trying to understand

I'm sorry to hear that, I hope that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

I'm a recovering porn addict, so I cannot answer your question from the perspective of the wives and girlfriends here, but I will try to answer.

It is hard to work out the core of your question, is it this?

I'm not sure I understand. What do you mean by "nothing to do with us"?

If you mean "Why wasn't I enough?" there are lots of answers, and many of them will be specific to the porn user.

One way to look at it, and I find this troubling, is through the science on The Coolidge Effect. The Your Brain On Porn website has a good article about it here. I've got a long journal post (here) where I try to work out the implcations of The Coolidge Effect for long term monogamous relationships which I wrote after contributing to @AngelofDarkness's thread How to deal with the Coolidge effect in a porn-free monogamous relationship?.

But perhaps more important than science are the psychological reasons we became so immersed in porn. These are the reasons that will differ from person to person and that may make things difficult for you. You are in pain, you have been betrayed, and your husband is working to fix himself and win you back. He may not be able to open up to you about what he got out of porn, that may be too buried now to access when he's feeling defensive or concerned. And do you really want to know? When I sat down and tried to write down what I got out of porn use here is the list I came up with.

But as you can see, much of that list is personal to me and your husband's list would be different.

One thing that he may be distinguishing between is fantasy and real life. I have encountered lots of wives here who believe that if us husbands looked at porn then those women were the women we wanted to have sex with in real life. That's just not true. Enjoying a fantasy and wanting to act something out are different things.

Me too.

One last point, there are some great old threads by wives and girlfriends who have long since stopped coming here. This one may help you, by @SpouseofPA's PA, do you ever really forget? It's not about what you are asking, so I'm not sure why I think it will help you move forward, but I do.

 

I am sorry to read you are struggling, but you've come to the right place. Addiction damages (and luckily that damage is reversible) areas of the brain that limit its ability to control behavior other than the behavior that feeds the addiction. It mistakenly treats the rewarding substance or behavior (for example, watching porn) as necessary for survival, causing the addict to act impulsively and compulsively, and seek out the source of pleasure, no matter the consequences. Your husband might really not want to receive sexual stimulation from other women in the form of porn, it's just the addiction in him making him unable to control his behavior to be in line with his true desires (= wanting to be sexually faithful to you). I know that this is not an excuse for his actions. I know that this doesn't change the effect his actions have on you, it might not change you feeling betrayed and/or undesired because of his actions. But understanding the science behind addiction might help you see that this is not about his attraction to other women and wanting to be sexually stimulated by them because you don't satisfy him enough. It's just a psychological coping/defense mechanism that makes him unable to see the consequences of his actions. I hope this helps, and I hope you can continue to learn more about how to help him and help yourself of course. Good luck!