Porn: why it is ruining your relationship.
Dear Maxwells, my husband watches porn regularly but is convinced it’s perfectly healthy and doesn’t impact our relationship. His reasoning for why it’s healthy is that all his friends also watch porn regularly and that basically “everybody does it.” It is a massive turn off for me, and I’m not convinced that it’s not harmful but am having a hard time getting him to see why. Am I overreacting here?
Dear reader, thank you for your question and no we don’t feel like you are overreacting. Like obesity, processed foods, screen addictions to name a few, compulsive porn consumption is unfortunately another thing that has become so pervasive in our culture that it’s become normalized. But just because it's normalized doesn’t mean it isn’t profoundly detrimental.
First off, the way you practice something is also going to be the way you perform it. When somebody watches porn, they are rehearsing for sex without realizing it. They are programming themselves to be disconnected from their breath, from their partner, from the pleasure in their whole body, and reducing their sexuality to fantasy images on a screen, performed by complete strangers. The more somebody rehearses this, the more their sexual impulse becomes reliant on these images. Additionally, there is no love in the practice of watching porn. The performers on the screen are strangers, how could anybody who doesn’t know them possibly be in love with them or feel loving feelings towards them? The consequence of this is that consistent porn use creates and entrenches a love/lust disconnect in the body and mind of those who engage with it. If this is how somebody is rehearsing their sexuality, then how could they possibly show up differently for the real thing when the time comes for them to be intimate with their partner?
Porn is often watched in secrecy as well, and this secrecy is a breeding ground for shame. It’s good that in our readers' case, there is at least some open dialogue about it, but for the most part, and for most of the people we’ve worked with, porn is something consumed in private, with the door locked to make sure that nobody gets caught with their proverbial pants down. The secrecy of people’s porn habits create an environment for shame to flourish, not because the behavior itself is shameful, but because the necessity most feel to keep the behavior secret gives it that label. We already have enough shame as a society surrounding sexuality and our relationship to it. Add rehearsing shame on a daily basis and you have an environment that is antithetical for deep and connected sex with an actual partner. Who wants to be physically or emotionally intimate, when they're carrying around shame? Additionally, regular porn consumption rehearses an individual's sexuality in isolation rather than in a relationship. It is sex practiced alone with strangers.
Porn negatively affects the dopamine in our brains. Like any substance, the more we engage with porn, the more of a tolerance gets built up. So what turns us on the first time we see it, isn’t going to do the trick the more we engage with it and the deeper down the rabbit hole we need to go in order to get the same effect. Practice this for years and it's amazing how far down the rabbit hole somebody can go in terms of what they need in order to get turned on. This makes "real life" intimacy that much trickier to generate satisfaction and pleasure from.
To answer your specific question about your husband, and to put it simply, porn weakens men. It disconnects men from their warrior spirit, from their ancestral lineage, from their purpose, their motivation, and their creativity. Thousands of years ago, men didn’t have time to sit around, flooding their brains with fast food dopamine to kill time or hide away from their wives and spill their vital sexual essence out of them like a casual sneeze. Now, without lifting a finger, save the one used to click a mouse, anybody can access an infinite amount of extreme sexual imagery and content whenever they want and men will flush their valuable currency of time down the porn rabbit hole. Unfortunately this is time and energy that could instead be directed towards their partner, their creativity or their purpose in life.
Now, picture bringing all of these negative practices into a relationship with a partner. How can men possibly expect to be great husbands, lovers, partners to their women when they are literally rehearsing to be the exact opposite in secrecy and isolation? How can men expect to satisfy their women, physically, emotionally and spiritually when they have practiced themselves away from sex and sexuality in relationships to another in general? They can’t.
If you are somebody who occasionally watches porn, every once in a while, then this article isn’t about you. This article isn’t even about swearing off pornography forever. It’s more to inform our readers of some of the actual negative consequences of regular porn use, so that they can make an informed decision. We wish, that like cigarettes, there was a surgeon general type warming before every porn clip, warning you of the dangers of consumption so you can at least make an informed decision.
One of the first things that we do in our coaching practice for couples who have been dealing with the negative consequences of regular porn consumption is to take a 90 day detox from all forms of pornography, including instagram models and “influencers.” In the case of our reader, I would compile some factual and statistical evidence of the negative consequences of consistent porn use and ask your partner if you could have an honest conversation with them and show them to him. Explain to him in no uncertain terms how impacted you feel by their regular use of pornography. Explain to them how turned off you have become, and how unsatisfied you are with this. For many men, (not all) once they connect the dots that their behavior is actually turning their partner off versus that their partner is the big bad wolf trying to take something away from them, they are much more willing to make a change.
