Did they want you to watch porn, too?

No but my GF did watch a lot of it which ended up bleeding into our "intimate moments". She wanted to try things that I was not even comfortable with(and I'm disgusting)... I had to say "look, I don't feel comfortable with all of this crap please stop" etc. So it was obvious where those ideas were coming from. Whether you are watching it together or separately, it's toxic trash.

 

Nope . We watched it separately. Both , often . That’s the effed up part . P was never the problem until it became a BIG one . Our therapist thought it weird that we never watched it together .

 

No, I tried to get him to “share” it with me (trying to be open minded) but that was incredibly difficult. I never really had any desire or inclination towards P so on the very few occasions I was trying to be open, he wanted something I was interested in but I never really experienced anything I could be into to even know. He never shared what he was into, he would get defensive about it. For him it was “something to do in private”. The last time we tried to sex while watch something I was so incredibly uncomfortable I never wanted to try that again.

 

Nope. I did make the offer to watch with him, because I thought that was 'normal' and what everyone did. I wasn't very comfortable with the idea though and p never has appealed to me. He minimized his use of PMO, told me about his 'stash' like it was something that didn't matter. When I told him I wasn't comfortable with it, pretty early on, he said no problem he'd stop. Yeah... But no, he never wanted to watch together and honestly I am very glad for at least that.

 

To improve an earlier relationship;
signed up for a weekend Catholic Engaged Encounter
in the 80s.

One section suggesting P as a way to spice up a marriage. That normalized the idea as a couple. But I was already wired for P which fueled my PA and never knew that was a big reason why that relationship died.

When watched during love making
it seemed not as interesting to my partner
as it was to me.

 

My husband preferred photos to movies. We did watch a parody P once but I felt really weird about it. He said he watched it a bunch of times without me. I read this is usually the case when couples watch P together- the man usually branches off enjoying it alone and it becomes a downward spiral.

 

This is right up there with "no no no you can totally just come to the penitential service and we'll do General Absolution. Confession is old fashioned and therefore wrong."

It's not the Council's fault; it's that everyone decided the Council meant whatever they wanted it to have meant. Ugh.