Have you recently found yourself watching more and more porn?

Did it start off as a fun and safe indulgence for you to enjoy, but now you look forward to it even more than sex with a partner?

Porn may seem like a harmless habit at first, and for some, perhaps it’s limited to that. Not everyone who watches porn has a problem with it. Many people are able to use porn in healthier ways than others. At the same time, it has the potential to be far from benign. While watching porn may have begun as mere entertainment, it can quickly escalate into something more.

The possible effects of compulsive porn use might surprise you.

May Promote Secrecy

What started as “once in a while” porn use can turn into a compulsive need. Watching porn may have left you feeling great. In those few minutes or hours, it may have relieved stress and distracted you from any worries. Maybe you got a few orgasms out of it, too. The more you watched, the better you felt. The problem was that the feeling didn’t last long. To reclaim this feeling, you’d watch another video.

A downfall is that you possibly don’t share the extent of your growing porn use with your partner. In fact, you may make every effort to hide it from them. You try to convince yourself that maybe what your partner doesn’t know won’t hurt them. The more porn you watch, however, the more you have to hide. Soon, you’ll be telling lies, omitting truths, and going to great lengths to hide your habit.

Like a toxic quicksand, porn can quickly pull you in. You become entangled by the positive - albeit pseudo - reinforcement of these “good feelings.” Lying and hiding things from your partner quickly becomes routine. The dishonesty doesn’t stop there either. The lies infiltrate the rest of your life, causing issues both at home and work.

Can Build a Wall Between Partners

The idea of intimacy is multi-faceted. It involves not only physical and sexual intimacy, but emotional intimacy as well. An intimate couple is a deeply connected couple. In terms of intimate physical expressions, sex is more than just an act involving sex organs. Although it can feel amazing to your physical senses, it also functions to fulfill you in other ways.

There is a wide range of what a sexual experience can feel like. On one end, it can feel like “fucking” while the other end can feel like “love making” and everything in between. There is nothing wrong with experiencing sex on various parts of this spectrum. Oftentimes in making love, you enjoy your partner’s body – their entire body. You hold, touch, and caress each other in a special way. The words you say to each other and the sounds you make in response to one another’s’ touch are expressions of intimacy. It can be very passionate and very fulfilling.

Compulsive porn use is a destructive behavior because it can support a breakdown in you and your partner’s intimate connection by honing in solely on sex organs. The more you become conditioned to pair porn with sex and masturbation, the more it can strip you of the ability to make that special and intimate connection of sex with your partner.

Focusing primarily on genitalia, porn often degrades its characters from people to mere body parts (particularly sex organs). While sexual intercourse does require the use of functioning sex organs, to reduce it to only that can really limit the fun, hot, and beautiful experience of sexual expression.

May Create Issues Between the Sheets

Before you realize it, you might start viewing your beloved partner solely in terms of the physical. He or she will be a sex organ to you rather than a person to whom you enjoy making love. Sexual intercourse will only be about you getting off, where it used to be about enjoying the “getting there.”

Although it may be their main focus, it’s not uncommon for compulsive porn viewers to lose the ability to reach orgasm with their partner. Staying aroused often proves to be difficult, as well. Porn-induced erectile dysfunction is fairly common in which one has difficulty getting and/or maintaining an erection due to desensitizing their arousal to be with porn rather than a real life partner. Without thinking of familiar porn images to get or stay aroused (mentally or physically), your sex life may soon become unsatisfactory to both you and your partner.

Most partners enjoy helping each other reach orgasm. If you consistently have trouble reaching orgasm, oftentimes your partner may feel insecure and question whether it has to do with them. This can lead to an even wider gap between the two of you.

Can Encourage a Search for Unrealistic Novelty

In addition, porn can condition viewers to hope or expect something new each time. Sex with the same person isn’t a part of porn’s repertoire. It likely has not been a huge concern - until now.

Porn might show you all the interesting types of sex you’re not having and the people you’re not having it with. In due time, you may start experiencing a boredom with your own sex life and your own partner. Whether it’s intended or not, your eyes and mind may begin to wander away from your partner and more focused on porn. You may not even realize it at first, but the seed for “greener pastures” has already been planted during a porn session.

Porn itself isn't necessarily the enemy. In fact, there are many that can enjoy porn without much consequence. It is the unhealthy relationship you've developed with porn that is problematic. Rather than harmless, compulsive porn use can be incredibly destructive.

If you are struggling with compulsive porn use and it has been impacting your relationship, don't wait for things to get worse. Reach out for help today.