My boyfriend’s OnlyFans addiction tore our relationship apart

Scarlet*, a 25-year-old journalist, had just ordered brunch in a cafe in Reading with her 25-year-old boyfriend, when she picked up his phone to check how much it had cost. She tapped open his Apple Pay, scanning his recent payments, and then froze, taken aback. “What the hell are these OnlyFans transactions?” she asked him. Her boyfriend was immediately defensive. “Am I not allowed to watch porn?” he asked.

An Eggs Benedict and a full English arrived at the table, but the couple left the restaurant without touching their food. They walked to Scarlet’s car and drove back in complete silence. When she pulled up outside her boyfriend’s house, she demanded that he hand over his phone and show her his OnlyFans account.

As Scarlet scrolled through his messages and transactions, she saw that her boyfriend had been using OnlyFans for the entirety of their two-year relationship – messaging creators when she was grieving her grandfather and during a period when she suffered depression – racking up hundreds of pounds worth of bills.

“I think I have a porn addiction”, she remembers him finally admitting. “I watch porn multiple times a day, continuously”.

“It’s just a massive shock to the system”, she told The i Paper, “To think that he was literally lying in the bed next to me, sexting an OnlyFans girl.

“My whole relationship I thought I knew him, but he was a completely different person… It’s mad to me”.

Scarlet is one of a number of people whose relationship has been impacted by addiction to OnlyFans, the paid subscription service known for its pornographic material.

Porn addiction rocketed during the pandemic, when nearly half of the UK’s workforce were working from home at least some of the time. The UK Addiction Treatment Group reported three times as many people seeking help for porn addiction in 2021 compared to the previous year. Experts warn sites such as OnlyFans are fuelling the problem – its usership jumped from 20 million before the pandemic to 120 million within a year). While the United States remains the largest user data base (455 million visits in January 2024), it is followed by countries like the UK, with 33.6 million visits.

Unlike with other forms of porn, OnlyFans users can directly engage with creators, even celebrity-level adult stars like Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips, maximising opportunities to feel seen, and be recognised and connected. 

Blue and Phillips have reignited debates over the site following controversial sex challenges. This week, Blue posted a video claiming to have slept with over 1000 men in a day allegedly overtaking Philips’ recent record of sleeping with 101 men in 24 hours. Blue previously made headlines for filming herself having sex with UK university students during freshers week. 

Experts warn porn addiction can have serious real-life consequences and is linked with erectile dysfunction, relationship issues and depression. Research shows that heavy use of pornography can desensitise the brain’s reward system, causing porn users to seek out higher intensity or more novel stimulation in order to satisfy their craving.

While there is limited data specifically focused on OnlyFans addiction, Dr Paula Hall, founder of Pivotal Recovery (a not-for-profit organisation that provides anonymous recovery programs for sex and porn addiction), says that OnlyFans’ interactive quality “may attract a different market of user than those who get addicted to porn, i.e those seeking more intimate connection with ‘ordinary’ women.”

She adds: “A good webcam worker is not just someone who can do the performance, but it’s someone who is going to make you feel special”, she says. Hall regularly sees clients who tell her “apparently I’m different,” when talking about their relationships with creators. OnlyFans is “like the ultimate garden shed, it’s the ultimate man cave”, she explains. “It is just about you. It is a place where you can just 100% focus on your needs and what you want”.

According to Sue Maxwell, psychotherapist and chair of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, the most common reason people become addicted to porn is a change in “sexual expression,” meaning that someone is “not getting the pleasure they once had” or “there’s a change in their sexual functioning”. This could be triggered by a variety of factors, from “health issues which are not being explored” to “life-changing” relationship events, like childbirth or going through IVF.

People who get hooked on porn are rarely using it for recreation alone, she says. “One of the biggest misconceptions about sex and porn addiction is that it’s about sex”, Hall says, “It’s actually a kind of personal relationship. It’s the intimacy. There’s a validation. There’s a sense of being in control”.

For the partners of those affected, the revelation of a porn addiction can be uniquely painful. “Everything just came crashing down”, said Jenny*, a 28-year-old who works in higher education in the UK, who came across her partner’s porn addiction when sending an email from his phone. “This is a loyal man, a family man”, she remembers thinking, “Surely this isn’t real?”

Jenny had met her partner when she was 19, and always found him to be attentive, loyal and romantic. It would be weeks before he told her the full story – that he’d joined a webcam site shortly after she became pregnant with their child, that he’d spent up to £10,000 on pornography in the six years since. He would watch porn in the mornings if he was awake first, on work breaks, anytime she was out the house and in the evenings when she was busy.

“It’s almost more difficult than if you were having a real affair,” says Maxwell, reflecting on the unique relationship between an adult content creator and consumer. “The person who’s looking is projecting a fantasy onto that person, and the person will fulfill their fantasy,” she said, “There’s more likelihood it’s based on the inner world of what they desire than the actual webcam person.”

After the revelation, Jenny’s self-image plummeted. She’d have sex with her partner when she didn’t want to, or she’d start crying halfway through. “I never realised that his whole world revolved around his addiction”, she said, “I had flashbacks of our conversations, flashbacks to moments in our timeline that only now made sense”.

She decided to stay with her partner. He enrolled in sex addict meetings, started therapy, and even called her dad to confess everything. Still, the impact of his porn addiction lingers over their relationship. “I question my reality”, she said, “I question who he is, I question his love for me and mostly, I question my own intuition”.

May, a 31-year-old medical coder living in the US, came across her fiance’s OnlyFans subscription when she was scrolling on his iPad, searching for an audiobook to put her baby to sleep. “It was like I immediately lost the person I thought I’d known for years”, she says, “I definitely lost a sense of myself”.

She, too, ultimately decided to stay with him, calling off their engagement and starting therapy. Gradually, May began to see some positive outcomes. They were able to have candid conversations about their partnership (she reflected on how she had been distant earlier on in the relationship) and she even felt her sex life improving (she realised she enjoyed dressing up more).

But, like Jenny, May struggles to move on from what happened entirely. “Our relationship is fragile”, she said. “There’s definitely transparency now, but it doesn’t solve all of our problems”.

When she brings up what happened, he says “they aren’t real”, which feels revealing of the dangers of porn: “He’s such a supporter of me and of equal rights for women, but somehow these people weren’t real?”

“There’s this grey area”, she reflects, “What is cheating? Like it’s really hard to define”.

As pornography consumption evolves and incorporates more and more interactive elements, Hall encourages people to have frank conversations about the parameters of their relationships. “Are you breaching the contract that you are in with your partner? What is your fidelity contract?

“So many partners think it would never be them, particularly if they’ve got a loving, caring, sexual relationship, that that’s not the kind of guys that do this stuff. Unfortunately, it is”, she says. “I think we have to be more specific about that than we used to be. Because when is having sex with somebody online, having sex?”

For many partners of porn addicts, moving on requires them to come to terms with ambivalence, to find clarity among the shades of grey.

Scarlet decided to break up with her boyfriend a few months ago, but they’re still in contact. She’s seen him take steps to combat his addiction, like speaking to his mum about it (who’s started taking away his phone at night) and signing up for therapy. “His end goal is to be with me,” Scarlet says. “But am I going to stick around for years waiting for him to be the person that I need him to be?”

*Names have been changed