Porn’s 5 Most Harmful Side Effects
I’ve been duped by porn more times than I’d like to admit.
God says that lust is a sin, but why is that the case? What does it matter to God if I look at sensual pictures?
My own experience tells me that the reason why God doesn’t want me to get involved with pornography is because it’s self destructive. Here are the ways I’ve found porn to be destructive in my own life.
1. Porn damages my relationship with God
Looking at porn has never made me think, “Wow, I feel so much closer to God now.” No, it’s always the opposite. I always feel dirty, guilty, and ashamed afterwards, like I’ve turned my back on God. It makes me feel estranged from him like I’m in a dark corner: cold, distant, and alone.
If my relationship with God is my source of eternal life, and porn makes me feel distant from him, then that means porn is destructive.
2. Porn is addicting
I’ve always believed that porn was “bad”, but for some reason I kept finding myself coming back to it. I never felt too worried about always coming back to porn because I told myself that no one is perfect and that everyone sins.
Sometimes I would find myself seeking out porn at times that I wasn’t even interested in it. I didn’t even necessarily want to do it, but I just found myself doing it out of habit. (Yikes.)
Then one day I had an epiphany:
If I keep finding myself doing something that I don’t want to be doing, then does that mean I’m addicted to it??
That was a scary thought, because being a porn addict is definitely not something I want to be.
I’ve always heard that addicts needed more and more of the same drug to get themselves high, and that’s something I found to be true of my porn usage.
3. Porn damages my ability to experience intimacy
I find that the more I use porn, the more I build up a tolerance for it. I imagine it being kind of like walking on hot coals: the first time I try it, my feet would be tender and extremely sensitive to it, but by the hundredth time, my feet will build up callouses so that I can hardly even feel it.
Every time I use porn, I feel it building up more and more callouses on my ability to experience physical intimacy. I’ve found that if I engage in porn more and more, the level of pleasure I experience becomes less and less.
God designed orgasms to be something that brings unity within a marriage, so when I use them while I’m alone with a computer, my brain gets trained to associate orgasms with isolation. If I ever get married and have orgasms with my wife, I don’t want it to make us feel isolated from each other.
4. Porn hurts my partner (current or future)
Not only does porn separate me from God, but it also separates me from my partner.
In my experience, girls always feel deeply wounded when they find out that their boyfriend looks at pornography. Whenever I’ve had a conversation with a past girlfriend about porn, she has always been really hurt by it. They always think that it’s because they aren’t attractive enough. Hurting the girl I’m dating is never something I want to do, but that’s exactly what porn does.
And porn doesn’t just hurt whoever I’m dating at the time—it also hurts my future wife.
If my brain is trained to feel isolated when I orgasm, that doesn’t just diminish the way I’LL experience intimacy in my marriage, but it will also diminish the way MY PARTNER will experience intimacy in our marriage.
That’s really sad: my usage of pornography doesn’t just affect me—it affects my partner too.
5. Porn perverts love
In John 15:13, scripture defines the term “love” when it says:
There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. (NLT)
This verse says that the ultimate example of love would be to give up my life for someone else. In other words, love is so focused on giving to someone else that it disregards it own desires.
Porn does the exact opposite of that.
There is nothing about porn that gives up its own desires for anyone else. Instead, porn is the epitome of selfishness. When I use porn, I’m not thinking about anyone else except myself.
I imagine that making love is most beautiful when it is focused on the giving of myself to my parter, but porn takes something that’s supposed to be self-LESS and perverts it into something that couldn’t be more selfish.
The biggest lie porn tells me is that I am the only one who’s desires are worth considering.