Bob is a thirty-six-year-old divorced financial analyst. His wife left him twelve years ago after she learned that he’d been cheating on her with multiple women the entire eleven months they were married and most of the two years prior to that when they were dating and engaged. After the divorce, without the constraints of marriage, casual sex with any willing woman became Bob’s top priority – not that it hadn’t been already. In the beginning, most of his “work” was done in bars and clubs. As time progressed, however, his behaviors moved more into the online realm. He found that video chat sites provided access to a lot more women than a local nightclub and that most of those women were online for the same reason he was, casual sex. Eventually, he discovered hookup apps like Blendr, Tinder, and Ashley Madison. “Those were like crack cocaine,” he says. With the apps, he was suddenly having sex with multiple women weekly. In time, of course, his work suffered, his friendships suffered, and he grew increasingly anxious, short-tempered, and depressed. Finally, he went to a therapist seeking treatment for his depression and described his life. A light bulb went off when the clinician said, “you know, I think you might have an issue with sexual addiction.” Before that, the idea had never even crossed Bob’s mind. He just thought he was a “ladies’ man” but when his therapist said the words sexual addiction, he knew it was true.
