Ask a sex therapist what women complain about most, and a familiar list tends to emerge. He watches too much, he lost interest, He made comparisons. And he promised to stop, but didn’t. The list goes on, and porn seems to sit at the center of all of it. Certified sex therapist Marty Klein has been hearing these complaints for decades, and he has some thoughts.

Klein published a piece in Psychology Today cataloging the complaints he hears most from women about pornography. He’s seen more couples with porn-related difficulties than most therapists ever will, and his core argument hasn’t changed: most of what women blame on porn has very little to do with porn.

Porn Might Not Be the Real Problem in Your Relationship

The pain is real. What’s causing it is a harder question.

Women aren’t really talking about porn when they say things like “porn stole my boyfriend” or “my husband was too weak to resist porn.” They’re talking about relationships, character, power, integrity, and communication. Klein’s point is that calling these “porn problems” makes them nearly impossible to solve.

Here’s what he hears most often, and what he thinks is actually going on.

“He lost interest in me sexually.”

Klein says this one has almost nothing to do with pornography. Long-term monogamous couples watch desire fade over time. It’s well-documented, poorly understood, and nobody has cracked the code on reversing it reliably. When a heartbroken woman says she’s been sexually abandoned in favor of porn, she’s almost certainly right about being heartbroken, probably right about being sexually abandoned, and almost certainly wrong about the explanation.

“He compares me to porn actresses.”

People find a million ways to be jerks—money, sarcasm, chronic lateness, and unfairly comparing someone to someone else. Klein’s position is that porn didn’t create that behavior. It’s just the current vehicle for it.

“He leaves evidence of it around the house.”

Klein calls this a selfishness issue. Selfish people are selfish across the board, with the last piece of food, with money, and with attention. The porn evidence is a symptom of that, loud and clear.

“He blames his watching on me.”

There’s a difference between explaining a choice and positioning yourself as the victim of someone else’s behavior. Telling a partner “you gave me no choice” is manipulative, and it’s a relationship dynamic that would show up with or without the porn. 

“He promised to stop and didn’t.”

This one gets complicated. Many men report being pressured to give up porn and agreeing just to end the conflict, with no real intention of stopping. The broken promise is the bigger problem. So is the dynamic that produced it.

Klein is careful to note he’s not telling women to absorb all the emotional labor here. His actual advice runs the other way. Stop arguing about the porn, he says, and say what you actually feel. The stuff you’ve been telling yourself is unimportant, and those thoughts you’ve pushed away. There’s nothing to disagree about there; it’s an opportunity to really talk. How the conversation is received, and the resolution you find together, is the bigger tell of the relationship.