Last night, lying in bed with my boyfriend, I started crying and couldn't get the words out neatly anymore. My face was red. I was struggling to catch my breath. Everything I'd been feeling came out at once, with him right there beside me.
We haven't had sex in a year. Then I found out he watches porn and masturbates, and the hurt I'd already been carrying became harder to contain. After that, even looking at him could make me want to cry.
It wasn't only that we weren't having sex. Knowing he still did something sexual on his own made the absence between us feel personal. I felt unwanted. I wondered whether he was attracted to me anymore. I couldn't make what I'd discovered fit comfortably alongside the fact that we hadn't had sex for so long.
I don't know what porn means to him or why we aren't having sex. I know what that contrast felt like to me: he still had a sexual part of his life, and I wasn't sharing it. That was the part I couldn't get past.
In bed, I told him how much it hurt. I told him that finding out about the porn had left me feeling as though he didn't desire me. Saying it meant admitting something I hated feeling in the first place. I wanted my boyfriend to want me, and I was crying as I tried to explain that to him.
I told him I missed being close to him. I missed sex with him, the physical closeness of being with the person I love. It wasn't an abstract complaint about how often couples should have sex. I missed him specifically. Being together in bed didn't take away that longing.
And I told him how much I hated feeling as though I was begging. Even while I was explaining the hurt, I felt ashamed of having to say any of it. Wanting sex with him had started to make me feel desperate, and now I was sobbing over it in front of him. I felt exposed in a way I hadn't wanted to be.
What I wanted to express was simple. Getting it out was anything but. By then, I wasn't just telling him that a year had passed. I was telling him what that year, and what I'd learned afterward, had done to how I felt when I looked at him.
He said he was sorry. That was all he said.
We stayed there together, with me in his arms, until he fell asleep.
