Marriage Rebranded

by Tyler Ward

  THE MISADVENTURE OF FANTASY.

  Sadly, most people—both men and women—don’t know what sex is today.

  Allow me to explain.

  It was a fall day in third grade. I jumped off the bus and abided by my normal routine of climbing my next-door neighbor’s fence and knocking on the front door to join Jackson, the son of my neighbor’s full-time nanny, in whatever nonsense he was getting into that day.

  From the moment he opened the door, something about the wild in his eyes and the smirk on his face told me today was different. He anxiously invited me in, quietly shut the door behind me, and ran upstairs. I followed him to the back of the house where a storage closet opened up to a walk-in attic.

  Apparently his mom wasn’t aware of the dozen boxes of Playboys her client was storing when she asked Jackson to organize the attic that day. He wasn’t sad about her ignorance, and neither were my preteen hormones. We spent the next sixty minutes skimming the magazines, saying goodbye to innocence, and creating misconceptions about sex that would take me years to understand.

  My earliest sexual awakening was built on fantasizing about women who weren’t actually real. These bad ideas about sex continued to be facilitated by the occasional exposure to pornography throughout my teenage years. And even though I never developed an addiction, my exposure was enough to keep me thoroughly misinformed about sex.

  Most men have their own version of this story. According to the most recent statistics in 2013, 85 percent of men look at pornography at least once a month.18 But whether you’re currently part of the 85 percent or not, you’ve most likely been misinformed about sex by marketers and the media machine all throughout your life.

  1. Fantasy vs Sex

  Pornography has lied to us about sex. It elicits and perpetuates ideas about intimacy that are actually more about fantasy than they are about real sex. Porn has taken a gift given to us to cultivate a lasting relationship and turned it into an act of self-fulfillment.

  In fact, there are many ways porn has—both subtly and significantly—stolen from the meaning, beauty, and long-term benefits of sex for most men today.

  2. Conquest vs Connection

  The woman on that computer screen requires nothing more than that you look at her. And though conquering her in your mind may somehow make you feel validated, there’s nothing truly validating about it.

  Sex is so much more than some physical conquest or achievement. It’s designed to facilitate real, holistic connection—mind, body, and spirit. And though this artificial validation porn offers can be addictive, the holistic connection of real sex offers so much more than a momentary high.

  “The complete physical and emotional proximity of sexual intercourse,” says Mary Anne McPherson Oliver, “is the single most important factor in the creation of the couple’s unity and deeply, irrevocably, and continually alters the people involved.”19

  It’s no secret that if a man has any bit of explorer in him, it doesn’t take long to experience every part of his wife’s body. And sure, she may not always be as open and inviting as digital companions portray themselves—but she’s far more excitingly dynamic, far more human, than pixelated beauty can ever be. What your wife offers you are the true benefits of sex. These benefits aren’t limited to the ecstasy of an orgasm—but include the physical, emotional, and spiritual connection that is cultivated with the person we get to wake up next to tomorrow morning.

  3. Escaping vs Engaging

  “Porn is not about sex,” Paula Hall, a sexual psychotherapist, says. “A man doesn’t need to look at pornography for six or seven hours if he just wants sexual gratification. It’s about escapism. It’s a secret world they can disappear into, as many addictions are.”20

  On the contrary, sex in marriage requires that we actually show up. And not just with our bodies, but with our whole selves—physically, emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically. Sadly, these artificial sexual experiences that seem to effortlessly remove us from our world of stress and uncertainty have been said to make real sex not feel worth the effort and vulnerability.

  The truth is that artificial sex offers little more than a brief escape followed by a harsh return to the same stressful and uncertain reality.

  In contrast, the effort and vulnerability involved in sex with your spouse is an investment with an incredible return. It offers holistic intimacy, rather than the emotional emptiness of porn. And while it is an effective stress-reliever, it also creates a long-term reality in your marriage and family that you likely won’t want to escape any time soon.

  4. Pleasure vs Love

  You offer nothing to that woman on the screen. She, on the other hand, offers you the chance to feel validated, to escape, and to indulge yourself with a few moments of pleasure. Therefore, your alleged experiences with her make the intentions of sex entirely about you and what you can get from her.

  But real sex is designed with a different intention in mind.

  Sex is scientifically proven to be one of the more effective cultivators of intimacy in marriage. As one expert puts it, “There’s convincing evidence that oxytocin [the hormone released during sex] is involved in mediating stability, pair bonding, and monogamy; all the enduring parts of love.”21

  It’s this enduring kind of love—real love, with a real woman—that’s worth abandoning fantasy for. And let’s make no mistake about it, you can’t have both.

  NINE REASONS TO STAY AWAY FROM PORN

  If not confronted, this addiction to fantasy can become a consuming fire threatening all quality of life. So before you go looking again for that woman on the screen, here are nine reasons to consider against it.

  1. Porn makes you unhappy and bored

  Research says that those who regularly indulge themselves in pornography are more likely to have higher levels of anxiety and depression and lower levels of self-esteem than those who don’t. The brain is to blame for this.22

  Apparently, as one artificially stimulates the pleasure center of their brain with porn, it perpetually weakens in its ability to respond to natural kinds of pleasure. Before we know it, real life has to compete with the unnatural and artificial levels of chemical excitement that porn offers. Real life—and our marriage—often lose this competition.

  Pamela Paul, the author of Pornified, puts it this way: “Pornography leaves men desensitized to both outrage and to excitement, leading to an overall diminishment of feeling and eventually to dissatisfaction with the emotional tugs of everyday life … Eventually they are left with a confusing mix of supersized expectations and numbed emotions … and become imbued with indifference. The real world often gets really boring.”23

  Sex with our wives proves to be quite a different story. The natural chemicals and pleasure real sex creates doesn’t inflate our expectations or numb our emotions. According to studies performed by the Institute for the Study of Labor, real sex actually makes us happier.24 The same studies also show that married people have more sex than those who are not married, and even experience far higher levels of satisfaction in life.25

  2. Porn neuters you

  Some people believe that pornography can add excitement to their sex life. However, studies prove just the opposite. Porn actually produces less intimacy between partners, less romantic excitement, and less satisfaction in real sexual experiences.26

  Dr. Mary Anne Layden writes in The Social Cost of Pornography, “I have also seen in my clinical experience that pornography damages the sexual performance of the viewers. Pornography viewers tend to have problems with premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction. Having spent so much time in unnatural sexual experiences with paper, celluloid and cyberspace, they seem to find it difficult to have sex with a real human being.”27

  Because of pornography, men have trouble getting turned on by their wives who happen to not be cybersex slaves. As a result, they don’t enjoy real sex nearly as much as they used to. This is because porn makes us less satisfied with our partner’s affection,
physical appearance, and sexual performance.28

  On the contrary, when porn isn’t a part of marriage, real sex proves to only get better with time. Sociologist Mandi Norwood discovered this socially unenforced reality after interviewing several hundred women. She found that married women are satisfied in the bedroom because of years of practice, less inhibitions, and the time to learn their partner.29

  3. Porn is not manly

  Though conquering that woman on the screen in your mind may make you feel like a man, there’s nothing manly about it.

  Real sex involves you. All of your fears. All of your insecurities. All of your capacity to give. It also involves another very real person. All her needs. All of her baggage. All of her propensity to judge you and hurt your dignity.

  Porn requires no work, no sacrifice, and no maturity. Real sex in marriage requires you to risk, to be vulnerable, to give yourself fully to another person. This kind of intimacy is not for boys. It’s for men only.

  4. Porn doesn’t make friends

  Studies show that men who use porn commonly become isolated from others, highly introverted, narcissistic, dissociative, and distractible.30 In other words, it doesn’t exactly make you a likeable person.

  Neurochemistry teaches that the more that you bond with fantasies on your computer screen, the harder it is to actually bond with real people. This is because the strongest bonding substance in our lives is oxytocin—the hormone released during orgasm. As this powerful bonding substance becomes consistently associated with porn, it becomes easier for us to feel connected in fantasy than it is in reality.

  Porn kills human connection. And human connection is what relationship lives and dies by.

  5. Porn is a professional liability

  Pornography is the master of preoccupation. According to recent polls, 18 percent of men who view porn regularly admit to be distracted by it even when not online, and 30 percent acknowledge that their work performance suffers because of this distraction.31

  In striking contrast, research also proves that across the board, men who have a healthy sex life make more money than those who don’t.32

  You decide what’s better.

  6. Porn hurts your wife

  It’s easy to think that your porn habit is private, and doesn’t affect anyone but you. Yet as we’ve already seen, porn inevitably kills a man’s ability to emotionally connect and consistently monopolizes his desires.

  Whether your wife knows you are using pornography or not, your actions have already hurt her.

  Rabbi Arush puts it this way: “A woman is not just a body, but a vibrant soul that thrives on intimacy, attention, communication, consideration, respect, and the love of two souls binding together. A husband that focuses on his own physical gratification doesn’t provide his wife with any of the emotional and spiritual gratification that is the basis of her vitality.”33

  7. Porn will turn you into “that guy”

  You know “that guy.” Most crowds have at least one. He’s the one who cares about no one but himself. He sees you and all others as commodities to be used, not people to be cared for. No matter how much you can’t stand “that guy,” as long as you continue to dabble in porn, you run the risk of becoming him.

  Gail Dines puts it bluntly in her book Pornland. “In the story of porn, men are soulless, unfeeling, amoral life-support systems… who are entitled to use women in any way they want. These men demonstrate zero empathy, respect, or love for the women they have sex with.”34

  No one wants to be “that guy.” What’s more, no one wants to be with “that guy” who only sees women as consumable objects and cares for no one but himself.

  8. Porn will never actually do it for you

  “Just as Twinkies are artificially enhanced,” says the nonprofit team Fight the New Drug, “and modified food that really aren’t good for you, pornography is an artificially enhanced and modified sexual experience that isn’t good for you either, and your body knows it.”35

  Lust, in its nature, is never satisfied. It only wants more.

  9. Porn will kill your marriage

  In the eight reasons above, we’ve looked to science, social studies, and history to witness the effects that pornography has on those who entertain it. We’ve seen that it kills everything long-term love is built on: human connection, trust, and self-sacrifice. It’s no wonder, then, that at least 56 percent of divorce cases today involve one party who compulsively visits pornographic websites.36

  Your marriage may survive your habit for a period of time. However, if you continue to choose fantasy over reality, it will inevitably destroy your ability to love your wife.

  As modern men, we certainly have plenty of unnatural things to navigate to keep our marriages healthy and alive. However, my hope is that—with a vision of a marriage that is worth fighting for—we’re more determined than ever to do just that.

  * * *

  Now that you have finished, share with your friends! Write a review on Goodreads and other book-sharing sites, Tweet & Facebook your thoughts on the subject, and share your testimony on how this book impacted you at mytestimony@moody.edu.

  Thank you,

  The Moody Collective Team

  NOTES

  CHAPTER ONE: A PICTURE WORTH FIGHTING FOR

  1. “Marriage and Divorce Statistics,” Avvo, 2009, http://www.avvo.com/legal-guides/ugc/marriage-divorce-statistics.

  2. Slater & Gordon, “Marriage Meltdown,” July 10, 2013, http://www.slatergordon.co.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2013/07/marriage-meltdown-slater-and-gordon-commission-report-on-the-modern-marriage/.

  3. Jessica Bennett, “The Case Against Marriage,” Newsweek, June 11, 2010, http://www.newsweek.com/case-against-marriage-73045.

  4. Andrew Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, Vintage, April 6, 2010, as quoted in: Jessica Bennett, “The Case Against Marriage.”

  5. “Marriage and Divorce Statistics,” Avvo, 2009, http://www.avvo.com/legal-guides/ugc/marriage-divorce-statistics.

  6. Bennett, “The Case Against Marriage.”

  7. This section is simply stating facts derived from research on the topic of marriage and divorce. These topics, however, are clearly much more complicated than just data and statistics.

  8. The information cited here is derived from polling those who have never married, as well as those who are divorced. The purpose of these statistics is to show the benefits of marriage by itself—not to compare it with the benefits of singleness.

  9. Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), 133, 135, 173, 197, 280.

  10. Ibid., 171–73.

  11. Phillip Moeller, “Why Marriage Makes People Happy,” U.S. News and World Report, March 22, 2012, http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/2012/03/22/why-marriage-makes-people-happy, excerpted from How to Live to 100: Be Happy, Be Healthy, and Afford It (U.S. News & World Report ebook, 2012).

  12. Waite and Gallagher, The Case for Marriage, 200.

  13. Tyler Ward, “3 Things I Wish I knew Before We Got Married,” RELEVANT, January 23, 2013, http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life/relationships/3-things-i-wish-i-knew-got-married.

  14. Niels Bohr, as quoted by Edward Teller, “Dr. Edward Teller’s Magnificent Obsession” by Robert Coughlan, LIFE magazine, 6 September 1954, 62.

  CHAPTER TWO: CARVING TO THE SKIN

  1. Stanley Hauerwas, “Sex and Politics: Bertrand Russell and ‘Human Sexuality’,” Christian Century, April 19, 1978, 417–22, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1797.

  2. Genesis 3:16.

  3. Hara Estroff Marano, “The Expectations Trap,” Psychology Today, March 1, 2010, http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201003/the-expectations-trap.

  4. Brad Wilcox, “Is Love a Flimsy Foundation? Soul-mate versus Institutional Models of Marriage,” Social Science Research 39, Issue 5 (
2010): 687–99.

  5. John Leggett and Suzanne Malm, The Eighteen Stages of Love: Its Natural History, Fragrance, Celebration and Chase (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1995), 139, accessed in http://www.cbc.ca/news2/background/science/chemistry-of-love.html.

  6. It’s only a legend, though many accounts claim that the stone did, in fact, sit in the marketplace for over fifteen years before Michelangelo took it home. Read more at http://www.italian-renaissance-art.com/Michelangelo-David.html.

  7. Inspired by “The Michelangelo Phenomenon” by Caryl E. Rusbult, Eli J. Finkel, and Madoka Kumashiro: http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/eli-finkel/documents/47_RusbultFinkelKumashiro2009_CDir.pdf.

  8. Genesis 2:23.

  9. You can view the symbol here: http://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/hebrew/nas/esh.html.

  10. Mark 9:49.

  11. Zech. 13:9 ESV.

  12. Psalm 66:12.

  13. Ephesians 5: 25–27.

  14. From the Greek word for salvation,” sótéria, http://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/greek/nas/soteria.html.

  15. Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), 171.

  16. Dan Allender and Tremper Longman, Intimate Allies: Rediscovering God’s Design for Marriage and Becoming Soul Mates for Life (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1999), 288.