Anyone who is married understands that sexual activity in a marriage comes and goes. At first, it is usually very common. As children enter the picture, it can slow down significantly. And if there are money or other serious problems, sex can stop dead. Sometimes the causes are not clearly apparent and your partner may simply stop showing interest in sex, leaving you stumped and repulsed.

In the short term, it makes sense to turn to masturbation as an alternative, perhaps accessing online pornography. This could be a successful alternative in the short term, but in the long term, it erodes your natural sexual communication with your partner, your self-esteem, and your relationship with your family. As? Start slowly. First, you connect once or twice a week. But since sex is still slow at home, you might find yourself online four days a week or even every day, spending one to three hours a day digging up new porn, saving it to CDs, smuggling it, and hiding it. At some point, you may be paying for access to a porn site, spending your hard-earned money on something that’s eroding your self-esteem and stealing your family’s time (and risking having printed porn delivered to your door). by mail). When a quick fix becomes an addictive 5-20 hour a week habit, the negative impacts quickly take their toll.

The damage to your marriage can come in many forms. First of all, depending on the relationship you are in, being caught accessing pornography online, whether in the act or through history files, recent files, or other data on your computer, can lead to a permanent rift between you and your spouse. . Many people find this to be a breach of trust, which can have far-reaching damage to the relationship.

Another way you can cause damage is in the very area you are trying to fix: the sexual aspect of your marriage. You might think that your sex life just needs some kind of spark, and it would naturally follow that some of the more, well, exotic things you might see online might be good things to introduce into the bedroom. Unless the sexual relationship is active and healthy (which we assume it isn’t), you’re likely to get mixed results at best, and you’re more likely to separate them sexually. This is because pornography has very little to do with real life sex and relationships. It usually depicts women in submissive roles to make it more attractive to the majority of men who view the pornographic images. If there are problems in the sexual life of the marriage, it is likely that humiliating or submissive sexual practices are not welcome. Again, this is best reserved for healthy, experimental intercourse. This can prevent relationships from growing and can negatively affect or end existing relationships.

Let’s continue with the scenario and assume that sex has slowed or stopped in your marriage and as a result you feel a little compelled to go online and download pornography. Over time, you spend more and more time online digging up pornography. In a way, you may feel justified; After all, if your partner had more sex, you wouldn’t need to masturbate on the computer, would you? You might even begin to resent their disinterest and rejection, and begin to harbor negative feelings toward your spouse. Now, instead of dealing directly with your marriage problems, you’re replacing your spouse with an online masturbation habit that makes you feel better in the short term. Going online becomes a wedge between you and your spouse in terms of time and increasing emotional distance, which is exactly what you do NOT want to happen, because it postpones the inevitable task of finding new coping methods until the sexual spark returns. (and working to get the spark back!), fixing the problems plaguing the relationship, or maybe breaking up altogether.

If you have children, then you may begin to see how these rifts between two people can not only make their lives worse, but also lessen and even put the lives and futures of your children at risk. And of course, even worse than getting caught by your spouse is getting caught by a child: that could ruin a relationship forever.

Then what do you do? This situation is not easy, but it is one you can overcome. The first thing to do is keep track of how much time you are wasting online each week. Try to keep records for at least a month. Then multiply those numbers by 12 to get the total number of hours you lose each year. If you spend an average of 5 hours a week online researching porn, you are basically wasting almost 11 FULL DAYS of your life a year masturbating online. This is a time that you can and should apply to the problems in your marriage, or at least spend more time with your family or at work, relax, or do whatever it takes to improve your marriage.

Make a list of things you should be doing, both specific to your marriage and other things you want to improve in your life, and then apply the time you would spend masturbating to completing the tasks on that list. This has a double benefit. It keeps you away from the computer and improves your life. It sounds simplistic and stupid, but the reality is that it works. The amazing thing is how little things add up in all of our lives. The problem is that it works both ways. Little things like addiction to online pornography undermine your life and self-esteem over time. But on the contrary, reversing that has the opposite effect, so that by redirecting and channeling your desire to masturbate online towards the things you need to improve in your life, you will find that your life will improve. This is because you will build your self-esteem in small steps, day by day, month by month.