It’s 6 a.m. Somebody’s screaming. You groggily make your way to the living room to investigate, and find your husband, passed out on the living room couch, with a beer in his hand. The screaming is coming from your big screen TV. And it’s the most disgusting sex scene you’ve ever seen in your life.
This is Laura’s story.
I’m on the other end of the receiver, acutely aware of what it means to tell me, a perfect stranger, the most intimate details of her life. But Laura elaborates with an articulate and clear voice, almost matter-of-fact at times. She describes herself and her husband as being “those really good Christian kids.” The kind of girl who dated a guy from church, fell in love, and then got married about five years later. All the while abstaining from sex.
“If we do this one thing, stay virgins,” she says she remembers thinking, “then Jesus will bless us and everything will be perfect.”
Growing up in the evangelical church, it’s a paradigm I can easily relate to. I remember receiving a True Love Waits pin at one of those high school youth events where the speaker yell-whispers into the microphone. The message: abstinence will eventually make your sex life better. Just trust us.
Laura says she had no idea her husband watched porn until seven years into her marriage.
About 70 per cent of guys 18 to 24 visit pornographic websites every month. And it’s something that affects even the most spiritual among us: more than 30 per cent of pastors have gone online to watch porn in the past year.
But even though it’s more common than we think, it’s still a taboo subject. Especially at church.
During their premarital counselling sessions, Laura says the only sexually related question her pastor asked them was whether they were still virgins. She says she wishes her pastor would have asked more questions about sex and their own expectations. After she found her husband on that day, Laura says he initially denied he was watching porn. He did eventually confess, and was overcome with shame and embarrassment.
“I knew a lot of my friends’ husbands who looked at porn and they’re very open about it,” Laura tells me. “And I thought, ‘Well, I guess this is kind of normal. Like, I’m not OK with it, but it’s normal.’” I feel like I would have thought the same.
So, Laura says her husband promised he would talk to someone. And she would stand by him, supporting him in his struggles, hoping it would just go away. But it didn’t. One month later, Laura says she caught him at it again. This time, she says she started to ask more questions. Questions like why and how often.
He said he only looked at pornography once every few months, and only when he was sad, Laura remembers. They had been seeing a therapist for a few months at this point, and she says she promised her husband they didn’t need to tell her anything about it. She didn’t want to embarrass him any further.
“And that was my huge mistake,” says Laura, her voice gets loud, her words pointed.
One day about a month after that, she got a frantic phone call from her husband, pleading with her to come home immediately. She says she thought maybe his grandma had died or something. But when she got home, she heard the words every person in any relationship dreads.
I’ve cheated on you.
“I just kind of sat there, just in silence,” Laura says. Laura’s best friend had seen her husband with another woman, and had given him an hour to tell Laura. Then he told her everything. How he went from occasionally looking at porn to watching it multiple times a day. How he started to pay women live on the Internet, eventually transitioning to meeting women in person. He didn’t have vaginal intercourse with any of the women, but engaged in oral sex and mutual masturbation. And this was going on for years.
The line is silent. It takes Laura a few moments to collect her thoughts.
“So what did you do after he told you?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine what I would have done.
She punched him in the face, she tells me. And then she threw her wedding rings at him.
“Because it was just all of a sudden a screeching halt, this thing that I had believed. That all you have to do is not have sex before you get married and that will mean total purity and the most beautiful sexual relationship with your husband ever.”
Laura says her husband’s habits also racked up a debt-load of $30,000.
Dan Gowe is a counsellor who works with men trapped in the cycle of a pornography addiction. “It ruins their soul. I mean literally, corrupts their soul so badly,” he says of pornography. He tells me the only way to be freed from this addiction is to have a desire for God that’s stronger than the desire for pornography. And to start talking about it with other people.
Laura says her husband did exactly that. For the next 10 months, they went through intensive counselling. He did everything right: he abstained from all pornography, masturbation, and sexual contact for 90 days; he went to men’s groups; he read all the books he was given by their therapist; he renewed his relationship with God. Laura says he was almost euphoric, because he wasn’t hiding anymore.
“But I’m just left in devastation,” Laura says.
She felt pressure from her Christian friends, as they couldn’t understand why she wasn’t healing faster. She remembers they would tell her she was holding onto bitterness, that it was the devil causing her not to move on. “And I just thought, ‘Wow. I am pretty sure this isn’t the devil. I’m pretty sure I’m just that sad.”
In her mind, she says, getting a divorce meant she didn’t believe in God’s healing. And because there was no penetration involved, Laura’s husband believed he didn’t commit adultery. Therefore, if Laura pursued divorce, she thought she would be the one to break the marriage covenant, she tells me, her voice strained.
Laura eventually sought the advice of the pastor who had conducted their premarital counselling sessions. “He’s the guy who told us that we should get married and this was great and here’s what we do to have a solid marriage,” she says.
While praying with him, Laura says she remembers feeling this overwhelming peace. The fear disappeared, and love was left in its place. She pauses, her voice breaking. I can tell she’s crying. After a few moments, she says she asked God whether or not she should get a divorce. “There was no answer,” she says. “There was just this calm feeling that no matter which way I went, God would be there.”
That was two years ago. Laura is now divorced, and continuing to heal.
She says she hopes her story doesn’t discourage people from being open about their porn addictions. “Our divorce was also very largely connected to actual, physical, real, live cheating on me with other women. The porn addiction started it, but I wouldn’t want to discourage honesty because they’re afraid that their wives will leave them,” she says.
Gowe says it’s understandable when marriages break down because of porn, as it’s a form of adultery. But he also says he’s surprised at the number of couples who stick together. If “both of the [parties] were willing to receive help and to receive care they could survive it.”
The church shouldn’t be afraid to talk about porn, Gowe says. Otherwise, “we end up lying, we end up covering over what’s really going on. And the gospel is big enough. It can take our brokenness and our sin as well.”
Laura tells me she’s been in a new relationship for about eight months now. They are very open with each other, and she says she regularly asks him when the last time he looked at porn was, and whether he told anyone. Though it’s been difficult, she says she wouldn’t trade the honesty for anything.
Art by Michael Lee
