DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: My partner and I have been together for about 7 months now, and the entire time has been long-distance. We live on opposite sides of the world, so we get to talk maybe a couple hours here and there. We’ve been able to make it work so far, but recently, I asked him about his porn watching habits and I was not happy with his answer.

To put it simply: he watches porn more than I expected, and this really upset me.

He never talked about it with me before, even though I always ask about his day (out of consideration, not because I’m snooping). I understand it’s not exactly an organic topic, but he has never mentioned it once until I finally brought it up. I feel like this something any partner would bring up with their significant other, just to make sure it’s okay. However, the fact that he didn’t and he kept watching it secretly makes me really upset. I suppose I could bring it up as well, but for me I’m someone who doesn’t watch that or even really think about porn at all. The only reason I brought it up was because of a recent documentary I watched, and i thought it was a topical discussion.

His excuses were pretty abysmal. “You’re not always here” was one of them. Well, you’re right. I’m not always there. But is that an excuse to reach out to a porn video to watch some girl that isn’t really there either? I’m more there for him than a body on a screen.

Lately, he’s been extremely bogged down with work and tells me how tired and busy he is all the time. I believe him, so I don’t try to tire him out more by getting him to have Skype sex with me. I bring up my sexual frustrations pretty often, but it hasn’t gone anywhere in a month.

He also said he never thought about how it would effect me. This really struck me – why would you not think about how watching other people have sex would effect me? Couldn’t you at least talk to me about it first?

I’ve been on multiple forums trying to see what to do about this (I know, bad idea), and a lot of them are telling me it’s unrealistic to think my boyfriend could just STOP watching porn. All men watch porn, men need visuals, etc. But to me, that’s just a poor and stupid excuse. Men are not animals; men are humans with feelings. If I ask my boyfriend to stop watching porn because it makes me uncomfortable, he should stop watching it. The raging boner in his pants should not trump my feelings. It may be an adjustment, but it’s one that any person should be able to make for their sig other if they’re serious about them. This is of course assuming that my partner does not have a porn addiction, which would be a whole other can of worms.

While he did offer to stop, I can’t help but feel really betrayed. What do I do to get over this? I feel like he’s keeping secrets now, or he won’t tell me something unless I specifically ask for it. I understand this is sort of treading into “slippery slope” territory.

I am also asking myself if this is about my self-esteem. Am I jealous of these porn videos? To be honest, I really don’t feel like I am. For me, it’s much less jealousy and much more a surprise at the complete lack of consideration for my feelings. When I asked him what he thought i would say, he said he knew I would get mad. Well then why would you continue to do it if you knew it would upset me?

Any advice would be sincerely appreciated.

Sincerely,

LDRs Are Complicated…

DEAR LDRS ARE COMPLICATED: Right, so I’m going to be up front with you LDRACL: I don’t think you’re necessarily going to like what I’m about to tell you.

Your boyfriend is going to be watching porn. That’s almost certainly not going to change. The biggest question is whether or not he tells you about it.

The fact of the matter is: most people watch porn; not just men (virtually all men do) but PEOPLE, across the gender spectrum. In fact, increasingly more women are consuming porn than ever before.

(Well, porn videos, anyway. These surveys tend to leave out things like written erotica, Tumblr pre-pornpocalypse, fan fiction archives like AO3 and so on)

If you break up with him over this issue, the odds of your finding a guy who doesn’t watch porn is going to be akin to winning the Powerball – it theoretically DOES happen, but almost always to other people. This is in no small part how humans are hard-wired. We like watching (and listening and thinking about) other people fucking. As soon as we as a species started painting on cave walls, people drew boobs, peens and stick-figure’s boning. We’ve had stone carvings of cocks, vulvas, boobs and people banging pretty much from the moment we could understand abstract representation.

So… yeah, your long-distance boyfriend watches porn. Honestly not that much of a shock.

Now, I’m not entirely surprised that your boyfriend didn’t tell you that he watches porn; after all, masturbation isn’t the sort of thing that comes up in the usual “so, how’s your day been?” conversation, any more than how many times you’ve gone to the bathroom or how many sodas you’ve had. In fact, most people don’t get into the nitty-gritty details of their masturbatory habits unless you’re specifically sharing them with your partner. And frankly, that’s exactly what his porn habits are part of: his masturbatory routine. Unless his use of porn is so all-encompassing that he has no time for you and he’s literally jerking himself raw, then I’m not entirely sure what the big deal is.

But let’s get down to the source of conflict: you don’t like the fact that he watches porn because it upsets you. So it really comes down to: WHY does it upset you?

Is it because you have ideological issues with porn? This is totally valid. While I am very much pro-porn, I’ll be the first to say that porn has a long and ignominious history of shoddy treatment of it’s performers – women in particular but men too – and it’s intensely problematic portrayals of race, consent, sexuality, etc. It may not necessarily mean that your boyfriend is going to stop watching, but it will at least mean that you both understand where you’re coming from.

If it’s because he’s watching other people having sex and by extension imagining other women having sex (possibly even with him) while he’s masturbating… well, then you’re going to have problems. Because unless you’re planning to police every thought that goes through his head, you’re going to have to deal with the fact that he’s going to imagine having sex with other people. The same, incidentally, as 99.99% of the rest of the human population.  His fantasies, whether they involve other people or not, really have no bearing on the primacy or security of your relationship or how much he cares for you or not. They’re literally just part of the toolset involved in how he gets his rocks off. As I’ve said many a time before: monogamy just means that you don’t sleep with other people; it doesn’t mean that you don’t want to.

And then there’s the fact that, frankly, you’re in a long-distance relationship. Part of what makes LDRs difficult is the D… as it were. That distance means that the physical intimacy of your relationship is going to be limited; not just sex, but the little things that couples take for granted like cuddling on the couch or holding hands as you walk around on dates. Not having that intimacy can make maintaining a relationship hard and as pleasurable as hot sessions on Skype can be, it’s not going to be the same. Part of what makes an LDR last is maximizing the times that you’re together in person. The less you see of each other, the less likely your relationship is going to survive.

This is especially true if you’re trying to maintain an LDR with a monogamous commitment. Trying to maintain a monogamous relationship in person can be difficult enough. Trying to maintain one when you are likely to only see your partner once or twice a year if that? That’s basically setting yourself up for failure.

For a lot of guys, porn is how they stay monogamous; it lets them get the variety that many men crave without stepping outside the bounds of the relationship. 

So what do you do? Well, you have two choices. The first is that you can demand that he doesn’t watch porn, and the other is that you resign yourself to the fact that your boyfriend masturbates and he’s probably going to watch porn while he does it. You don’t like him doing it because it hurts your feelings and feel that he should stop because of that. He, I feel fairly safe in saying, has his feelings hurt by your trying to police his fantasies and masturbatory habits. I would be willing to bet a not-insignificant amount of money that this is why he hasn’t been down for a Skype session recently – it’s hard to get it up when you’re still feeling resentful that your girlfriend is telling you that you’re not allowed to do something that ultimately doesn’t affect her.

Because let’s be honest: it doesn’t and didn’t affect you until you specifically asked him about it.

You’re certainly able to tell him not to… but the odds are, he’s just going to keep doing so and either not tell you or lie about it.

So either you can break up with him over the issue and try to find someone who doesn’t watch porn or you can find a compromise. Maybe you can find porn that you like (or that doesn’t upset you) and see he’ll give that a try – perhaps something along the lines of Cindy Gallop’s Make Love Not Porn. Or perhaps you might want to try something like C. Spike Trotman’s Smut Peddler anthology or Jess Fink’s comics and see if those open up a new avenue for you. But if his watching porn at all is too much for you to bear and you can’t find a way to accept that it’s just part of how he gets himself off, then that compromise is that he tells you he doesn’t watch porn any more and you choose to believe him. He makes sure that he’s discrete about it, he doesn’t jerk off so much he doesn’t have any energy left for you and you don’t go looking for evidence that he’s been checking out PornHub.

Straight talk time: men watch porn. So do women and non-binary folks. Men masturbate. So do… well, you get it. This has nothing to do with “being animals” or “the power of boners being stronger” and everything to do with the fact that it’s about fantasies and getting off and – critically – has nothing to do with their partners. Unless his porn is directly bleeding into your relationship – he can’t have sex with you in person without Jenna Jameson on in the background, he demands that you watch things you’re uncomfortable with, he can’t get it up because he masturbates so much, etc – then ultimately turning a blind eye to it is likely your best bet. Because trying to enforce a no-porn ban is going to end the relationship.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com)

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I knew this woman through Twitter last year, we share the same favorite TV show and I want to live in her part of the world, I’m studying her language. We communicated through Twitter throughout the year, liking each other’s tweets and learning about our lives from it.

Things started to change last month, when she’s started ignoring my comments and questions, even though we still had some chats and I still received her likes. Things got worse with every passing week, and tonight I couldn’t take it anymore, I DMed her, asking if I had done something wrong.

Yes, she said. She said we seemed to have different thoughts on our relationship, and she didn’t like it that I added her on other social media besides Twitter. Turns out we also have different cultures – in my culture acquaintances easily add each other on Facebook, in her culture it’s reserved for close friends.

The good news is she didn’t block me and we are still mutuals on Twitter. The bad news is she asked me to step back because I was being too intense.

Turns out I still repeat the same mistake I did in college. Two friends I liked literally running away from me and I didn’t understand what’s going on – no touch, no lewd talk, but it happened. We remained friends, but I had scared them away. Another love interest ghosted me, and when we had a chance meeting, I was so lucky she prevented the store assistant from calling the police as I was weeping inside the store.

Some people have asked me to dial it down when chasing a woman, and I thought I’ve got it, especially now I write column for a feminist website. Turns out I’ve made lives miserable for both me and another person because of my bad habit.

My question is, how does I control my intensity? How can I attract a woman better without scaring her? How can I win her trust gradually? How can I differentiate between being caring & supportive and being overbearing?

Thank you,

Too Intense

DEAR TOO INTENSE: Y’know, TI, at first, I was going to chalk this one up to a difference in how folks use social media. Some people collect followers and connections on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and so on while others prefer to use it strictly as a way of staying in contact with close friends and family. A clash in these philosophies can create conflicts that could otherwise be avoided.

Then I got to the part about friends literally running away. And the line about your freaking someone out because you ran into them in the store.

Hoo boy.

Look my dude, you don’t just come on too strong, it sounds like you’re getting so caught up in emotion that you’re blowing through people’s boundaries like they’re not even there. Even if we’re allowing for the fact that you aren’t touching people inappropriately or saying inappropriate things… there’s a lot of room for making people deeply, intensely uncomfortable through your behavior. And a lot of it seems to stem from the fact that you have absolutely no awareness of how your behavior comes off to other people. I mean, I hate to say it, but if you’re not engaging in hyperbole in your letter but you have literally had friends run away or had the cops come on you then the problem here isn’t that you’re coming off as too intense, it’s that you’re coming off like a psychopath.

I mean, ok I get it. I get being so into somebody or so excited by someone that you get a little over the top, in ways that make people uncomfortable. It’s a little like being an over-eager golden retriever who wants all of the attention, all of the time. In its mind, it just wants to play with its new friend. But in its enthusiasm, it’s not recognizing how it’s destroying the living room, digging up the carpet, chewing on all the furniture and leaping all over people who aren’t comfortable with big dogs.

You may not mean to be causing all of this discomfort. You clearly aren’t aware of it. But not being aware of it really isn’t an excuse. Not when it keeps happening to you over and over again, especially when people keep bringing it up to you.

It sounds to me like there are two problems here. The first is that you seem intensely needy. It’s one thing to be excited and enthusiastic about a new friendship or relationship. But many times, when we have low self-esteem or feel like we aren’t “worthy” of relationships, we can start getting incredibly pushy and clingy and emotionally over-invest in people. We want to lock those relationships down as quickly and as firmly as possible, before they can realize that they made a mistake by getting with us. We want to eliminate the possibility that they may find someone else cooler, more attractive, more interesting or more “worthy” than us so we want to occupy all of their time, spend all of our time with them and otherwise just make sure that we are their entire world. Otherwise they might stop liking us and that would be a goddamn tragedy.

But it’s rare that we recognize this behavior for what it is. More often than not, we just chalk it up as “being excited” or “being a hopeless romantic” or “having a big personality”, not realizing just how we’re demanding a far greater level of intimacy or connection than is actually warranted. And that results in behavior that is DEEPLY disturbing to people on the receiving end of it. And by even the most charitable reading, it sounds to me like you didn’t just assume a greater level of of friendship than actually existed, you started behaving like you were the only person in their lives.

I mean being ghosted absolutely sucks, but reacting so over the top at a chance encounter that the shop-owners felt like they needed to call the goddamn police? That’s some next level s

t, dude.

The second problem is that you’re very self-centered. I don’t mean this in the sense that you’re selfish, I mean this in the sense that you seem to be completely unaware of how other people feel. The way you describe things makes it seem like things had escalated to such a degree that people were literally running from you and you hadn’t realized how bad it had gotten until that point. And this wasn’t one time, this is multiple times over the span of years. That’s not good dude. That’s not a case of “not good at reading people”, that’s “verging on being oblivious” or “living in my own version of reality”.

Now here’s the thing: this is clearly not something that’s entirely out of your control. All of your examples of this behavior are with women, which tells me that this is selective behavior. If you’re able to control your “intensity” with men, then you’re able to control that same intensity with women. Yeah, you may not be sexually attracted to men, but the fact that you can apparently recognize that acting like this with guys you know would be bad means that you have the capability of acting like this with women. Even women you’ve got a crush on.

Right now, the last thing you should be doing is wondering how to win people’s trust or avoid scaring away women you’re attracted to. You need to get this s

t under control by, like, yesterday. Frankly, I think the best thing you could do is start looking for a therapist, especially a therapist who helps people deal with emotional issues and social awareness. This is the sort of thing that you need a trained mental health professional for because man it is beyond the pay-grade of a loudmouth with an advice column. You need to put in a lot of work at not just learning how to let go of your neediness and regulate how emotionally invested you get in people, but in learning how to read the goddamn room. You’ve been missing a lot of warning signs and signals and it keeps leading to increasingly extreme confrontations with people. You’ve been lucky so far, but it’s the sort of thing that could very easily have consequences for you, including getting fired from your job.

Focus on getting better. Dating can wait until you’re in a better place.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com)

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’ve been dating my girlfriend for a year now, and we’re going strong. I love her and I know she loves me and that is an amazing thing. However, there is just one thing that makes me uncomfortable and jealous: her male best friend.

This guy best friend of hers was actually one of my good friends before I met her, and they started becoming friends when we started dating. However, as time progressed, they got closer and closer, which means more touching, more hugging, and they even say “I love you” to each other right in front of me, which makes me extremely jealous as her ACTUAL boyfriend.

These days, their friendship keeps escalating even more. They both coincidentally work at the same place they both hang out a lot over the week, and at most, I get to see and hang out with her during school and during the weekends when it’s just the two of us. It’s just gotten to the point of becoming very uncomfortable and sometimes when I’m with her and this guy best friend shows up (after she’s been asking about him for a while), I feel more like I’m third wheeling and I have to work even harder to get her attention.

I don’t want to be the controlling boyfriend that limits who she hangs out with, but I just think it’s crazy. They share “amazing” text messages, share hugs, playfully touch each other, have a crazy amount of inside jokes. Meanwhile, I’m over here with her getting mad at me for texting a good friend that’s a girl, who lives in CANADA, about how she’s doing. What should I do? Should I just bite my tongue and let it happen? I’ve been doing that for the time we’ve been dating and it’s torture and it hurts me so much. Please help.

From,

Feeling Jealous

DEAR FEELING JEALOUS: Y’know, FJ, nine times out of ten, I tell people who feel insecure around their girlfriend’s male friends to calm down and trust their girlfriends. It’s something of an insulting myth that you can’t have (straight) cross-gender platonic relationships without sex getting in the way.

(And I emphasize straight because nobody ever seems to ask this of gay men or lesbians, and bi and pan people wouldn’t be able to be friends with anyone.)

More often than not, it’s mostly a case of misplaced jealousy and the best thing you can do is talk openly and honestly about it with your girlfriend – be open about being jealous, be up front with needing a little reassurance and being walked back from the edge when you’re being an irrational bag of slop, etc and just trust your girlfriend  because, hey, she picked you.

Congrats, though. You have the dubious distinction of being that one time in ten when I think there’s legitimately something hinkey going on.

Now, this doesn’t mean that I think she’s cheating… but it sure as hell seems like it’s heading that direction. Hell, even if it’s just an emotional thing between the two of them, some lines are definitely being crossed here and that’s not cool. The fact that he can casually barge into what is ostensibly your time with your girlfriend is, at the very least, a boundary violation that’s very unfair to you.

And, to be perfectly frank, when your partner starts getting on your case about being too flirty/intimate with someone… well sometimes that’s a way of deflecting potential accusations by judo-flipping it onto you first.

So I’d say it’s time for a very long talk with your girlfriend about what’s going on with her and her bestie. It’s one thing to say “you can only hang around with the people I approve of” but it’s another to say “I’d appreciate more of your time and attention, especially since we’re, y’know, dating.” Or to say “I’d really prefer if our time could be OUR time, not me hanging around with you and your BFF”. Or to say “I’m not comfortable with the way you guys behave around me.”

Or you could quit dancing around the subject and ask her  “Are you sure you’re dating the right person? Because it sure as hell seems to me like you’d rather be with him.”

Regardless: I think it’s time you had that talk with her. Just be prepared; putting it all out there like that may well mean the end of the relationship.

Although, in fairness, with the way she seems to be treating you, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

Good luck.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: So, my question is less relationship and more social, but I suppose what advice you give me I could apply to establishing relationships.

I recently got a job working as a site manager. I really like the job: Pays decent, co-workers are chill, flexible schedule, I supervise a good amount of people. Fun, right?

There’s a slight problem, though, at least in terms of appearances: It’s for a porn site.

Now, I have no problems working for this site. But socially speaking, I’ve had a really hard time discussing the extent of my profession to people. I think about 8 or so of my friends know, as does two of my old bosses who I’m on friendly terms with and my sister. For a lot of them, it was a struggle because I was really worried about what they’ll say. For most, they were supportive. A couple, however, had more straitlaced backgrounds, and it was clear that they only respected the fact I had a stable job. Talking sometimes gets dicey with them.

To complicate matters further, I’m a high-functioning/moderate autistic, and it’s not exactly easy to navigate these settings without feeling like I’m now some sex offender or something because I have trouble speaking in a way people can easily mesh with.

Of course, this brings me to my issue: If I’m having this much trouble talking to people who are long-time friends, how do I handle regular people when discussion of work comes up? I try to go for the “I’m under NDA, can’t talk about it” angle, but people get nosy these days about work, and I don’t want to look more like a curmudgeon than I already appear to be. Moreover, I live in a Midwestern city, so while there’s socially “liberal” elements, being in my field can be seen as far too much for many. On the one hand, some of my friends are moderate Christians who would not take this lightly (I was raised a lapsed Catholic).  On the other, my primary social scene (DIY music) is seeing more social-justice conservative types who speak of safe spaces and triggering, and some would certainly find my line of work to be “exploitative.” The vast majority of these people would, say, probably vote yes on Proposition 60 in California (even though it’s a poorly-written referendum). And this is to say nothing of dating women (which has never been a strong suit of mine to begin with), where answering about my work could become a very loaded question.

What do you suggest in handling these situations?

-A Different Sort Of Closeted

DEAR A DIFFERENT SORT OF CLOSETED: You have two choices, ADSoC. You can play the detail game, or you can just own it.

In the former, you give people the technical truth: you work for a company that does high-bandwidth data transfer and you manage the technical side of things. Good pay, cool co-workers, flexible hours, etc. What sort of data? Meh, mostly VOIP and streaming stuff, nothing terribly interesting. So what about you? This is the version you can wheel out at parties or family gatherings when talking about working in porn – even at several levels removed – would cause more problems than it’s worth.

In the latter, you take ownership of it and don’t treat it like it’s shameful. As I’m saying all the time – hell, I’m saying it in this very column – if you don’t roll it out like it’s something to be ashamed of or some deep dark secret, then most people won’t take it that way. Just a flat “enh, I’m a site manager for Brazzers/Burning Angel/Pornhub/whatever; I just keep the back-end running” will do. What do you do? Nothing that different from keeping YouTube/Vimeo/TikTok running smoothly. You don’t have anything to do with the content.

The fact of the matter is: you’re not doing anything to be ashamed of. While porn definitely has it’s problematic issues (especially regarding things like race or performers like James Deen), if the actors are all consenting and the company is ethical (not coercing it’s actresses into scenes they don’t want to perform, following the laws about workplace health and safety, etc.) then you’re more or less in the clear, ethically speaking.

What about the people who will judge you? Well… people are going to judge you. A

holes are gonna ass. You can’t really stop people from doing that. And – as both Tumblr and Reddit have shown – there will always be people with more enthusiasm than experience who’ll treat any deviation from their cause as a crime that makes you literally Worse Than Hitler. The fact that they act like that doesn’t make them right, however; mostly it makes them annoying.

Yeah, you’re going to run into people – folks in your social circle and potential dates both – who will side-eye you for it. You’re also as likely to find people who think it’s kinda awesome; more women than ever watch porn these days, especially online. You’ll never know if they’re one of those if you keep treating your job like something to be spoken of only in whispers.

(Of course, considering that almost everyone watches porn these days, I can almost guarantee that many of the people who’ll be looking down their noses at you will have visited that site - or your competitors - at some point in the very recent past. Possibly even that day.)

And to be perfectly honest: if you’re going to date somebody and they wouldn’t be ok about where you work, then you’re not likely to be all that compatible, period. If your job is going to be a dealbreaker, you’re going to be better of getting that out of the way early on so you can find people who are right for you.

TL;DR – give the technically correct, if general details if you really feel like you need to hide things. But I think you’d be better off in the long run getting comfortable with just letting people know.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com)