Until a month ago, I’d never told anyone (except my wife) that I used to be addicted to porn. I kept it hidden to myself, too ashamed to tell anyone.
Before my wife found me out, I told nobody. Whenever I was bored, I got online and found hours of images and videos. It was that simple and that accessible.
At the peak, I spent about hour a day watching porn. Maybe more. It was a quick, downward spiral from the “standard” porn to something much darker and sinister.
“But so what?” people say, “That’s what men do. They are sexual beings and it is normal for them to view porn.”
This is the great excuse that shields our society from the devastating effects of pornography. Trust me, I’ve been there. It’s not normal.
In my opinion, pornography is the silent killer of morals and virtue in our society. With increased viewing comes a decreased perception of reality, especially the reality of what sex really is and how women ought to be treated.
It’s a vicious cycle. The more you look, the more you find. The more you find, the more you look. The more you look, the more you warp the reality of sex. Porn is addictive. It’s thrilling. It’s hard to stop, and even when you do, the images take months, maybe years, to leave your mind.
How did I stop? I didn’t. I was stopped. By my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time. She found out I was looking at porn, but she didn’t know the extent of the problem. After an extremely frank and lengthy discussion about how devastated she felt at the fact her boyfriend was viewing porn regularly behind her back, she gave me the ultimatum of a lifetime: “If you look at porn one more time, we are done.”
Those are eleven of the best words anyone has ever said to me. The moment definitely provided a huge turning point in my life. Given I planned to marry her, I had a choice to make: Give up the porn addiction or give up the love of my life.
I’ll be honest: it was not easy to give up. Porn is satisfying in a twisted way. I missed it at first, although I was glad to be rid of it. It was a source of guilt and shame. I felt guilty after each binge, and the fact I didn’t tell anyone shows I knew there was something wrong with it. Most people know this. It’s not as if the regular guy comes home from work, kisses his wife hello, devours dinner and says, “Honey, I’m in the study watching porn. Come and get me if you need anything.”
Porn creates huge trust issues. It did for me. I hurt my wife so deeply when she found out about my addiction, back when we were dating. It took a long while for her to fully trust me again. And fair enough. The insecurities porn creates for the partner of the one looking at it is not to be underestimated. In my case, my wife felt subordinate to the women I was looking at. She felt like she was being compared to women in porn movies. She felt hurt that I was mentally cheating on her behind her back. It makes me ashamed now to even think of how I made her feel.
In an easily accessible, technological world, most people will come across porn at some stage. Parents need to have conversations with their kids to teach them what sex is about: love, the giving of self, and sacrifice. Not lust, the using of others, and fantasies.
I feel like I am one of the lucky ones. I broke free from the chains of porn addiction because my wife was forgiving and supportive. Others are stuck in a web of deceit and addiction. It’s a huge issue, and one that is rarely spoken about publicly and truthfully. It needs to be.
For tips on how to break free, click here.
Dominic Meese lives in New Zealand with his wife, and the two are expecting their second child. This article was originally published at the website Chastity Project and is reprinted here with kind permission. For more of Dom’s writing, visit http://www.restlesspress.net/, his blog, http://www.dommeese.com or follow him on Twitter at @dmmypiece.
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