Chapter 1 – The Journey Begins

“Victoria, I have something I want to tell you,” my fiancé began. “I don’t want any surprises or secrets between us. And I don’t want to hide this, or feel shame about it like I have in the past.” He paused and took a breath, then plunged ahead. “The thing is, I like to look at porn.”

This simple declaration took our relationship on an unexpected detour, well off the beaten path. 

Several years ago I began seeing Garry again, a man with whom I’d had a relationship eighteen years earlier. Much can happen to people in eighteen years, and this was certainly true of us. At the time we reconnected, Garry had left a marriage three years before and I had just ended a three-year relationship. In some ways, it was as if we had never parted, but the growth we had both experienced in the intervening years had given us a capacity for much deeper intimacy than we’d had before. Along with the joy and ease we always felt together, we seemed better equipped for the art of loving. Quickly, we knew we wanted to be together, and we became engaged.

One of Garry’s patterns in earlier relationships had been to hide what he believed were unacceptable parts of himself, which had the unintended effect of virtually ensuring that he would not experience the intimacy he longed for. He was determined to change this pattern, and he chose to be open with me about who he was. When he told me about his longtime pattern of viewing pornography, I felt no small measure of discomfort, but I found that his honesty and openness, and his willingness to be who he was and to share that person with me, deepened my love and respect for him. For the time being, I accepted the situation, and we began working on the issue and my unease with it.

We were still working on it when an unexpected job opportunity for Garry compelled us to decide about living together much sooner than we had expected: his new position meant moving across the country. Garry had often moved for his job and had no strong attachments to where he was living, but such a move would take me far from my work, friends, and community on the East Coast. After weeks of deliberation, we decided that the gains outweighed the risks, and so we moved to California together.

My personal crash came soon after we arrived and settled into a rented house. Suddenly I found myself with no systems of support—and only when they were gone did I realize how much I had relied on them. Without my work, I felt lost, lacking purpose. I was meeting new people but didn’t yet have friends, and the time difference and our conflicting schedules made it difficult for me to reach out to my friends back east. Exploring my new home helped pass some time. The seaside town where we lived was as spectacularly beautiful as calendar art, but for me it was every bit as flat; I felt no connection at all to the place. With no real friends and nothing to do that had any meaning, my feelings of isolation grew. I was profoundly lonely, and I felt as if my very identity was dissolving. I had pulled the plug on my former life, and the only connection I had left was with Garry. I began to focus more and more of my energy on him, both positive and negative. And one of the things I fixated on was his desire for porn.

We were sharing a computer now, and the amount of porn he was viewing was literally in my face. Each time I entered a web address or search term, the computer offered a list of possibilities I might be looking for based on previous sites visited. My stomach pitched when I saw the choices. While the list of porn sites seemed quite long—an issue in itself—what bothered me most was that I couldn’t get away from it. No matter what I entered, porn sites were always an option.

I was suddenly terrified. This habit was no longer okay … he was no longer okay. I asked myself, “Who is this person I’m with? What does it mean that he needs this kind of stimulation in his life? Is there something wrong with the relationship? Is there something wrong with me?”

Garry: I knew that this move was a big change for Victoria, especially since she’d left so much behind, and now that I could see she was starting to have some doubts about the move, I felt guilty. I tried to reassure her that looking at porn had nothing to do with how I felt about her, but I could tell that she didn’t believe me. I also couldn’t explain my desire to look at porn, and it wasn’t something I was ready to give up. In a way, it was like an old friend.

I found myself becoming more and more secretive. I felt shame and started to hide what I was doing from her so she wouldn’t be upset. If she walked in while I was looking at it, I quickly clicked off and pretended that I was looking at something else. This only exacerbated Victoria’s fears because she could sense the dishonesty. We were beginning a vicious cycle fueled by guilt, shame, fear, and distrust.

I had a sense of dread. I started to wonder if I’d done the right thing by telling her the truth. Some things are best left unsaid; maybe this was one of them.

There was no doubt: I was worried. Garry liked his porn. He would come home from work and sit down at the computer and unwind by surfing the web for pictures of women that stimulated him. While he perused a variety of types, his favorites to look at were young, beautiful nude women, and he liked reading erotic stories.

I hated it that he looked at other women’s bodies for hours on end, day after day. I wanted him to take that kind of interest in my body and our lives together. It brought up many of my insecurities about what I should look like and whether he would judge me in comparison to all those other women. I also worried that he was using porn as a way to numb out and that he wouldn’t be able to face the challenges of a real relationship.

Garry: I really didn’t understand why it was such a big deal that I liked to look at porn. So what? I had hoped that Victoria would be into looking at it with me so we could use it together as a way to have fun. I also thought that if she didn’t have such low self-esteem, it wouldn’t have bothered her as much as it did. I thought this was her issue, not mine.

I was livid when he told me that porn was my issue! It was as if he expected me to say, “Yes, you’re right. I’ll just go over here and deal with it all by myself so that you can keep doing what you want!” Ugh!!

We were deep in conflict and butting heads. I found myself famished for anything that might ease my pain, and at the same time, I wanted to understand Garry better. While I still felt too much fear and shame to reach out to friends, the Internet seemed like a safe place to get some help. Ignoring the porn pop-ups, I sought out advice columns and articles related to the subject. Much to my surprise, I found nothing helpful at all. Nothing? How could this be? Surely there must be people who had been down this road before me and could share what worked for them. But instead of what I needed, I found back-and-forth arguments about porn. These left me just as unsettled—and worse. I began to feel hopeless.

Most of the arguments fell into one of two camps, with the language of each side inevitably couched in terms of good versus evil, right versus wrong. One side argued that porn freed them from unhealthy inhibitions and repressions. They stressed the importance of being allowed the freedom to do as they pleased without fear of society’s reaction. The other side stressed that these so-called freedoms impinged on the rights of others. They condemned the users and purveyors of porn for contributing to the suffering of women and children.

“Porn is the ultimate deal breaker. Never tolerate it in a relationship!”
“Looking at porn has nothing to do with the person’s partner.”
“It’s all about the right of freedom.”
“Pornography is degrading and offensive to women.”
“Looking at porn is contributing to the suffering of those who have been violated.”

While I found much of the discussion compelling, and I thought that much of it held some form of truth, none of it was helping me to navigate the angst and confusion in my relationship. I wasn’t getting any sense of relief from my distress, nor was I gaining any insight that would help me better understand either Garry’s actions or my reactions. I felt righteous one moment and utterly confused the next as I bounced back and forth between the differing poles of right and wrong. I was longing for something that I didn’t know how to articulate: something outside the paradigm of polar opposites, something that had room for my pain as well as an understanding of the motives underlying Garry’s behavior.

Shadow Territory

Sometimes, after touchdown from my latest trip on the World Wide Web, I wondered what was actually going on in our culture. If what I was reading was any indication, pornography was a bigger issue than I had ever imagined, with people on all sides suffering in some way because of it. Porn was everywhere, it seemed, so why did I feel so alone with it? How could something be so prevalent yet still so much in the recesses of our culture? Why hadn’t I been aware of this before? What was it about porn that kept it hidden, especially in a culture where sexual images abound?

Sex is ever-present in magazines, on television and the internet, in films and on billboards. Some parents dress their little girls in miniature versions of sexy adult clothing and march them across stages to be looked at by adult men and women and then judged on their attractiveness (a theme a suburban family struggled with in the movie Little Miss Sunshine). We see TV commercials with young, sexy girls suggesting that driving this car, dressing in that suit, owning the right stereo means you get the girls (i.e., sex) by extension. And we see young men in Calvin Klein underwear on sidewalk ads in major cities, suggesting that anyone can have the man with the underwear for the right currency: sex.

In these and other ways, sex and images of sex are around us all the time. Our culture is suffused with them; the sexual tension is palpable. One would think we’d be talking about all aspects of it, including porn, but we don’t. Many of us have a hard time talking about sex at all, let alone what I call the more taboo aspects of it. Oh, we can joke about it, sure, but open, frank dialogue? Forget it.

I wondered if porn was a direct extension of such avoidance. Is it possible that in our reluctance to discuss sex, to confront it directly, we have created a situation in which it has to go underground in a sense, to a place where people—like Garry and millions of others—can be free to express themselves without censure? Is it there, in that underground space, where it not only grows but flourishes and becomes magnified?

I recalled the famous psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow, that unconscious part of ourselves that we repress or suppress. Jung believed that the shadow represents everything the conscious person has disowned and rejected in him- or herself, and he emphasized that unless we bring those aspects of the self into conscious awareness, we will be condemned to project those attributes, that essence, onto others. More pertinent to the subject of pornography, that essence would find a way to express itself, often in unrecognizable and distorted ways.

As I contemplated Jung and the debate on the internet, I wondered … could it be that pornography is one of our culture’s expressions of all that we don’t dare discuss—its shadow? Is it the collective cultural unconscious resisting the restraints placed on it by our refusal to discuss our sexuality? Or are we longing for something hidden in ourselves, unconsciously trying to find it in pornography? This possibility made sense, and I began to feel hopeful at last. I certainly didn’t have all the answers yet, but I finally had a place to start looking.

Paradigm Shift

Concurrent with my contemplation of the shadow, I was looking for something else: a way to understand myself and my reactions, as well as Garry and his desire for pornography, that went beyond all the arguments about right and wrong, moral and immoral. I found a poem by the Sufi poet Rumi that resonated with this desire:

Out beyond  ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
There is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

I realized that I wanted to know this field: in truth, to live in it. I wondered if Garry and I could meet one another out beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing and embrace our distress over porn. For quite a while I held my longing and questions in my heart, not speaking of them even to Garry—until one day the answer came knocking at my door.

I had done some work in the past with Nonviolent Communication (NVC), which has also come to be known as compassionate communication. This is a process developed by Marshall Rosenberg that is designed to bring forth our natural way of giving and receiving by speaking our truth with honesty and listening with empathy. It supports a quality of connection in which what is deeply valued by each person is equally valued by the other. This is accomplished by connecting to the core values of oneself and others and by clearly expressing observations, feelings, needs (deeply held values), and requests—while avoiding language that implies wrongness on the part of others.

A few months after arriving in California, and not long after I’d had my realization about the pervasiveness of porn, I invited a local NVC teacher to my home to tell me what training was available locally. As I’ve experienced with most people I meet in the NVC world, I felt safe and comfortable talking with him about what was going on in my life. When I brought up my angst about Garry’s porn, he listened empathetically, which helped settle my anxieties some.

Then I asked, “Why do so many people, including Garry, look at porn?”

“Well,” he replied, “looking at porn is just a strategy for meeting needs, so if you can identify the needs he is meeting with it, you will have your answer. For example, most people strive to get money, but it’s not the actual pieces of paper they’re after, it’s what money gives them. So money is the strategy to meet the need. For some, the need is purely survival: it’s a way to put a roof over their heads and food in their mouths. For others, it’s a way to get the respect or acceptance they want. The same goes for pornography—people are after something when they look at it.”

I was starting to get it, and I was really curious now. “Got any ideas about what it might be that Garry is after?”

“I don’t know about him specifically, I think it is probably different for different people. Maybe some want relief from the complications of a relationship, and they still get to feel the aliveness that comes from sexual energy.”

We were quiet for a while, and then he added, “But that doesn’t mean porn is meeting all of Garry’s needs. Often, a person will do something to try to feel better in one part of his life that has consequences for other parts of it. And then there is your side of things.”

“What do you mean, my side of things?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “your pain is telling you that there are some needs that aren’t being met for you by his looking at porn. If you can see those needs clearly, it will give you a greater understanding of what is so important to you.”

I was hanging on to his every word. This was what I had spent weeks trawling the Internet for but couldn’t find: a way to understand what might be going on for the both of us. With these simple statements, I found what I was looking for and the door barring peace and understanding sprung open. There, glittering in the morning sun, was Rumi’s field.

- – - 

It would take a while for Garry and me to understand what he meant and how we could step onto Rumi’s field, and longer yet before we could find ways to live there. This book is the story of how our insight evolved—and how we ultimately created the love we had always wanted.