You and your partner are struggling with porn use in your relationship.
You may feel as though you are not getting the attention, connection, and pleasure you want in your intimacy and sexual relationship.
Porn has become something that is seen as taking away from your relationship.
Perhaps you grew up finding porn gross and disgusting and do not understand why your partner would want to watch it.
Porn has become the problem and you may view your partner watching porn as a form of cheating.
How Porn Could Be Considered Cheating
Many people struggle with porn and often times for good reasons.
The porn industry is an almost 100 Billion dollar industry and does not always have the best reputation for how the performers are treated, paid, and recruited as well as how they monitor illegal forms of porn from being spread around the internet.
Often times the tropes in mainstream porn are very male centered, with the focus solely on the man’s pleasure and less, if at all, on the women’s pleasure.
Mainstream porn often comes with the women being degraded and demeaned. So it makes sense that for many of us, porn has been sold as something mainly for men to partake in and enjoy.
Many of my clients also grew up with the understanding that when it comes to a heterosexual marriage or a committed relationship, sex between those two people should satisfy both of those partner’s sexual desires and needs and any type of sexual expression or exploration beyond that should not be necessary.
With that notion, if a partner does want to engage in something like watching porn or masturbating outside of the sexual experiences of the couple, there are often feelings of insecurity around if those experiences are enough or if that partner is enough to satisfy their partner.
These experiences are viewed as taking away from the couples’ sexual experiences and can even be viewed as cheating.
Porn becomes a threat to the experience of desire and pleasure in the relationship and can end up becoming the main focus in the relationship instead of focusing on what some of the underlying feelings and needs are that are not being met or attended to.
Why Would Someone in a Relationship Want to Watch Porn
Though porn has always tended to have a negative reputation or at least controversy, as I stated above, it is an almost 100 Billion dollar industry for a reason.
There simply are a LOT of people out there watching porn.
Though there are definitely problems that need to be addressed in the porn industry, it is also a tool many people use as a way to explore parts of their sexuality.
Due to the vast array of sexual experiences people can find in mainstream porn, many people that are curious about different ways of having sex, positions, or fantasies, are able to explore those in a way that does not have to take them into reality just yet.
Porn can also be used as a way to get aroused for a sexual experience with yourself or another person.
Others use porn as a way to cope with stress or connect to others on the internet.
Is Porn a Form of Cheating?
There actually is no black and white answer to this question.
The true question is how is porn affecting your relationship and is porn acceptable within your relationship contract? And also what forms of porn are ok and not ok or what uses for porn are ok and not ok?
If porn has become a problem in your relationship, I encourage you and your partner to take some steps back and discuss these questions:
What are both of our thoughts and opinions on porn and masturbation in general?
What about porn do we like or does the partner that watches it like?
What about porn do we or the person the watches not like?
What about our intimacy and sex that we are having do we like?
What about our intimacy and sex that we are having do we not like?
What about our intimacy and sex that we are having do we need more of?
What about our intimacy and sex that we are having do we want less of?
Can we meet the needs of each other and have the sexual experiences we want together without the insecurity of porn or masturbation taking something away from our experiences?
Once you have answered those questions and work on the quality of your sexual experiences together, create some boundaries that feel comfortable to both of you but are not too restrictive.
For example, maybe you make a boundary that interacting directly with sex workers doing live videos is not something either of you feel ok with and want to be off the table. However, watching porn passively from prerecorded legal content is ok.
I also recommend that there should never be a ban on masturbation. Our bodies are our bodies and we can do with our bodies what we want. Our bodies and our sexuality with ourselves, in my opinion, cannot and should not be regulated by our partners.
If you are someone struggling with masturbation, seeking out the help of a sex therapist may be useful.
If you and your partner are struggling with porn in the relationship and would like help navigating these conversations, please click the button below to schedule your FREE 30 minute consultation, and I would be happy to work with you on creating the relationship and sex that serves you both!