How on earth do I decide when enough is enough?

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Dear Hera,  

My boyfriend and I have been together for three years and recently have been having a really hard time. I feel like SUCH a cliche saying this, but we really do have such a great relationship outside of this issue. He is my best friend, I’m still so in love with him despite him hurting me, and we have previously had many conversations about the future and how well we see our lives fitting together.

The problem: he is addicted to porn, and keeps lying to me about his usage of it. He is fully aware of his addiction and is seeing a counsellor about it, but he cannot seem to stop lying to me when I ask how he’s going with things. It’s happened a few times now where he tells me things are good and then I later find out he hasn’t been entirely honest (usually through me looking on his phone, which I know is terrible but my gut tells me I’m not being told the truth and I keep being proven right).

I think there is a world where I can find peace with his addiction to porn and react calmly and rationally when told about it open and honestly, but right now when I find out about his “slip-ups” I react very emotionally at the feeling of betrayal from the lying, which isn’t helping with the cycle of him not telling me honestly. When I’ve asked him why he doesn’t just tell me so we can avoid this, he says he just feels so ashamed and like this is going to be my final straw. And honestly, it’s getting very close to my final straw – not because of the porn, but because of the lying.

I should also point out that he doesn’t lie every time, there has been instances where he’s come to be on his own accord and let me know about a slip up. I feel I reacted pretty well and we talked through what led to the occurrence.

I guess my question is, how on earth do I decide when enough is enough? I keep thinking when I’m finally at my wits’ end it will be so clear to me that I’ll have no problem leaving, but each time I am pulled in two directions between my heart, telling me there is still hope and he is a good man and he’s working so hard to be better for me, and my head, which tells me I’m an idiot for constantly allowing my boundaries to be crossed. Where is the line???

Please help,

Last Straw

Dear Last Straw,

Many people think of porn as a victimless crime. But the female performers are not just nameless, faceless women. They are mothers, sisters and daughters, horny milfs and well-endowed stepsiblings whose jean shorts are chafing them…

This is one of those emotionally loaded subjects, on which there seems to be a vast spectrum of opinions, ranging from those who consider all porn “cheating” to semi-professional gooners who spend hundreds of dollars a year on fascinatingly specific OnlyFans content. Because of this, it’s hard to intuit what someone means when they say “addicted”.

Is his use so compulsive that it’s getting in the way of your intimacy or his ability to function in the world? It’s completely up to you to negotiate the terms of your relationship. But there’s a massive gulf between someone who’s regularly jacking it to hentai in the staff bathrooms and someone who is trying to quit because their partner really hates porn.

I have a lot of sympathy for young people growing up with unfettered access to the internet. I grew up in a time when you were only likely to accidentally stumble across porn if you ran into someone’s illicit magazine stash abandoned in the woods. Now it’s unavoidable. Trying not to be addicted to porn in 2025 sounds like trying to stay sober at a 24/7 whiskey convention.

Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with people watching porn in a relationship, as long as it’s not impeding their ability to fuck. People deserve a private fantasy life, and anyone expecting total imaginative fidelity is frankly delusional. I also think there are a few interesting double standards. Some of the romantasy I see people reading on public transport is an order of magnitude more raunchy than your average amateur home video. Besides, is porn really more emotionally threatening than what goes on in the privacy of someone’s imagination?

Having said that, porn addiction is unquestionably real, and I completely agree that lying is the major issue here. If it’s got so bad that your partner is regularly seeing a counsellor about it and still can’t stop, it does seem like this problem goes much deeper than a basic ideological disagreement.

I can’t tell you what your final straw should be. Honestly, it sounds like you’re almost there, and are just gathering the courage to make the call. Sometimes it takes a while to leave a relationship we know isn’t right for us. I have a lot of empathy for both of you. It sounds like you have a lot of love for each other, and this situation has been extremely stressful.

However. It does sound like your ability to trust him has been majorly eroded. His repeated lies have forced you to become an amateur detective, scouring his internet history for clues and violating his privacy. The thing about being an amateur detective is you never get to clock off. A relationship where you have to constantly monitor someone’s behaviour because they’ve repeatedly proven they’re not trustworthy is an exhausting and miserable one.

People can change. But even if he stopped tomorrow, and never again stared into the mesmeric vortex of another woman’s naked anus, it doesn’t mean you’d be able to relax, because you’d still have a lot of trust to rebuild before you could feel confident he was being genuine.

I can’t tell you whether you should break up. People’s relationships are always more complicated than they seem from the outside, and I don’t think there’s anything dumb about trying to offer someone a little grace. But if your relationship is consistently the most stressful thing in your life, and you’ve only been together for three years,  that’s usually a good sign you should consider breaking up. You’ve been trying so hard to make this work, but your one wild and precious life shouldn’t be spent neurotically monitoring someone’s search history. That’s no way to live.

It’s OK to love someone and want the best for them, and still decide your values are fundamentally incompatible. It’s OK to love someone and decide there’s too much water under the bridge.

I’m not going to lie. If you’re hoping for a zero-porn relationship, you may find it difficult to meet someone with compatible values. It might be worth asking yourself if this is really the hill you want to die on. But that’s entirely your decision to make.

Good luck.