Personally I myself watch porn.... When I'm single. When I'm in a relationship I do not. To me wanting to watch porn WITH your SO implies that you need the visual stimulation to have sex with them(it's not making love if you bring someone else into your bed, whether they're there physically or not) because A) You have an addiction or B) You don't find them sexually attractive. And watching it alone (whether openly or in secret) is disrespectful and disloyal, not to mention damaging to the relationship.

I just recently discovered that my SO has been watching porn for some time now and the time frame roughly coincides with a decline in our sex life.

I went to Google and asked the same question (couldn't decide if my emotional response was irrational or not) but came up with so many conflicting articles(watching porn improves relationships/watching porn destroys relationships/etc. Plus many that say that porn is like a drug that actually alters the way you brain works) that I'm now feeling even more confused/worried/betrayed.

I haven't said anything to my SO yet, mostly because I don't like conflict and I don't yet know what to say.

I feel like if I either use memories or pictures I have of him to masturbate if I just CAN'T wait until he's available and willing to take care of me then he should respect me enough to do the same if he truly loves me (I should say that while I'm not always available immediately because of work, I've only turned him down once during our whole relationship and only because I had a nauseating migraine and would have thrown up on him due to the motion)

I also have to say that he and I did have a conversation about this back when we first started seeing each other, but he was drinking quite a bit(much more heavily than I realized at the time) and I've learned over time that a lot of our conversations from those early days are extremely murky (if not missing altogether).

I'm looking for advice so if you've got anything that's actually helpful to say I'd be extremely grateful

@Faith A random woman that lives on the other side of the country sends him a dirty pic (let's say it's a wrong number) he's never talked to her, does not talk to her and is unlikely to ever meet her even by accident. But he masturbates to the pic. Would you be mad? If not then you're a stronger woman than me. It's essentially the same thing, because whether the porn is fake or not, those people are definitely real and they're out there existing somewhere on the planet. Unless of course he's into anime style porn....

@Maddie yes masturbation is normal. Porn is not. It did not always exist (though sex for pay has existed for a VERY long time). And it can be unhealthy. I have a friend who masturbated so much to a specific kind of porn that she actually reprogrammed her brain so that she could no longer become aroused by sex with a partner or any other kind of porn, and she's not the first person I've heard of this happening to. Think Pavlov's dogs (the dogs learned to associate the sound of the bell to being fed and began to salivate at the sound even when no food was offered.) Like them humans are very capable of being conditioned to associate one thing with another.