Why Do I Notice Every Woman in the Room?

About these entries. Nina and Tom are composites. They are not clients, they are not people, and they are not a couple — they are two constructed voices, built from a pattern I've seen often in twenty years of practice, written so it can be recognised from the inside. Nothing here is drawn from any individual's life, and no detail belongs to anyone.

I read something that said pay attention to your own attention for an hour. Don't change it. Just watch it.

So I did it in a line on Monday, because I had twenty minutes and nothing else to do, and I'm going to write down what it was, honestly, because I don't think there's anything in it and I'd quite like to demonstrate that.

Woman ahead of me, two along. Dark hair, grey coat. Yes.

Woman behind the counter. Yes. I'd have said that one was obvious.

Woman by the cooler, on her phone. Yes.

Woman with the stroller. No. Then yes, when she turned around.

The one in the grey coat again. And again. She stood with her weight on one foot and I went back to that four or five times over the twenty minutes, and by the end of it I could have told you more about her than I could tell you about most of the people I work with.

Then out to the car.

That's the hour. That's what it is. That's what it's been every hour of every day since I was a teenager.

And here's my honest question, and I'm asking it properly and not to be difficult: what is the alternative?

Not looking? Nobody doesn't look. Looking and then feeling terrible about it? I've tried that and all it does is make you strange to be around. Looking and then telling your wife? Telling her what — there was a woman in a grey coat in the line? What is she supposed to do with that. It would be a cruelty dressed up as honesty.

I'm not doing anything with it. That's the whole point. It goes nowhere. It has always gone nowhere.

I keep arriving at the same place, which is that if this is a problem then it's a problem shared by every man who has ever lived, and a problem everybody has isn't a problem. It's just what people are like.

One thing though.

I took the far checkout. There were two open and I took the far one, and the near one was free, and I'd have got out three minutes earlier.

I don't know. It's nothing. I didn't decide it, I was just at it.

The coffee place I go to is worse than the one that's closer. The near one does that thing with the lids.

Anyway. She's been better this week. We had a decent Sunday.

I've stopped bringing up the eight weeks, which has helped. Ten now.

I'm not counting. I am counting.

Attention — where it goes when nothing is happening

Everything in that inventory is accurate, and that is what makes it useful. From inside it is also unremarkable, which is why it has never been examined.

Three things in it are worth naming, since he does not name them.

The return. He does not glance at the woman in the grey coat. He goes back — four or five times over twenty minutes, by his own count — and each return tends to add something the last one did not have: the shape, then a detail, then the beginnings of a scene. The charge builds across the sequence rather than resetting between looks. The first look was closest to a reflex. Each one after it was a decision, and he made it repeatedly without experiencing any of them as choosing.

That is the difference between noticing a woman and this. A glance ends. This accumulates.

The routing. The far checkout. The worse coffee. He says he did not decide it, and he is right that it is not an offence — but he is wrong that no deciding took place. It happened somewhere he has never had to look, which is not the same as it not happening. A pattern like this does not only respond to what is in front of it. Given the chance, it arranges the day so that there will be more.

The line about the counter — I'd have said that one was obvious — is doing quiet work in the middle of the inventory. It invites whoever is reading to agree, and an observation everybody shares stops being an observation about anybody. That move is the thing that has kept this unexamined for as long as it has, and it is not evidence that there is nothing here. It is the reason nobody has looked.

He asks what the alternative is, and it is a fair question badly aimed. The alternative is not don't look — nobody can legislate a reflex, and approaches built on that tend not to hold, for exactly the reason he gives. The alternative is knowing what the returns are for.

Because they are not really about the women. The private scene is not about her. It is about him — that for a few seconds he is someone desirable, unattached, free of whatever he is carrying. That is the thing being reached for, and it is why the reaching survives the stopping of anything else. It was never a route to a woman. It was the fastest available way to change how he felt.

And the last thing, which he cannot see from where he is standing: the person living beside him has been reading the half-seconds of this for years, is not imagining it, and has usually been told that she is.

On the other site, the other voice, the same ground: My Husband Looks at Other Women and Says I'm Imagining It — what this layer looks like from the outside, in a different house.

Earlier in this diary: I Quit Porn and Nothing in My Marriage Changed

If you want the shape of the whole thing: the free guide, You Stopped. So Why Hasn't Anything Changed?.

One thing to do with this

Not a programme. One thing.

Take one ordinary hour this week. Don't change it. Don't improve it. Don't try to have a better hour than you would have had.

Then count the returns.

Not how many women — how many times you went back to the same one, and whether the second time had something in it the first one didn't.

That number is the only piece of information in this entry that is actually yours.

What this is, and what it isn't. This is education, not therapy, and not an assessment of you. Nothing here is a diagnosis — I'm a social worker and psychotherapist, and diagnosis isn't mine to give.

If you're struggling right now, you don't have to sit with it alone. In Canada, the 9-8-8 Suicide Crisis Helpline is available 24/7 — call or text 9-8-8.