Gareth told his wife, Beth the following: “I have a porn addiction.”
It was just after they’d had their Saturday morning breakfast in the cute little kitchen of the cute little house they’d be renting since their wedding six months before. (They hoped to someday buy their own home.)
“Ewww, Gareth, that’s disgusting!”
Gareth was surprised by his young wife’s answer (she was 21, he was 23). Gareth had expected Beth to be sympathetic and understanding with an offer to help in any way she could. But no.
“Why would you even tell me that? It’s so gross.”
Gareth bowed his head in shame.
“We’re doing it all the time!” Beth was practically shouting. “Isn’t that enough? What’s the matter with you?”
A few tears were making their way down Beth’s face.
Gareth felt sort of like he did when he was a kid and his parents chewed him out. He wanted to dig a hole and crawl into it.
Poor Gareth.
Poor Beth.
“Why? Can you at least tell me why you look at porn? Is it because I don’t satisfy you?”
“God know. That’s not it at all.” Gareth was concerned now that Beth had gotten the wrong impression. He was very much satisfied with the sex he enjoyed with Beth and had been ever since they first started dating four years before.
“Watching the porn is no reflection on you at all,” Gareth added desperately. “I guess, I mean I think, well, that is, I believe it’s sort of like any other addiction like gambling or drinking.”
“How? How the fuck is watching porn all the time like being an alcoholic? Explain that to me, Gareth, because right now I’m pretty confused about all this.”
Beth’s use of profanity — particularly the “f” word — was unusual for her.
Gareth was silent for several seconds as he desperately searched his mind for what to say.
So Beth continued: “I don’t get how you can watch that stuff and get any satisfaction at all. Can you explain that to me?”
Beth was hurt and confused. She loved Gareth with all her heart.
Hectoring. Gareth remembered the word from some stupid book — a novel, he was pretty sure — that he read in college. He’d had to look it up at the time. Right now he felt like he was being hectored. He couldn’t believe that Beth was being so harsh with him. He felt like he had a problem, not like he was doing something wrong. Maybe the one wrong thing he’d done was share the problem with Beth.
“Look Beth, I’m sorry I brought it up. Let’s maybe just, uh, forget about it. I’ll deal with it. I’ll just stop looking at porn all together. I’ve tried before but this time for sure I’ll quit. You can even check the history on my computer every night.”
Gareth hoped that did the trick. He wanted this over. He wanted to get on with his day.
“Why couldn’t you have done that in the first place? Why couldn’t you have decided this morning, ‘never again, I’m quitting’ then done it and left me out of it.”
“You’re right, that’s totally what I should have done. But I kind of thought we should share everything with each other.”
“Yeah, sure of course, but not that! That’s what you call —- what is it? — an exception for making it a rule. We get to have some secrets, after all.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Gareth said softly. He wished he could rewind to the beginning of breakfast and not say anything about his porn addiction. It was stupid of him.
“Have you cheated on me?” Beth asked with what Gareth thought was a real edge in her voice. It was a tone he’d never heard from her before and it upset him, just as the way she’d responded to his confession had bothered him.
“God no! How could you even think that, Bethy? You’ll always be the only one for me.” Gareth hoped his voice conveyed how hurt he was by Beth’s question. A question that felt a little bit like an accusation.
Gareth was reasonably certain he’d never cheat on Beth. The pretty new secretary at work was kind of flirtatious with Gareth, but he wasn’t tempted. If he could resist her….
“Well, to me it’s a kind of cheating that you’d look at porn. I mean, don’t you imagine doing it with the woman in the video?”
In truth, Gareth usually did picture himself being the one boinking the women in porn videos. That’s one reason he liked to look at a variety of kind of women. Blondes, brunettes, redheads, African Americans, Asians, Latinas, MILFs, teens, skinny, big-breasted. Through porn he’d been able to sample all kinds of women. In real life he’d only been with five women and two of them just once. They’d all been about the same age and were from the same town and if they didn’t exactly look alike, they were in the same ballpark. Porn had also allowed him to try it rough with some women and be dominated by others and experiment with different positions. While he loved sex with Beth it was all pretty straight-forward stuff. They usually preformed oral sex on one another and then had intercourse in one, two or three of the six basic positions they ever used. Since they’d gotten married all the sex had been in their bed and almost every time had been at night before going to sleep. What little variety there had been to their sex life was already fading. Maybe that’s what Gareth got out of porn.
“Well, do you, do you imagine you’re fucking the woman in the video?”
“No,” Gareth lied. He had to. “I’m just watching.”
“Just watching? Is that actually exciting for you? I mean does that turn you on?”
“Kind of, yeah. I mean it does, for sure. But the truth is that I don’t feel good after watching porn. Afterwards I feel kind of empty inside.” Gareth was surprised he said that about feeling empty afterwards. He’d never really thought about it and here he had said it.
“So why do you watch it if it makes you feel bad afterwards?”
Gareth was starting to get sick of the way his wife was talking to him. He felt like he was being cross-examined in some big criminal case. Gareth was starting to feel like telling Beth to shut the hell up.
“I don’t know,” Gareth said wearily. “The whole thing is hard to explain. I suppose it’s like how an alcoholic has a hangover and feels real bad the next morning but then that night they drink again.”
Beth finally recognized that her husband was feeling rotten. She loved Gareth with all her heart and since about their third or fourth date had been sure that he was her one true love and they’d be together — as she told her best friend Ruthie — “forever and always.” They’d had maybe five or six arguments ever and always over little things. Gareth was sweet to her and a good lover and everyone — including her family — liked him a lot. He had a good job at an insurance company where there was plenty of room for advancement and she was working as a checker at a grocery store and would continue to until she got pregnant. Everything had been just great. Now when he finally had a problem and opened up to her about it she’d reacted badly.
“I’m sorry, Gareth, honey, I’ve been really mean about this. I truly am sorry. Obviously this is something you didn’t have full control over and its made you feel bad and you want to correct it and you needed to confide in me. I guess I was just taken by surprise is all. Anything I can do to help, I’ll do it.”
Gareth was overwhelmed with relief. Beth had redeemed herself to him. It had seemed for awhile that she was an unsympathetic shrew. That was hardly the case after all.
“I love you, Bethy.” He said.
“I love you too, honey. One thing, I’m glad that it was porn you were addicted to and not booze or gambling, that would have cost us money.”
“For sure.”
“Wait, you didn’t spend any money on the porn, did you?”
“No, all the sites give you free videos to look at. More than enough, trust me.”
“Gareth, I was a hundred per cent honest that I’ll help you in any way I can but on the other hand I want to know as little as possible about porn. That stuff turns my stomach. Oh I don’t hold anything against people who do it. People got to make money how they can. In fact I had a friend in high school, Clarice Simpkins, who moved to LA and does porn under some name — ”
“Cherry Stone. That’s her porn name.”
“Oh god, that’s right, you knew Clarice too.”
“I’m not sure you’ll want to hear this, but I looked at some of her videos.”
Gareth immediately regretted sharing this information with his wife. But was pleasantly surprised by her response.
“You did? Show me! I can’t believe I’m saying this but I’m curious as hell about what that mousy little girl looks like naked with some stud screwing her.”
Gareth was once again surprised by his wife.
“I’ll get my laptop,” he said cheerily.
A few minutes later they were watching Cherry Stone (nee Clarice Simpkins) in “Nerd girl gets fucked hard by two jock studs.”
Cherry Stone was slender, with small breasts, a milky white body with no tan at all, a small but curvaceous ass; she wore glasses in all her videos.
Gareth had watched the video many times before.
Beth watched in stunned silence.
Cherry Stone had fellated both men who then took turns, in various positions, fucking her, after which they both ejaculated on her face.
“Oh my God!” Beth exclaimed when the video ended with her old friend smiling into the camera with ejaculate covering her face.
Gareth asked Beth if that was the first porn video she’d ever seen.
“Once in high school at a party I watched a minute or so of one but I was pretty drunk and don’t remember it so well. Tell me, do they do that a lot? I mean cum on a girl’s face.”
“Yup, that’s a regular feature of porn videos.”
“That blows my mind. You better never want to do that to me.”
In truth Gareth had very much wanted to but could never figure out how to suggest it to Beth, especially since he was 99 per cent certain that she would say, absolutely not.
Gareth poured his wife another cup of coffee. Then he poured himself another cup. They sat in silence for a minute, each lost in their thoughts.
Gareth was glad that things seemed to have worked out and he promised himself that he would never look at porn again. He looked around the kitchen and thought that maybe, as Beth had suggested several times, he would paint it. He also thought that this might be a good day to work on the bathroom door which was squeaky.
Beth decided that she wasn’t going to be bothered by the fact that Gareth had looked at porn. She figured that most men did and it was a good sign that her husband had confessed. She was also curious about porn and what kind of videos there were. She was also blown away by seeing Clarice getting screwed. Beth sipped her coffee and wondered why her coffee wasn’t as good as her mother’s. She thought about maybe dropping by her parent’s house and looking at the spare towels and sheets mother said she could have.
Gareth ended the silence with a question: “What are you going to do today, Bethy?”
“I think I’ll visit my folks for a bit. Mom said she had extra towels and sheets we could have. We don’t have enough towels and it would be nice to have an extra set of sheets. How about you?”
“I’m going to finally get to the bathroom door. There’s also a game on I want to watch. Ya wanna go to a movie tonight?”
“Maybe,” Beth answered. “It depends on what’s playing.”
They were silent again for a little while they drank their coffee. Then Beth said: “To tell you the truth, Gareth, I…..” Beth stopped talking, not able to finish what she was about to say.
“What, what is it?” Gareth was curious — especially because of the previous conversation.
“Actually, I’d like to take a look some more of that porn. It’s just that I’m curious.”
Gareth was stunned and — though he would never admit it (even to himself) — pleased.
“It’s not that it turns me on or anything,” Beth said realizing that it kind of did.
“I understand,” Gareth said.
There was an awkward silence.
“Well?” Beth asked.
“Oh, so right now?”
“Duh.”
“What do you want to see? I mean what kind. There’s a lot of different kinds.”
This hadn’t occurred to Beth before. “Show me one you like.”
Gareth decided he’d show her a straight-forward conventional video of a man and woman having normal sex. He also decided it would be best if both participants were white. Gareth searched for Star Bloom, a porn star he liked because she was much prettier than most. She tended not to be in kinky videos.
“Okay, here’s one.”
It was called “Star Bloom has passionate sex with a stranger.”
Beth and Gareth sat next to each other and watched the seven minute and twenty second video. Gareth found Star Bloom to be incredibly hot and loved to imagine being with her. He tried to watch it more dispassionately with Beth sitting right there next to him. Beth was intrigued by the video. The couple seemed really into it and used four different positions. She recognized that the woman was attractive and saw why any man would like her. She noted that the camera pretty much ignored the man’s face. Beth loved his long, muscular body and how well-hung he was.
If Gareth imagines himself doing it with the woman, I sure can imagine myself doing it with the man, she thought.
When the video was over, Beth had Gareth give her a tour of some of the other types of videos. She didn’t like the rough sex or the three-ways or some of the silly scenarios they made up. She was intrigued by all the inter-racial sex and surprised by how many featured teens, or at least girls who were supposedly teens. That some of these girls were with much older men disgusted her.
Finally Beth said: “Okay, that’s enough. I’ve seen plenty. A life time’s worth. I can’t believe just how much there is of that stuff.”
“And I never even showed you the amateur stuff.”
“Amateur? What’s that?”
“Kind of what it sounds like. People who aren’t paid. They make their own. Sometimes the man films it or someone else does, without the woman knowing.”
“That’s just wrong.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“So you’re done with all this? You think you can stop looking at it from now on?”
“I promise you, Bethy.”
Later that day Gareth fixed the bathroom door and made plans for painting the kitchen. Then he watched the game he’d been looking forward to. Beth went to her parents house and visited for a bit and got the spare towels and sheets. On the way home she did the grocery shopping.
Beth and Gareth went to a movie that night. It was a comedy that they both enjoyed.
Before going to sleep they made love. For Gareth it was as good as always. For Beth it was somehow better. She laid in bed after wondering why. Gareth started snoring and Beth realized that this would be one of those night in which she’d have trouble sleeping.
She went into the living room, opened her laptop and searched for porn. Beth watched porn videos for two hours. When she saw it was 3:15 she said out loud, “oh shit.”
