by Ronald Jones

Created on: March 12, 2010

It just didn't make sense to me. Here I was sitting across from a young and attractive married couple that had come to me for counseling. They were both meticulously dressed, well groomed, and could have easily passed for high fashion models. When I spoke to the wife over the phone, she was vague and wouldn't tell me the nature of their visit.

As they now shared their situation, I watched the wife's painful, betrayed facial expressions and listened as the husband told of the sexual addiction he had developed over the last seven or eight years that had recently created an immovable rift between he and his wife; His body language spoke volumes; head lowered, eyes filled with tears, and words coming in choppy, broken sentences. He said that he had relied on pornography exclusively to achieve sexual gratification before marriage, never thinking it would be a problem once he got married. What he discovered, however, was that after their marriage, his wife couldn't compete in real life, with what he had become accustomed to through his internet addiction. As this first session came to an end, they thanked me for listening and let me know they would call to set up their next visit. As they walked out the door, I was pretty confident that they wouldn‘t return. Unfortunately, I was correct.

Since that day in the office, I have counseled many other couples going through similar struggles. Most of the troubles and difficulties pornography cause in relationships are the same. Couples will usually experience difficulties creating and maintaining sexual and emotional intimacy in their marriage. Additionally, feelings of shame, guilt, betrayal, and mistrust actively attack the cords of commitment that are so necessary for a healthy marriage. In a real sense, pornography addiction can have the same devastating effects on a marriage as an affair; with porn playing the role of the other woman.

It would be easy to point the finger and place all blame on those individuals that struggle with pornography abuse. Inevitably, they often do end up paying a considerable price for their unbridled habit; feelings of shame, embarrassment, and guilt that is often carried in secret. If you look at the target audience of the pornography industry, however, it is composed of young males aged 14 to 25 years old that have little or no clue about the strong addictive nature of porn.

It is my belief that one of the greatest dangers that Internet porn poses is the accepted status it enjoys

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