3 Ways Porn Is Sabotaging Your Sex Life

Let’s talk about what happens when you watch porn, and how it’s affecting your actual sex life. Because here’s the thing: access to porn is easier than it has ever been. People are even creating it with AI now. And the way it’s quietly damaging real relationships and real sex lives is bigger than ever.

It’s not only visual, either. It shows up in the books we read and the shows we watch, and little by little we get desensitized, until we’re craving what’s on the screen or the page more than we’re craving our own spouse.

When my husband and I first got married, he went to a counselor, and the counselor actually told him that the way to make our marriage better was for the two of us to watch porn together. Thank goodness he didn’t listen, because he knew it would do more harm than good. So let me walk you through what porn is really doing, and what to do instead.

Think of it like coffee

There are two ways to make a cup of coffee.

One way, you start with good whole beans. You grind them fresh. You pour the hot water over them in a French press, and you let it sit and simmer. It takes time. It takes intention. It’s slow, but it honors the process, and the result is genuinely good.

The other way is the single-serve cup. It’s quick. It’s easy. Everyone does it. But the grounds inside are burnt and overworked, the rejects of the better beans, sitting in plastic. It’s fast, and it tastes like it.

Good sex in a marriage is the French press. Porn is the single-serve cup. One honors the process and gives you something rich. The other is the shortcut, and the shortcut never tastes as good as it promised.

So what is the shortcut actually doing to you? Three things.

1. It creates unrealistic expectations

Porn programs your mind to expect something that isn’t real.

For men, who tend to watch the more visual kind, it plants the idea that any woman is always ready, always revved up, always wanting it in any situation. That’s not how real people work. And I’m not leaving women out of this, because there’s a whole world of feminine erotica, the spicy novels, that does the same thing in reverse. It plants the expectation that a real man will always have the moves, the words, the perfect scenario, every single time.

Either way, porn teaches you to want it quick and want it easy. And then it sets you up to be disappointed by the actual person in your bed, who is human.

2. It creates sexual dysfunction

This one is a little ironic, because dysfunction is the very thing most people are afraid of in their sex life.

But the more someone watches porn, especially men, the more they can become wired to only be aroused by porn, or by their own hand. And that creates a painful cycle. If you can’t perform without those things, you start avoiding sex with your spouse, which sends you back to porn, which makes the problem worse. Round and round it goes. That is not the sex life you actually want.

3. It disrupts real intimacy

Here’s what porn can’t give you, because here’s what sex is actually for.

The whole purpose of sex is to bond two people together. The oxytocin, all the things happening in your body neurochemically when you’re intimate with another person, those things knit you together. Sex is an intimacy and attachment creator. That’s part of why the more partners someone has had, the more complicated it gets, because they’ve bonded at the deepest level with so many people.

And underneath all of it, what you actually want, what every one of us wants, is to feel fully loved and accepted for who we are. The people chasing record numbers of partners are looking for the same thing. They just won’t find it that way, because lining up bodies is not intimacy.

That’s the lie porn tells: that you can have the pleasure without the process, the reward without the risk of a real relationship. It cheapens the very thing it pretends to offer.

What you're really after isn't more. It's to be fully known and fully loved by one person.

The fix is usually outside the bedroom

So if you’re having trouble in the bedroom, look at the relationship around it. And sexual rejection and the distance it creates usually runs in both directions.

So instead of taking the easy way out, the answer is to repair the relationship underneath. And step one is honest and simple: stop watching porn. There was a man who called into our live show recently and described exactly how this goes. His wife had been struggling, so he turned to porn, and when she found out, she was crushed. The way he said it was telling: since she wasn’t there for me, I turned to porn. He was blaming her for his choice. And it didn’t make anything better. It pushed her further away and deepened her belief that she wasn’t good enough. That’s how the spouse on the other side of porn almost always feels, man or woman. Nobody likes how it makes them feel about themselves.

So set up real boundaries in your life so you don’t fall back into it, and take it seriously. Remember when people smoked in restaurants and we all just accepted a smoking section and a non-smoking section, even though we knew exactly what smoking does to a body? Things changed. Porn is a carcinogen to your sex life. Just because society treats something as normal doesn’t mean you have to sit in the smoking section.

Build the real thing

If there’s a breach of trust in your marriage, if there’s been infidelity, if communication has broken down, if you don’t even want to be around your spouse, your sex life is going to struggle until you address that. So start there. Work on the relationship, and the intimacy and attraction have room to come back.

Because the bottom line is this: for your marriage to thrive, you have to be the kind of person who wants the reward of a great sex life enough to take the risk of the real, messy, beautiful work of relationship. The shortcut will always let you down. The real thing, built slowly with your spouse, is a gift that keeps giving.

Sex is a gift, and it’s a gift best enjoyed in the safety of your marriage. So fix what’s underneath, choose the real thing over the substitute, and give your marriage the kind of intimacy it was made for.