Is Porn Ruining your Relationship?

The explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of erotic or sexual satisfaction is nothing new. But what makes pornography a major threat to contemporary relationships is its overuse which experts believe are now causing a host of problems between men and women. So before you allow pornography unrestricted entry into your bedroom or even home, keep in mind its potential for ruining relationships.

Pornography need not be a bad thing altogether in adult relationships. Indeed it can act like an important means of visual stimulation when couples find it difficult to get started or erotic inspiration is flagging. Relationship experts include the sharing and acting out of sexual fantasies as one of the ways of keeping the spark alive in a long relationship. However trouble crops up when fantasies move from the realm of mutual excitement to solitary addiction. When one partner gets hooked to porn, the other feels left out at best and rejected at worst. In order to prevent this from ruining your relationship, restrict entry as well as use of pornography in your relationship. Above all don’t use porn as a substitute for real-life relationships; if you feel your sexual needs are not being met in a relationship, consider where the problem lies and then find ways to fix it. This may seem a more torturous route as compared to taking refuge in porn but in the end it will lead to a more fulfilling relationship.

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Pornography has been around for a long, long time. Right from images carved in the walls of monuments to paintings of practically nude female models, various forms of the visual medium have often served to gratify the sexual desires of men in the past centuries. Then came the age of forbidden magazines wrapped in innocent-looking covers, pay-per-view adult channels and videotapes with explicit material sneaked out through video rental shops. Today all this seems ancient history and even innocent in a sad sort of way.

What changed things irrevocably was the arrival of the internet; this led to an explosion of pornography right inside the houses of regular people and not merely the perverts. Today's users have access to porn 24 hours a day and seven days a week; they can view it in multiple windows, search endlessly, fast-forward to the bits they find hottest, switch to live sex chat, absorb explicit video action and escalate to extreme genres as well. It is this wide-ranging availability of porn through the web – anytime and at any place – which poses the greatest threat to relationships in the real world.

A recent study reveals the dangers of internet porn in the starkest way possible. Titled 'Porn-induced sexual dysfunction is a growing problem', and published in the US journal, Psychology Today 1, the study shows how internet porn is desensitizing large numbers of young men with the result that they are increasingly unable to become excited by everyday sex. Even men in their 20s who are supposed to be at their sexual peak are finding themselves unable to perform in real life sexual situations, all due to overexposure to internet pornography. According to researchers who compiled the report this is happening because of continuous over-stimulation of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that activates the body's reaction to sexual pleasure. With every new thrill that men obtain from viewing porn, the brain loses a little of its ability to respond to dopamine signals; as a consequence porn users need increasingly extreme visuals in order to be aroused. When this happens over a period of time, some users find that their response to dopamine has dropped so low that they cannot even achieve a normal arousal without viewing heavy porn. Young men often find it incredible that pornography which is supposed to provide visual stimulation can actually be a source of sexual dysfunction. And the only way of prevent this from ruining your relationship is to avoid porn, or least seriously restrict viewing porn especially over the internet.

Even couples in a steady relationship can be damaged by excessive use of porn. This is because pornography entails an extreme kind of sexual behavior by the participants. However when real life couples try to replicate this in their own relationship, they are bound to be disappointed. It is good to remember that what you are seeing on the screen is not actual sex – it is merely a paid and rehearsed performance by two people who are after all actors. Just like it is foolish to get depressed over the misfortunes of a character in a movie or novel, identifying too closely with the actions in a pornographic material and worse trying to duplicate it in a relationship can cause nothing but problems.

Along with leading to unnatural expectations in sexual behavior, heavy use of porn can also damage your self-image or negatively affect how you perceive your partner. Pornographic material - whether in the form of adult magazines, web content or explicit CDs - fuels a distorted version of sex in which female sexuality exists solely to serve men's needs. More often than not, the female performer is the willing object of all kinds of outrageous, unnatural and even sadistic male sexual behavior. Even though such warped depiction of sex has always existed alongside more equitable sexual behavior, it is rapidly becoming standardized by the large-scale use of pornography and is routinely reinforced to its viewers across class, race and age groups. Law enforcement agencies as well as social scientists see increased levels of violence, particularly sexual violence, against women and children as one of the many consequences of the ubiquitousness of internet porn. More importantly, even in regular relationships men begin to believe that the only things that matter are sex, sexual control over their female partners and orgasmic release. Thus extended use of porn kills sensitivity, gentleness and romance which are crucial in maintaining a mutually fulfilling relationship.

Finally pornography works to destroy users and relationships in the same way as drugs kill its users. Just like an addiction, you need larger and larger doses of porn in order to feel even the normal level of arousal. And what you have achieved in the end is not a permanent state of bliss but merely replaced healthy, real-life experience with depraved fantasies and unrealistic expectations.

Reference:

AOL Lifestyle Uk - Internet porn makes men bad in bed