AIBU to ask my partner to move out over addiction and lack of support?

[Endo33]

AIBU for leaving this situation?

My partner has a porn addiction. At first I turned a blind eye thinking something along the lines of "everyone does it". But the more time went on the more I realised that when it goes beyond occasional use it has a profound impact on the brain. Even just the fact he's up late at night watching clip after clip meant he was grumpy and short tempered the next day, low in energy and unhelpful, etc...before we get into all the other impacts.

He got into a 12 step programme and is making okay progress, has dropped the porn but still stays up watching YouTube shorts for hours before bed so the impact of rejecting time with me "because he's tired" but then not actually sleeping till late so then being perpetually tired is still there.

It got to the point where earlier this week I asked him to move out.

But now I'm wondering whether I overreacted.

What happened was that a few months ago I had a miscarriage, and the way he reacted highlighted to me that I'd be very vulnerable if I had been pregnant for longer - he went to the library for hours to journal rather than helping me get from the car to the house, look after our DC etc. We almost split up then, but after some long talks decided to use my period as "practice" where he can show me how hes improved in being present for me when I'm ill (my periods are VERY painful). Well, this month he left the house for two hours to buy a gift for our DC and only came back when it was time for me to leave....he said he was scared if he didn't bribe DC with a gift he'd have refused to leave. I don't think that's particularly helpful parenting, you can say to DC "mum needs some tlc right now" but I can see why he might have thought leaving me alone was the right thing to do because thats what he'd have preferred. So in one sense I feel like I did overreact

But in another sense I feel like he wouldn't have found the DC "such a handful" if he hadn't been up in the early hours fantasising about women. He says they are unwanted intrusive thoughts and he doesn't know what to do about them but I feel like the YouTube shorts late at night are not helping with the clarity of his thinking and he does have control over it. It also makes me feel rejected that he has so many thoughts for so many hours about other women.

Sorry this is all a bit of a jumble but I hope it made enough sense.

I think you’re over reacting to him going out of the house for 2 hours unless you asked him not to? But overall, no, I don’t think you’re overeacting ending the relationship.

I'd end it too. It sounds awful.

I've said in the past I'd like him present when I'm feeling ill, hugging and rubbing my back - not the whole day of course but I was leaving when he came back so it felt like he was avoiding me and had deliberately filled the time out to avoid directly nurturing me. Also all week he'd been going to bed early as he was tired, but then scrolling on his phones till midnight, so it felt in the moment like he was avoiding me all week on purpose. But I can see in retrospect he probably wasn't doing so deliberately and we should have just communicated about it.

Overall though I don't think I'm strong enough to watch the porn addiction play out and stay. So it's probably for the best.

I think ending things requires more strength. You’re stronger than you think but if you stay I think he will sap that out of you.

Yes I agree
he is neither use nor ornament really

Don’t focus on one incident, the fact is he’s fairly selfish and unpleasant to be around means you’ve made the right choice.

Yeh. He's okay when he's been sober for a stretch and we have really good times (hence the pregnancy!) but it's awful when he relapses into bad habits again, and doesn't seem to take much.

Oh god at least stop trying to bring more kids into the world with this loser. They don't deserve that. If you want to stay and put up with it then that's up to you, but more kids are really not going to help in any way.

Yes I can see that now. Things had been good for a while before we got pregnant. We're not TTC anymore.

This is a very odd post. You used your period as "practice"? He sounds dreadful. LTB

Yeh I maybe didn't word it right but he said he's going to work on being better in a crisis in therapy, and I said "I don't want to wait for another crisis before I know if it's worked or not" and he said "well maybe I can show you how I've improved when you're on your period as you always feel pretty sick then".

To be fair to him since the miscarriage my father has been in hospital and he was much better dealing with that than he would have been before the therapy.

If you don't want to be writing the same sort of post in a year or so from now, get your ducks in a row and separate.

No OP your intuition is leading you the right way. And you do not need to to overexplain yourself to MN. Relationships are impossible when there is addiction as it takes over every aspect of the relationship so your reactions, over time, change, you will be walking on egg shells, navigating situations you know you will eventually loose out in and yeah you did the right thing. Imagine raising a child in that environment, they dont have a choice. Its toxic and you will find, over time, that your nervous system will settle, and things will become easier as you will not have to worry over this.

You naturally want to focus on the good parts but I would bet that the bad outweighs these times. I highly doubt it took two hours to find a gift, what else might he have been up to? Ultimately you want and deserve more.

Yeh I think it's the unpredictability that is wrecking my nervous system.
But on the other side...I feel like my child is stuck with it for life as it's his child too and I can't just cut them off, it feels like a disservice to exit left myself and yet my child can't.

You need to reframe that thinking OP, if you stay with him you are showing your child that this is an acceptable, healthy relationship they should aspire to replicate themselves as adults. If you leave you are showing them that it’s ok to leave an unhealthy relationship.

I would leave someone with a porn addiction without a backward glance.

I love that phrase 'neither use nor ornament' 🤣