all of the ways that you’re lying.” That’s creating deeply unhealthy dynamic.

Dawn Serra: And, of course, he lied about watching porn. He knew he was going to be shamed and judged if he was honest. I also just want to mention, we’ve talked about this before, Kitty Stryker was on the show a couple of years ago when we talked about this, and it’s come up a couple of times. But one of the other things you mentioned, Christina, is that he’s watching porn that you find deeply unethical ], porn of people who look like 14 year olds. For anyone out there who’s watching and consuming teen like porn, my invitation to you is to take a really deep look at where those desires come from. 

We live in a culture that teaches men to desire young girls because young girls are malleable and impressionable, easy to control, unable to set healthy boundaries. The fetishizing of youth is not about youth, it’s about control and power. And it’s possible, it’s so possible, for us to hold ourselves lovingly around the things that we fantasize about, to acknowledge the truth of our fantasies, and to inspect them and to invite ourselves to examine new pathways through erotic, fulfillment and pleasure that isn’t about perpetuating, contributing to further harm and violence. Yes, the fantasies that we have in our head are just for us and they can be taboo and weird and violent and dark. And it doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with us.

Our fantasies go all kinds of places and we can say, “Yes, this is what turns me on. Why do I think I find that a sexy? Why don’t I find these other things sexy?” What would it be like to gently move in the direction of some other things and try them on, knowing it might take a little time to feel my way into my version of those things.” But we have a responsibility as adults to turn towards ourselves tenderly, to know we are deeply indoctrinated by the culture around us, and we can also be doing the work of shifting the stories we carry, the things we find desirable. You can absolutely change the things that you find desirable, the bodies you find desirable by just taking a little bit of time and being really gentle and loving around it. And know we can birth our way into new realities that are less violent and less harmful. So I also just want to offer that.

Dawn Serra: Okay. So I didn’t even have a chance to hit all the points that I wanted to hit, but there was a lot here that I really wanted to address and zero in on some key things that I know lots of other people are wondering about. I also just want us all to ask, are we creating a culture in our relationship that allows for us to say scary things, to admit the places that we have shame, to admit the places that we’ve constricted or hid from ourselves and each other, and to allow for those kinds of conversations to happen from a place of generosity and grace? Because so many of us end up in relationships where we feel like we can’t talk about things that are important to us because we get punished when we do, and I want us to all practice into new ways of being with each other, knowing that’s going to be really uncomfortable.

I also just want to say that the relationship that’s being described in this email started from a place of unspoken expectations and then that led to ashame, which led to lying. And on top of that, when you’ve got a partner who makes disrespectful comments about your body, that is never ever, ever acceptable. It’s not an excuse to violate someone’s privacy or to go snooping. They’re totally separate things. Both behaviors aren’t okay and it’s so rare that I say these words. But after reading this, I really think you would both be better off if you ended this relationship. If you took some time, maybe a couple months, even a couple of years, to do some healing work with the help of community and a professional to really reassess how you do relationship. Why are you staying in relationship with someone who says such terrible things about your body? Why are you staying in a relationship with someone who isn’t prioritizing your pleasure during sex where you’re doing things you don’t even want to do? Why are you staying in a relationship where you deeply distrust this person, and then do things that you probably don’t really want to be doing like snooping and violating their privacy? Why are staying in a relationship with someone who’s made it clear that porn is important to them and this, for you, is something that feels deeply, deeply hurtful and not okay. 

I really, really want all of us to try to find a partner where we can both opt in from the getgo about our values, communicate them clearly and openly without manipulation or attempts to control each other, knowing we’re going to step on landmines, knowing things are going to come up and we’re going to say, “Whoa, I didn’t realize I was going to feel that way about this. This feels way different than I expected. Maybe it’s way better. Maybe it’s way harder.” And then to make choices from there, but that comes from a very place than the the closing down, the shutting down the demands, all the things that are outlined here.

Dawn Serra: We all make mistakes. We’re all indoctrinated into deeply problematic, toxic, violent beliefs about relationships and sex. And we’re all trying to figure out as we go. But in order to be in just relationships, healing relationships, we have to be willing to do the work to examine our own behaviors and how we can do better, which is what I hope, in hearing this email, all of us can be invited to do. Maybe we’ve done some of these things in the past. Maybe we’re doing them now. Can we pause, acknowledge, forgive ourselves and invite in new ways of being and moving ahead.  Thank you so much, Christina, for writing in and for sharing all of this. I know that it feels tender and scary and hard and that there’ve been so much hurt here. I hope this gives you lots to think about so that you can decide how you want to be moving forward and what kind of relationship you want to be in. Thank you.

Interestingly, just after recording my answer to the two emails for this week, Esther Perel posted a quote on Instagram thatI thought it was so appropriate. I should record this little addendum and it says, “Your partner never belongs to you. At best, they are on loan with an option to renew.” And then she goes on to say, “The grand illusion of committed love is that we think our partners are ours. In truth, their separateness is unassailable and their mystery is forever ungraspable. As soon as we can begin to acknowledge this, sustain desire becomes a real possibility.” So I just thought I’d add that little tidbit to go with this week’s emails. 

Dawn Serra: Okay. I have another email. It’s also about betrayal and heartbreak. I figured I just put them both in the same one. We can use a lot of the advice from the last question to just inform this question. But Heartbroke Sex Freak wrote in with a subject line of “Staying after cheating.”

Hi Dawn, I love your show. I need help or guidance, you could say. I have been a cheater in the past and now I believe karma has seriously come back and hit me hard. I cheated on my wife and I left that marriage. We had no kids. We were together five years. The other woman, let’s call her Pam. Really put it on me in the sexual department. We had sex in the car, in a field, all over the place. It was great. Finally, I had someone that’s fucking me. Well after opening my heart to her and doing, doing, doing, at the one and a half year mark, she went on vacation alone, got physical with a guy from the diving school. And I found out months later with a, “love you” text from a person and a picture of a guy. We talked about it or I talked about it. She denied everything and said it was nothing. 

To make a long story short, I kept asking questions. And over six months, I found out that it was a physical and emotional affair. He thought he was in a relationship with her. It was love from both sides. This explains her strange behavior and her overprotectiveness of her phone. And I have watched Esther Perel videos on this topic. I’m really trying to be a better person and to show her that I will stay with you through everything. But I feel like I’ve lost myself. This destroyed me in so many ways. We now have zero trust. 

Dawn Serra: I think I know everything, but I still get images that pop into my head. On the positive side, I guess I needed this to experience what it feels like on the other side. And I am so, so, so, so sorry I was a dirtbag. Do you know of couples that actually survive affairs? On top of all of this, I don’t know if we’re really supposed to try this hard. I want sex all the time. I told her if she wanted an open relationship to talk to me about it first, and then to let me find out like this later on my own. I just don’t know. Please help.  I also called this dickhead and talked to him on the phone and that didn’t go well at all. It actually made things worse. Thanks for listening. 

I just want to say Heartbroke Sex Freak, I feel for you. This is shitty. It sucks. It hurts. And you kind of nailed it on the head with karma seriously came back. So often when we act from a place of “I really want this thing, I really need this thing. They’ll never find out. It can’t be that bad. Cheating’s not that bad. Betrayal is not that bad. My dick or my whatever wants the thing.” And then if we find ourselves in the position of being the one who’s been lied to and kept in the dark and manipulated, and had the rug pulled out from under them, it’s a really, really, really shitty place to be. And it does hurt, of course it hurts. 

It hurts whenever we lose trust in someone that we trusted. It’s vulnerable to love, it’s vulnerable to be in relationship, it’s vulnerable to let ourselves be seen. And when someone violates that trust, they can bring everything into question. And I know you even said you feel so lost. 

Dawn Serra: To answer your question, yes, couples can survive affairs. One of the things that Esther Perel talks about is that after an affair, you can’t ever get your relationship back, but you can start a new relationship with that same person from a new place and it can be stronger. Because usually what she finds is that there have been all of these unspoken resentments, stories, beliefs, hiding that’s happened in the relationship before the affair. Often too, affairs are about turning away from ourselves or feeling like we’ve lost ourselves and not really about not loving the other person. But then when the affair happens, all of a sudden, it’s this reckoning. It’s this call to truth. And when the people in a relationship have the capacity to do the work and to keep showing up knowing things are going to hurt and be really confusing for a while, you can get to a place that’s even stronger and more resilient and more connected than before. Because you’ve had to practice all of these skills that lots of other people don’t ever have a chance to practice or they just practice in small ways. But what I do think is rare is people who have the capacity and the resilience to really stick through the discomfort and the awkwardness. 

It takes a long time to rebuild trust when it’s been shattered. It’s one interaction after another. Consistency over time that starts to put those marbles back in that jar. 

I love how Brené Brown talks about trust being a marble jar and that we all have a different number of marbles in our jar that we just show up with to relationships. Some of us have lots of marbles in the jar because we’re really trusting. Some of us have fewer. But over time, with each and every small interaction, we start to tell a story about how trustworthy this person is, and those marbles go into the jar or they get taken out depending on what happens. And when we get to a place of really trusting someone, we’ve got this jar that’s just full of marbles, which are all of the evidence, all of the interactions that showed this person cares, this person tends to me, this person listens to me. They do the things they say they’re going to do. They don’t talk about the things I share with other people. All of these interactions. And then if something big happens, like a massive betrayal, it’s as if that jar has shattered and we’re not starting from some marbles, we’re starting from no marbles. It’s even further back than when we first met, which means there’s a lot of repair work that has to happen to not only put that jar together, but then the start slowly putting those marbles back in.

Dawn Serra: Shadeen Francis who has been on the show and was at Explore More Summit talks about how after a betrayal, especially. But I think in all relationships, part of how we rebuild trust is not with honesty. It’s with transparency. And transparency is generously offering truth, that I think is going to be important to you, ahead of something happening. So letting people know where you’re going to be, when you’re going to be home, what you’re thinking, what you’d like and asking ahead of time. All of those things slowly start to rebuild trust. But in that time of doing the rebuilding, there’s a lot of discomfort. There’s a lot of distrust of, “I’m not sure if I can be vulnerable enough to believe you right now.” 

There’s going to be big feelings probably multiple times. Something else that Gina Senarighi who was a relationship therapist for many years and now is doing relationship coaching for queer and poly folks has talked about is when we offer an apology, often that apology just scratches the surface of what we really need to hear. And then we hit another layer of, “I need to hear that apology again but with more to it.” And then we offer an apology and then we go along and then we hit another bump and, “I need to hear that apology again and I need it to be more specific.”

Part of the repair work is knowing you’re going to move in and out of these big feelings, there’s going to be tears, there’s going to be triggers. And so for people who are willing to do the work and who have the capacity to be in that discomfort and to experience those feelings and to slowly rebuild, you can end up in such a powerful place. A place that’s deeper than you ever thought that it could be. And it’s really important to have professional help helping you through that, so that you’ve got someone you can talk to when you just feel overwhelmed or stuck. 

Dawn Serra: So again, the question is, do the two of you want to do that work? Can you do that work? And are you willing to give each other the time to put in what it’s going to take to rebuild that trust? Not everybody has the capacity for that for a variety of reasons. It’s not good or bad. But if we’ve got a lot going on in our lives, we might not have the energy to put into rebuilding trust or maybe we do, but the person that we’re wanting to rebuild trust with just really doesn’t. It just hurts too much. They’ve got too many other things they’re trying to work through and that can hurt and we have to grieve and mourn that. But it’s real.

So I think the thing to offer is just that when we do these things, it takes a lot of work to repair and we all deserve so much better. We might have to have some really uncomfortable conversations on the front end. But it’s so much better to have those uncomfortable conversations and maybe repeatedly over the course of time before something happens, than to have something happen and then have to do the repair work, which can take so much more time and so much more energy and so much more intention. So to answer you, Heartbroke Sex Freak, it’s possible and it’s hard work. And you just have to decide, are the two of you interested in that? Are you capable of it and where can you turn to for support as you do that repair work? I hope that was helpful. I’m sorry the two of you are hurting. And I also feel sad that for so many people, they can’t see how deeply they’re behavior is hurting until they get hurt in the same way. 

Dawn Serra: I wish more of us were able to really understand the consequences and the importance of those consequences before experiencing them. I think that that would lead to so much less hurt. But here you are and it sucks. And I hope for you a chance to find out whether or not this repair work as possible. Good luck. Thank you so much for listening to all of you who listened. 

If you have your own questions for the show, head to the sexgetsreal.com Send me your questions. I want more of them. I want to hear from you. You can also contact me on social media. I have been killing it on Instagram lately, posting all kinds of great stuff about pleasure. So if you don’t follow me yet, head to instagram.com/dawn_serra and follow along with all my pleasure posts. They’re amazing and hopefully I will see you in the pleasure course. Until next week. I’m Dawn Serra. Bye.

Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to the vocal few, the married duo behind the music featured and this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com had to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and get awesome weekly bonuses. 

As you look towards the next week, I wonder what will you do differently that rewrites an old story revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?