'My boyfriend couldn't afford our rent. Then I uncovered his 10-year secret addiction.'

It was when Fiona* moved to Australia from New Zealand that she first met Steve*.

She was in the midst of building a new life for herself — she had made friends and found a job that she loved — when she decided to give the Aussie dating apps a go. It was then that she matched with Steve, a charismatic musician.

"On our first date he said 'I don't sleep with girls on a first date'. I said, 'I wasn't going to sleep with you.' He said, 'Well, a lot of girls have a problem that I won't go home with them. I've run into that issue before'." Fiona told Mamamia's Everyone Has an Ex podcast.

Despite this exchange, their relationship progressed and, eventually, they made it official. But soon, Fiona noticed that Steve wasn't very sexual.

"He shared some sexual trauma that he had, which was a reason as to why he didn't want to rush into things," Fiona explained. "But he never initiated sex and didn't want to do it very often at all."

After six months of dating, Fiona had to move out of her house, and she asked Steve if he wanted to move in together. They were spending so many nights a week at her place anyway. And she thought, 'Well, at least this way he could help pay the rent?'

The reality was quite different.

Watch: Woman discovers partner cheating through receipts. Post continues below.

"I was footing the bill a lot. One of our favourite things that we like to do together, (was) to go out and eat and he stopped contributing to things like that, while not wanting to stop doing them," she said.

"His reasons were that his booking agents weren't paying him. And he was like, 'I've got thousands of dollars owing, and no one's paying me'."

However, alarm bells started ringing for Fiona when she realised Steve's behaviour wasn't matching up to his supposed financial troubles.

"He was going out a lot, so he'd go to his gigs and then come back at four in the morning," she recalled.

"That started to be a problem, because I'd say 'You're low on money, you shouldn't be going out for five hours after your work is finished and spending money. I don't want to tell you what to do with your money, but yes, you should prioritise rent over drinking for five hours'."

The cracks appear.

Not only was Steve not pulling his weight financially, he also showed no interest in having sex and struggled in that department too, stating it was his trauma that made it difficult for him.

"We'd been together 10 months and in the middle of the night I caught him watching a homemade sex video of his ex-girlfriend in the bathroom," she said.

"I was flabbergasted. It was an old video that they'd had from when they were together. It was obviously just something that he had stored somewhere and was using while I was asleep."

Fiona didn't say anything at the time because Steve hadn't seen her, and she was in such shock, she just scampered back to bed.

But she was left wondering if he wasn't feeling sexual with her. Why was he looking at an old sexual video of an ex-girlfriend?

The shocking discovery.

On what was supposed to be a romantic trip away, she finally got the answer. One night, during the trip, they were watching a movie on Steve's iPad and everything changed.

"Messages from 'Optus' started popping up. It was confirming a 10am appointment for that morning we were due to be back," Fiona explained.

"I said, 'What's Optus? And he said, 'Oh, it's that telecommunications thing'. And I was like, why are they sending you messages about appointments? And he said, I don't know.

"When he went to sleep, I went on to his iPad and looked at what Optus was, and it turned out that it was a brothel service, and that he had been confirming a sex worker appointment for the morning we got back."

A second discovery.

"I was just shell-shocked," she continued. "The messages dated back longer than I could read through.

"It didn't really quite feel real, I suppose, because frequently visiting sex workers goes against everything that I knew from the moment I met this person. I was like, this feels like fake.

"He knew them all by name, who was on for the day. The brothel Madam would address him by name."

One message read: "Steve, we appreciate you so much. Thank you again for coming."

"I threw up. My body just couldn't handle it," Fiona said. "Like, I know it was going on in my heart and my head, but my body was just in full shaking and hot flashes and sweating."

Listen to the full story on Everyone Has An Ex. Post continues below.

The confrontation.

"I took screenshots on my phone of all the messages, and then I woke him up," she continued. "I said 'You need to tell me again, who is Optus'. And he said 'I've told you'. And I said, 'Who is Optus?'

"And he went onto his phone, scrolling through the messages. I said, '*Steve, I know'. And then he smiled at me. He said 'You went on my iPad. I forgot to erase them from there'. That was his first reaction. Was the smile at the fact that he'd forgotten, or that he'd been caught? The smile shook me to my core."

His explanation was as devastating as the discovery itself.

"He said, 'I've had an addiction to this for a very long time. I thought when we first met that you were going to be the love of my life, and I stopped my addiction for the first three months, and then when I realised that you weren't the one for me, I decided to go back to it'," she recalled.

"He told me that he'd lost feelings for me just before we moved in together. So for me to hear that us moving in and living together, I was used, and that he could skip rent, and he would get free food. And I felt very much at that moment, like I had just been taken for a ride."

The hypocrisy of his addiction versus his behaviour in their relationship was impossible to reconcile.

"I said 'I don't understand. You're telling me that you've got this sex addiction, and specific sex work addiction and porn addiction. But you have had a girlfriend who adores you, and worships the ground you walk on'. He tried to explain it away. He wasn't very apologetic, which really shocked me."

The aftermath.

The journey home was excruciating for Fiona.

"The drive home was hell," she said. "He asked if we'd be able to work through this? And I said, 'No, cheating is my absolute no-go'."

After the breakup, Fiona found sex toys while packing up his belongings.

"I think it was such a shock, because he seemed so unsexual with me, then I found these sex toys," she said.

"I found his old phone amongst his things, I got it plugged in, the password was the same as the current one, and oh my gosh, it was a treasure trove of information dating back to nearly ten years of visiting sex workers, and he filmed them."

Moving forward.

Despite the trauma of the experience, Fiona has found a way to process what happened and move forward.

"I don't think it's any reflection on me or anyone else who's been through it," she said. "There will be times that I will still feel super-self-conscious and a bit low about it.

"But it's a massive bonus that I found out about this. We never had kids. We never got married. It was only a year into the relationship. It could have become three easily.

"If that little thing hadn't happened while we were watching a movie on the iPad, I might not have found out for a very long time. So thank you, universe."

*Names have been changed to protect privacy.

Feature Image: Getty.