Freshly out of a 10-year marriage, I was really naive about hookup culture and sex in general. Looking back, I see so many red flags in the guy I dated for five months after my divorce. Here are the signs I missed that I was dating a closet sex addict.
- He wanted to have sex all the time. We were having sex at least four times a day. At first I didn’t realize it was weird; I’d been married for quite a long time before I dated him so I didn’t know what was a “normal” amount of sex. When I was married, normal was once a month, so when I started dating this guy, I just thought he was really, really attracted to me. I mean, I am pretty awesome.
- He was painfully shy. I know this doesn’t seem like it fits, but he met all his girlfriends online, so I assumed he’d never had a one-night stand. I could never picture him picking up a woman in a bar. Turns out, he met everyone on Craigslist, Tinder, or other hookup apps. Now I’m not saying all shy guys are closet sex addicts, but I am saying that being shy doesn’t rule it out.
- He loved women in all shapes and sizes. In a perfect world, all men would never care about any woman’s imperfections. In reality, we’ve all dated men who had their preferences and dislikes. He had none. At first I thought it was empowering; he seemed to accept me for me. He would point out women he found attractive, and they ranged from rail-thin to obese, blonde to black hair, pale skin to dark skin. I never once felt bad about any part of my body and he never made me feel unattractive, but later, I had to wonder: who’s really attracted to everyone?
- He had some strange sexual encounters in his past. Who am I to judge if he did some things that I wouldn’t have? Didn’t we all have a past? At first I was excited to have found someone so open. I purposefully didn’t react when he told me about the time he met a guy on Craigslist to be on the receiving end of a glory hole. (It wasn’t gay, he explained, since he couldn’t see the guy. He watched straight porn while the man performed oral on him from behind a piece of cardboard.) Then there was the time he participated in a threesome, and the time a woman came to his work so he could fist her. I have to admit I enjoyed listening to his stories, but I was starting to get worried that things he had done in his past would be things he would want again in his future.
- He watched porn… a LOT. I remember our first conversation about porn. He was very shocked to hear that I didn’t have a problem with it. How could I dictate that he wasn’t allowed to watch porn? That would mean I wasn’t allowed to watch it, and I enjoyed porn. Unless it prevented him from wanting to be intimate with me, I didn’t see a problem. It never became a problem; he always still wanted sex. It wasn’t until after we broke up that he admitted it was interfering with him getting his work done during the day.
- He owned his own business. If you constantly need to watch porn, masturbate, swipe on Tinder, or arrange craigslist hookups, what better day job to have than to being your own boss? He could leave several times throughout the day without anyone knowing—including me.
- He would never tell me his “number.” I didn’t ask outright but we joked about it. He told me he would never tell me his number. I added up his past girlfriends and guessed that number. He chuckled and told me, “Probably more.” I figured he’d dated more girls than I’d heard about. I never guessed he had hooked up with so many random people.
- He was really, really good at sex. I thought it was because we were so in tune emotionally. He paid attention to my cues during sex like no other man ever had. As it turns out, he’d just had a lot of practice. Even though I couldn’t stay with him after I found out he was cheating (with so many other people!), I’ll always remember him as the best sex I ever had.
