Pornography is a Pandora’s Box, full of exciting forbidden fruit but if opened it can destroy a happy marriage.
The porn industry is raking the money in using every trick in the book to grab another buck.
They want you to believe that it’s all perfectly normal, everyone’s doing it … except you, because your sex life is boring.
What they won’t tell you is how their fake product can damage your marriage.
Here are three ways pornography can seriously damage your marriage.
Desensitisation
There are only so many times you can watch a businessman check into a hotel and find the chambermaid making the bed without any underwear on before it becomes old and boring.
So you sign up to a more adult site, hey it’s only the price of dinner out with the wife or a new playstation game for the kids and you work for the money so you deserve it.
You’re not into anything kinky so you slide on over to the teen virgin section … hey we all know they are much older and school uniforms don’t mean you want to have it away with kids.
A month later that’s old and tired, hey check out the threesome section .. it’s perfectly normal, lot’s of people do that.
The wife swapping section looks good .. maybe your friends Gill and Ben would be up for that?
There’s sections for sadism and bestiality which you’ll never look at … although we know it’s only acting so you just have a quick look for a laugh.
This is the process of desensitisation, in the same way that we watch more and more graphic horror movies, because we become less sensitive to what we are watching.
Desensitisation leads to crossing moral boundaries you would never have dreamed of crossing before you happened across that first pornography website.
How can your wife compete with this? You now think these acts are perfectly normal and acceptable, not only that but you need such images to get excited .. however, your wife still lives in the real world.
Self Serving
Most people will masterbate when they watch pornography, which isn’t really a big deal.
However, masterbation, when you have a sexual partner waiting upstairs for you, is purely a self serving act.
As an occasional act for relief it’s not a problem but when you start to prefer to masterbate watching pornography instead of having sex with your wife or husband then your marriage is in trouble.
Once you start ignoring your wife or husbands sexual needs and sneaking off to your fantasy world then your ability to fulfill your own and your wife/husbands sexual needs as a couple are diminished.
If you are watching lesbian films or threesomes you will begin to feel that something is missing when you do have sex with your wife or husband.
Your spouse will therefore become boring and you will be driven right back to the films or internet and back to serving only yourself.
This can then manifest itself in a lessened feeling of affection for your wife or husband, a lack of closeness begins to emerge and your wife/husband begins to feel neglected and unloved.
Addiction
MORE, give me more!!
So you “innocently” enter the fantasy world of pornography late one night when browsing the net, while you’re wife or husband’s asleep.
You know it’s a fantasy world, the men and women aren’t real, they are surrounded by soft lighting, have fake boobs and have been ridden more often than the winner of the Grand National but it’s just a bit of fun.
You masterbate for a couple of minutes then switch it off, no harm done.
The problem is once we enter the fantasy world we can never be satisfied and the occasional look becomes a regular habit.
You visit the sites more often at night after the wife or husband is alseep, until you find yourself waiting for them to go to bed so you can go and watch.
You become less interested in your sexual relationship with your partner because you have the fantasy world waiting and it takes zero effort, there’s no coaxing or foreplay involved.
How long before you ask the tech guy at work if the computers have adult sites blocked?
You hide your actions because you know your wife or husband would be upset, they would feel inadequate.
You download a couple of films .. just to watch if the computer breaks and hide them where your spouse won’t find them.
This is an addiction like any other and like any other addiction it can in time consume you.
There is also the issue of building an unrealistic image in your mind of what a healthy sexual relationship is about.
If you need help in dealing with a sex addiction or addiction to pornography please contact the following organisations and get help before you damage your marriage:
Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous UK
Sex Addicts Anonymous Scotland
July 11th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
pornography is very dangerous and addicting. It can take away from the lovemaking with your partner. It feeds off our darker innate lust that never leaves us feeling good. Yet it’s so accessible. Good post!
Briddick-Seattledatingcoach´s last blog ..Vlog: The White Zone
August 10th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
what if there’s a masterbation issue…we have sex between 2 and 5 times a day but he still masterbates to the point of getting a callous on his you know what. i feel it when i go down on him. i ask why he needs to do this if he’s got me around…he says “i can’t help it, i get so horny.” i don’t know if theres a simple answer like, he’s a nympho, or if there’s some other possibility i could trouble my mind with that im just not aware of yet…
August 13th, 2009 at 12:07 am
Hi Puddin
Does he do this when you are in the house or when you are out? Also does he use porn as a visual aid?
October 29th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
03 October 2009, 09:00
I am quite worried by the above mentioned post. I am a very sexually open woman, and on meeting my partner I discovered I had finally met a man who was on my ‘sexual wavelength’. When I met my partner we discussed the issue of pornography, and i told him I didn’t have a problem with it, providing he was open and honest about it and didn’t feel the need to hide it from me. It was at that point tat we began watching it together. We both found this exciting and it certainly had its advantages at the time.
However, I quickly found that I wasn’t always excited by it, and much preferred the physical contact and foreplay that led up to our sessions rather than sitting in front of the laptop. Over a period of time this became a problem, as as soon as the laptop was switched off, my partner was ‘ready to go’. I, on the other hand, was not, and it ended up that most of our sessions began with my partner playing with himself, or me doing it for him. So, I started going to bed earlier than him, knowing what he was doing downstairs alone.
This started to leave me feeling cold and turned off, and I would often ‘pretend’ to be asleep when he came to bed. This would always end up with my partner arousing me whilst i was static. This is a very nice feeling, but as this happened everytime we went to bed I started to feel as though i was being a lazy lover, and not reciprocating. In other words, I was blaming myself for the problems caused by our over exposure to porn. once or twice this issue was raised in an argument, which left me feeling very inadequate and sexually unattractive.
I need to add at this point, that my partner was not watching pornography every night, and our sex life on other occasions was very fulfilling for both of us.
However, I did notice that the content of the material he was watching was becoming more and more extreme, and as pointed out above, the ‘actors’ appeared to be getting younger and occasionally performing acts that I felt uncomfortable with.
recently things took a turn for the worse. We’re not television people and often spend the evenings browsing the net on our individual laptops and, certainly in my case, chatting on social networking sites. I noticed over a period of time that my partner was becoming more and more engrossed in what he was doing/watching. On occasion I would ask him what he was looking at. He would often tell me that he was viewing porn sites, but often he would say he was doing something else, and would close the screen down if he left the room. In the end I took a peek at his laptop and realised that his porn viewing had moved away from movies to live streams and webcam views. Although I was slightly uncomfortable with this, i didn’t make a fuss about it. However, one evening I asked to use his laptop whilst he showered, because it is much faster than mine, and I decided to peruse his history. This was when things went sour for me, because I realised he had now moved onto adult dating sites and appeared to have looked at quite a lot of them.
Now, on occasion we had both looked at swingers sites, etc, for the amusement value, and we had discussed this as being an option when we were older and things had become stale, as they often do, but I was shocked to see that he had set up profiles on many of them. The next day I decided to play Private Detective and logged myself onto as many of the sites as I could remember seeing on his PC. I was mortified when I saw the profiles he had set up for himself, and for us both as a couple without my consent. Generally speaking, I am not a jealous or possessive woman, although my partner very often is, but I became very upset about it, as I felt it paramounted to a form of cheating. I was also suspicious that he may have been logging into these sites to ‘look for me’. However, the profiles he had set up were graphic and inviting responses of a sexual nature from both sexes. Whilst i was not concerned about the bi-sexual side of it (I have dabbled myself in this area) I was disappointed that he had not been able to discuss this with me. I was also very disturbed by the extreme content of the pornography he had been viewing, although i put that to one side for a while.
I confronted my partner in a very calm way about the dating sites, and informed him I was not angry with him, but was disturbed by the implications of this, and told him I had no problem with him using the sites for fun, but felt it would be a lot better if he had been honest about this and suggested it was something we could do together. he became quite emotional at this and also defensive, so I brushed it off, and reassured him again that I was not angry, but asked him how he would’ve reacted if the roles had been reversed. He agreed that he would’ve been upset but informed me that most of the sites registered where ‘pop up add ons’. I already knew this not to be the case, but I let it go and we were both okay.
However, the next day I saw him hide his laptop under the bed before leaving for work. On his return he started browsing and accused me of hacking into his network sites, which I had not done. I became upset at the accusation and eventually I disclosed to him that I was shocked by the content of the porn I had found, as some of it was violent, degrading and the ‘actors’ appeared to be very young. This led to an explosive row, and as I suffer from depression, this left me in a very upset state, and my partner walked out on me. He did return and we discussed the issue calmly and he apologised and told me he was shocked himself by what he had seen and that most of it was ‘pop ups and add ons’.
A few days later we decided to have a bit of fun and set up some profiles for ourselves, and we had a good laugh about it. However, whilst on the Adult Friend Finder site, I noticed several profiles that appeared to be ‘him’ or ‘us’. I asked him if this were the case and he denied it. However, the next day I again ‘snooped’ (I’m not proud of it) and discovered that the profiles had indeed been created by him and he had deleted them. I was crushed by this, as I felt the sites were set up to ‘entrap’ me, and this eventually left me feeling colder than cold, to the point that I was not going to bed when my partner did, and he was taking the laptop into the bedroom with him instead of me.
The upshot of it all is that my partner then became very cold towards me and often snapped or even shouted at me, and it has resulted in us breaking up. Since breaking up I have discovered his profile on many, many other sites, including sites specifically for married/partnered couples. This has left me very shaken and lacking faith in myself as well as him.
So, I very much agree with the above posts that pornography does indeed de-sensitise one, and unless it’s viewed together and in a controlled manner it can have devastating effects on a relationship. We have discussed some of the reasons for our break up, and are currently in talks, but I have not mentioned this issue yet. We have decided that we can no longer live together and my partner thinks this will work for us. I however, have my doubts. If my partner is not by my side at night, I will always be wondering to whom he is chatting on the net, and he will wonder the same about me, and I will be wondering if it has gone any further. I have always trusted my partner 100%, but I now feel that this is an issue I will worry about in the future.
November 3rd, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Hi Mand
Thank you for sharing your experience with us, it certainly verifies what we believe about the effects porn can have on a relationship.
I hope you and your partner find a way forward but I do feel you need to say all this to your partner, he needs to be aware of how much damage his porn addiction has done to you and your relationship.