Would you maintain sexual intimacy with a spouse addicted to porn?

[Trident_H]

Trident, you are most probably destined to help others by your experience if you have that desire so don’t think that is where you go wrong. It’s just perhaps premature because there’s evidence that you are still in old thinking patterns. That truly can happen. Someone gets clean and might think that’s the end of it… but it doesn’t end there. You have to keep working and chipping away at old patterns until you can see how they keep you imprisoned and helpless. If you lived near here I could give the names of 10 or more fantastic counsellors!!! but keep at it with the counselling until you are free of the old beliefs about your limits.

God bless on your journey to wellness.

Thanks for that. Thanks for understanding. I’m all alone where I’m at. I’m doing this alone. So I don’t get that kind of feedback. I only hear myself all the time. So I really appreciate you telling me. I needed to hear it.

Peace.

-Trident

 

[Allegra]

He has hidden his actions from me in the past and I have communicated to him that his deception hurts far more than his actions…

Exactly! The hurt associated with the source of the addiction is nothing compared to the lying, blaming, manipulation, and overall BS that addicts use to excuse and cover up their dysfunction. If your husband truly gets this, then it’s most likely far more beneficial for you to be intimate with him, assuming YOU are comfortable with it. Even so, you are still not obligated to do so. However, it sounds like he is making an honest attempt at overcoming this.

 

[Allegra]

Yeah. I guess that’s how that reads. I thought I was just expressing how it felt to be an addict and to try to recover and still feel too low to get up. But I guess I just only saw it from my point of view. Which is typical I guess. But I didn’t want to bring more pain into this. I just was sensitive to it and felt like I was back in a place. But I mean I’ve got to remember that when a guy falls he shouldn’t expect anyone to treat him like he used to be. Like he was before he fell. They should treat him like what he is. If he’s fallen they should look down on that. And on him I guess. I don’t know.

I guess the part I keep forgetting is that the addiction started with a free choice. Maybe it wasn’t completely without confusion. But it was a choice. So when an addict like me gets to look back we keep mixing up the addiction with not having a choice. But we had a choice at the beginning. It’s no one’s fault that we chose that path. There were other options. I mean I could have tried something other than alcohol to deal with the pain. And I could have tried something other than drugs to try to deal with the alcohol. But I didn’t. So I guess that’s why I’m still on the wrong side of things. Sorry.

Peace.

-Trident

You were 100% successful in demonstrating how it feels to be an addict. You pretty much listed off nearly every line that the voice in an addicted person’s head keeps telling them in order to keep them in addiction and isolate them from those who genuinely care about them and want them to recover. The reason that a therapist can write a script of what you are going to say before you actually say it, is that addicts have been spouting the same stuff since antiquity. It’s literally the addiction talking, and it doesn’t seem to make a difference if the addiction is to porn, drugs, alcohol, video games, or gambling. That “addict voice” uses the exact same lines regardless of what the person is actually addicted to. Weird huh?

Anyway, that’s why there is so much more to overcoming addiction than “getting clean”. Many people who have suffered from addiction have to continue with group and individual therapy for the rest of their life in order to keep themselves accountable. That voice in your head is invasive and will continue trying to manipulate you back into addiction for years after you’ve successfully gotten clean. Part of recovery is learning to recognize the defective thinking patterns that got started while you were using, and stop them before they effect your relationships and cause you to get isolated and depressed to the point of using again.

 

[Allegra]

I’m doing this alone.
-Trident

Don’t. AA and DA meetings are free and in plentiful supply. They aren’t always perfect, but they are almost always better than going it alone.

 

[TK421]

I’m actually really surprised at the responses already in this thread. If I found out that my husband was being unfaithful to me by using porn, I really don’t think I could go there. I know enough about addictive behavior from my family life that I know better. It’s not a wife’s job to be “good enough” in bed so as to dissuade her husband from infidelity. If the man is unfaithful, it’s NOT the woman’s fault, nor does the woman have it in her power to fix HIS brain and HIS habits. It’s a repulsive and unrealistic expectation for a woman to put on herself, in my opinion.

You’re not obliged to have intercourse with such a husband (though I think this is in most cases imprudent towards both you and him), but the bolded part isn’t under theological debate. Yes: a woman - by God’s grace - has it within her power to be the instrument that saves her husband. It has happened many, many times before, including a few examples from canonized women; most famously St Monica and St Rose. People can be (and must be, if their religion is to have any substance at all) instruments of Christ’s work.

When you excel in virtue & charity against someone that is committing an offense against you, it drives a sword into that person’s soul. It awakens and torments that person’s conscience (in a good way) until to leads them to repentance. This isn’t something just between a husband and a wife. The examples of this power of Christ at work are so numerous there wouldn’t be enough space in the world to fit the books on it. This is basic, unmovable, meat and potatoes evagelization.

 

[TK421]

You’re not obliged to have intercourse with such a husband (though I think this is in most cases imprudent towards both you and him), but the bolded part isn’t under theological debate. Yes: a woman - by God’s grace, and whether she wants that power or not - has it within her power to be the instrument that saves her husband. It has happened many, many times before, including a few examples from canonized women; most famously St Monica and St Rose. People can be (and must be, if their religion is to have any substance at all) instruments of Christ’s work.

When you excel in virtue & charity against someone that is committing an offense against you, it drives a sword into that person’s soul. It awakens and torments that person’s conscience (in a good way) until to leads them to repentance. This isn’t something just between a husband and a wife. The examples of this power of Christ at work are so numerous there wouldn’t be enough space in the world to fit the books on it. This is basic, unmovable, meat and potatoes evagelization.

 

[alphawoman]

You’re not obliged to have intercourse with such a husband (though I think this is in most cases imprudent towards both you and him), but the bolded part isn’t under theological debate. Yes: a woman - by God’s grace - has it within her power to be the instrument that saves her husband. It has happened many, many times before, including a few examples from canonized women; most famously St Monica and St Rose. People can be (and must be, if their religion is to have any substance at all) instruments of Christ’s work.

When you excel in virtue & charity against someone that is committing an offense against you, it drives a sword into that person’s soul. It awakens and torments that person’s conscience (in a good way) until to leads them to repentance. This isn’t something just between a husband and a wife. The examples of this power of Christ at work are so numerous there wouldn’t be enough space in the world to fit the books on it. This is basic, unmovable, meat and potatoes evagelization.

Yes, a good example is a powerful witness. Abstinence as a personal and familial sacrifice is a valid way to model Catholic charity and love. It protects the family from growing at a vulnerable time and supports the children’s receipt of appropriate love and attention from the non-addicted spouse. Let’s be honest: the addicted spouse’s well-being does NOT supersede the collective needs of everyone else in the family, present and future.

Please note, however, that addicts don’t have a good grasp of the pain they cause others, and their decision making becomes egocentrically focused on maintaining and feeding the addiction. They are, in many ways, partly or totally oblivious to reason. The addiction numbs them to prosocial behaviour. Again, yours is another post that suggests sex is the only–or the dominant–means of assisting a porn addicted spouse. That’s false. It can be an option in some circumstances, but it need not be, and a strong case can be made against condoning an addiction by extending sex to a spouse engaged in infidelity.

 

[TK421]

If you go back to page #1, I make it clear that intercourse between a man and a wife can never be a substitute that leads a man out of porn. Why not denying intercourse is - in my opinion - usually the wise choice (unless for radical scenarios there is a question of safety), is because it might be the only tangible model the husband has to work with that shows him sex is about love. It’s not just about the release that sex itself provides, but what the sex communicates. The Theology of the Body explains that the human body communicates in a language, and so how we choose to communicate in that language will carry very different messages. Sex via pornography, fornication, etc., is using that language to lie and curse. Sex in fidelity is using that language to encourage and to build up.

I haven’t gone down the rabbit hole as far as some men who truly develop a radical obsession with pornography, but I was a non-religious teenage/college male not so long ago, and like the vast majority of males in my generation, I’ve dipped my fingers in porn in the past. What I can say with 100% certainty is that “making love” and “porn” are fundamentally different sources of pleasure. Everything about the feelings, the thoughts, the aspirations: it’s all completely different. The physiological aspect - powerful as it is - is secondary.

Pornography, honestly just like rape itself, shares the same Satanic allure of control and domination. A woman in your imagination, or on a computer screen, or in any other objectifying setting, is your plaything. (Of course, a lot of men watching porn won’t necessarily admit to this in such a blunt way, but that is essentially what is going on). You don’t court her, or win her heart, or make commitments to her, or give yourself to her in anyway. She gives you everything, and you give her nothing. She serves you - is even in some sense a slave to you - and there is no such scenario in this where it doesn’t end with the drug-like rush of an orgasm and a temporary “feel better” mood. Pornography has become more and more “hardcore” and debasing over the years in order to satiate this hunger for control & power.

The wife is the opposite of all of this. In one scenario, you’d be willing to die for her. In the other scenario, you don’t even care what her name is. A lot of porn doesn’t even involve the woman speaking (or hardly at all). She just fulfills her function of inducing pleasure.

I think this also depends on what phase the man is in. There are married men that watch porn and commit impurity and have no intention to stop. There are also married men that have come to despise porn, but are still lit with the evil afterglow, and are actively trying to get rid of it. I think with the newer generations, what is happening is that men are never actually rid of porn once they get married, so it isn’t something “new” in the marriage, but something he never got rid of in the first place. Maybe he thinks it will go away on its own once he is married, which is nonsense. It’s also very likely in contemporary life that two people were fornicating before beginning their (non-sacramental) marriage. The woman usually makes little effort to discern the long-term problems she’s getting herself into, because she suffers from insecurity and self-hate and is willing to grab & keep the man she has, since having a man - in her benighted mind - is always better than not having one.

 

[LongingSoul]

You’re not obliged to have intercourse with such a husband (though I think this is in most cases imprudent towards both you and him), but the bolded part isn’t under theological debate. Yes: a woman - by God’s grace - has it within her power to be the instrument that saves her husband. It has happened many, many times before, including a few examples from canonized women; most famously St Monica and St Rose. People can be (and must be, if their religion is to have any substance at all) instruments of Christ’s work.

That makes me think you either have had nothing to do with addicts or that you are and addict yourself. The reality is that addicts almost always only seek genuine help when they are at rock bottom having been forced to face the damage they’ve done to themselves or to the ones they love via consequences.

That doesn’t imply that the rule is that a wife should not have sex with a porn addicted husband as a way of forcing him to get help… it says that it is important for a woman to listen to her instincts with regards to her own and her childrens wellbeing. She has a duty to protect her self respect for the sake of those who depend on her.

 

[TK421]

What is that they are protecting themselves from? 90% of women entering “marriage” are entering marriage as a fornicator, and with a fornicator. Never mind the children: the parents already robbed them of their rightful due before something like porn even entered the picture. The ax has already cut down that tree. How can they have any hope of turning their fictional union into at least a sort of healthy natural marriage, if one person is going to isolate herself from a problem that she is part of? They might as well spare the delay and sign the divorce paper while they’re ahead.

Are you even aware of how pervasive and ubiquitous these problems are in your country? You’re essentially advocating for almost all conjugal relations within “marriages” to cease, across an entire culture of people. Setting aside the overkill of porn, the average couple isn’t in a sexually wholesome relationship anyway. They play God with contraceptives, have little concept of the permanency of marriage, etc.

 

[TK421]

I’ve already said in more radical scenarios, a woman with an abusive husband has an obligation to her safety and to the safety of any children (Children? What are children?)

That isn’t a typical Western “marriage”. The typical Western marriage is two morally apathetic people that are boyfriend/girlfriend for a few years and decide that marriage is a cool thing to do. They get married, and if it isn’t too much of a bother, they have a kid or two. If porn is still present, it usually involves the husband masturbating at some time during the night or while his “wife” is away, and then he goes back to doing whatever it is he is doing. There is no imminent danger to the wife or the children. Sure, he’s vacating his duties as a husband with his actions, but that would be the case even without pornography.

Moving away from porn just doesn’t happen when you’re at rock bottom, unless you’re talking about the more severe addictions. It happens when you have a child, or you reach a certain age, or at some point it finally clicks in your mind that you’re not doing what you should be doing. I don’t see what benefits the wife hopes to get by completely denying herself to her husband in this scenario since, more than likely, she was already at least vaguely aware of his promiscuity to begin with and decided to throw those thoughts on the back burner and get married anyway. She reasons to herself that she’s a bad person, and there are no good men anyway, and that she has to take what she can get. If at some points she spiritually matures, it’s something she needs to come to terms with, and preferably not by being divisive.

 

[LongingSoul]

What is that they are protecting themselves from? 90% of women entering “marriage” are entering marriage as a fornicator, and with a fornicator. Never mind the children: the parents already robbed them of their rightful due before something like porn even entered the picture. The ax has already cut down that tree. How can they have any hope of turning their fictional union into at least a sort of healthy natural marriage, if one person is going to isolate herself from a problem that she is part of?

Are you even aware of how pervasive and ubiquitous these problems are in your country? You’re essentially advocating for almost all conjugal relations within “marriages” to cease, across an entire culture of people.

There’s an awful lot of intense protest going on in your post. The key to a healthy marriage is to work towards mutual selflessness and that dynamic is a dance. Sometimes one leads and the other follows and vice versa. Addiction is another thing altogether. It doesn’t respect the rules of marriage or relationship or love in general and the response to it has to be different to the response to normal selfishness. It’s more like cancer than a cold or the measles.

I don’t know what the female version of to be ‘emasculated’ is but any of the sex related addictions robs a spouse of her identity as a woman and wife at a very basic level. If as you say 90% of people are already fornicating before they marry, that doesn’t mean that marriage should be ultimately accepted as a lesser godless institution. It’s natural to strive for true marriage of spouses as God meant it to be regardless of how it began. That is why the Church goes as far to recognise that some states warrant separation or the cessation of sexual intercourse and even recognises that some beginnings were devoid of validity.

Just as a husband doesn’t want to be emasculated by a lack of respect, a wife doesn’t want to robbed of identity as woman and wife by sharing their sexlife with porn.

 

[TK421]

There’s an awful lot of intense protest going on in your post. The key to a healthy marriage is to work towards mutual selflessness and that dynamic is a dance. Sometimes one leads and the other follows and vice versa. Addiction is another thing altogether. It doesn’t respect the rules of marriage or relationship or love in general and the response to it has to be different to the response to normal selfishness. It’s more like cancer than a cold or the measles.

I don’t know what the female version of to be ‘emasculated’ is but any of the sex related addictions robs a spouse of her identity as a woman and wife at a very basic level. If as you say 90% of people are already fornicating before they marry, that doesn’t mean that marriage should be ultimately accepted as a lesser godless institution. It’s natural to strive for true marriage of spouses as God meant it to be regardless of how it began. That is why the Church goes as far to recognise that some states warrant separation or the cessation of sexual intercourse and even recognises that some beginnings were devoid of validity.

Just as a husband doesn’t want to be emasculated by a lack of respect, a wife doesn’t want to robbed of identity as woman and wife by sharing their sexlife with porn.

Which she is within her rights to do, just as long as she is aware this will probably lead to divorce. It’s doubtful she was ever married to him in the first place. My view isn’t that a woman denying herself to her husband is wrong, but that she is unwise.

I’m really trying hard not to be ingratiating towards women in these situations, but the world you’re presenting here is - statistically speaking - fiction.

My heart goes out to the small minority of faithful Catholic women that have found themselves in a situation where their husband started watching porn. This is the exception to the norm. Most marriages where porn is present consist of one of two things: 1) both partners are compliant to it being in the marriage, 2) the woman “married” a man that she was fully aware was morally complacent, and she went ahead with it anyway, usually because A) her own sexual ethics are lax, and B) she takes whatever she can get.

Look at contraception. Let’s say one person has a change of heart and decides that contraception is intrinsically an insult and a lie to married life and to human dignity. The other person doesn’t. The person who is against contraception may still have conjugal relations with his/her contracepting partner, provided that they make their view clear to them. Normally speaking, the person wouldn’t suddenly completely switch off their sex life, even if they become to some extent heartbroken by its current state. To do so would be detrimental. She isn’t going to “protect” anybody, and she almost certainly isn’t going to save the marriage, let alone be doing the kids any favors: just the severe emotional trauma of watching their parents split up.

 

[TK421]

I suppose my unpopular and factually correct view that some female members might be unhappy with is: women are not incompetent. They are intelligent creatures. For the majority of women in these situations, it is to some extent their fault that they’re stuck with a husband that masturbates to porn, which puts them in an awkward situation to shut the conjugal life of the marriage down. They saw the red flags and they chose to ignore them because of moral weakness and willful ignorance. They are culpable for that, they are directly culpable for the suffering & consequences it has on the children they willfully chose to have with the man, and if they want to salvage the relationship later, it’s going to involve suffering on their part, and it is suffering which they created with their own two hands.

I’m going to end my discussion here. Your reputation precedes you and I know the dialogue here isn’t going to make any ground.

 

[LongingSoul]

I suppose my unpopular and factually correct view that some female members might be unhappy with is: for the majority of women in these situations, it is to some extent their fault that they’re stuck with a husband that masturbates to porn, which puts them in an awkward situation to shut the conjugal life of the marriage down. They saw the red flags and they choose to ignore them because of moral weakness and willful ignorance. They are culpable for that, and if they want to salvage the relationship later, it’s going to involve suffering on their part.

I’m going to end my discussion here. Your reputation precedes you and I know the dialogue here isn’t going to make any ground.

I think it is probably best that you leave the issue here. If you want to have someone elses view of how porn affects a wife, here is a helpful link.

covenanteyes.com/2010/07/06/the-effects-of-pornography-on-wives-and-marriages/

 

[Allegra]

You’re not obliged to have intercourse with such a husband (though I think this is in most cases imprudent towards both you and him), but the bolded part isn’t under theological debate. Yes: a woman - by God’s grace - has it within her power to be the instrument that saves her husband. It has happened many, many times before, including a few examples from canonized women; most famously St Monica and St Rose. People can be (and must be, if their religion is to have any substance at all) instruments of Christ’s work.

When you excel in virtue & charity against someone that is committing an offense against you, it drives a sword into that person’s soul. It awakens and torments that person’s conscience (in a good way) until to leads them to repentance. This isn’t something just between a husband and a wife. The examples of this power of Christ at work are so numerous there wouldn’t be enough space in the world to fit the books on it. This is basic, unmovable, meat and potatoes evagelization.

Are you trying to advocate for the idea that the only way, or even a legitimate way for a wife to evangelize her porn-addicted husband is to allow him to bully her into having sex with him?

 

[Eliza10]

Trident, you are most probably destined to help others by your experience if you have that desire so don’t think that is where you go wrong. It’s just perhaps premature because there’s evidence that you are still in old thinking patterns. That truly can happen. Someone gets clean and might think that’s the end of it… but it doesn’t end there. You have to keep working and chipping away at old patterns until you can see how they keep you imprisoned and helpless. If you lived near here I could give the names of 10 or more fantastic counsellors!!! but keep at it with the counselling until you are free of the old beliefs about your limits.

God bless on your journey to wellness.

 

[TK421]

Are you trying to advocate for the idea that the only way, or even a legitimate way for a wife to evangelize her porn-addicted husband is to allow him to bully her into having sex with him?

@Allegra:

She can also hop in the nearest time machine, go back, be continent & single for a few more years, repent of her culture of death & secular liberalism in Confession, and marry a man in her late 20s. There is no absolute guarantee of how any spouse is going to behave in the future, but the divorce rate of fully orthodox Catholics (Catholics that practice NFP) is supposedly around 1-2%, which is a statistic I’ll take on any day of the week. I don’t think very many men that turn over their procreation into God’s hands are going to be watching pornography. I don’t have data sitting in front of me to back that up, but it just seems like a reasonable assertion to make.

If the woman is already a fornicator and an enemy of truth that is stuck in what is probably an invalid marriage, then yes: you’re more or less correct that she put herself into a situation with zero appealing options and the “marriage” was in grave trouble from the very beginning, and no matter what she does she is going to suffer, and she is going to suffer quite a lot. She can start living with her morally compromised husband as brother and sister, which will likely lead to divorce and the lifelong scarring of any children she has, and she’ll join the ranks of millions of exhausted, overworked, unhappy single mothers. She can keep living with him like a wife, which is also problematic if he has no intention of stopping porn in the first place (it is less problematic if he is in a recovery process). St Rose chose to do this with her unfaithful husband, and she redeemed him in this way, although the actions of saints are not infallible. You’re morally permitted to disagree with her, and the Catholic Church doesn’t oblige a person to maintain conjugal relations. This also will be painful.

Unless there’s an option I’m missing, a happy outcome is doubtful. Unless her conscience is numb to the fact that her husband is unfaithful to her, she’s going to suffer no matter what, even if she did take responsible steps to avoid such a situation as a single woman. The only thing that does is make being stuck in that situation drastically less likely.

 

[TK421]

Naturally, the man here will have a great deal of misery on his hands too, largely from pornography itself. Apart from the staggered rushes of pleasure it brings, it tears his life down and turns him into his own prisoner, and he becomes more and more incapable of looking at women (and by extension, all human beings) as the immortal creatures that they are. He’ll be a lonely soul that sees his kid’s on weekends and pay out a fat alimony check that decimates his income, and eventually find comfort in another woman who herself is probably divorced. The cycle then has a good chance to repeat itself.

None of this has anything to do with my own conjecture. This is the contemporary landscape of marriage.

 

[Allegra]

@Allegra:

She can also be continent & single for a few more years, repent of her culture of death & secular liberalism in Confession, and marry a man in her late 20s. There is no absolute guarantee of how any spouse is going to behave in the future, but the divorce rate of fully orthodox Catholics (Catholics that practice NFP) is supposedly around 1-2%. I don’t think very many men that turn over their procreation into God’s hands are going to be watching pornography. I don’t have data sitting in front of me to back that up, but it just seems like a reasonable assertion to make.

If she’s already a fornicator and an enemy of truth that is stuck in what is probably an invalid marriage, then yes: you’re more or less correct that she put herself into a situation with zero appealing options and the “marriage” was in grave trouble from the very beginning, and no matter what she does she is going to suffer, and she is going to suffer quite a lot. She can start living with him as brother and sister, which will likely lead to divorce and the lifelong scarring of any children she has, and join the ranks of millions of exhausted, overworked single mothers. She can keep living with him like a wife, which is also problematic if he has no intention of stopping porn in the first place (it is less problematic if he is in a recovery process). St Rose chose to do this with her unfaithful husband, and she redeemed him in this way, although the actions of saints are not infallible. You’re morally permitted to disagree with her, and the Catholic Church doesn’t oblige a person to maintain conjugal relations. This also will be painful.

Unless there’s an option I’m missing, a happy outcome is doubtful.

I think you are considerably underestimating the number of men who artfully hide their porn use from their wives or fiancés, particularly if they are Catholic and know better. Addictions can certainly occur later in life or can progress from occasional use. But that’s neither here nor there.

I would never advocate for a woman to accept infidelity in order to maintain a comfortable lifestyle. I was raised by a “single mother”. (That is, my parents were divorced. She remained unmarried for less than four years and she and my father continued to raise us as a team, despite no longer being married.) My mother was raised by a single mother. (My grandfather passed away before my mother was a year old.) My grandmother was raised by a single mother. (Her husband disappeared for ten years and later it turned out he had illegally remarried, had another family, and was a state senator in Michigan.)

Single motherhood isn’t an easy thing, but I would happily accept it before I would allow my children to watch me be degraded by an addicted, unfaithful man. There’s no amount of money in the world that’s worth allowing one’s children to grow up believing that’s okay and then get into relationships where they accept it for themselves. Financial struggles are endurable. Sacrificing all of your self-respect in order to stay in a bungalow in suburbia is not. They are two massively different forms of suffering.

My father accepted my mother’s abusive infidelity for a long time, because he was afraid of losing his family. He even accepted her blaming him for her own evil actions. And what did he accomplish? She left him anyway.