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Did you find your partner less attractive while viewing porn?

Discussion in 'Rebooting in a Relationship' started by TryingToHeal, Nov 28, 2017.

Did you find your partner less attractive while viewing porn?

  1. Yes, I found my partner less attractive while viewing P.

    21 vote(s)
    48.8%
  2. No, I didn't find my partner less attractive while viewing P.

    17 vote(s)
    39.5%
  3. After rebooting, I now find my partner more attractive than I did while viewing P.

    11 vote(s)
    25.6%
  4. After rebooting, I am attracted to my partner the same as when I was viewing P.

    6 vote(s)
    14.0%
Multiple votes are allowed.
  1. Lol...I meant how does one deal with erotic threads here to protect oneself.
    Watching porn while fuckong was a huge turn on. But I don’t want to go into any of these.
     
  2. it's all about self control and that depends person to person. I don't mind talking about it, it's not going to automatically make me watch porn since I'm already nearing 100 days.
     
  3. Congratulations!!! And happy you can control your mind. I can’t. My mind thought turns direct into action
     
    Deleted Account likes this.
  4. Jennica

    Jennica Fapstronaut

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    I can only speak for myself (and maybe a little bit for my hubby) as it’s in context. Some of the PA’s certainly had a loss of attraction for their SO’s like my husband with me. For some of us this is focused on positive changes and how we are dealing with it. It’s not about getting turned on.

    * I know for my hubby his taking part in these threads (like the other thread referenced) is part of accountability and realizing the damage his mindset had done. For this thread it would be speaking to his positive mind change.
    I hope this helps.
     
    phuck-porn! and Hopefulgirl like this.
  5. it's definitely hard but it gets easier the more you do it. Especially after 30 days.
     
    Jennica likes this.
  6. Kenzi

    Kenzi Fapstronaut

    That's why a minimum of 30days abstinence is recommended
     
  7. 100% once i saw the 30 day mark , I couldn't go back. But I was still having sex with my girlfriend though, I couldn't do hard mode.
     
  8. TryingToHeal

    TryingToHeal Fapstronaut

    A big reason I asked this question is because my husband says he didn't find me less attractive, but I don't believe him on that. I wanted to see if any other guys answered that they didn't find their spouses less attractive either, they would have no reason to lie here (but IMO my husband would). If others could PMO but not find their wives less attractive, I might be more inclined to believe him.
     
  9. I didn't find my girlfriend less attractive at all. Porn for me wasn't necessarily about what the women looked like as much it was more like a scratching an itch. Of course when I was younger, It was about sex, and fake tits and etc but after a while I was so addicted that I just needed to masturbate to relieve the stress in my life. And I used porn as a tool to do that. My girlfriend is hot always was, but if anything I just became numb and everything in life seemed repetitive and mundane.
     
  10. Jennica

    Jennica Fapstronaut

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    That makes sense, guess my reading still isn’t up to snuff with my eye injury. I have been miss reading things all over the place. I have some friends that are definitely PA’s and are very attracted to their wives still (I was a little jealous) and at least one other that is so not the case. It’s certainly possible to still be attracted.
     
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  11. kropo82

    kropo82 Fapstronaut

    I am not saying "ask him" but please please do entertain the possibility that, like me, his answer would be the opposite of what you expect. @EyesWideOpen, does he keep a journal here?

    That's exactly why I want to answer, since my own experience is out-of-kilter with the other PAs posting on this thread and with the mental model the wives and girlfriends here, like @TryingToHeal, have built of their PA partner's views.

    My post yesterday (here) was a bit rushed and cobbled together from other posts, sorry. My wife announced that she was off to bed and (for obvious reasons) I do not like staying up on the computer after she's gone to bed. (Actually it started off for the obvious reasons, now I just like the togetherness of going to sleep together.)

    Back to the plot.

    It is often jokingly said that women are good at multitasking and men are terrible at it. I think men are good at 'multi-moraling' (sometimes called hypocrisy). I'm not sure what the Victorian era is called in America but if you think back to then we clearly see that the morality men expected at home with their wives was very different from the morality they practised when they were out at night with their friends. That's not to say they kept their erotic lives separate from the home. Many of Queen Victoria's diaries were destroyed by her daughter when she died as they were scandalously racy, but even the ones that survive have some erotic moments in with Prince Albert. I imagine that lots of Victorian men practised loving erotic sex with their wives at home and sordid sex with prostitutes or mistresses when they were out.

    We are not Victorians but I think some men are still excellent at compartmentalising their minds so that they have one set of beautiful erotic encounters with their wife or girlfriend and a completely different set with pornography.

    Obviously there are many many men who cannot or do not separate their experiences out like this. For example this heart breaking post, and I've not quoted the worst of it :-(

    Men are varied and complicated, just like women. We are all human and share more than we differ on, but I wonder if men are more able to be sexual hypocrites than women. Some of us separated out porn from how we saw our wives and girlfriends.

    I posted about this recently in my journal (here) and I just wanted to copy-an-paste another factor which I think is at play in the distinction I drew between porn-women and my wife, and that is the way we look at people.

    When you meet someone you form an opinion of them very quickly. Some of that is based on what they look like, some on their clothes, some on their manner, some on the context in which you meet them, etc., etc. That “opinion” is a kind of feedback loop: what you think of someone affects how you see them, even what they look like to you. This was proved to me most forcibly years and years ago. I had an office job for a year and there was a lovely older woman worked there. We were all friends with her because she was such a fun, kind, and interesting person. A few months after I started there we were chatting and she mentioned that she was ugly because her nose had been damaged in the womb by her twin brother. I was startled, and carefully looked at her again. She was right, she did have a damaged nose, and it did make her ugly, but for the past two months I had not noticed that at all. When I saw her, I saw her through the lens of my mind’s understanding of her: she wasn’t ugly.

    When I look at my wife I don’t just see a beautiful 52 year old woman, I also see the 18 year old I started dating, the amazing mother of our children, and the woman I am hoping to get old with. I see her strengths and weaknesses, I see her beauty and her frailty, I see her love of me and my love of her. Pornography did not eat away at the richness of shared experiences that form the lens my mind uses when I look at my wife. She is beautiful, you would think so if you saw her, but she is even more beautiful and even more visually arresting for me.
     
    Last edited: Dec 6, 2017
  12. EyesWideOpen

    EyesWideOpen Fapstronaut

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    He started one a long time ago but he very rarely comes on here and when he does his posts are very shallow. There is no real participation.
     
  13. Millsdeago

    Millsdeago Fapstronaut

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    I wonder if my wife fells that way, I guess if you love someone you just keep giving them the benefit of the doubt.
     
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  14. SpouseofPA

    SpouseofPA Fapstronaut

    I always thought it was my fault he didn't look. i gained weight, wasnt doing my hair enough or whatever.
    My husband even blamed me for his P at first. that it was cause we didn't have enough sex and i said No too much.
    so it only drove that knife deeper.
    long story short he never quit porn. has used it for the entire 8yrs we been together and 3yrs we been married,
    i am not sure how he viewed me that entire time. was it real?
    there was a time it felt real.
    i felt on top of the world!
    and then it faded and i tried to fix it this whole time. well all along i couldn't fix it. he had to.
    i beat myself up for so loong. just to find out it wasn't me at all
    i should be happy about that but im stuck. its almost worse i guess. now i feel like i was never enough. UGH i am sorry for this rrant. and i am sure i am completely off topic of this thread and i apologize. but i really needed this.
    i dunno how to think. him looking now is just confusing. i want to hide sometimes when he looks. and at times i wonder if he is forcing himself to look. i love him and i dont want to leave but this feeling has to get better.
     
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  15. I voted no. When I was deep in porn I still found my now ex physically attractive. I still think she's attractive.
    This!
     
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  16. As a PA I want to try and explain how I could still find my partner physically attractive despite being deep in porn. I will start by saying that I can only speak for myself, but for me I've struggled for a long time with the belief that I have value; that I am lovable. This belief made intimacy pretty much impossible because when you're intimate with someone it's not their body you're focusing on, it's their personality. It's the very thing which makes them unique and the appreciation of which is what most would constitute as love.

    With that said lets look at the nature of porn. What is porn completely devoid of? Well it's completely devoid of personality. None of the actresses and actors reveal their personality and by doing so they expel the very thing that professes their individuality. By doing this they have reduced themselves to being objects, and since objects are completely interchangeable they have removed their value. So in this we see porn is anti-personality and as a result anti-love.

    Time to put the PA next to the P.

    PA:
    • Struggles with believing they have value.
    • Believes they are unlovable.
    Porn:
    • People are reduced to objects = no value.
    • It's devoid of personality = no love.

    Misery meet Company

    I gravitate to porn not because I find my partner physically unattractive, but because I find in porn a perfect mirror of how I feel about myself.
     
  17. well said! For me porn is a reflection of self hatred. If things in my life were going south, I would go on porn not because I had to. But once I would orgasm that shame and guilt in would set in and it would ruin my entire day. Just like any addict, I couldn't stop watching it no matter how much I hated it. During this process, I had to learn how to deal with my feelings in a much healthier way and not depend on porn to make feel good for about 5 minutes. On top of that I was hardly having sex, because I couldn't get hard whatsoever and in turn I kept going back to porn. Now that I quit watching it, my relationship with my girlfriend has improved because I got the shit monkey off my back for good.
     
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  18. TryingToHeal

    TryingToHeal Fapstronaut

    Love your post. My husband has said the same thing. He came to that conclusion on his own that he was a PA because he felt unlovable, that he did not deserve love, especially mine. He's always felt like I was too good for him (I do not agree with this).
    I feel like I say this all the time, that the key for a lot of people to stop the mindset of being a PA is to love yourself. I know it sounds cheesey and even impossible to some. And I don't say it as often as I want to, I even type out responses and then delete them and don't post (did that today actually on B3's thread) because I know I sound like a broken record, but I really think for a lot of PAs that self-hate, not loving yourself, not feeling you are worthy of live is the root issue. You and a few others here have said that as well.
     
  19. Jennica

    Jennica Fapstronaut

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    This is interesting to me. As with my hubby who did find himself with less attraction and more critical of me and shallow minded in regards to women as he stated he became more arrogant and started to feel as he put it he was “God’s gift to women”, he stated he started to feel that pictures and porn were made for him (blurring the lines of reality and fantasy) even though he had a low self esteem and he had felt unworthy overall especially in the beginning. I’m wondering if the difference is the development of false sense of arrogance so to speak?
     
    Last edited: Dec 6, 2017
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  20. TryingToHeal

    TryingToHeal Fapstronaut

    Oh that's a good point. Maybe the root is all low self esteem but it comes out in different ways? My husband didn't really react that way, didn't seem arrogant, more depressed.
     
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