When Your Gf Has Homemade Porn

I can’t remember where I saw this on the timeline a few weeks ago.

But it was something like the title of this email suggests: guy finds homemade porn of his girlfriend with an ex. She’s moaning and doing the whole nine yards. Pretty jarring.

Understandably, the guy is wondering what to do. Should he break up with his girlfriend? Their relationship seemed OK. But this revelation has really thrown him for a loop.

Now, I believe in this case the guy found it on her phone, in a hidden folder – and that she still followed her ex on Instagram. This to me is an even bigger problem than the porn itself, because it indicates something that didn’t simply exist, but that she wanted to keep… and was arguably still looking at. Which means to some extent she’s still hung up on her ex. And if he were to somehow enter the picture again, she would cheat.

Given these details, I think it’s pretty clear cut that the guy needs to leave. His girlfriend, to a large extent, isn’t really his own. Perhaps there are some extenuating details I don’t know about… but this is my initial impression.

But let’s examine this topic more generally for a moment. What if you were to find a video of your girlfriend’s homemade porn with a long distant ex, but on an old computer? Not something she uses or looks at anymore, or with a guy she has any contact with. But nevertheless there.

Well, incidentally this situation happened to a client of mine a few years ago with his wife. It was apparent the porn was old and forgotten — she didn’t use the computer anymore. I forget why he was using it — he needed to access something on it — but he decided to start looking through her old files and found it. He began looking for evidence of bad behavior afterwords, and secretly logged into her messenger. While he found zero indications she had been in contact with any other guys since they’d been together, he did find old dirty conversations between her and her ex. These well predated his own relationship, but they were still painful to see.

Unsurprisingly, this threw the whole marriage into a bit of a loop. It not only enraged him, it made him feel inadequate. Nobody likes the idea of their woman having good sex with another man, but accepting it may have happened and witnessing it is something different entirely! It made him think completely differently about his wife. Especially since their sex life wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders at the time. Where was the sex kitten that this other guy had, that he didn’t anymore?

However, there was a variable that complicated the decision to leave besides for the fact that they were already married.

She was also pregnant.

“This shouldn’t matter,” some of you might say. “It’s over, better to get out now.”

But those of us who live in the real world, however, understand it’s not that simple. You are talking about destroying a family — a child being born in a broken home. You are talking about upending everything. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it. But you need to make sure it is necessary, and you’re doing it for the right reasons. And that means doing it because there is a real threat to the relationship itself, rather than simply a threat to your ego.

So he pretended he had found it by accident, and confronted her about it. She cried. She didn’t like who she was in that relationship, she said. She was insecure, he made her feel insecure, and she was doing all this stuff to keep his attention. She neither loved or missed him.

My client was still pretty pissed, and kept her a bit at arms length at first. Although their sex life improved in the aftermath. It was clear she was trying harder to keep him happy, and unsurprisingly, didn’t want him to leave.

I know, I know. In some ways this pisses a man off more. Oh, so you could have been acting more sexual but you chose not to? You’re just doing it to keep me?

But the truth is, my client wasn’t fully in the right either. He was looking through her old files and conversations. Because of his insecurity about his masculinity, he was violating her privacy. He was looking for things to incriminate her for. And although he found some jarring stuff, what he found didn’t paint a picture of her being an unfaithful girlfriend. There was no flirting or slipping about with other guys while they were together. It was just this skeleton in the closet that had been buried, and now uncovered.

So we worked through all of this. Processing the emotions. Forgiving. But also self-examining. He had to confront the kind of insecure man he had become that had gone snooping — the same insecure man who had been not commanding his wife’s sexual interest the way he wanted.

It led to some serious conversations and breakthroughs in their marriage. In the end, he became not only more of a man, but a real leader. His business ventures, as if in response, started taking off, and his marriage over time has continued to deepen. They’ve gotten more into their faith, and currently have an incredible sex life… with baby number two on the way. All from the brink of divorce over an old homemade porn video.

Now I hope you understand from my differing advice in both of these scenarios, that I am not “pro” one response or another to all of this. Every relationship has it’s own dynamic. Finding your girl’s old porn in one case may be a dealbreaker, in another it may be not.

What matters to me, as a coach, is to what extent that her porn is a feature of the past, versus a something hovering over the present. Was it just a bad judgment error of a younger girl? Has she moved on? And most importantly, can you?

I don’t like being the guy always telling men “forgive her.” I think there are a lot of coaches out there who do this, and at a certain point it comes across cucky. I am very happy to tell men to move on from a woman, and I have done it — many, many times.

But when I tell guys to move on from a woman, it’s less because of what she has done, than her relationship to what she has done — how much it defines her today. That doesn’t mean her past actions don’t matter — some things are always a bridge too far. (Had this porn been made for public consumption, rather than something private for her old relationship, that pretty clearly would have been). But her past actions matter less than her future orientation. Some women have done bad or dumb things but have learned from them and are growing. Others have hardly done anything bad yet, but their heart wants to. And from the perspective of long-term prospects, the latter is much worse than the former.

In the case of my client, his wife was very much in love with him, extremely invested in their marriage, and had a lot of shame around her past. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be more sexual with him. But she also didn’t want to be like she had been when she was young and felt desperate for that guy’s attention.

(FYI: This is a major dilemma for women when it comes to sex, because a lot of female horniness – especially with younger girls – gets entangled with an impulsive desire for attention, which is often a product of an undeveloped personality. This is “hindbrain sexuality” that is largely unconscious. More developed women need to integrate this, and also accept that they can choose to receive pleasure on their own terms, rather than simply reactively. More on this in another email.)

My client, for his part, wanted more of his wife’s sexuality — to integrate some of that whore in with the madonna — but also didn’t want her to be a broken girl to get it either. The porn created a vector for all these hard conversations, and for them to finally understand each other better. And to finally give each other their best.

The moral of this whole story?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. But a lot of you are way to quick to judge and discard an otherwise good woman because of something in her past. I understand men say they do it because they want to avoid staying with a bad woman. And sometimes this is the case, and needs to be done. But I also think most of this knee-jerk reaction is not simply male ego and insecurity, but a lack of capacity for real discernment. These guys miss the signal over the noise when it comes to a keeper: which is self-awareness, good faith, and humility.

The sad reality is, most women today are going to come with some baggage. It may not be as bad as a homemade porno with an ex. But unless you’re plucking her young from one of those rare pristine environments, she’s unlikely to be squeaky clean. And in some ways this is something to worry about on it’s own. The less a woman’s been tested, the less certainty you have over her future goodness. Many girls aren’t ruined not because it’s not on their mind, but because they haven’t yet had the opportunity.

So I recommend avoiding living your life by internet platitudes, and to start judging women on a case-by-case basis. That is — if you’re interested in having a good relationship, rather than staying single and seeking some elusive perfect woman.

And if you want some help deciding whether that girl is right to keep?

You should consider working with me.

Everything I do with my clients centers around nuance. And I don’t simply tell men what to do, I teach them how to perceive and think… so that one day they don’t need me.

You can apply to work with me here: www.patstedman.com/application

– Pat

PS I wrote this email a few days ago, only to find FrenchOG last night discussing the same phenomenon. I elaborate more here on notch count. I’m glad it seems the conversation is finally becoming more sophisticated!