This Could Change The Way You Think About Sex

Is pornography sabotaging your sex life and your marriage?

In this video, Dr. Kimberly Beam Holmes, CEO of Marriage Helper, breaks down the three ways pornography creates unrealistic expectations, leads to sexual dysfunction, and destroys real intimacy in marriage. Whether it is visual pornography, erotic novels, or the shows you watch, the effects on your relationship and sex life are more damaging than most people realize. If you want a better sex life and a stronger marriage, it starts with addressing the real relationship problems underneath.

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Transcript

Porn Is Everywhere Now

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Let's talk about what happens when you watch porn and how it's affecting your actual sex life. Because here's the thing. I don't know if you've noticed, but porn and access to porn is easier than ever before. People are actually even creating porn from AI. The access is incredible, and the way that it's damaging real life relationships and your sex life is more than ever before. When my husband and I first got married, he went to a counselor and the counselor told him, hey, in order to make you and your wife's marriage better, y'all should just watch porn together. Thank God my husband didn't actually do that because he knew, number one, that it was going to be more damaging than helpful. And number two, that there was no way I was ever going to go for it. But porn comes up in so many different ways. It's not just visual, although that's part of it, but it can also be in the books we read, the shows we watch. We can become very desensitized to the things that we are looking at that's making us crave looking at that more than looking at our spouse. Let me show you what this looks like. Let's head inside. I kind of think about it like I think about coffee, because there's one of two ways that you can drink coffee. I mean, I guess there's a third. You could go and get it from Starbucks or Duncan or a local coffee shop. But for the premises of this, there's one of two ways, even then, that you can drink coffee. You can either do it this way, where you get the really good ground or the really good whole bean coffee, and you pour the beans in. And you actually take the time to grind the beans. Then from there, you take those beans, freshly ground, you place them in French press, a chemex, you pour the hot water over them, and you let it simmer. You let it sit, you follow the process. It takes time, there's effort, there's intentionality, it's slow, but it honors the process of making coffee. And in the end, you have a better result. But then there's another way that you can make coffee too. It's quick, it's easy. Everyone does it. It's what the masses are doing. It's easily affordable, easy to access. Who somewhere in their life have access to a curing? But here's the thing: the grounds inside of here, they are disgusting. They are overworked. They have absolutely no good taste. They're burned and they are the rejects of the other coffee beans that ended up being put into the coffee that you pay more for. I learned that at a coffee farm in Costa Rica. This burnt, overworked, gross, chemically. It's in plastic. If you put stuff through here, you're gonna end up drinking microplastics. Who wants that? This timeless. This allows us to actually enjoy the end product. This is what good sex in a marriage looks like. Let's go back outside. So, what are the three ways that porn is actually sabotaging your sex life? Let's go over them. The first one is it's creating unrealistic expectations. If you think about pornography, whether it's the type of pornography that men like to watch, which tends to be way more visual, it's creating an unrealistic expectation because men begin to think any girl is always going to be ready to have sex in any kind of situation, and that they're just going to be able to be revved up and ready, that the desire is going to be there. What they see on the screen is what they begin to think that all women are going to want. And it's unrealistic. But I'm not leaving women out of this because there is a lot of feminine erotica that's out there, the kind of books, the spicy books that women read, which is also porn and creates an unrealistic expectation that every man is going to have the moves, the words, and create that really unrealistic sexual scenario that just makes women swoon and that it's going to be like that all of the time. That's what porn does. It puts and programs into your mind that this is what I want, this is what it's always going to be like. And so you're just looking for that. And you're looking for it to come quick and you're looking for it to come easy. The second thing that porn does that sabotages your sex life is it actually creates sexual dysfunction, which is a little ironic because that's the thing that most people are most scared of when it comes to their sex life. They're most scared of not being able to perform, of not being able to do the things that need to be done in the bedroom. But especially for men, the more that they watch porn, the more they are likely to only be able to get eroticized by porn or even by the use of their own hand. And it can create problems in marriage. That's not what you want. You don't want to only be able to perform when you have that in front of you or from your own touch. You want to be able to have that with your wife, with another woman. And it can perpetuate that cycle because now, if you can't perform without those things, then you're going to want to avoid having sex with your wife more and more and more, which creates the process of you continuing to go back to porn, continuing to go back to porn. Now there's a way you can solve that, and I'm going to get to that in just a minute, but let's talk about the third way that porn is sabotaging your sex life, which is it disrupts real intimacy. Sex, the whole purpose of it, the whole purpose of sex is to bond two people together. Now, there's going to be some people out there who say that's not the purpose of sex. The purpose of sex is to create and to procreate. It is to create children, to bring in new life into the world, or there's going to be some people out there who say the whole purpose of sex is for me to feel good. Like the purpose of sex is orgasm. It's great. Like that is a great thing. But if we really look at what sex does in a relationship, it binds two people together. The oxytocin, all of the things that go on inside of your body, neurochemically, physiologically, when you have sex with another person, bind you and bond you. It is an intimacy and attachment creator. That's why the more people that you have sex with, the more problems there are. Because you've given not just your heart figuratively, but you have like neurochemically connected and bonded in the most intimate level with so many other people. That's problematic in and of itself. Because what you actually crave, what you and I actually want in our lives, is to feel loved, to know that we are fully loved and accepted for who we are as we are. That's what everyone is looking for. The people who have all the sex partners, that's what they're looking for too. Bonnie Blue, who slept with 1,057 men or something like that in 12 hours breaking a record. I just want you to like think about how this worked. They literally were lining up. Like, how emasculating is that? That's not intimacy. And people may look at that and think, oh my gosh, she made like such an incredible feat. It's terrible. It's heartbreaking. She's never going to be able, unless she stops doing those things, she's never going to be able to have what she's truly looking for. And that's what the lie of porn tells us. That you can get the pleasure without going through the process, that you can get the reward without taking the risk of real relationship. And it bastardizes sex. It just does. So what is it that you can do right now to get your sex life back on track? Because here's the truth of the matter: everything that happens inside the bedroom affects what happens outside the bedroom. And everything that happens outside the bedroom affects what happens inside the bedroom. So if you are having a sex problem in your marriage, you are likely also having a relationship problem. If you're having a relationship problem in your marriage, it is more than likely affecting your sex life. So instead of taking the easy out and drinking the K cup coffee, I would much rather you fix the relationship issue in your marriage. How can you do that? Well, the first thing that we can do is stop watching porn. Stop taking the easy route, thinking that it's going to just be fine. There was a guy I talked to just today on our live callin' show at Marriage Helper. And he called in and he said, My wife has been struggling with her mental health over the past three years, and I turned to porn. But she didn't know it when she found out she was incredibly hurt. And then she found this erotic novel or literature that I had been writing. And of course she got upset again. And the way that he said it was, since she wasn't there for me, I turned to porn. It was a he was blaming her. He was blaming her for his choice. She made me do this because she wasn't able or willing to give me what I wanted. Well, guess what? Watching porn didn't make his marriage any better. In fact, it pushed his wife even further away and continued her negative self-belief about herself that she's not good enough, she's not worthy enough, and she's never going to measure up. And that's how women feel. That's how men feel too when their wives are watching porn. Like no one likes it. No one likes the way that they feel about themselves. And yes, there's going to be those people who are like, oh no, I love it. You know, we like we watch it together. It's just part of our sex life. We use it to make things spicier. It still doesn't deliver because guess what? After a period of time where that doesn't work anymore, you just go to something even deeper, even more erotic. You begin to open up your marriage to other people. Because if you don't actually fix the relationship problem, then nothing is going to ever make your sex life spicy, good, satisfying. You can find the most satisfying sex life with just your spouse. And you should, because it is the gift that will keep on giving, and it's not the thing that's going to end up continuing to sabotage your sex life. So, number one, stop watching porn. If that man who called in today had actually done the work years ago to fix the relationship instead of turning to porn then, they'd be in a completely different situation now. It's still not hopeless. But you can either take the action five years ago, two years ago, which you didn't, or you can take the action today. So number one, stop watching porn. Number two, stop watching porn. Number three, stop watching porn. Just just stop. Just stop doing it. Put the things in place so that you won't do it anymore. Begin to take this seriously because we know that it's been having a negative effect on marriages for decades. Yet it's becoming more and more of probably the most lucrative industry in the world. Porn isn't going away. You're gonna have to set up boundaries in your life where you don't fall prey to watching it, that you don't fall prey into getting involved with it. You should take it seriously. Because remember, like remember back in the day when people smoked in restaurants and it was normal, right? We all just accepted the fact that there was a smoking section and a non-smoking section, even though we know there is no refuting the fact, the damages of smoking on a person and on their lungs and their body and all of the things. It is cancerous, it is a carcinogen, yet people still do it. However, things have changed. Now there's not smoking in restaurants, and it's it's it's crazy for me to think that we ever even had that. Corn is a carcinogen to your sex life. The things that you may find normal that society does now, maybe those are the things that you should be like, you know what? I'm gonna sit in the non-smoking section. I'm not gonna drink the K cup coffee. I'm gonna take the time to do the things that honor the process and create the sex life that we want. Think of porn as a carcinogen and do everything you can to flee from it and to run from it. Your marriage will thank you. Now, like I said, sometimes there are relationship problems that are causing the sex problems in your marriage. And that's where you need to start. Because your sex life really will struggle to get better if there is a breach of trust, if there's been infidelity in the past, if there's just been bad communication, if you don't want to be around your spouse, you definitely don't want to get in bed with them. Fix that. We have an assessment that can help you do that. You can find it in the show notes below. I encourage you to take it. It'll help you understand the real issue happening in your marriage and how we at Marriage Helper can help. I hope that you do that. Because the bottom line is for your marriage to thrive, you need to be the kind of person who wants the reward of a great sex life and is willing to take the risk of going through the messiness of what relationship looks like. But that's why it's beautiful. Sex is a gift, and it's a gift best enjoyed in the sanctity of marriage. Also, drink good coffee.