How pornography can destroy your marriage and sex life

Welcome, dearest friends, once again, to our anti-pornography forum. This is a public awareness platform campaigning for the eradication of pornography from our society due its inherent adverse effects on the user. Today, we shall explore how injurious porn is to marriage and sex. Many married couples erroneously indulge because they believe it would spice up their sex life and marriage but the truth of the matter is, as we shall see, porn did grave damage to them more than they ever bargained for. Such people would have to look elsewhere for a healthier and saner means of scintillating their union. But that is a matter for another day. First, let’s look at some dangerous statistics!

Red Alert!
According to Pure Life Ministeries, porn is a 57 billion dollars industry. Every consumer of porn contributes to the expansion of that market. A Top Ten reviewer study reveals that 50% of American Christian men are porn addicts while 20% of the women are equally addicted to porn. Due to the systemic lackadaisical attitude of the government and people of Nigeria towards the fight against the pornography phenomenon in the country, we lack any statistics about porn usage in Nigeria where it is probably worse! Again, 56% of divorces in America involve a party who uses porn! In fact, blogger, Sam Guzman, captured a true life story of an anonymous contributor to Catholic Gentleman.net who recounted how she was compelled to divorce her hubby due to his porn addiction which lured him to molest their daughter and granddaughters!

How pornography ruins marriages
First, when any party in a marriage indulges in porn secretly, what it does is to break trust in the union as it is akin to infidelity. Porn is an embellished infidelity which breaks trust in marriage. Second, the porn user begins to compare his spouse to the characters he or she sees on set. Usually, porn stars portray sex in bizarre and unrealistic fashion so that such baseless comparison explicitly ruins sexual intimacy between couples. Third, this last fact is fuelled by the preponderant fact that porn generates unrealistic expectations of sexual pleasure by the often drug-induced actors and actresses in porn movies.

Next, porn usage creates an unnatural sense of shame in the user. He or she feels self-conscious when nude before his or her mate due to excessive exposure to nudity. Further, porn is addictive: it lights up the pleasure centre of the brain far more than cocaine, making the habit recalcitrant. Besides, porn dwells on customer dissatisfaction: it never gives satisfaction because it creates an inordinate craving for someone different, doing something different. After a person, a different look, a different position, the desire for another different passion never ceases. That was why Tiger Woods cheated on his equally beautiful super model wife with several women due to the lust and the lure for the different woman. Finally, porn is perverse. It is at the root of infidelity and sex crimes. Ted Bundy, an American serial murderer and rapist who also killed and raped a 12 year old girl, confessed before his execution that he started viewing porn as a 13 year old!

How porn can destroy sexual intimacy between couples
According to speaker, blogger and writer, Sheila Wray Gregoire, porn is highly injurious to the brain, marriage and sex. She explains that if a partner uses porn, he or she begins to associate arousal with an image, an idea, or a video, rather than his or her spouse. She said that that is how porn destroys the libido through this unrealistic and unhealthy sexual preoccupation.

She further argues that since the porn user gets sexual gratification without his or her spouse, this leads to selfishness and an absence of sexual intimacy between couples, making them fall less in love with each other. In other words, porn is pure lust and she further argues that it could lead to pre-mature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction in male users!

Invariably, she says, porn makes a man or woman too sexually lazy to satisfy his or her spouse, reducing “making love “ to “sheer lust” and absolute bore! She also says, porn makes tenderness during sex almost impossible because of the bizarre drama the goes on during porn videos. She adds that porn generates a twisted view of sex in people, damaging their sex life as the user begins to associate sexual pleasure with stereotyped male or female forms seen on set and in some more bizarre forms, it could even be an animal! At that stage, the user does no longer find his or mate sexually attractive since he or she fails to meet the physical criteria seen in porn movies.

Such a person becomes self-centred, even in other areas of their relationship, such as, their finances, making him not just a lousy lover but an inconsiderate partner. The bottom line is that porn will deal a big blow to sexual intimacy between couples, unlike the popular opinion which seems to suggest the opposite.

How porn ruins relationships generally
As earlier stated, porn results in deep-seated personality adjustment which makes one a largely selfish person. It alters totally how you think, behave and react to people, making you a mal-adjusted person. The porn addict thinks of himself or herself alone, not caring for the satisfaction of others, even loved ones on account of his or her obsession for sexual gratification.

A little wonder why some of them end up as sex offenders. If he or she is single and in relationship with another person, his or her selfishness overtly affects the future of that relationship which is most likely doomed to fail! As said in the last issue, porn leads to loss of interest in long-term monogamous relationships, crippling the capacity to settle down in marriage. So if you are single and you indulge in porn, porn will, either on the long-term or short-term, destroy your chances of settling down!

Feedbacks
On the very Saturday we hit the stands last week, I got a text from a very disgruntled reader which reads: “Is porn not legal and publicly shown in Nigeria when it is being sold normally on our streets? We should be thinking of how to sponsor a bill for blocking the websites to Nigerians. Sometime last year, some girls in Kogi State University that I knew personally were expelled for being involved in a porn video. Forget Las Vegas!” (08062908770)

We have only just revived this column in our darling newspaper and there will be many other opportunities to address the pornography phenomenon as it applies to the Nigerian situation. Please, bear with me. I also got a call from Franklin (not the real name) who had been battling porn addiction for 10 years. Like I said last week, I flushed porn from my system by God’s power and self discipline; so if you are battling with the same issue, feel free to contact me. I am also available for counselling, talks, seminars and conferences on the pornography phenomenon.

Let me know what you think!
I want to make this column as interactive as possible. Porn was not just my personal problem but that of the world and I believe we can all collectively expunge it from the society. Follow me on twitter @isaiahogodo. Send me a friend request on Facebook to Isaiah Ogodo and join the Facebook group called #Let’s expunge pornography from our world today. Call or text me on 08026229520 or email me at akpomovinedc@yahoo.co.uk. Stay chaste and stay blessed!