How Porn Effects Marriage

I am on an email list from the great folks at Smart Marriages…a recent email from them included a new report from the Family Research Council on the Effects of Pornography on Individuals, Marriage, Family and Community.

This report has some amazing findings in it – how men and women take in pornography differently, how it effects children, the effect of Sexually Oriented Businesses (SOBs – funny enough, but seemingly appropriate) on their surrounding communities, the effect porn has on the brain and much more.

Here are a few quotes from the report by Patrick F. Fagan, Ph.D.:

Pornography hurts adults, children, couples, families, and society. Among adolescents, pornography hinders the development of a healthy sexuality, and among adults, it distorts sexual attitudes and social realities. In families, pornography use leads to marital dissatisfaction, infidelity, separation, and divorce. Society at large is not immune to the effect of pornography. Child sex-offenders, for example, are often involved not only in the viewing, but also in the distribution, of pornography.

Pornography use undermines marital relations and distresses wives. Husbands report loving their spouses less after long periods of looking at (and desiring) women depicted in pornography.
In many cases, the wives of pornography users also develop deep psychological wounds, commonly reporting feelings of betrayal, loss, mistrust, devastation, and anger in responses to the discovery or disclosure of a partner’s pornographic online sexual activity.
Wives can begin to feel unattractive or sexually inadequate and may become severely depressed when they realize their husbands view pornography. The distress level in wives may be so high as to require clinical treatment for trauma, not mere discomfort.

The estrangement between spouses wrought by pornography can have tangible consequences as well: when the viewing of pornography rises to the level of addiction, 40 percent of “sex addicts” lose their spouses, 58 percent suffer considerable financial losses, and about a third lose their jobs.

…women reported that they preferred engaging in “cybersex” within the context of a relationship (via email or chat room) rather than accessing pornographic images. This preference may contribute to the significant difference one study found in the proportion of women who have real-life sexual encounters with their online companions compared to men. It found that 80 percent of women who engaged in these online sexual activities also had real-life sexual encounters with their online partners, compared to the much lower proportion of 33 percent for men…However in another study, this time of men who flirted in Internet chat rooms, 78 percent reported they had at least one face-to-face sexual experience with someone they had met through a chat room in the past year.42 Thus, it seems that a very high proportion of both men and women who engage in “cybersex” may go on to have physical sexual encounters with their online partners.

Many of the findings in this report are right in line with some of the negative experiences I have had with pornography in my marriage.

If you are struggling with porn or sex addiction – its ok to get help.  Check out the resource page where you can find a group, install a filter on the computer, or surf websites that deal with sexual addiction.

For the complete report visit the Family Research Council.

photo by id-iom