hello readers,

for today’s episode, we’ve got a would-be-cheater with a twist. yes, he is a sex ADDICT. let’s take this one…

right after a quick thank you to my anonymous reader for sending this question in and also a quick reminder to send me your questions. everything is published anonymously—you don’t even need to tell me your name.

onto today’s question:

at night, the cats take over my “office”

hey- so long story story short, my bf of two going on three years now has admitted to me about having a sex addiction in the past and his struggles with fidelity. i caught him on a site, Fetlife, where he was asking girls to “help him cheat on his girlfriend” or telling them how he’s supposed to be in a monogamous relationship that’s why he was on private. he did this while i was away on a work trip and i found out about it because i saw his phone (i’m aware of how wrong that is too). you’re probably reading this and saying, why don’t you just leave. well- now looking back there were clear red flags of all of this, but i was blinded. i’m beating up myself for not being smarter. a few months ago we purchased a home together. so that’s partly why i’m not just leaving. he told me he was never planning on doing anything and how it was all attention he was looking for, but now i just find myself utterly disgusted by him and i feel bad because of of his whole “addiction” reasoning. he told me he would seek therapy, but one drunken night he said “we can solve our own problems we don’t need to include other people”. that’s the part that worries me because i feel like now he’s just acting like nothing happened and if it’s something he’s always struggled with then why not get help? ever since he told me he didn’t want to go to therapy anymore i can’t help but feel like i need to walk away from this. should i communicate my concern or just take it for what it is and leave.

quick little bit of context here for my readers who are unfamiliar: Fetlife is a social media site geared toward people involved in the kink or fetish community. unlike Ashely Madison, it is not a site that is necessarily intended to be used for discrete affairs. just want to clarify that. someone having Fetlife on their phone or search history does not mean they are a serial cheater—but they might have more leather in their closet than you’d have originally expected.

onto your question:

you need to leave this person. and i also recommend letting some of the people in your lives, maybe some mutual friends or at the very least some of your friends, know that this is going on as soon as possible. from the sounds of it, he’s making a substantial effort to downplay this and you really need someone that can keep you grounded and push back on some of that.

the Fetlife thing really jumped out at me here. see, there are people who would be interested in the kind of game he’s playing right now—minus all of the manipulation, of course. these people are called cuckolds or cuckqueens. they get off on having an unfaithful partner humiliate them by having affairs behind their back. and i sort of think that the reason he’s on Fetlife is that he wants these other women, from whom he’s soliciting sex, to think you’re one of these people. maybe i’m giving him too much credit on that one… either way, it seemed like a weird and kind of deliberate choice on his part.

anyway, your boyfriend made a monogamous commitment to you. there was no clause in that commitment that stated he could troll the internet for affairs as long as he didn’t act on them—which, by the way, is complete bullshit. if he wasn’t planning on acting on it, why’d he wait until you were out of town to do this?

and he made this commitment to you even though he apparently knew that doing so would be very difficult or even impossible for him. because, as he says, he’s a sex addict. but he isn’t willing to seek help for that addiction. he’s either lying about the sex addiction—because he got caught. or he isn’t willing to put in the work to address the sex addiction. either way, there is a strong, almost inevitable likelihood of this happening again. and probably again after that if you’re still around.

you say you feel bad about a couple of things. let me help with that. first, you went on his phone, which you say you know is bad. and yeah, that’s really not a great habit to get into. but people who’s partners make them feel secure in their relationships don’t generally get an overwhelming urge to snoop. and furthermore, you found something conclusive. you aren’t writing me upset about having found a flirty conversation with an ex. he asked these women to participate in an affair with him. in normal times, that’d be something you’d have a right to know. he could contract an STD or get someone pregnant after all. and in COVID times, you doubly have a right to know because he could contract the potentially deadly and highly contagious virus that has completely shutdown most of the world for the better part of a year now.

and about the sex addiction… if your boyfriend truly is a person who desperately wants a monogamous commitment but cannot manage one due to his sex addiction—if he really is tortured by his inability to maintain this commitment to you—then you aren’t doing him any favors by letting him sweep this under the rug. in this (hypothetical) instance, he’d continue to be tortured by those desires for the duration of your relationship because he’s made it clear that he has no intention of getting help.

personally, i think this guy is completely full of shit and as soon as there’s some distance between the two of you, i think you’ll see that, too. the reason your boyfriend doesn’t want to “involve other people” in “solving your (own) problems” is because he knows that anyone who isn’t under his spell is going to see him for the manipulative little fuck that he is.

i’m really sorry you’re going through this and i hope my response was helpful.