Sexy Breast

The first time my boyfriend Matt announced he was a sex addict was just a few weeks into our relationship; we were swapping confessions. This one, however, sounded really lame.
“Of course you are,” I said. “You’re a guy.” Even if he really did think he was a sex addict, he certainly wasn’t a very good one. For much of the first year we were together, his interest in sex was annoyingly low. Once, when we were in the process of moving in together, I set up a scavenger hunt in the apartment, and the treasure at the end was a lace teddy I’d bought as a surprise. I modeled it, but he barely gave me a glance and insisted I throw on a T-shirt and help him unpack the kitchen. As soon as all the boxes were empty, he fell asleep.
Still, there was no one I loved more than my sweet, nerdy Matt—the way he’d dance around the house with socks on his hands; his beef jerky collection. I couldn’t imagine life without him. He’d write me love e-mails even if I was in the other room, and he IM’d me one afternoon out of nowhere: “You’re beyond goodness; you’re a streetlight on cracked pavement, ketchup on fries. I’m never letting you go.”
Intimacy, however, always felt slightly out of reach. After we’d been together about a year, I tried to express the fact that, even when all systems were go, sex with him often left me feeling bereft, not desired. He accused me of having unrealistically romantic expectations. “Sometimes,” he said, “sex is just sex.” This, I suppose, could have been interpreted as a handy rationalization from someone who’d been having it—lots of it—with other women.
Sex addiction has been a subject of psychiatric discourse since Freud—long before 76 percent of Us Weekly readers said, no, they would not dump David Duchovny as he was shipped off to sex addict camp last fall. But the idea that addictions are diseases and not just moral weaknesses is relatively new. The realization that alcoholism can afflict a seemingly thriving, successful CEO (and not just an unreliable sad sack) only became widespread in the 1950s, with the growing gospel of Alcoholics Anonymous. Sex addiction is decades behind alcoholism in terms of acceptance, partially because it’s not as easily defined, according to Patrick J. Carnes, PhD, executive director of Pine Grove Behavioral Center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and, until 2004, clinical director for sexual disorder services at the Meadows in Wickenburg, Arizona, where Duchovny was reportedly admitted. The label, he says, fits everyone from pedophiles to cyberporn addicts to relationship drama junkies to exhibitionists—all people for whom sex overrides any sense of order in their lives.