April 20, 2015 (CatholicGentleman.net) — Two weeks ago, I wrote a post about how dangerous porn is; how it destroys your relationships with God and others, how it kills your soul, and how it enslaves you.
Perhaps some thought I was exaggerating or simply being shrill. That’s why I want to share a real-life story left in the comments of last week’s post, describing how porn destroyed one woman’s marriage. It is shared with permission of the author. I hope that it will reinforce the point that porn is neither a harmless nor a solitary sin, but that it can ruin your life and steal everything that you hold dear:
PORN DESTROYED MY MARRIAGE
My marriage was utterly destroyed by porn. I tried everything to help my husband stop, but because he had been looking at and using porn from age 9 when he found his oh-so-Catholic father’s magazines, he would not stop. I did not know he had this problem till six years into our marriage.
We have four beautiful children, three of which are girls. Financial malfeasance often accompanies this addiction, and he was no exception. He ruined us financially and still stayed up hours every night downloading porn. He had a membership to the sex video shop, secret bank accounts, secret computer accounts…. I could go on and on. I dragged him to our priest, he went on retreats, I cried buckets, got angry, begged. To no avail. I finally had to ask him to leave. He did and I gave him six months to show me some real change and work to try to correct this horrible thing that had destroyed our marriage.
He did not change. I am now a working single mother rather than a stay at home, homeschooling mother. Our four children are now in public school. I am financially ruined, and he doesn’t even pay his child support as ordered.
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THIS is the truth of what porn does to marriage. It destroyed not only my marriage, but gutted my children and my life. His addiction almost cost me my faith because the priest did no more than tell my husband he needed to stop. No real harsh spiritual counseling. I HATE PORNOGRAPHY. My husband is lost in it. He already exposed our son to it. His father, whose magazines he found is lost in it. His father progressed to molesting his own granddaughters, one of them MY daughter.
So any man who thinks that porn doesn’t kill the soul of the person using it, or that it doesn’t destroy the bonds of marriage, is a fool. It captures you, and you will give up everything and everybody for it. You will view all women as objects to be used. Your heart will become hardened to the pleas of your wife. You will completely and utterly destroy her. And your marriage.
I had to save my children and myself. I did not want to divorce, and I spent 8 soul crushing years trying to save our marriage. But at the end of the day, porn won. Lust won. Selfishness won.
My children and I lost.
And so did the man I married.
Reprinted with permission from Catholic Gentleman.