I know I’ll probably get a lot of people saying LTB but I have no intention of doing that, I just want to know whether my response is normal or not, and therefore where to go from here (other than leaving!)…
My DP truly is a wonderful man. He’s a devoted and loving partner, and a fantastic dad to our children. He works long hours with a long commute but the second he walks through the door he’s helping or taking over with the children’s bedtime routines so I can get a break. We’re a great team in terms of the house, neither of us needs to nag the other and I never feel resentful or as though we don’t have a good balance - all this to say that I have zero complaints with regards to our life and my DP and I are very much in love.
However, I saw something a few days ago that has shook me and I simply can’t move past it, no matter how many explanations my DP gives me, it still upsets me. We are looking for some new furniture and he said he’d seen something on a Facebook page so, whilst holding our toddler, suggested I have a look on his phone. I opened Facebook, clicked on the search bar and was confronted with several ‘sexy’ pages he’d recently visited. You know the ones, attractive young girls/women wearing next to nothing and doing provocative dances for the camera. Maybe I shouldn’t have looked but I clicked on a few of them, trying to hide my upset/panic, and to be honest some of the pictures I saw were akin to porn - women bent over wearing thongs, almost everything on show, or women in see through tops jiggling their boobs around.
I basically pretended I hadn’t seen them, and we carried on with our evening, but once the girls were in bed I confronted him. I asked why he’d been looking at these things, and he hesitated for a second before saying “because they’re attractive and I’ve been feeling really horny lately”. For context, I’m 3 months postpartum and our sex life is only just starting to get back to some sort of ‘normal’, although pre pregnancy it was VERY active and now I’m hardly ever in the mood. He knows this is just a normal part of postpartum for me, I’m breastfeeding so my hormones are all over the place, and whilst he still tells me he wants me & occasionally tries to instigate things, he’s very much respectful of the fact that I might say no and never makes me feel guilty or anything like that. He’s more than happy just to cuddle or whatever, but I guess he can’t turn his libido off and so has clearly started looking at these pics/videos instead.
In a nutshell, he says it doesn’t change anything in terms of the way he feels about me. He says he still finds me attractive despite the way I feel about myself (tired, a mess half the time!) and recognises that I am real and he loves me and these women are just nice to look at. There’s a lot more to it than that and he’s genuinely sorry he has hurt me - he has deleted Facebook (I didn’t ask him to) and promised not to do it again, but I’m conflicted about the whole thing. Is it normal? Do most men look at these things? Is it just part of our culture these days, a bit like sexy magazines used to be? Should I be worried? Should I just let it go? He’s getting a bit upset that he’s apologised and explained soo many times but I’m still bringing it up.
So, AIBU for being so upset/annoyed by this? How would you react if you were in the same position? Am I overthinking this way too much??!!