“Don’t Come Here Looking For Love”: How Porn Hurts Relationships

“Pornography promotes an understanding of sexuality and relationships that is corrosive to connection because it doesn’t promote people, only parts.”
Dr. Mark Butler, Brigham Young University¹

The porn industry rips sex out of the context of human relationships and repackages it as a highly-industrialised, mass-produced consumer product. There’s something deeply dehumanising about pornography. It’s easy to recognise what it gives us, namely the quick fix of instant sexual gratification, but more difficult to see what it takes away.

“Porno is littered – porno is heaped – with the deaths of feelings.”
Martin Amis, British AuthorM. Amis, The Guardian (17.03.2001): A rough trade (part 2) | Books

Porn sex is generally performative and has nothing to do with relationships. The release of oxytocin at orgasm, the ‘bonding’ hormone designed to help us feel a deep connection with our partner after sex has no place in the context of people masturbating in solitude to pixels on the screen.

People tend to treat porn as a supplement rather than a substitute for real-life sexual relationships. It’s even said that porn enhances our real-life sexual relationships. When we think of porn sex as merely sex that isn’t ‘real’, we can easily see it as a stimulus to intimacy and something that adds spice and interest to our sex lives.

But this is simply not the case. Porn sex and real-life sex aren’t merely dissimilar – they’re diametrically opposed: the more invested we are in one, the less we’re likely to care about the other. Research shows that while watching porn increases sexual desire, watching lots of it actually lowers sexual and relational satisfaction.

Porn reduces sexual satisfaction²

Porn is like sexual junk food. Just as fast food is cleverly designed to seduce our taste buds into thinking we’re eating something really nutritious, so porn tricks our brains into thinking we’re doing something that’s good for us.

With its limitless novelty, potent delivery and the ease with which consumers can click through to more extreme material, today’s online porn is what’s known scientifically as a ‘supranormal stimulus’. In other words, it amplifies the usual neurochemical response we get from having sex – which means that if we regularly masturbate to porn, over time, real-life sex becomes less appealing.³

In fact our brains get so used to being turned on by porn images, as opposed to the arousal cues we get from sex in person (such as touching, kissing and seeing another person) that, eventually, porn becomes the preferred source of sexual satisfaction – or even the only thing that can turn us on.⁴

Porn leads to erectile dysfunction⁵

In the past, erectile dysfunction was generally considered to be an age-related problem; today, however, there are as many British men in their teens and twenties suffering from the condition as there are men in their fifties and sixties. As Martin Daubey explains in the Daily Telegraph, “The cause is almost always early-life and unchecked access to unlimited porn.”⁶ Globally, since the sharp increase in internet porn, the rate of erectile dysfunction has jumped from two to 13%.⁷

Pornography quashes sexual creativity

Porn presents a kind of sex that is, in the words of Dr Gail Dines, “debased, dehumanised, formulaic …based not on individual fantasy, play, or imagination, but one that is the result of an industrial product created by those who get excited not by bodily contact but by market penetration and profits.’⁸ The more porn a man watches, the more likely he is to deliberately conjure up similar images during sex in order to maintain arousal.⁹ As one man put it, “It can be a kind of problem to think about porn as much as I do, especially when with my girlfriend. It means I am not really present with her; my head is somewhere else.”¹⁰.

Pornography reduces men’s attraction to their partners

After watching porn, men rate themselves as feeling less “in love” with their partners and as finding them less sexually attractive.¹¹ Many women, meanwhile, often recognise that they are being unfavourably compared to the impossible ideal portrayed in pornography.

“The fact that I trusted him with my physical and emotional self has left me shattered, especially when he did not deny my body DISGUSTED him because I did not look like the internet [surgically enhanced and airbrushed] females he spent every night with.”
“Chantelle” in M. Tankard Reist and A. Bray, Big Porn Inc¹²

“You could no longer have an orgasm with me… Then your hints began. Could I wear more makeup? What about those white-tipped nails? Had I ever thought about breast implants? I hadn’t. Wouldn’t. You preferred my hair blond.”
Anon, Ex-Wife of a Porn Addict in The Guardian¹³

Pornography hurts partners

More often than not, porn is something we consume alone, sometimes without our partner’s knowledge. Even though women and girls are under pressure to just accept that their partner watches porn (because it’s “what men do”), many feel upset by the combination of secrecy and sexual activity outside the relationship.¹⁴

Where their partners are deep in a porn or sex addiction, women often report feeling shocked, hurt and confused when they learn of the nature and extent of their partner’s online sexual activities. As one study found, they experience “‘feelings of hurt and betrayal, lowered self-esteem, mistrust, decreased intimacy, anger, feelings of being unattractive and objectified, feeling their partners had less interest in sexual contact, pressure from the partner to enact things from the online fantasy, and a feeling that they could not measure up to the women online.”¹⁵

Pornography leads to less relationship satisfaction.¹⁶

When used by both partners together, it’s sometimes thought that watching porn can have a positive effect on intimate relationships. However, research suggests that this effect tends to be very shortlived.As time goes on, consuming porn as a couple often ends up lowering relationship satisfaction, emotional closeness, and sexual satisfaction.

Watching porn also increases the chance of infidelity: unmarried couples who watch porn together experience twice the rate of infidelity in couples who watch it individually and alone, and three times more than couples who don’t watch it at all.¹⁷

Pornography has a strongly negative effect on marriage

Statistically, porn consumption increases the chance of couples breaking up, and in fact decreases the chance of them getting married at all.¹⁸ For married couples, research shows that starting to watch pornography doubles the probability of divorce, for both men and women. There’s also a strong negative correlation between porn consumption and marital quality (i.e. happiness and satisfaction within marriage) over time – not least because porn users are on average more open to the idea of extramarital affairs.¹⁹

“There were words for what we did but it was never making love… It made me feel that I was less than. There was never intimacy in what we did, and in the end I stopped wanting sex.”
Anon, Ex-Wife of a Porn Addict in The GuardianAnon, The Guardian (13.06.2015) A letter to … my ex-husband, who preferred pornography to me