How Pornography Poisons Your Relationship

During my 25 plus years as a therapist and life coach, I’ve heard thousands of reasons why men started using porn.  “It feels good.”  It helps me relax.”, What’s the harm, it’s not like I’m cheating.”, “It’s free, easy to access and no one is getting hurt”, or “I like it”.

Whatever your reasons in the beginning for using porn, has it brought you any lasting satisfaction?  Or has it created a craving that feels like it can never be calmed?

That’s part of porn’s lure.  It provides anything you can imagine, other types of porn you never imagined, and the potential promise of even more pleasures at just the click of a mouse.  Unfortunately this too becomes unsatisfying and you move on to the next level, more intense and often more violent.  Because what stimulated you in the beginning now seems boring and passé.

Now it’s even harder to become sexually aroused with your wife or partner.  Which often leads to fantasizing about port while have sex with her, thereby diminishing the quality and closeness within your real life relationship.

This is how porn’s promise of pleasure, masks how it poisons your relationship.  Slowly, secretly but steadily makes sex with your partner less appealing, less satisfying and frankly makes you feel like it takes too long.

If you want to stop using porn, you need to be wise to the ways that porn poisons you and your relationships.

• Porn creates unrealistic expectations: it begins to shape your options of what women should look like, what women should do to arouse you, how often you expect sex, and measure their love by how ‘good’ it feels.)
• Objectification of women: the key word is that you USE porn to obtain pleasure. USING someone like tool or an instrument for your pleasure objectifies that woman.  And because what satisfied you at the beginning no longer does, the porn you’re drawn to now not only objectifies women, it dehumanizes to being no more than a hammer or wrench in your toolbox.
• Unhealthy coping mechanism: a University of Arkansas study found that a third of men use porn to ease boredom or stress. Porn has become your fix for frustration to avoid or delay dealing with the real problem.  Thus weakening your healthy coping skills that develop resilience and stunting your emotional maturity.
• Desire for new and different partners and types of sexual experiences: because your craving for more porn, leads to searching for a wider variety of porn that is more intense and often more violent, this often filters into your real life. You begin to seek out new and different partners to satisfy your appetite, which often leads to affairs, and multiple partners.
• Porn turns sex into masturbation: masturbation wasn’t meant to be sexually satisfying. As best it was meant to be an infrequently healthy release of sexual longing, usually for your wife or partner.  But was never meant to be a replacement for healthy relational sex.
• Porn rewires the brain: use of porn generates the release of dopamine in the brain, causing you to feel pleasure as you would with having healthy sex. Constant use of porn over stimulates the release of dopamine in the brain, literally re-wiring the brain to crave and demand more and more stimulation.  Thus your brain and body become addicted to the dopamine.  And like an addict you do whatever it takes to get you next fix, even if it causes harm to you, your relationships, and your career.

These are just a few of the facts as to how pornography poisons your relationships.  Pornography poisons your ability and your willingness to work at developing deep meaningful intimate relationships.  Pornography leaves you lonelier that satisfied.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.  TransformingFamilies.org resources are designed to guide you through the restoration process of developing your heart, mind, and strength, enabling you to become the man God created you to be.

I also provide one-on-one coaching, if you want to improve your relationships, let’s connect through e-mail at ‘rturner@transformingfamilies.org’.  My hope for you is that through these blogs, references, and resources, God will transform you from being bruised or broken to an abundantly blessed man.