Confused About My Partner’s Online Behavior and What It Means for Our Relationship

My partner and I have been together for about two years. I’ve known about his habit of looking at explicit content since before we started dating, as we were friends first and had brief discussions about it. He was the type of guy who didn’t have much success with girls as a teenager, and it takes him a while to trust someone enough to be intimate with them.

That being said, he’s always been passionate about looking at naked women online and even had an OnlyFans account some time ago. Recently, I snooped on his phone—something I know stems from my own trust issues, which I’ve struggled with for a long time. While doing so, I came across some Instagram content that bothered me, but I tried to rationalize it as something “most guys do.”

However, that wasn’t enough to put my mind at ease, so I checked his Google search history. To my surprise, I found multiple pages of escort service websites. These sites featured photos and videos of naked women. I was shocked and started digging further, checking his messages (including deleted ones) and his email. I didn’t find anything incriminating—just the browsing history.

My partner has always been firm about not checking each other’s phones, saying it’s a matter of privacy and something he’d never do to me. At the same time, he’s never actively hidden his phone from me, and we know each other’s passwords.

Because of this, I feel like I can’t confront him without him being upset that I invaded his privacy. But I also can’t stop thinking about what I found. What’s the reason for him to browse those escort websites? Could it be something like using OnlyFans—just out of curiosity—or could it suggest other intentions? Do guys sometimes visit those websites as part of watching explicit content, or does it mean something more?

We are originally from Europe, where this kind of behavior (like browsing escort websites or engaging with OnlyFans) isn’t as common or culturally accepted as it seems to be here. It’s a bit of a culture shock for me, and we haven’t been in this country for long, so it feels like an entirely different perspective on “freedom.”