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"  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. &amp;quot;Of course you are,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re a guy.&amp;quot; Even if he really did think he was a sex addict, he certainly wasn&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;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\u2014the way he&amp;#039;d dance around the house with socks on his hands; his beef jerky collection. I couldn&amp;#039;t imagine life without him. He&amp;#039;d write me love e-mails even if I was in the other room, and he IM&amp;#039;d me one afternoon out of nowhere: &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re beyond goodness; you&amp;#039;re a streetlight on cracked pavement, ketchup on fries. I&amp;#039;m never letting you go.&amp;quot; Intimacy, however, always felt slightly out of reach. After we&amp;#039;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. &amp;quot;Sometimes,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;sex is just sex.&amp;quot; This, I suppose, could have been interpreted as a handy rationalization from someone who&amp;#039;d been having it\u2014lots of it\u2014with other women. Sex addiction has been a subject of psychiatric discourse since Freud\u2014long 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&amp;#039;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\u2014all people for whom sex overrides any sense of order in their lives. By now, we all know the signs of addiction making life unmanageable in alcoholics: drinking at work, a DUI, chronic hangovers, etc. But it can be hard to recognize the signs that point to sex addiction\u2014probably because they&amp;#039;re very similar to the signs of assholism, especially in men. It&amp;#039;s the senator who seeks out anonymous sex in bathrooms, even though he knows he gambles his career with every rendezvous; it&amp;#039;s not telling your partner you&amp;#039;re watching eight hours of porn a day; it&amp;#039;s hitting on your wife&amp;#039;s best friend; it&amp;#039;s chronic cheating followed by chronic begging for forgiveness. Carnes estimates that there are between 9 and 18 million sex addicts in America today (and that as many as 40 percent are women, who are traditionally less likely to go to strip bars or rent porn, but who can now find it all right at home on the Internet). But sex addiction is rarely just addiction to sex. Sex, booze, gambling, coke\u2014they can all provide that numbing high, so perhaps it&amp;#039;s simply a question of which spark is the first to ignite in the addiction-prone person. Chances are, however, that more than one will do the job. According to Carnes&amp;#039; research, nearly 90 percent of addicts have multiple addictions, and usually they ricochet back and forth, one diverting the pain and guilt caused by the aftermath of using the other, and each doing equal damage: Addicts often compare it to switching seats on the Titanic. &amp;quot;We don&amp;#039;t yet understand why some experiences are simply pleasurable to certain people and addictive to others, why some people&amp;#039;s neuro pathways become overstimulated from sex and others from alcohol, any more than we know why you like dark chocolate and I don&amp;#039;t,&amp;quot; explains Robert Weiss, director of sexual addiction services at the Life Healing Center of Santa Fe. Indeed, researchers have found that the chemical highs that come with an increase in dopamine in the brain and overstimulated mesolimbic pathways are nearly identical in sex addicts and in cocaine addicts, for example. So it&amp;#039;s not a huge leap to believe that sex, like other dopamine elevators, might generate dependency, especially in people who dealt with childhood trauma.  Trauma is a key component to the sex-addiction cocktail, Carnes argues. His studies have found that roughly three quarters of sex addicts were physically or sexually abused as children, and nearly all experienced emotional neglect or abuse. &amp;quot;Fear changes how the brain develops. The corpus callosum, for example, is smaller in kids who&amp;#039;ve been abused,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;So the release of oxytocin, a chemical that helps the frontal lobes make good decisions, doesn&amp;#039;t happen as well.&amp;quot; The addict&amp;#039;s brain, then, embraces the rush of chemicals produced by stimulants like drugs or sex because it numbs the pain of the trauma that caused the brain&amp;#039;s malfunctioning to begin with. And as with any addiction, the zero line gets recalibrated, so it takes an increasing amount of those brain chemicals just to feel normal. For Matt, this meant at one point asking me to password-protect his Internet usage\u2014I thought he was just getting distracted from his work by news sites and blogs\u2014then begging me to undo it. He graduated from your average guy&amp;#039;s interest in online porn to hours and hours of it while locked in the bathroom with his laptop to sex via IM to real-world cheating. His triggers were the kind of accumulating life stressors\u2014visiting parents, an overdrafted checking account\u2014that healthy people can usually shake off with a sick day or a long run. In the months after an injury forced him to leave a hospital job he loved, Matt&amp;#039;s reactions, especially to me, got more and more unpredictable. He&amp;#039;d be charming and passionate for weeks sometimes and talk about how we should get engaged. But then he would say I bored him, more in life than in bed. Like most women, I&amp;#039;ve worried about my weight, my looks, but I at least thought I&amp;#039;d had interesting in the bag. But then who, once settled into the cozy, domestic stage of being a couple, isn&amp;#039;t easily enough convinced that staying in and cooking and watching DVDs is the same thing as boring\u2014particularly when the one true evaluator is the one telling them so? I suspect the moment I should have seen I&amp;#039;d caught his crazies was when I asked my sister to list things about me that aren&amp;#039;t boring. I also wrote off Matt&amp;#039;s want for everlasting excitement in a long-term relationship as a fairly immature, male one, and felt almost smug in my higher ground of desiring closeness over kicks. The morning after he and I had had what I thought was the most intimate, connected sex of our relationship, he threw a tantrum over nothing. &amp;quot;Why are you doing this after such a nice night?&amp;quot; I asked. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s because of last night,&amp;quot; he screamed. I came around to thinking he just didn&amp;#039;t like me anymore and was daring me to break up with him, afraid to do so himself. The second time Matt told me he was a sex addict was also, I&amp;#039;m embarrassed to admit now, the second time I told him he was full of shit. A few minutes before we were expecting dinner guests, I&amp;#039;d turned on his computer for an e-mail check and found an explicit IM conversation\u2014between him and one of his doctors, no less\u2014mutually fantasizing about having sex at the library and planning their next rendezvous. In one of the less panting moments, she&amp;#039;d suggested that I was an inadequate girlfriend for him. He hadn&amp;#039;t disagreed. Instead he&amp;#039;d described the curve of his doctor&amp;#039;s breasts. I was stunned, sickened. I spent the meal staring at the bookcase, subtracting his books. As soon as our friends left, it burst out of me. He said that he hadn&amp;#039;t been able to stop himself and that his life was spinning out of control. His eyes were glazed as he spoke, and he looked scared. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t stop,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I need help.&amp;quot; While he sulked around and begged me to go to therapy with him, I sat on the living room floor in a stupor for hours, livid at his attempt to turn himself into the victim and slough off all his lies and my pain as &amp;quot;addiction.&amp;quot; It reminded me of those kids in grade school who&amp;#039;d blurt out profanities, then try to convince the teacher they had Tourette&amp;#039;s. At the same time, I couldn&amp;#039;t shake the sense that Matt did seem afflicted, more tortured than guilty or looking for a way out. Boyfriends had cheated on me before, but something about this felt different. Unable to resist my own urge, I went onto his laptop a few days later, when I knew he&amp;#039;d be out for hours. The doctor, it turned out, was only part of the story. According to his browser&amp;#039;s cache, Matt&amp;#039;s porn viewing had shot up to a regular four hours a night, and he was getting up to search for it after I was asleep. There were love letters to\u2014then clear-enough reunions with\u2014ex-girlfriends. By the last month, he apparently was having sex with the doctor, who was married. A couple weeks into that affair, he&amp;#039;d started seeing a poet he&amp;#039;d met at a writing retreat. His IMs compared her ass cheeks to tulips and waxed on about the agony and ecstasy he experienced while struggling with her bra. When he came home, I told him to pack. He asked me to try to understand; I asked him to never contact me again. I was as confused as I was angry. What had I just lived through? Who was this person? Was he lying about wanting to be with me, or was he lying about his inability to control his actions, or just lying about everything? In a moment of calm, I remembered that Matt had mentioned a book, by a Patrick Carnes, whom he&amp;#039;d cited as the country&amp;#039;s leading sex-addiction expert, that would clarify things for me. When I picked up Don&amp;#039;t Call It Love at the bookstore, I&amp;#039;d half imagined it&amp;#039;d be all about pedophiles and rapists. I never thought it&amp;#039;d be what it was: an accurate 200-plus-page profile of a person I had thought I loved. It was the first time I began to buy Matt&amp;#039;s sex-addiction plea as anything more than a convenient way to describe hypersexuality coupled with bad decision making. Hey, it was reportedly Eric Ben\u00E9t&amp;#039;s defense when he cheated on Halle Berry\u2014and why else would you cheat on Halle Berry? But Ben\u00E9t later told New York magazine that his behavior was caused by something less clinical: a series of &amp;quot;stupid-ass mistakes.&amp;quot; When my therapist suggested another book, How Al-Anon Works for Families &amp;amp;amp; Friends of Alcoholics, I found I could substitute the word Matt for alcoholic, and the narrative flowed just fine, right down to the insecurities that commonly plague those around the addict. &amp;quot;In the face of the alcoholic&amp;#039;s vehemence, we begin to doubt ourselves and our perceptions,&amp;quot; I read. &amp;quot;We do whatever is demanded of us to avoid conflict&amp;quot; with the addict, who will lash out at the people who aren&amp;#039;t able to stop him from the cycle of getting his fix, feeling despair over his powerlessness, then drowning that sense of failure out with another dose. Weiss later tells me that when an addict chooses sex as the agent of distraction and soothing, it &amp;quot;often results in a separation of sex from any kind of relationship that holds the possibility of intimacy.&amp;quot; Whether the high comes from porn or prostitution is as inconsequential as whether the drunk likes beer or bourbon, he explains. Both paths lead to the same black hole, and in our home, that was Matt&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t stop&amp;quot; plea. In her recent memoir Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction, Susan Cheever describes the experience as a &amp;quot;brownout&amp;quot; state. &amp;quot;Giving in...is as involuntary as breathing,&amp;quot; she writes. &amp;quot;The addiction sweeps away all inhibitions...everything but need.&amp;quot; Erica, a married woman in Chicago who keeps a blog about her recovery from sex addiction, got to the point where she was meeting anonymous men for sex at hotels four times a day. &amp;quot;I would tell myself that I absolutely couldn&amp;#039;t and wouldn&amp;#039;t do it anymore,&amp;quot; she told me. &amp;quot;But then I would literally be in the car to the hotel, yelling to myself, `Don&amp;#039;t do it!&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Erica is\u2014as Matt is, and as Weiss describes your average sex addict\u2014&amp;quot;charming and charismatic.&amp;quot; Weiss reasons that a common trait is being good at giving attention to others but ultimately looking for ways to manipulate the situation so the addict can be taken care of in ways he or she wasn&amp;#039;t as a child. Benoit Denizet-Lewis echoes this quest in his new book American Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life: &amp;quot;My brain believes that sex is the best way to medicate loneliness, disconnection, shame, anger, and a core belief\u2014only recently challenged\u2014that I am inherently unlovable.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Do you have proof?&amp;quot; one of my best friends asked me when I told her, a month after Matt and I had broken up, that I&amp;#039;d come around to accepting that he&amp;#039;s a sex addict. My friend&amp;#039;s question was both understandable and infuriating\u2014like being asked to make a case that you&amp;#039;re depressed and not merely sad. I tried to explain that while I now believed addiction might have hijacked my ex&amp;#039;s self-control, I still blamed him for the hurt I felt, not to mention the lies and the cheating. Consequences aren&amp;#039;t negated by the cause. No one pardons the drunk driver who causes a pileup or the junkie who holds up a store. Yet, in a sense, things are harder for the sex addict when it comes to recovery. The alcoholic may never have a drink again, the drug addict goes clean, but the sex addict\u2014like someone with an eating disorder\u2014isn&amp;#039;t expected to simply abstain from such an important and necessary part of the human experience. &amp;quot;Mainly, we try to help sex addicts figure out the thoughts and actions that precede acting out so they can begin trying to stop the behavior much sooner,&amp;quot; Weiss says, adding that some sex addicts suffer withdrawal symptoms as intense as a drug addict going through detox. As many as half of the sex addicts he treats end up on SSRIs, which can help dampen compulsive behaviors. Yet after 30 years of research, Carnes has determined that for a sex addict to truly recover it takes three to five years of commitment to treatment\u2014involving any combination of intense group therapy, 12-step work, and cognitive behavior modification. I thought about that estimate a lot during the months after Matt moved out. While I loved him, I hadn&amp;#039;t absolved him enough\u2014or embraced the disease so completely\u2014that I could imagine holding his hand during a 60-month recovery process that offered no guarantees. I&amp;#039;d walked out of the relationship feeling more stunned than heartbroken. I didn&amp;#039;t obsessively check his blog or wake up mornings with the kind of aching soul that I&amp;#039;ve felt at the end of other romances. There were tears, but frantic rather than sad ones\u2014a sense of seeing yet not seeing the ball of fire inches from my face. I cried because I&amp;#039;d been so dumb not to have realized what was happening, and because in the end, I was okay. Last I heard from Matt, he said he was in treatment. I still have plenty of friends who roll their eyes at the idea that he&amp;#039;s an addict. But when it comes down to it, I believe that they&amp;#039;re dissenters simply because they&amp;#039;ve never fallen in love with someone who&amp;#039;s under the spell of an addiction. If that&amp;#039;s the case, then I hope it&amp;#039;s something they never have to understand, let alone forgive. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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