"My wife and I went through a stage where I found it hard to keep my erection and my libido was waning. She didn’t want to put me under pressure so she stopped taking initiative sexually. Eventually we decided to do something about it. To help us kick-start our libidos, we took to looking at soft porn together before making love. As a Christian married couple is this wrong?"
It is really good that you have owned the problem of your waning sex life together, and have wanted to inject some life into it again. Sexual intimacy helps us feel close and strengthens the bond of marriage. Sex-less marriages run the risk of an affair, can undermine self-image, or create a lack of softness towards each other. I hope you have talked to your doctor about the erectile dysfunction, as it can be caused as a side-effect of medication, or may be an early sign of other important diagnoses such as cardiovascular problems or diabetes. The waning libido was probably a reaction to the anxiety caused by your erections. Erectile dysfunction can be effectively treated with psychosexual therapy, often with the support of oral medication such as Sildenafil or Cialis. Cialis can be taken in a low dose daily, thereby keeping the spontaneity as you do not have to anticipate when you are going to want to make love. Using porn brings another complexity into an already complex dynamic. While it can be superficially arousing, it takes the focus off each other and puts it onto an external contributor. You have thereby created an unstable triangle. It can subtly undermine your own self-confidence because real life is always different to porn – which is airbrushed and a camera creation. It is easy to make comparisons with your own bodies and the created images that are staged for you. Either partner can start to doubt whether their body is ‘good enough’, and the curse of comparison reduces our ability to be fully in touch with our own bodies. There is something intended in God’s design of exclusivity that endorses our selfworth and therefore our confidence to abandon ourselves to the other. Ironically, it is not only your self-image that is undermined by the porn star, but the porn star’s self-image is often undermined by the harsh realities of selling their body to you. Porn is crafted purely for physical stimulation; it is devoid of relationship, intimacy or love. This can bring a thread into your lovemaking that separates out arousal from intimacy, which can in the long-term put pressure on the arousal system, which needs supporting with emotional tenderness. I have seen this set in motion destructive dynamics, ultimately creating sexual dysfunction. Performance anxiety is a very common pressure that is always a killer to sexual functioning and libido. Real lovemaking is just that: it is about expressing your love and passion for each other. While we want to learn to touch each other wonderfully, the most important thing is to express the tenderness in your heart for each other, and let the touch flow as an expression of that. Some couples cannot physically have intercourse due to medical conditions, but they can still ‘make love’: they can give each other the pleasure of sexual touch, and create physical and emotional closeness. I believe porn puts the wrong balance into a loving and secure sex life. Porn also raises a wider issue beyond you as a couple. I believe it degrades others to just being ‘a body’, not a whole person with emotions and relationships. If a person can be treated and viewed as just a body, not somebody’s son, daughter, mother, or partner, then we dislocate our conscience from who they truly are. Evil begins whenever we start treating people as things. I believe your intention of wanting to rebuild your sex life was life-giving and to be encouraged. But there are better ways of doing this than by using porn.
