One night soon after discovering my husband’s porn use, we were talking and I was sharing with him how the thought of him pouring over those images made me feel. He was not arguing with me, but I could tell that because he believes my body is beautiful, he was struggling to understand how I was feeling.
“Seeing your search terms listed like that was like seeing a list of my shortcomings. You say that your porn use wasn’t about me, but you looked up a lot of things that I’m not. I’m not “fit” or well endowed or into kinky stuff.”
“I don’t know why I searched for those things. Stuff just popped into my head, so I’d search for it. Or sometimes I would just chase the Google rabbit trail down the hole.”
“But do you understand why it makes me feel like you hate my body or you wish I was something different?” I paused and then asked, “What are you most insecure about?”
He started listing things, most of which I expected. But then he just kept going past the expected..and kept going and kept going until I think he’d mentioned every single part of his body. He started crying softly and said, “I had no idea I hated so much of my body.”
I wept, too. I felt his brokenness for a few minutes, and then I whispered, “That’s how your porn use makes me feel.”
What we discovered that night was yet another part of the “it’s just a little harmless porn” lie: porn destroys the user’s body image, too. You cannot possibly spend that much time looking at those bodies–airbrushed, Photoshopped, surgically enhanced, and carefully selected by size–and not feel awful about your own body. Hubby thought that because he was looking at the women and the sex, not the men, that it wasn’t affecting his own self-esteem.
But it was.
I’ve always been a pretty confident person, and though his porn use has definitely hit my self-esteem and sexual confidence really hard, we’ve learned that his has suffered tremendously, too. It’s been much easier for me to believe that my body is good because God says it is, for me to believe that I have worth beyond what magazines, advertising, and pornography say I do, for me to believe my husband when he tells me that I’m gorgeous. He has struggled a lot more with all of those things.
Because porn destroys the user, too.
A Beautifully Wrecked Marriage 
Another valuable and insightful post! My husband suffers from low self esteem and a poor body image, but I have never connected the body image part to his porn use. He is quite overweight, but in our 27 years of marriage I have been careful not to be critical of his body. Because honestly, it doesn’t bother me sexually. Healthwise, sure. But I desire him, and feel comforted and loved by the softness of his embrace. He struggles to believe that though. And now I can see how it is quite possible the male bodies he saw contributed to that. I have really only thought about the female bodies. Very interesting. We have never discussed this. I wonder if he has even connected those dots at all……
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Yes! My husband absolutely did NOT connect the dots himself until that moment, either. I think the most tragic part of all of this is the fact that there is absolutely nothing that porn didn’t touch or corrupt in my husband’s life. I desperately want people to understand that truth: porn destroys everyone involved and has ripple effects far beyond what the user could ever imagine at the moment when they’re entangled in all the secrecy and lies. We spend SO MUCH time praising God for uncovering my husband’s sin so that He could set about healing and redeeming us and our marriage.
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