I have an online boyfriend who I believe suffers from pretty severe sex addiction of some kind. I know that it's common for the girlfriend or wife to try to help someone struggling with sex addiction, and in general the advice is to not try to FIX the partner and know that they must make that step on their own accord.

I'm curious, like if anyone here is struggling with some kind of sex related addiction, how you would have preferred your mate to respond when they found out about an episode of the behavior, or what they could have done to help you better at the time when you were dealing with this as a couple.

I see a lot of shame and sadness in his eyes at times, and it makes me feel sad. But I like to believe that our feelings are faithful in revealing when something is very bad for us, emotionally and mentally. I feel like he's hurting, but he won't admit he is a sex addict. He always says that when he gets with me in RL in the future, he will settle down and be with me alone. He claims it will be easy then. He says he just needs my body, since we are long distance.

I think it sounds like a reluctance to face what truly is an addiction for that would awake tremendous anxiety or bad feelings about self esteem perhaps.

Would it help him at all if I just left him and told him that when he is serious about getting therapy and establish some new way of moving forward on this, I would return to him??? Should I just cut him off from my love, as I often wonder if I am providing him the comfort and the "emotional closeness" FILLER of his porn online world. Like he can enjoy talking to me all day, and get so many good laughs, interesting talks, and love... then just later he may log in to the webcams and do his thing there at late night? I sincerely feel this may be happening even now. I just keep feeling that he's telling me the truth about his sincere love... but he still can't stop and in fact, once he gets into his sexual activities that do not include me, he probably forgets me super fast and gets totally absorbed and sucked into THAT. Then he comes back to me later acting like everything is fine??? Usually he will disappear for like a day or a day and a half. I wondered if he binges and then has to cool down before appearing to me, like to restore a sense of ME again and not the countless random females.