Marriage Validity?

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BernardetteB

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Hello,
I have a question about the validity of my marriage. My husband and I were married civilly 5 years ago. I am Catholic, he is not. He has tried to cheat on me several times but I don’t believe any of the times were ‘all the way’, but they may have well as been. When I started going to Mass we had our marriage Blessed in the Church. Before this time I wanted to make sure he understood what the Sacrament of marriage is in the Church
Today I found out that my husband has been sending videos of women to his friends and saw on one video where he made some very bad comments on it. I confronted him about this and he seemed to not understand at all why I was upset. I explained to him that looking at another woman in lust is the same as adultry and he still didn’t seem to get it as he rolled his eyes at me like I was bothering him.
He seriously does not see anything wrong with looking at porn, making near porographic type comments himself, or talking to other women. I’m starting to worry that when we had our marriage blessed that he didn’t understand, and therefore our marriage isn’t valid.
I’m not sure what I should do, other than pray.
 
bkayw said:
Is your husband Christian?

EWTN had a series of programs hosted by a married couple and a priest.

The main emphasis was breaking addiction to porn and healing the wounds that that creates in marriage.
Click to expand...
Yes and no. He was baptized as a child, but is not practicing.
 
Considering you had your marriage convalidated (blessed in the Church), than it would now be considered valid at this point. You would need to go through the marriage tribunal for anything beyond that. We can’t just look at our marriages and assume they’re invalid nor should we really be doing this for other people.

What you are having to go through is hard though. He doesn’t seem to be taking his problem seriously. Porn addiction can be a very hard thing for a man to overcome and even if you have a man who understands he has a problem, gets blocking software, etc, if the addiction is bad enough he may still go back to it and with much regret. It can very much be the type of sin that is so ingrained in the person that he is ultimately enslaved to it. This is especially the case if he began viewing material at a very young age and grew up in a household that considered this a normal part of sexual development.

If you can get him to acknowledge his problem, than I’d recommend either safe eyes or covenant eyes. Safe eyes will block things. You’ll need him to give you administration access and then will need to change the password and control what content he’s allowed to view. You’ll also get notifications of the time of day he’s on and what sites he visited the most. Covenant eyes would work as you being his accountability partner. However, even if you have someone who loves you dearly, knows its wrong, is striving very hard against it, the addiction can be so bad that those sites will still pop up.

In that way, I would say its very different than adultery. Pornography addiction is like having discovered a very addictive drug that is released by your brain when you view the material. Just like alcoholism, it’s very difficult to just stop cold turkey and its very easy to deny that you have a problem.
 
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