Several years ago, I got a call from a man who was in a mild panic after his wife caught him looking at porn. A few months into our work together, Jim asked me if I’d be willing to meet with he and his wife, Sarah, together. He told me that Sarah was struggling to understand why he’d been using porn for so long, and what she needed to do about it.
After I met with the couple, it became clear to me that there is a huge misunderstanding about porn usage as it relates to the wife. The majority of women that come into my office really struggle to understand porn. More importantly, they struggle to know what they can do to help.
When men seek help in addressing the issues with their porn use, many times their wives do not seek their own help. While there are a myriad of questions that come up regarding porn use, I often hear wives ask questions like: “Do we need to have more sex?”, “Why am I not enough?” or “Why can’t he stop for me?” Sarah was asking some of these same questions. Here are the 4 things I told her that wives need to know about their husbands porn use:
1. It’s not about you.
Porn is almost always something that is brought into marriage. I can only think of a few stories over the past 15 years of working with couples when porn use first started after marriage. Because porn is a “pre-existing condition,” it really doesn’t have anything to do with the wife “being good, sexual, or beautiful enough.”
Genesis tells the creation story of God creating man and woman in His image (Gen 1:27). Porn distorts this truth. It perverts the dignity of both men and women. A man’s use of porn is between he and God, not as a statement about you or your dignity.
Evil wants to convince men and women that we are sexual objects, not sexual beings. If we are sexual objects, then sex can become a commodity to be marketed and sold. It is becoming increasingly difficult for men to develop a God-created view of human sexuality.
When you make his porn use about you, you put yourself in the middle of the problem. And if you’re in the middle of the problem, then it is up to you to solve the problem for him. Many women unknowingly insert themselves in between their husband and God in dealing with recovery from porn. Don’t do this. Don’t make it about you. Your husband has his own sexual recovery process that will involve you, but it is not about you.
2. Porn use is about shame.
Sarah was having a difficult time understanding why her husband Jim couldn’t stop his porn usage. Nearly 15 years into their marriage and he admitted to looking at it once or twice a month. She thought he should be able to stop because “it’s not what Godly men are supposed to do.” Here’s what she was missing. Jim had a long complicated relationship with porn that started when he was 10 after his dad left the family.
His porn use had very little to do with “being a Godly man” and had way more to do with an unreconciled trauma that occurred in his childhood. Every man has a story that answers the question “why porn?” And every story will have shame at the center.
Shame is the feeling that says “something is wrong with me, and I need to get away from this.” After Adam and Eve sinned, they recognized their nakedness and hid from God (Gen 3:7-8). What an awful feeling that must have been! They sewed fig leaves together to hide their nakedness first from themselves, and then they hid themselves from God.
Porn is a form of fig leaves for a man. It’s a poor attempt at hiding a God-sized problem. It temporarily hides the painful truth that he’s naked. It hides his vulnerability and the reasons that he is in pain. For a few brief moments, his shame disappears amidst the pleasureful fantasies taking place on the screen, or on the pages.
Your husbands porn use is an indicator that he is in a tremendous amount of pain, and is needing some form of relief. Depending on his story, he might not emotionally know another way to relive that pain outside of looking at porn. This is no way excusing his behavior. Paul speaks directly to this in Romans 6:1 “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” What I am suggesting is that he has enough pain and shame on his own to deal with, he doesn’t need more from you.
Shame doesn’t last very long in an environment with grace and empathy. God doesn’t turn his back on Adam and Eve when he finds them hiding in the garden. He doesn’t shake his head with disdain. He doesn’t lecture them. He doesn’t imply that they should have acted differently because they knew better. What does He do instead? He sacrifices an animal to clothe them (Gen 3:21). And then he protects them by disallowing their ability to live forever by eating from the tree of life (Gen 3:22). When we fail God, he returns grace, mercy, and love. This is the invitation for wives as well.
But here’s the problem: Wives often can’t give the gift of grace and empathy to their husbands because of their own stories. Without doing her own work of healing, she will not be able to offer empathy. She will resort to her own coping mechanisms and will likely make his porn use about her.
Tend to your own story. Engage in your own healing work so you can know how to be in relationship with your husband without enabling, or shaming him.
3. Having more sex can cause more harm.
This is a delicate topic as withholding sex can be harmful just as the use of porn is. Some errant advice given to wives of porn addicts is that they need to make themselves more sexually available. The not-so-subtle hint here is that more sex is the secret to keeping the husband from acting-out with porn.
In short, this is awful advice. It invites the fantasy life of porn into the marriage bed, and says that the wife’s lack of sexual availability is reason for the man’s acting out with porn. If someone gives you this advice, run away. God came looking for Adam first after sin entered the world. He did not ask Eve to account for her actions as reason for Adam’s sin. His sin is his sin. Your sexual story is influencing your husbands, but it is not the reason for his choices.
Women do not need to be more sexual for their husband to keep him from fulfilling his needs elsewhere. This is enabling behavior. It makes the wife responsible for the husband’s sexual maturity. Most would not want an affair partner in their marriage bed with them, but this is exactly what the advice to “become more sexual for him” is doing. It’s bringing a fractured sense of intimacy into a sacred space meant to be shared only between husband and wife.
There needs to be hard work and conversations about the harm that porn has caused in a relationship before sex can be trusted as an expression of love and commitment. Sex without love and commitment is a form of power and control. This comes closer to using each other for pleasure as opposed to loving each other with pleasure.
This does not mean that couples need to stop having sex altogether if porn is present. Do not limit sex as a form of punishment or control, and do not give in to having more sex just to make things better. If you find yourself struggling to know the balance here, seek professional help to establish healthy boundaries.
4. Porn use is an affair.
Though men are resistant in accepting this, porn use is an affair. It is taking the most trusted and vulnerable act that a couple can share together, and expresses it elsewhere. Yes, it’s kind of a “one-way” relationship as the images provide no relational feedback, but it is still taking the sexual embrace outside of the marriage bed. Most of the men I talk to initially resist the label of porn as an affair. I think this mainly relates back to point 2 and the shame they feel.
Jesus says in Matthew 5 that looking lustfully at a woman has committed adultery. Porn takes this a step further and moves it from just an issue with the heart to becoming an issue with the body. There is a spectrum of pain and ease of recovery that couples face when an affair enters the picture. Affairs of the heart (emotional connection, attachment, infatuation) are always the most painful and difficult to recover from. Affairs of the body (sexual contact, fantasy induced orgasm, “solo sex”) tend to be simpler and easier to understand. Affairs of the mind (fantasy, lust, escape) afflict us all.
Porn use is an affair of the mind and body. Instead of working out the issues of the relationship in the context of the relationship, fulfillment of sexual needs and desires are engaged outside the marriage. One of the more difficult realities of porn use is that sex between a husband and wife now includes the images, videos, sounds, and sexual impulses experienced when previously viewing porn.
Lastly, don’t wait to seek help. It’s been my experience that couples wait 4-6 months too long to seek help for the problems they are unable to resolve on their own. Don’t go at this alone. Get help even if your husband won’t. It’s not an easy topic to address, but it’s not impossible to heal from. Be patient, take your time, and work hard to find a path forward towards wholeness, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
