To Wives Addicted to Pornography: You Are Not Alone

Pornography Steals

Porn will steal your enjoyment of sex with your husband. How does this happen? Imagine eating a diet of all junk food. Your breakfast is two doughnuts. Your lunch is a double cheeseburger with fries and a milkshake. For dinner you eat a pizza with chips and soda. While this food might temporarily satisfy your hunger, it provides little to no nutritional value. If you ate like this for a month, it would change your appetite. An apple would no longer taste sweet. Broccoli would taste foul, and a piece of broiled fish couldn’t tempt you.

In many ways, this is what porn does to your sexual appetite. Pornography floods your brain with an amino acid called phenethylamine (PEA). PEA triggers your brain to produce high volumes of dopamine and adrenaline, which together act like an amphetamine. This response makes it easy to become addicted to pornography. God created this chemical reaction in your brain to respond to sex with your husband, particularly when you experience new love or try fun things together in the bedroom.

However, porn tricks your brain into an unnatural experience of sexual pleasure. The result? The beauty of intimacy and pleasure in your very normal sexual relationship can seem painfully dull.

Pornography Destroys

Porn will destroy your fellowship with God. I’ve become convinced that sexuality is a massive spiritual battleground — far greater than we realize. Yes, Satan wants to destroy marriage through pornography, but that isn’t his end goal. He ultimately wants to separate you from the love of God.

John writes that when we have sin in our lives, we don’t have fellowship with God or with each other. Instead of intimacy, we hide. David expressed this in his own walk with the Lord. In Psalm 32 he said that God’s presence became oppressive to him because of his sexual sin.

Your struggle with pornography will make you feel dirty, unlovable, and rejected by God. You may even question your salvation. Satan’s objective is to keep you isolated from God and from life-giving love.

What You Need to Know

Friend, if this describes you, I want you to know and truly believe two very important things:

You Are Not Alone

First, you are not alone. Because struggling with porn feels so shameful, few women talk about it. I can assure you that many of the women you know are walking a similar path. In 2021, women accounted for 35% of consumers on the largest porn site. This is a 5% growth within just one year. The same site shared that in 2021, the second most searched for type of porn was “romance” or “romantic.”

My job is to talk about sex, so people feel safe sharing with me what they are really dealing with. I’ve learned that we are all sexually broken. You might be shocked if you knew the struggles and pain of those sitting next to you at church. Their story may not be exactly the same as yours, but I assure you, their questions are very similar. Where is God in my struggle? Does He see me?

Freedom Is Available

Second, freedom is available. As I write this, I picture real women I know who would shout from the rooftops, “I found freedom!” Freedom from shame. Freedom from sin. Freedom from bondage.

One of my team members at Authentic Intimacy, Joy Skarka, found this freedom from being addicted to pornography. Joy wants you to be encouraged by her story.

“My freedom didn’t happen in a day,” she says. “I have experienced more and more freedom as I’ve made the daily choice to run to the Lord instead of away from Him. Don’t give up, because the pleasure you’ll find in Christ is better than any fleeting pleasure from porn!”

Jesus described Satan as a thief who comes to “kill, steal, and destroy.” This is a truth that you may know too well. You have experienced this death, theft, and destruction in your sex life.

Please don’t skip past what Jesus says next. “But I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly“ (John 10:10). Jesus didn’t say that just to some random person who lived thousands of years ago. He also speaks it to you.