How Porn Can Kill Exclusivity In Marriage

This is the second post in an ongoing series about how porn affects marriage. If you’d like to catch up, you can read the first post in the series: Porn and Marriage!

I went into a Costco for the first time a couple weeks back.  I got really nervous.

See, I was headed to their pharmacy, because my beautiful wife™ needed a prescription picked up, and that’s where she had it filled.  But, the thing is, I don’t have a Costco membership.  I was afraid that when I walked through the front door the Costco po-po were going to jump me because I wasn’t an ‘exclusive’ member.  Thankfully, when I waved the prescription (which could have been a random piece of paper, now that I think about it) to the lady standing at the door and said ‘Going to pick up a prescription!’…she smiled and nodded.

Marriage is like Costco. Or Sam’s Club.  Or any big box store where you need a membership to get the cool privileges.  They are an ‘exclusive’ thing.  And that’s what marriage should be.

An exclusive thing.  Hopefully without the warehouse feel, but WITH all the free samples.

If you’re not a member at Costco, you don’t get the cool benefits of great discounts on tubs of Twizzlers.  You don’t get the rows of industrial sized detergents and toilet paper. It’s for the members of the ‘exclusive’ group.

In my life, I wandered around the “Sex Costco” without a membership.  I had sex before marriage – and that is a choice that I would rethink now – looking back.  I made the choice to be free with my sexuality – and now I battle with  things like comparison…like robbing my wife of the gift of being the one and only person who I share that very ‘exclusive’ thing with.  My struggle with porn robbed her of that special ‘exclusivity’ too.

When I was viewing porn, it was like I was bringing someone else into our exclusive relationship.

Where is your Focus?

Let’s say you are walking in the desert without water. You come upon a sign with an arrow that says “Water this way”. You know exactly which way to go to get water.  Now, your walking in the desert without water, and you come upon a sign that has two arrows.  One points left, the other right.

Which way do you go?

We get bogged down with multiple options.  When you bring someone else — even if it is just a picture –  into the relationship, you begin comparing your spouse to others.  That exclusive thing goes out the window.  You begin to doubt that your spouse is the best choice – the gift from God that they truly are.

What you focus on expands.  If you are focusing on someone outside your marriage, that image, or person, will begin to take up more head space than your spouse.  If you have multiple “options” rolling around in your head, you aren’t giving the exclusive focus to your spouse.  The focus is diminished for your mate… and, as you spend more time in fantasy land – that area of focus gets bigger and bigger.  Because of the law of diminishing returns, it takes more and more to feed your focus.  All the while, your spouse gets less and less of that exclusive attention.

We are supposed to be exclusive with our mate. They are to get our best – thoughts, words, actions. If someone else is getting them, that takes away from your marriage.

I think Solomon said it best in Proverbs: ‘Rejoice in the Costco of your youth.’

What did I miss?

photo by hawaii

Tagged as: how porn impacts marriages, porn and marriage