My Girlfriend Doesn’t Want Me to Look At Porn

I was asked this lately in person and I said I’d answer it here. What to do if your girlfriend (or partner generally) doesn’t want you to look at porn? Does it count as cheating? Is it okay to just carry on looking at porn and not say anything? Should you just give it up? Should you break up? Here are a few ideas to think about if this comes up for you.

Is it okay to look at porn?

The BISH view (and thus also my view) is that porn is a complex entanglement of things, rather than one ‘thing’. Like I said in my article about fetishes, I think we have to be careful about making ‘a thing’ out of ‘things.’ So porn involves viewers, performers, directors, crew / technicians, studios, platforms, capitalism, funders, sex and relationships education, our cultural messages about sex (and relationships), gender, sex itself etc etc.

I have a lot of criticisms of porn here, but I never go as far as saying that porn is good or bad. That’s also not my job. My job is to encourage us to think about how we can all make porn (and our relationships with porn) safer, more consensual, and more enjoyable. (In the broadest sense of the word ‘enjoyable’ – for more see this article on how to feel joy). But clearly individuals can think it’s bad, or good, or have strong feelings about it, or even ‘mid’ or weak feelings about it. Sounds like your girlfriend has strong feelings that it’s bad (or that you looking at it is bad).

Why does your girlfriend not want you looking at porn?

There are a load of reasons for why someone might not want you to look at porn. Some people have ethical objections to it, that it’s wrong for there to be images of people having sex, or being naked. Others have objections from a political point of view, perhaps they are conservative, or have a particular feminist viewpoint.

It might be more personal for some people. Maybe it makes them feel insecure, because the bodies which you are enjoying in porn are very different to hers. Although there is a lot more diversity of bodies in porn than in Hollywood or TV and certainly fashion, we should remember that the bodies on show are extraordinary. Women have to look at particular way to have a successful porn career, and it’s also the same for men in porn. If we ourselves don’t meet those beauty standards, then it can make it very hard for us to feel good about our bodies. (I have great advice for you about how to feel better about your body here).

It could also just be a monogamy / exclusivity thing. Solo sex is a form of sex and some people would just think of this as having sex with someone else: so cheating. I actually don’t think it’s okay for someone to stop someone from having a solo sex life. We all have our own thoughts and fantasies and enjoy our bodies in ways that feel okay for us. Even in an exclusive relationship we should still be able to have this, in my opinion. 

Why do you like looking at porn? 

To help you have conversations about this you could think about why you like looking at porn. Think about your relationship with porn, how it fits into your life, and what you do with it. Is there a particular kind of porn you like? Or particular performers, directors, or studios? See if you can write a list and see what you come up with. Are there any of those that you could get from other sources? What if you were reading it, or listening to it, would that make a difference?

If you did want to give it up, because it was upsetting your girlfriend, could you? What would you be missing as a result and could you live with that? Would just solo sex without porn work, just fantasising about people for example? 

This might help you to think about how important this is to you and also help you to communicate with your girlfriend. Porn is a big word, but being able to break it down a bit and to talk about your relationship with it might help you and your girlfriend. Last time I checked, 5 of the top 50 websites were porn websites. Each site has millions of videos, so there is a lot of porn, lots of different types of porn, and they all do different things. If you can talk about this with each other you might be able to find some common ground. 

Talking about it

From our conversation it sounds like you’ve been able to talk about it a bit, but can you talk about it some more? Try allowing each other to talk about your thoughts about porn and the relationship. What is making you feel bad? What could make you both feel 5% better? Is there something else which isn’t to do with porn that could improve your relationship? I urge you to read this article about how to make chats about sex and relationships easier, because it has lots of actual advice on how to make this easier. Put your chairs on the wonk. Have some music on in the background. Chat via text. Try to affirm each other with nods and ‘I understands’ and ‘I get thats’ and ‘that’s interesting’ and ‘thank yous’. 

Can you just keep it from your girlfriend?

You could of course just keep it from your girlfriend. We don’t have to share everything in our relationships, and I think this means that we don’t have to tell everyone everything about us. Here’s an article about this using Venn diagrams. As I was saying above, I think we all have a right to have our own solo sex lives if we want to, even if we are in a monogamous relationship. 

The difficulty for you is that your girlfriend knows and has made it clear she’s not into it. That means that rather than just keeping it from her, you’d have to actively keep a secret. They are different things, because the first is just not revealing everything about you, the second is a deliberate not telling. She (and you) might consider that cheating, which you might not feel okay with. 

You can put the secret in a container but secrets have a habit of oozing out. It could be a tell, a nervous fidget, a look away, a reference, a moment of recognition. The secret being found out could lead to the kind of breaks in trust in relationships that might not be repairable. So you’d be taking a risk in hurting your girlfriend more, hurting yourself, and having a difficult time in your relationship. 

Negotiate your boundaries

One thing that I wished that monogamous relationship would learn from (ethical) non-monogamous relationships is to be able to talk about our relationships more. What is okay? For your relationship, what does ‘faithful’ mean? How do we want to communicate? What are the things we need to share? What is important to us? How do we get trust from each other? What are the volume levels of different aspects of our relationship? How much time, money, effort, and resources do we spend together? How does this relationship relate to the rest of our relationships? 

Thankfully, I’ve got a lot of resources about this, but you could start here with this one about relationship negotiations. A lot of this is down to consent conversations really. So you could talk about what you both want and need, but also talk about how you will do it in a way that is going to work for you both. For example, about the porn you could agree a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. Or you could agree that you will try to only watch particular kinds of porn. Maybe she wants to know more and might be interested in watching it together? Consent conversations are about what you agree to do together and how you are going to do them. 

You could call it a day

Look, all relationships end okay? If you can’t get on the same page about porn and your relationship, even with lots of conversations about how you might manage it, then it might be time to call it a day. What if she found someone else who wasn’t interested in porn at all? How about if you found a girlfriend who was into it as much as you? Sometimes a relationship ending is a real ‘win / win’ because you have found a way to free each other to be happy. 

Don’t get me wrong, break ups suck, but don’t be afraid of being sad. If you do it right, it can be a really wonderful thing for both of you, especially if you are really kind and do everything you can to avoid hurting each other. All great relationships are about people working on a joint project together, sometimes this means knowing when the project has run its course and seeing how you can both bring it to an end in a way that is going to work for you both. 

© Justin Hancock, 2025 Find out more about me and BISH here.

BISH is run by me, Justin Hancock. I’ve been a trained sex and relationships educator since 1999. I’m a member of the World Association for Sexual Health. As well as BISH I also have resources, a podcast, and a coaching service for over 18s, as well as some of the best RSE teaching resources around. Find out out about my other work at justinhancock.co.uk. My work has featured (positively) in the media, like the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Sky One, and Novara Media.

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