9 Ways Pornography Affects Your Marriage And Sex Life

Pornography is ravaging marriages. In our culture porn is treated as if it's harmless, but it's not.

Porn will wreck the arousal process in your brain and end up wrecking your sex life in marriage. The effects of porn are devastating.

Here are 9 side-effects of pornography.

1. Porn Breaks Trust: Marriages are built on trust. Ask a woman how she feels when her husband looks at porn and if she's honest she hates it. She'll say it feels like he is bringing other women into the relationship. And whether the man likes that or not she's right. It's infidelity.
2. Porn Creates Comparisons: You can't look at images without comparing those images to your spouse. This can lead to ungratefulness, where you focus on what your spouse "isn't" instead of being thankful for what he/she is.
3. Porn Destroys Self-Esteem: Just ask your spouse how confident they feel being naked in front of you after you've looked at pornography and you'll understand this one.
4. Porn Creates Unreal Expectations: Porn is not reality! It's a movie created by a director and paid actors who are acting! It's not real! And guess what, most of them hate it. Many of the female actors were coerced into the film industry at a very young age against their will. A high number of female actors take drugs to cope with both the physical pain of filming and the emotional pain. The suicide rate is high among both male and female actors.
5. Porn Destroys Intimacy: Porn in a marriage is usually very secretive. The one looking doesn't want the other spouse to know. The result is a lack of intimacy as one spouse is keeping secrets from the other.
6. Porn Creates Shame: The enemy tempts us to look, and when we do, he tells us what a loser we are for looking. Shame is one of the worst side effects of porn. Because people often look at porn to escape stress or fear, it creates a downward spiral that goes like this. 1. Feel bad about your life. 2. Look at porn to escape. 3. Feel bad about your life for looking at porn. 4. Look at more to escape.
7. Porn is Addictive: Anyone who tells you it isn't is wrong. Studies show that porn lights up the pleasure center of the brain more than cocaine. It's powerful and it's very addictive.
8. Porn Never Satisfies: The porn industry thrives on "customer dissatisfaction." A podcast once explained the difference between sexual addiction and drug addiction. They stated that the drug addict craves "more" but the sexual addict craves "different." In other words, a heroin addict wants more heroin. But a sex addict doesn't just want more sex, he wants "different" sex. The power behind porn is lust. And lust doesn't crave "prettier" – it craves "different." It's why a man can be married to a super model and still cheat with numerous other women. It's not that his wife wasn't "attractive enough," it's just that lust always craves "different." The deception is that "different" will satisfy you, but of course, once you have what you craved you want something different. It never ends.
9. Porn is Progressively Perverse: Due to its inability to satisfy, pornography always leads one to greater perversity. We hear these horrible stories on the news about acts committed against children, even toddlers, and we try to wrap our minds around how someone could be so warped to do something so sick.

If you are dealing with pornography you need to get help immediately. Meet with a marriage counsellor or a trusted religious leader to guide you on how to deal with the problem.

You have to take aggressive steps towards uprooting it out of your life and getting freedom. Freedom is possible but it often takes some drastic changes and aggressive accountability.