D
duskyjewel
Guest
I don’t mean this to come off as insulting, but I see so many threads where a marriage is struggling because of a porn addiction on the part of the husband that pre-dates the marriage. The woman in question almost always knew that her husband had a very damaged sexuality and that he was currently and actively using porn before the marriage took place. Why on God’s green Earth would a woman purposely choose to marry into such a huge problem, and one that goes straight to the heart of the marriage?
I know that people will say, “she loved him.” But love is not enough to make marriage work all by itself, and it certainly cannot cure deeply pathological personality problems. People are choosing to enter marriage, a relationship in large part defined by sexuality, with a person they know has a damaged sexuality and a gravely disordered use of it. Then they spend years being hurt, feeling degraded, or feeling ignored, because the spouse prefers porn to a real relationship. Then, usually after they have made children who will now suffer under this situation, they start asking, “how do I solve this?” I am fairly sure, too, that both partners would have to actively conspire to hide the porn use during pre-marital counseling or marriage prep, so that the priest or counselor would not tell them not to marry, that the problem needs to be solved first. (I am fully aware that secular counselors by and large regard porn use as normal. But this board is full of Catholic people, many of whom went through Catholic marriage prep and somehow still got married with this issue intact.)
I don’t understand people making these choices. I don’t understand wanting to inalterably attach the rest of your life to dealing with something so horrible. Is it just naivete? Thinking that “love conquers all?” Desperation, thinking this is their only chance to marry? Am I just being unreasonable and elitest, expecting people to examine their relationships rationally when love itself is usually not rational? Is it a societal problem, where people just are not receiving any kind of good education or advice about what marriage really is and what it takes to succeed?
Again, I am not trying to be insulting. I really want to understand the mechanisms, here. Partly to help my own daughters avoid making such mistakes…
(P.S. I do not mean to say that anyone with a “damaged sexuality,” like abuse/rape victims, or even a former porn user who has conquered it, should be excluded from marrying. People who have had bad experiences but have healed and are ready to move on are just as ready to marry as anyone else. I don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea from my comments.)
I know that people will say, “she loved him.” But love is not enough to make marriage work all by itself, and it certainly cannot cure deeply pathological personality problems. People are choosing to enter marriage, a relationship in large part defined by sexuality, with a person they know has a damaged sexuality and a gravely disordered use of it. Then they spend years being hurt, feeling degraded, or feeling ignored, because the spouse prefers porn to a real relationship. Then, usually after they have made children who will now suffer under this situation, they start asking, “how do I solve this?” I am fairly sure, too, that both partners would have to actively conspire to hide the porn use during pre-marital counseling or marriage prep, so that the priest or counselor would not tell them not to marry, that the problem needs to be solved first. (I am fully aware that secular counselors by and large regard porn use as normal. But this board is full of Catholic people, many of whom went through Catholic marriage prep and somehow still got married with this issue intact.)
I don’t understand people making these choices. I don’t understand wanting to inalterably attach the rest of your life to dealing with something so horrible. Is it just naivete? Thinking that “love conquers all?” Desperation, thinking this is their only chance to marry? Am I just being unreasonable and elitest, expecting people to examine their relationships rationally when love itself is usually not rational? Is it a societal problem, where people just are not receiving any kind of good education or advice about what marriage really is and what it takes to succeed?
Again, I am not trying to be insulting. I really want to understand the mechanisms, here. Partly to help my own daughters avoid making such mistakes…
(P.S. I do not mean to say that anyone with a “damaged sexuality,” like abuse/rape victims, or even a former porn user who has conquered it, should be excluded from marrying. People who have had bad experiences but have healed and are ready to move on are just as ready to marry as anyone else. I don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea from my comments.)
Even my DH’s young life had been contaminated with porn, as his dad decorated the garage with Hustler Honeys (those pictures were SO gross!), but he never had much interest and when I expressed disgust agreed that they were not the nicest pictures. He has never wanted to bring any of that into our home. The closest he’s gotten is Boris Vallejo and Olivia de Bernardiis calendars, whose art some would consider too racy, but certainly not porn, and I like most of it too. He likes artistic nudes and classic pin-up type art, but that’s a far cry from the nastiness he saw growing up. I’m proud of his strength of character in getting past seeing that stuff growing up.