Dear Elsa,

I’ve been with my current boyfriend for 2 1/2 years. Before we even got serious, I knew he looked at porn. Even now it bothers me when he looks at porn, but I have dealt with it. I look at it too, every once in a while. No big deal.

For a while he was using my old computer. We had an agreement that he would no longer look at, even though he would continue to do so thinking he covered it up. I could always see what he looked at, and yes I did snoop a lot, after all if was my computer.

Anyways it was always typical porn a guy would look at, nothing bad or abnormal. Recently I was on his computer at his condo and stumbled across his recent documents. In there I saw names of files which he had downloaded from limewire. I couldn’t access them because he had deleted them. He thought he covered it up, but he forgot to delete the file names from the recent documents folder. The part that shocked me was the names of these files. There were several that were underage porn. The titles of some had 10yr old in it, up to 15yr old. I was very shocked and upset when I found this. I didn’t know what to think.

I have monitored his porn activity for the past 2 yrs and he has never looked at anything like this before. I know he is not some child molesting freak. I finally asked him about this. I asked him why he downloaded that stuff and he said he couldn’t help it, he was curious. I asked him if it did anything for him and he said no. He also said it was the first time he ever looked at anything like that and had no intention of doing it again.

I just don’t know what to think. Different thoughts go through my head. I think maybe he was just curious. I know people download strange things out of curiosity. He was very embarrassed when I asked him about this and didn’t wanna talk about it after a certain point of my questioning. I love him more than anything, but now I am questioning our relationship.

We generally have a good relationship, and he has never shown signs of being into anything like that. We have even had talks before of child molestation and both know the pain it causes as we were both molested as children. He has made it very clear his feelings about the subject being that it is wrong and disgusting. This is not like him at all. He didn’t deny downloading the stuff even though he has denied looking at regular porn when he was not aware I knew before. Is it possible he was just curious? Or do you think this is a problem?

Girlfriend
United States

Hi Elsa,

I have been with my boyfriend for about five and a half years. Things are pretty great, except he has a thing for teenage girls. I discovered a teenage porn website on his computer a few years back and confronted him about it. I had deleted it, so naively, I figured it was done.

Then I noticed some pictures of girls on his computer a while later. He apologized multiple times, and said that he still loved me and wanted to be with me. I never asked him to stop, I just assumed that he would. Again, I was naive.

Fast forward a couple years to two days ago. I was on my laptop and noticed that he had created a secret MySpace account pretending he was an 18 year old. He had two “friends” who were 14 and 15 year olds. I was sick to my stomach when I discovered this.

I confronted him last night. He admitted he had an addiction and that he knew it was wrong. He said he’d stop, but he can’t say what will happen in the future. He said it’s like someone trying to quit smoking. I’m giving him some time to think about if he wants to work on us, or keep talking to teen girls. He said he’s never met any of these girls in real life. The contact has only been online.

What should I do? Should I stick around and try to help him get through this if he’s willing to work on our relationship? I just feel like he’s been so deceitful and it’s going to be really hard for me to trust him again. I love him so much though. We’ve been through a lot together and we’re just really good when we’re happy. He makes me laugh like no one else can.

Thank you so much,
Girlfriend