In the end, it was the girl across the street who understood the situation most clearly, the tiny one who dressed like a middle-aged Realtor and carefully studied my family’s demise. I was approaching 40, and the terms of my second marriage were being renegotiated from soul mates to a joint-custody arrangement. ¶ The girl lurked in the front hedge of azaleas to watch our first custody exchange: my wife’s SUV pulling up in the drive, the hug, the seat belt, the school uniforms buttoned up on hangers. When they drove away, she walked up in grown-up shoes and glasses, holding a clipboard. She consulted her notes, then looked me over. “You,” she said with finality, “alone.” ¶ As an ad guy, I could have campaigned for a thousand words and not nailed the truth like that.
Inside the house, nothing looked the same. A piano with no kids practicing. An expanse of rug and no board game being played on it. The kitchen and no one to torture with new ways to eat kale. The computer sat on a white desk that was the painted-over dining table of my first marriage; its power light glowed off and on, the closest thing to another pulse in the house.
Alone, I’d sit down and scroll through used cars. New cars. A discount cruise. A boat. All of it dull and gray. I’d look around again at the empty house. I hadn’t had this kind of privacy since the advent of high-speed Internet. Then the tiny fiber optics leading into my computer lit a bonfire of skin tones.
The pixelated glow of porn addiction spread over the next eight years, burning my free time and head space until a night came when I believed the only way I could break away from porn was to break away from my body. I was exhausted from juggling three incompatible lives: the hardworking family man who happened to be divorced; the porn addict whose house was lit only by the computer screen; the freewheeling bachelor who was no longer free and was having trouble with the wheeling part.
At first I hadn’t understood that porn, and the escalating levels of dopamine I was hitting with it, was behind the new problems I was having in bed. For a few years I juggled multiple prescriptions for Cialis and Viagra, missing the occasional utility bill or car payment to fund them, and then began mixing in questionable cures bought from beneath the counter at gas stations or at Asian markets — pills with such names as Hard Ten Nights and Mojo Risen.
Every addict hits rock bottom, and my descent had been gradual until the FDA cracked down on the strongest of the gas-station pills. Then I had nothing left. I was addicted to a ridiculousness that had hijacked my libido, and I couldn’t bring myself to explain this to my date in bed that night. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything, in fact, but stare back at her in the ubiquitous Netflix glow of middle-aged dating and begin to get dressed. I’d defined myself as a husband, then a father, then by relationships, and then by just sex; that night, every piece of clothing I put back on was a flag of surrender.
Leaving her house, I ran a stop sign, which is what my first wife did right before she died, at 26. I ran another. The speedometer was one thing I could still make rise at will. A long bridge rose ahead of me, and I was open to its possibilities. Maybe I’d make it across. Maybe I would hit the side and flip off. Maybe I’d just hit the concrete barrier and spin a few times. Then I thought about the envelope I was handed years ago at the hospital, when I was asked to identify a wedding band and one earring. I took my foot off the gas.
At the end of the bridge I pulled over onto the soft oyster-shell shoulder and called a close friend. At 2 in the morning on a weeknight, it went straight to voice mail. Across the bay I could see the lights of the marina and, beyond it, the darkness of normal people sleeping.
Read more: He was hooked on porn for eight years. Then he learned to fish.