Marriage is hard. Can I get an amen? I’m Ken Anderson, a fellow porn fighter.
I’d like to share with you why quitting porn helped my marriage – before it even started.
Let me assure you, getting married is one of the best decisions I ever made, and it’s also one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
Two individuals with unique personalities, temperaments, preferences, and upbringings uniting in the most intimate of relationships is a recipe for the highest joys and the most maddening conflicts. Without question, one of the best ways to help your marriage is quitting porn – right now, or before it even starts.
Because marriage is hard, it only makes sense to do everything we can to set ourselves up for success, and to control what we can control.
Why listen to me? Thankfully, I’ve been free from porn 8 years and counting.
I struggled with pornography and masturbation for ten years before I decided to get serious about fighting. I hit my one year anniversary of sobriety about a year before my wife and I got married.
Now I’ve been free for 8 years and counting. Quitting porn helped my marriage immensely.
3 ways that quitting porn helped my marriage before it even started.
1. My struggle to quit porn forced me to dig beneath the surface.
Author and therapist Michael Cusick says, “your struggles with lust and porn are not actually about sex” (Surfing For God, 14). The first time I read this, to be honest, I thought to myself, “Yeah right. If it’s not about sex, what’s it about?”
In answer to my question, Cusick elaborates, “Lust is the outcome of disordered desire” (SFG, 31). His argument is that something deeper, something beyond a surface level urge to procreate, drives us to look at porn and act out sexually.
I discovered this was true! Oftentimes, porn is just a refuge, a numbing behavior of sorts we turn to when something feels “off” beneath the surface. Maybe we’re angry, sad, hurt, depressed, feeling apathetic, or just have a general sense that something feels off, even if we can’t quite put a finger on it.
And if you’re anything like me, you want to escape these feelings as quickly as possible! Why? Because it’s really uncomfortable to feel them!
We don’t like how we feel, but don’t know how to deal with this internal emotional churning and just want relief! And so, we turn to porn like many other things we use for escapes: alcohol, food, TV, exercise.
Typically, after giving in and watching porn, I would resolve to never do it again, but wouldn’t try to figure out what had led to me giving in. This never led to lasting change.
However, here’s what sparked good changes in me.
- After giving in, I began practicing curiosity with myself.
- “What am I feeling right now?
- What was I feeling leading up to giving in?
- Did anything happen this week that made me particularly tired, angry, anxious, or afraid?
- How have I been eating and sleeping?
- Are there any emotional needs I have that aren’t being met?
- Asking these questions and sometimes writing down my answers in a journal helped me. I began getting to the root of what was driving me to act out, which helped me to not simply react and turn to porn when I felt “off.”
- I began proactively taking care of my deeper needs, rather than numbing myself. For example, if I had felt lonely all week…or sad…how could I take care of the deeper need these emotions pointed to, in a healthy way?
Down the road, this process helped my marriage. As I began to understand what was going on inside of me, I was able to share these things with my wife. This helped us connect and feel closer to one another.
Interestingly, it also reduced my temptation to look at porn. I believe this is because I was meeting the deeper need masking itself as an urge to look at porn – a desire for intimacy, and to be known deeply.
As I began to understand and know myself more deeply, I was able to share more of myself with my wife. Sharing deepened our connection, meeting the need of being known deeply, and improved our marriage.
2. Quitting porn helped my marriage, because it helped me build healthy relationships with other men.
Quitting porn was a long process. One of the keys to long-term success was surrounding myself with other men who were also fighting porn. We met consistently, held each other accountable, and shared how we were doing on an emotional level. All of this was completely new for me and revolutionary!
As I began consistently sharing my emotions, slip ups, and struggles with these trusted men, I felt deeply known for the first time in my life.
It produced a joy and freedom in me that I honestly didn’t realize was possible. The things I wanted to hide because I feared they would cause people to reject me were suddenly out in the open.
Much to my surprise, instead of others running away when I shared the ugly parts of myself, they embraced me with love, and encouraged me to keep sharing and growing.
Quitting porn taught me the importance of having other men in my life with whom I could be vulnerable! Without intimacy with other men, it’s almost inevitable we’ll expect our spouse to meet all of our needs. Trust me, this sounded weird to me at first too – but hear me out.
To expect your spouse to meet all your needs isn’t fair to them, nor is it healthy. Quitting porn helped my marriage by teaching me to be a healthier person in general. Now I know how to have deep, vulnerable, satisfying relationships with others.
In addition to these benefits, some of the guys I got to know in this process were married.
Being around them consistently didn’t just help me quit porn. It also made me a better husband, because I got to learn and grow from their wealth of collective wisdom and experience as husbands.
3. Learning I couldn’t quit porn on my own made me a more humble person.
Quitting porn was easily the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It was also the most humbling. I struggled for ten years, and kept telling myself I could quit if I just tried harder.
But after ten years of “trying harder,” berating myself for failing, and hoping things would change without me changing, I finally had to look myself in the mirror. I had to admit that I couldn’t do this on my own. I needed help.
When you fail at something again, and again, and again, it is brutally humbling. Quitting porn was a roller coaster of emotions – the highs of little successes followed by the lows of defeat. This process showed me that I wasn’t as strong as I thought. It showed me that I needed others to help me. It humbled me.
Being kind to myself was a surprising key to quitting porn (an unexpected benefit to my marriage, too).
In the process of quitting porn, I learned that beating myself up didn’t help. In fact, it made things worse.
Cusick talks about a cycle we fall into where we act out, feel shame, and then are driven by our shame and self-loathing to self-medicate and end up acting out again (SFG, 83-34).
Ironically, one of the things that helped me the most was learning to be kind and gracious towards myself in the midst of my struggle. This was really hard, especially at first! I didn’t feel like I deserved kindness or grace. I had screwed up. I deserved to be punished, right?
But being kind and gentle towards myself not only massively helped in the process of quitting porn, it also helped my marriage a ton. I have learned over the years that when we are kind and gentle with ourselves, it helps us be kind and gentle with others.
Kindness creates a safe environment for growth.
Oftentimes, when we aren’t being kind to ourselves, it’s because we are holding ourselves to some impossible standard. We berate ourselves each time we fall short. Unfortunately, even without intending to, we often place this self-imposed, unrealistic standard on those around us as well.
And so, at least to some degree, we are hard and exacting on those closest to us.
However, when we give ourselves grace and compassion – the freedom to be imperfect – it becomes much easier to be kind and compassionate towards everyone else, including our spouse.
Kindness and grace creates a beautiful marriage environment where both spouses are allowed to show up, flaws and all, and know that they will still be treated with dignity, respect, and love.
It also makes marriage feel safe. Safety makes growth not only possible, but rapid.
Kindness and grace creates a beautiful marriage environment where both spouses are allowed to show up, flaws and all, and know that they will still be treated with dignity, respect, and love.
We resist being kind to ourselves, because we fear that it’ll just be a license to act out. And sure, it can be. But, if you have a tendency to beat yourself up, I don’t think it will be.
I have found that when someone loves me, shows me respect, and honors my dignity, especially when it feels undeserved, it touches something deep inside.
I’m spurred to a desire to grow and change in ways that fear of punishment cannot. Unless you have experienced it, there is a joy that is hard to describe.
Quitting porn helped my marriage and made me a better husband, because it humbled me deeply.
Humility means my being okay with my wife being imperfect and struggling in her own areas.
If it wasn’t for this forced class in humility, I am confident that I would have been a huge jerk to my wife when she struggled.
I’m sure I would have asked her the same questions I was internally asking myself: “Why can’t you just stop doing this? Why can’t you just start doing this? Why aren’t you choosing to do better here?”
Isn’t this what we all often think when we see others struggling?
But, when you’ve failed again and again, you’ve had to deal with a sickening realization that you aren’t as great as you always thought you were.
It’s much easier to be kind to others (including your spouse), when you have wrestled with your own failures.
You now see yourself for what you are – a flawed person, yes, but still deeply worthy of love and connection.
Conclusion
I’d like to end in the same way I began. A good marriage is hard work, but worth the effort. Can I get another amen? Because it’s hard, we should do whatever we can to set ourselves up for success. Quitting porn helped my marriage in innumerable ways.
To recap, there are three benefits that stand out the most for me. First, I was forced to dig and learn more about myself. Next, quitting porn helped me build healthy relationships with other men, and finally, also made me a more humble, compassionate person.
Today Ken Anderson “pays it forward” by mentoring young men.
You can reach out to Ken: kenanderson@deepwatersmentoring.com or on his website:
https://www.deepwatersmentoring.com
He’s also a campus minister with The Navigators.
