Throwaway account, as my boyfriend uses Reddit very often. My boyfriend (29m) and I (26f) have been together for about 3 years and we have an amazing relationship. We have been living together since 6 months into our relationship. I know that he was planning on proposing soon, as we talked about it and I caught on to not-so-subtle hints. Which is amazing because I love him so much, and I’d be happy to spend the rest of my life with him. We don’t fight, we have conversations about things that bother us and work it out, but even that is very rare.

There’s one thing about our relationship though. Our sex life isn’t great. I’ve talked to him about it and he puts his lack of libido down to being stressed from work and being tired. We have sex about one a week, sometimes less, rarely more. It’s not very exciting, little to no foreplay, lights off, one position, and he hardly ever can keep an erection or finishes. It’s put a massive dent in my self-esteem.

To be completely honest, I’m not ugly and I haven’t gained weight or anything during our relationship. 5’ 4” 50kg, I go to the gym. Before we were together I was on the porn scene, I was on quite a lot of NSFW subreddits and I did quite well. My libido is VERY high, to the point of me wanting to get off multiple times a day most days. I’ve stopped posting myself on all porn sites/reddit since we started our relationship out of respect for him, but frankly I loved the validation that men would give to me. I got off on it, really. I started sending the pictures/videos that I would normally make for those sites to him recently, hoping that he would want to have more sex with me, maybe spice myself up in his mind. But I usually just get a “❤️” in return.

I know he loves me, he’s very affectionate, very sweet, brings me flowers and my favourite food when I’m sad. He listens to me and tries to reassure me. He says that it’s just stress and he’s going to try and work on it, that there isn’t anything else that is taking his attention from me and he just can’t get it up because of his mental overload from work. That he sees me as the most beautiful, sexy woman ever and he’s lucky to have me. That he wants to have sex with me but his body won’t let him.

I think I had a bit of a breakdown last week after almost a month of no sex. I was tearing myself apart emotionally. No good thoughts were going through my head. He left his computer on while he went to work and I (regrettably) went through his search history. There was so much porn. Not regular porn either, mostly VR porn for his oculus headset. Cam-girls as well, but less so. I cried so much to the point that I locked myself in our room for hours even after he got home. I felt worthless, ugly, and betrayed. I didn’t know what to say at all. I knew he watched VR porn in the past but I didn’t know he still did, honestly. We spend all of our days together most days, we mostly go to sleep at the same time, I’m never away and I don’t go out much. I saw that he gets up at about 3am a couple days a week while I’m asleep to go to the next room and masturbate to VR porn that he pays a subscription for. I never knew because I am a heavy sleeper and he gets out and back in quietly. I saw the videos, and they’re all POV women, pretty vanilla and nothing kinky. So I was even more upset and confused. Why would he want to pay for this instead of having sex with me?

He was sitting outside of the door begging me to come out and talk to him. I could hear him crying as well. Eventually I came out and sat down with him on the couch. I hugged him and then told him that I looked through his search history, and I apologised for invading his privacy, but I didn’t like what I saw and how it made me feel. I didn’t ask him to stop, I didn’t ask him to change, I just told him how I felt. He started crying more and apologised for disappointing me and that he forgives me for looking through everything because he doesn’t want to hide anything from me ever. He then got up and threw away his headset. We cried together for a while, he took the trash out, and then we cried and hugged more. He said he will try to be more attentive to my needs, but he never wants to hurt me again.

Later that night he started crying again and told me that he feels as it we’ve cracked our relationship and that he doesn’t know how to go forward. We talked about it and I reassured him that I still love him, but he needs to keep his word and we need to fix our sex life. I’m starting to feel terrible, that I am completely in the wrong here. That honestly, I am just very jealous and insecure. We have been a bit raw to the situation and I don’t know how to fix it. He feels too ashamed to have sex with me. I feel ashamed that I broke that trust. Now we are hardly talking and things feel broken.

Is this the end? We have an otherwise perfect relationship, but I’m afraid that I’ve broken what we had. AITAH?

TL;DR: My boyfriend and I have a great relationship, he’s my best friend and an extremely affectionate boyfriend. Our sex life has been extremely lacking. He said it was stress, but I looked through his search history to find a lot of VR POV porn that he watches multiple times a week. I admitted my snooping and apologised and we talked. We were both hurt and a week later it still hurts. I don’t know how to move forward. Do you think there is a way to solve this? Is it just time? AITAH?