'I thought our sex life was just in a rough patch. Then I opened his emails.'

This is Part 1 of Maya's story. You can read Part 2 here.

"I don't really know where to start... So much has happened in the past 10 months — since I started to find out about your sexual secrets.

"I still struggle to comprehend the reality of the things you were doing in the nine months we were together, before I found out.

"It still feels like such a betrayal. To me, it feels like you had another life I knew nothing about. You were another person."

It was Maya*'s therapist who suggested she write the letter to her partner, Leo*. 

They had met many years ago, after Maya broke up with her fiancé and downloaded a dating app for the first time.

"I thought I'd try something different," she told Mamamia.

From the first date, Maya and Leo felt a palpable physical chemistry. But things between them moved glacially.

"He was more reserved than guys that I'd usually dated, it was a really slow burn," Maya said. "There was no intimacy, and he wasn't showing any interest in me sexually, which I found really bizarre because he kept asking me out on dates."

When things eventually did progress to the bedroom, other issues arose.

"He wasn't able to maintain an erection," Maya explained. "I thought, 'This is very strange. He's a handsome guy. What's going on?'"

One day, Maya was looking in Leo's bag and found some little white pills. She quickly realised they were Viagra, which is used to treat erectile dysfunction.

"I put two and two together that he was heavily dependent on this when we were able to be intimate," she said.

But Maya put it out of her mind, and focused on the ways they "did connect". They had similar interests, and wanted the same thing long-term.

She had no idea what was coming.

Watch: What causes sex addiction? Post continues after video.

"I still vividly remember when I first confronted you about what I had found — by accident!

"You got so angry, denied any involvement or infidelity. Said you 'didn't know' how it got there.

"I felt like you had such little respect for me, it was excruciatingly painful you didn't even allow me the respect of finally telling me the truth when I had hard evidence in front of me."

Leo was out of the house. His laptop was sitting there. Open. Inviting.

Maya couldn't help herself. She "started snooping around" and found something that left her speechless.

"It was a payment receipt in his emails for Grindr," Maya told Mamamia. Grindr is a LGBTQ+ dating app.

She kept looking.

"I found a series of other emails where he had signed up to all kinds of apps," Maya said. "These weren't straight dating apps. There were transgender dating apps. There were all sorts of memberships to pornography sites.

"I was really hysterical."

When Leo returned home, Maya confronted him about what she had found. But he denied everything, telling her it was all junk mail.

Maya had her guard up, but she gave Leo the benefit of the doubt.

Then, she fell pregnant, and the couple moved in together.

With easy access to Leo's phone and devices, Maya couldn't help herself.

"I started sneaking his phone. I knew the passcode. I looked at who he'd been searching on Facebook and Google," she said.

This time when she confronted him, Leo couldn't deny it. He told Maya the truth: that he had a pornography and sex addiction.

"Addiction can escalate."

"When we talk about porn addiction, it's more than just checking out porn once in a while. It's about patterns, not just incidences," said Tabitha Corser, the founder of The Whitehaven Clinic, a rehabilitation centre dealing in addiction treatment and recovery.

"Addiction escalates over time," Tabitha continued. "The porn becomes more frequent. It could be daily, could be sneaking to the toilet to watch it. It's typically done very much alone. A big sign [of addiction] is secrecy and lying, hiding the phone, withdrawing emotionally."

It's not just the frequency of porn that escalates, but the type of content the addict is consuming.

"It becomes more extreme or more niche. It's more intense," Tabitha said. "Suddenly, what was a turn on is now not. So you have to escalate the degree of the pornography."

Maya came to realise that this is exactly what Leo had been doing.

"He would sit [watching porn] for hours on end," she said. "When he was at work he would sneak away to the toilets and jump on these apps and just consume and consume."

In Leo's case, explained Maya, the porn "migrated to hardcore porn."

"Then that wasn't enough," she added. "So he moved to trans, and then that wasn't enough… At one point, I accused him of being bisexual, of being gay, of all of these sexual preferences, which he denies and gets incredibly agitated [about]," she said.

"But [I learnt] this doesn't necessarily mean those are his sexual preferences, he's just not getting a hit from heterosexual sex, so it's got to be more and more."

Like porn addiction, sex addiction involves patterns of "repeated casual or transactional sexual activity that is about meeting a need," said Tabitha.

"There was a total lack of intimacy unless I'd dress up in extravagant lingerie or something," Maya said. "I was not used to a man not initiating sex.I always had to be the one who initiated it, and even then I felt like there wasn't an interest.

"It terribly impacted my self-esteem. It destroyed my self-confidence."

Leo told Maya that he could overcome his addiction. But she wasn't convinced, and became obsessed with "trying to catch him out."

"I'd cracked his passwords and I would get his phone. I found things. He'd keep going and I kept catching him. I was pregnant at this time. It was absolutely devastating."

"One thing that still sticks with me is the night of my birthday, when you were taking me to a surprise dinner.

"What I found signified not one breach, but hundreds. Such a total disregard for the sanctity of our relationship. It undermined any sense of trust we had."

Leo was running late for Maya's birthday dinner when she decided to take a look at his laptop. What she found shattered her.

To be continued….

This is Part 1 of Maya's story. You can read Part 2 here.

*Names have been changed for privacy reasons.

Feature Image: Getty (Stock image for illustrative purposes only).