Hello,

I am 20 year old who is not married, which is why when I hear in speeches that you have to break the addiction before marriage because it won't go away, I'm always bothered.

My question to you is, Why doesn't it? Why would a man want to look at porn or masturbate when they have a wife and they can do things a married couple is halachically allowed to do? Is porn or masturbation that much more satisfying? I would think being with an actual woman would be better.

I am not trying to be disrespectful, but I'm trying to wrap my head around this concept before I get married.

If you think this message is disrespectful, then I want to apologize in advance and just let me know so that I can remove it. I'm honestly just trying to learn.

Thank you!

I can only tell you my personal experience. Physically, yes it is more satisfying with your wife, but that is not the real point. Just for starters, can you go 2 weeks without masturbating and looking at porn? Well every month you have almost 2 weeks were your wife is assur to you. In fact, by the end of 2 weeks the stress can be very great.

But even that is not really the point. I suppose that for someone who is not an addict but rather someone with a little extra taiyvah and nisyonos, then maybe marriage can fix them, I wouldn't know since I am an addict. For someone who is an addict, lust is the manifestation of their addiction. The underlying issues that you have that caused the addiction in the first place will still be there. When you have an addiction, there is some underlying flaw that you are using lust to heal. Getting married will not fix that. Being married is hard and will only make you desperation for lust greater.

It is true in the beginning, that you may think that you are healed. I know many people saying their longest clean streak was when they first got married. But really you have just found a new mutar way to satisfy your lust. 2 issues with that are, when that mutar way is not available you will turn to other ways. And even more critical treating your wife as simply an object that you use to satisfy your lust is abusing her and your relationship, and will only end in hardship for both of you. Even though she may not know exactly what your issues are, she will feel that she is being used, and that for her is treachery.

In short, thank Hashem that he inspired you to tackle this before you involved a wife, and thank Him for GYE which is such a wonderful tool. Now you owe it to yourself to do your best effort to fix yourself. Not your future wife and not Hashem, you owe it to yourself, to be free.

Eli

EDIT: There is one more thing. The word of porn is a world of fantasy. It has plastic women and plastic men doing unnatural, uncomfortable acts all in the effort to entertain. Then you go to your real wife, who will not have the perfect body, and will certainly not want to do all the disgusting things that you have been drinking in through your porn use. Well, in terms of feeding the fantasy, porn is definitely better. Real life is so much more awesome, because it is real. But if you are entrenched in your fantasy, real life can never compare.

I think when a young man who loves pornography gets married sex with his wife not only doesn't take away his desire for porn, normal sex actually presents a problem for him. The typical behavior of looking at pictures or movies on the web, or holding magazines, causes you develop a belief that women's purpose in life is to please a man. Even if you don't want to think that, because you think it's irrational, or you think it's wrong, you will still believe it because your mind finds justifications for your actions.

It's like when your friend has an animal that needs to be unloaded, and your enemy has an animal that needs to be loaded. It is a mitzvah to help your enemy first, in order to coerce your yetzer (a gemara in B"M.) How does the yetzer gets coerced? You watch yourself actually helping your enemy and find justifications for it. Once you see it differently, your hate for this person goes way down, because your feelings are a direct result of what you believe.

So if you have been doing porn for many years you may have beliefs that will get you in trouble with your wife. When people have sex they can see each other's true beliefs, to some extent. So if you have undesirable beliefs your wife will know, even if you think you are doing your best.

What matters is the way your wife sees herself. If they way you see her is very different from the way she sees herself, there will be fireworks. Women generally see themselves as regular people. Their purpose in life is the same as men's purpose, to do their own interest. Their main purpose when they have sex is to enjoy it for themselves.

If you get yourself cleaned up and start seeing the benefits of a life free of porn and masturbation you have a shot at a happy marriage.

and if you have a lust problem, and your main purpose of sex is for your own personal enjoyment, chances are you will have an unhealthy marriage.

many women are intimate and have sex with their husbands for that sake itself...the intimacy, bond and closeness with their husbands.

once again, if it is for their own enjoyment....not sure how healthy that will turn out.

b'hatzlachah

One thing that I know : if you are seeing porn and you are doing masturbation when you are married, the pictures of porn that you have seen before will prevail in your mind when you will be in an intimate moment with your wife, and it will be very difficult to concentrate in the relationship with your wife because of this...

This will interfere in this intimate moment with your wife, and these thoughts of porn will very difficult to overcome, because you are in a intimate moment of you see pictures related to this theme (even if these pictures are falses intimates moments)

And, over all, your wife will sense that you are not entirely with her in this moment, that "something" is between her and you. And this "something" is porn !

This could cause many problems in the relationship... and could crush the possibility to have intimate moments with your wife. Or even more.

TryTryAgain wrote:


The wise king Solomon teaches us, מים גנובים ימתקו, stolen waters are sweeter. And Chazal explain that the pleasure derived from kosher relations is much much less than the pleasure derived from sinful activities.

MT

Hey y'all! newlywed here... Well, not really, im married for about a year, but in some ways i am a newlywed, and you'll see why in a sec.

TTA, u ask why it isnt enough when u get married. Ill answer that i thought the same thing. In fact, when i was about 18 i asked my mother if i can start shidduchim for that reason. I thought to myself that it will go away, no? The truth is, maybe it would have helped. I wouldnt know, i didnt have a normal marriage until 10 months in. (its still not normal, but thats for the BB forum). In the beginning of my marriage, even without relations, i kept clean. In fact, until i fell that first time, i was the cleanest ive been in years. But then i fell.
But was i really clean? honestly, i was lusting after my wife every second of every minute of every hour of every night and day... Is that clean? I dont think there was one day that went by that i didnt think and dream about being with my wife. Is that clean? clean means being nobody's slave besides Hashem's. I was a slave to my teivos and NOT to Hashem.
What im trying to say is that channeling your lust towards your wife doesnt mean your clean. In fact, its quite the opposite. It turns your wife into ur own little sex toy, ur own little prostitute (speak to Dov for more on the subject). You are not keeping clean. But, when those relations come from love (im not there yet, im just repeating what ive heard countless times, and i do believe it), then yes, that is keeping clean. Holding myself in for 4 months because i thought to myself "any day now..." is called HOLDING MY BREATH. And since im here on GYE, you can see that it doesnt work.

So, when you just saw the hottest supermodel you've seen in ur life on a billboard, and you wanna channel that to ur wife, Are you going to be able to keep clean when there comes a time when our wives cant be with us for whatever reason? Or are you gonna say to yourself the same thing you've been saying until now...


idk, if what i said over here makes sense or whatever, if it doesnt, Zemmy will take it down for me


But do yourself and your future wife a favor and work on this, and get in control (though when you go thru the 12 steps, you'll see that youre NEVER in control) before you get married, and you will be MUCH happier then you would be if you go into marriage with your teivos

TryTryAgain wrote:
Understanding it will not help you at all. Philosophising is nice, but it may be true, it may be false. The collective experience of hundreds of addicts saying that it is true is better proof than any philisophical, psycological, or any other type of explenation. It is true, because experience has proven it to be true over and over again.

I'm not sure how it will help you to wrap your brain around it before you get married.

Bottom line: Getting married will not help an addict to give up his addiction. It may actually cause the addiction to get worse. That is all you need to know.

"Understanding" is often just a distraction. I know, because I do it myself . I spent years trying to "understand" my addiction. When I tried to "understand" less, and just "followed directions" more, that is when I started to recover.

I hope I wasn't too blunt. I apologize if I was.

Love,

gibbor

May Hashem grant you progressive freedom from lust, and your zivug in the proper time.

Oh, and the real answer is that lust can never be satisfied. That is the big lie we keep telling ourselves over and over again. Just one more. Just the right one. Just the "perfect" one. Just a wife. Just... Just... The more we get, the more we want.

The more you feed it the more you need it. It's a fact of life.

David26fr wrote:

Adding onto wha David26fr is saying here... my wife and I have been married over 10 years, baruch Hashem... back in year 2 or 3, there was one evening when I got back to our place in the evening (a weekday), the baby was asleep, and she came out to greet me wearing something quite pretty... and, although I obviously caught what she was thinking, I stupidly said what was on my mind at the time when I walked in the front door... that is, that I still needed to daven maariv.

My wife told me later that my lack of appreciation for her efforts at pleasing me and intimacy with me in that situation caused her to resent me going to minyan for a long while after... even though, later on (after growing up some as a husband) I replayed the scene in my mind and realized immediately how insensative I had been, and apologized profusely to her... i.e., she knew I was sincere... but to her, something came between her and me, and so she was still slightly mad (even much later) at that thing... and that thing I'm talking about davening to Hashem! I imagine all the more so, if it were something shmuzty like p or m, c"v!

Hey Guys,

Thank you ALL for the responses! They're starting to make sense to me.

I just want to clarify. When I wrote in my post about having a wife to satisfy your needs, I wasn't saying it in a way that I was objectifying her, making her your own little toy.

I'm very serious about quitting and with Hashem's help it will be soon!

Once again, thank you for taking your time to respond to me. It means a lot

TryTryAgain wrote:
That is a tall order for an addict. I'm sure most non-addicts objectify their wives to some extent. It's just that for an addict, exercising the lust muscle is toxic.