Oh Tim.How we have lulled ourselves into a denial of the hideous horror of sin.I wish her poem could be required reading. I will be praying for her and her dear boys, as well as her husband.

My cheeks are stained with tears as I read this.

Thank you for reminding us all of the destruction of porn. That (far from harmless) it is a destroyer of lives. It is not an individual who is harmed (though the individual is destroyed) but it is everyone that individual loves most who is ravaged by that hate.

I am getting married in a few months and have spent years battling with lust. Your book and accountability from several Godly men have gotten me far and I fight harder every day to press deeper into God and flee the temptation that started so long ago.

Thank you for posting this, Tim.

I echo what Alex said.

I got my first glimpse of porn many years ago. Every since then there has been a raging battle going on in my life. Though I am single, the Lord is slowly revealing to me the devastating way that porn wrecks and ruins not just my own soul, but it’s potential to damage the souls of my future wife, children and loved ones. Though I hated reading this poem, it was so good for me to read. I want my heart to burn more deeply at the thought of returning to the poison called porn.

I wish I could somehow erase the years and years of images that I have in my bran from all the countless late nights I have spent sacrificing my soul on the altar of porn.

Lord help.

I wept.

I agree.

I lived this (without physical violence) for 23 years. My four sons are all struggling with sexual sin. ALL FOUR of them. My daughter has been victimized. My marriage has ended (Did it ever really begin?). I have recently battled breast cancer. Anyone who says that porn is harmless is insane.

I teared up when I read this. Reading the poem is painful enough- I can only imagine what agony the woman who wrote it feels. God help us!

I thought the book “The Excellent Wife” had a pretty solid chapter on how to Biblically respond to/deal with/help a husband in unrepentant sin.

That poem…wow…my heart is aching for this family.

I weep, tears running down my face.

As a therapist nearly all the men I work with struggle with pornography. It is incredible, the swath of it’s destruction! This is a powerful reminder that we must not allow oursleves to be deceived by a culture that worships at the altar of sex.

Thank you for sharing.

yep - it destroyed my 20 year marriage. everytime, though they were few, we were intimate, is was as if he was trying to drive out a demon.

he would watch those csi-type shows, and all of them revolve mostly around sex, showing graphic images. once it showed a passive man doing violent things to a prostitute and eventually killing her. my (now ex) watched with no emotion or expression.

i once told him he had opened a window and allowed satan free access to our home, to which he replied without emotion or expression, “I know.”

the addiction of porn is progressive and destructive. it is not an answer to anything.

it’s been five years since he moved out, but our girls still long for an intact family.

i have remarried a wonderful man. he has seen porn a few times in his life, but he’s not addicted - the difference is night and day. i no longer live in fear of his abuse, his anger, his hatred. i have to deal with it as my ex b/c our kids are still young, but i don’t have to be married to it. having grown up with an abusive, sex-addicted dad and having been married to one for 20 years, it is like i live on another planet being married to a man who knows how to love, who knows how to experience and desire intimacy on every level, who does not abuse or hate.

btw - this is not exclusively a male-issue - there more than enough women who deal w/the same thing and destroy their marriages, too; my husband’s ex was one of them.

The heart that wrote this poem hit the nail on the head. Wow! My husband, a pastor, and I have seen the devestation porn can do to a family of those who are sitting in our pews. How I wish I could say it wasn’t prevelant in our evangelical churches, but then I would be lying. But what better place for those whose hearts and lives have been ripped apart because of porn to find help and healing as the gospel is applied to these hurting men and women and their children.

Thank you.

Wow, I’m speechless. I’m devasted by what was written, but so glad that it was indeed written and is now being read. I will be sharing this and pray that many others do too!

Thank you for putting into words what I have experienced. Our family has been devastated by my husbands addiction to porn. We had to separate because of the lies, deceit, adultry and anger that was unleashed on our family. Whoever said it was giving Satan free access to the home is right on. This is NOT a harmless activity.

OK so what books that handle this issue biblically, do you who are elders recommend to your young men? Something that takes a young man from puberty, through his teen years and into premarriage, courtship? How do we produce godly young men? I am in my late 50s and had nothing in the way of this subject to read in my day, No that is not correct, as a late teen, I read it is ‘better to marry than to burn’ and so married at the age of nineteen. I did not discover pornography until I was married and then had to confess to my young wife that I had succombed to its tentacles. She forgave me and then left it alone until the era of the internet and now it has become the source of my downfall on occasions. Reading this woman’s lament is very convicting. (I’m sure the same could be said by the wife of a gambler, drunkard…) Please Tim reecommend some literature for young men.

Oh, that everyone treated in this degrading manner would realize what you said in your last sentence, “May they realize that while their earthly bridegroom may look on them with lust instead of love, their heavenly bridegroom always looks on them with eyes of tender, unconditional love.” Powerful, gripping poem!

thanks - a very helpful resource. puts a fair bit of flesh on the bones of how rotten the sin of porn can be.

An awesome book for young men is “every Young Man God;’s Man” (<—this book actually convicted my husband) by Steven Arteburn. A great book to help break free is “the Game Plan” by Joe Dallas. A great book for the wives is by Clay Crosse’s wife Renee Cross, “I surrender all”.

Husband’s who are trapped, I implore you to know that the only way out is through the fire of telling your wife the truth. This is a sin against her, your one flesh. And if she discovers it on her own, now you not only have adultery issues, but you have also compounded them with trust issues. By telling her on your own, at least you have stepped up to the plate of truth and are admitting your failing and asking for HER help in fighting this evil. As your God-given accountability partner, she is the best resource to keeping you honest. For no one knows you like SHE does. Yes it will hurt at first, but it will hurt nothing like it will if she were to find out - which she will eventually anyway, since everything become revealed in due time. The enemy would love nothing more than to spring the hidden secret at just the right time to inflict THE MOST damage possible on all members of your family.

And for anyone needing marriage help, the ministry that has saved our marriage is www.godsavemymarriage.com

I’ve been through this fire and could have written that poem too. Its awful. But there IS hope. The enemy would love nothing more than to keep it hidden and brewing ever stronger. I now look back and KNOW that finding out about my husband’s porn was a GIFT of saving grace. It ripped us apart at first, but it also helped us dig out all the uglies of our lives, repent and turn towards Christ in a NEW, redeemed and passionate way. May this generational curse be broken FOREVER! Hallelujah and Amen! God is good!

I do have to agree with Roland to an extent. I’ve been in that same situation. Yes, porn is a sin that Satan uses to snare men, and men have to accept their responsibility if they yield to that temptation. Women, you must understand that men want to be desired just as much as you women do. When a wife, even though the marriage may be good, when she withholds herself from her husband and makes excuses not to be intimate, it hurts. We want our wives to want us intimately as we want them. When they reject advances, the temptation to fulfill those desires through porn, or extramarital affair, increases drastically. I believe that is why God says in His Word for spouses to not withhold themselves from each other. Sin is sin and porn is as much of a sin trap as there is for many men and those that succumb to that sin are guilty. Don’t shirk your duty as a wife to meet your husband’s needs, though, as this is also wrong. Spouses must work together to satisfy each other.

I could add some of my own tale here, but want to raise another point.

The world thinks wisdom means learning from your mistakes. This is a part of wisdom, but greater wisdom is to avoid the path in the first place. Elihu in Job, rightly says that wisdom doesn’t come from age alone, and the Proverbs back him up. Wisdom comes when we fear/obey the Lord first time round.

What does this mean for us?

I messed around with a girl I wasn’t married to, when I was aged 16-18ish. Had I not done that, I wouldn’t have learned how to masturbate. That would have made the struggles from then onwards a lot easier.

Young people have sex pushed in their faces more and more now. What can we do to help them not make our mistakes?

I am a bit conflicted about this poem and most of the comments: Though I agree that pornography is a terrible, enslaving sin, the poem and many of the comments here strike me as being extreme. Many of the commenters seem to believe that porn is THE sin from which all others flow. It isn’t. It is as much a symptom as it is a cause. Moreover, suggesting that a wife may have a role to play in her husband’s sin is not “hateful,” nor is it “blaming the victim.” It is an assertion of the reality of marriage & interdependency. I’m not suggesting that a husband is justified to look at porn because his wife is uninterested in sex, I’m suggesting there may something else in their relationship producing both responses: her lack interest and his prurient interest. My guess is that the shock, horror, outrage, depression, alienation, shame, guilt and every other extreme emotion that the women have expressed here are as much a source of the problem as the testosterone coursing through their husbands’ bodies. What husband wants to share his struggle with his wife if she’s going to respond with such extreme, antirealist emotions? And if this is her emotional response, every man can imagine how she’ll respond behaviorally and relationally.

To clarify my point, let me provide an analogy: If we came upon an auto accident in which a woman was badly hurt, a bone was protruding out of her leg, and she was bleeding from her head, it would be a normal for the lay person to respond with shock and horror. But you certainly hope the EMT and emergency room physicians don’t respond that way. You want them to be confident and say, “the situation is obviously bad, but we can fix it. Hang in there.” Men who struggle with porn (i.e., as opposed to those who wholeheartedly embrace it) often feel like the woman in the auto accident. The way their wives respond, however, is akin to an emergency room physician responding with, “Oh my gosh, what a mess. You’ll never be the same. Your face is going to be scarred and you’ll walk with a limp the rest of your life. And this is ALL YOUR FAULT. If you weren’t such a bad driver, you wouldn’t be in this mess. I don’t even know if it’s worth it to fix your wounds. You’ll probably just get in another accident. To make matters worse, I had to miss my daughter’s ballet recital to take care of you. I’ll never forgive you for that. You better have really good insurance or these wounds might not heal.” Most men would rather just try to heal themselves or die on side of the road.

In the total universe of sexual sin, looking at heterosexual pornography strikes me as being akin to breaking one’s ankle: you don’t want to do it, it causes problems, and it’s going to require physical therapy to get back to “normal,” and even then you may have a hard time running a marathon. Too often, the man with the broken ankle is sent to a leper colony. Not only does in not resolve the problem, it creates new ones. If the church cannot realistically respond to heterosexual pornography, how can it respond to perversions such as homosexuality, S & M, pedophilia, fetishism, or any other sexual perversion (of which there are many)? What does a pastor do if a 35 year-old man comes to him and says, “I don’t know what to do. I’m actually having sexual thoughts about my daughter.” If the pastor says, “Repent, memorize this list of verses, and spend time asking God to impress upon you how wicked your sin is,” I can almost guarantee you that man is doomed.

For many years I have believed that Christians need to BE the relational context for one another’s redemption and sanctification. Since we know the consequences of the fall better than anyone, we need to be like the emergency room physicians when it comes to other person’s sin. We need to be able to say: the wound is great, but there is help. After reading all of these comments, however, I wonder if I’ve missed something. Maybe I should spend more effort highlighting the sinfulness of sin, particularly when I am the victim of another person’s in. Rather than trying to respond like an emergency room physician, maybe I should respond like the 12 year old girl who thinks that a schoolmate’s acne is “gross” and “disgusting.”

For all of you women out there who are horrified by pornography, I need your advice. Before I got married I was reasonably well off with over a million dollars in the bank. When I got married, I paid off all of my wife’s debt, paid for her daughter to go to college (and eventually her wedding), and supported my wife so she could start her own business. It didn’t take too long before I discovered that my wife could not manage money. No matter how much money her business brought in, I has was having to “loan” it $15K - $20K a year to keep it afloat. On top of that, she was racking up lots of credit card debt—which I continued to pay off to avoid paying over 22% interest. She and I have had many talks about this. She will usually agree that she needs to manage money better, and I used to believe our talks worked, but then I’d find another $20K in debt I didn’t know she had. As a result of the economy, I had some real estate investments go bad and my normal business is suffering. In short, we’re going broke. Nevertheless, she still routinely shops for more clothes that she doesn’t need. Granted, she no longer shops at Neiman Marcus, but she still shops and it’s taking it’s toll. Moreover, she refuses to work outside of the home because she doesn’t like “corporate life.” What should I do? Should I condemn her for her greed, lack of self-discipline, and vanity? Should I withhold my affection? Divorce her? I’m not interested in sermons about what I should have discovered before we got married, I want to know what I do now. I’m thinking about telling her that I’m horrified & repulsed by her vanity and that it’s no different than porn. I’m also going to explain to her that I feel used by her, and that almost ALL of the difficulties we’ve experienced in our life together stems from her vanity and lack of discipline. I’m also considering scowling at her with smug self-righteousness. Please tell me if you think this will work. If not, what should I do. Thanks.Broken (and broke),Dr. X.

Thank you for sharing this poem. Wow, massive. During times when I have struggled with porn my wife has tried to share her hurt, but it never came across the way this poem has. I have three young boys and I know I need to not only protect them from this cancer but gear them up for war against it. God be with me through my lifetime in this struggle. Bring victory!

May I give an added perspective of this kind of situation. I am a preacher of the Gospel, and I had to deal with this battle. I hated what I brought into my marriage and even more, I hated the fact that I was fighting it alone in my dark corner. This was my deep dark secret. Whenever my wife would make me feel less than a man or make me feel like she was doing me a favor to make love to me, I would run to what I was familiar with, porn. In my mind it helped me keep from running out and finding another woman to satisfy me. Before I knew it I was making this apart of weekly activity(Never realized, or wanted to admit to myself, that even the thoughts were just as bad as using my body to cheat) I would excercise self-discipline for at least a week before I had to minister, this way the pictures would not be stuck in my head and become distracting. I trusted God for everything else in my life, but for some reason when it came to the desire for sex, I never even asked God for HIs help. I was caught twice and foolishly explained my way out of it, but when my kids(teenage girls) found the dirty e-mails and my wife read them, I felt a shame so great that it would never allow me to touch another piece of pornography. How could I have thought that God wasn’t just as disgusted. On top of that, your wife is now disgusted at everything she saw, she doesn’t want to hear you try to explain that some e-mails were actually products of your sin and others were just e-mails sent as spam to try to guide you to their site. At this point she doesnt trust you and thinks you are a pervert to the highest extreme, and as far as she is concerned everything she saw is the sum total of everything you are.I begged God to forgive me. I know He did but the shame wouldn’t leave me. Then I felt really stupid that it took my kids seeing this for me to really decide to stop!!! (it’s a decision!!) They are are such a blessing, I explained how sick it was and they were quick to forgive. Constantly telling me, Daddy you never do anything, we knew you weren’t perfect. You just made a mistake. (LOL, interesting how kids can make it so simple!!!) I still couldn’t shake the shame, though. Later, while really feeling down, a prophetess came to me, sent from God, at a gas station(I know it sounds crazy), but she made me realize that I had no right to live in condemnation after God had forgiven me. So, for the first time, I really began to thank God for uncovering my secret. I began to realize that (unfortunately) it took that kind of shame for me to see how I was insulting God and in turn disrespecting my family. I was never violent and never allowed my body to join what my mind was already submitting to, but if I had continued I am sure that at some point it would have. All along I was convincing myself that it was only hurting me, which made it that much easier to fall to the temptation over and over again.My wife was disgusted and said she was leaving me. This broke my heart because I felt that I hadn’t touched another woman and honestly had just fallen prey to foolish desires and foolish security blankets. Then later, my regret was joined by memories where she had taken me through hell with her harsh words and acts of disrespect in the past, how could she now act like my sin is so disgusting in comparison to hers. I never judged her and never threatened to leave though it often took months and sometimes years before she would even admit that something she did was hurting me or that it was even wrong. Nonetheless, at that point, I was too busy loving the fact that I was finally free to be too angry with her. The very last secret I had in my life was finally revealed. You will never imagine the weight that was lifted from me. I immediately began using it in Bible Study. It found its way into my sermons. I could now be really be transparent because this secret sin wasn’t holding me hostage anymore. What I went through could actually help someone. I felt like I could minister effectively now. I prayed that my marriage would last and even begged her forgiveness. I knew that this hurt her and challenged her trust. So I owed her more than a grave apology. But admittedly, her self-righteous reaction felt like a stab in the heart. i had practiced forgiveness and restoration so long and felt like I was entitled to receive the same. We are healing now, thank God. But I pray that couples would learn to stop acting like one sin is better than the other. What gives us the right to stand on top of our spouse instead of fighting to save our spouse. Don’t marry a man for his righteousness, because when he falls, and he will (maybe not to this but he will make a mistake or foolish decision) your love will not last. Marry him because you are IN love with him. Then when he falls, you will rememeber who you fell in love with and fight with all the power God has put in you to get him restored. I felt like she loved me, but was never really IN love with me. I felt like she just married what she saw as a good man, not a good man that had taken her heart. Just giving some real input.

I can see the pain of this woman, and I feel for her. What she has been through is not right.

I hope she has stopped to think that her husband was probably just a boy when he was first exposed to porn. I really don’t think that most men are old enough to realize how they are killing the potential for intimacy the first time they see a “dirty picture.” The little boy inside the addict husband is a victim too. Please, let’s not forget that.

The sin is in the person, not on the page. I am fully aware of the degradation and violence which is found in pornographic images. I do not in any way dismiss this horror.

However, my ex husband never looked at porn and never dated anyone except myself. He was the model of sexual purity. I was the first and only girl that he kissed.

He used the rhetoric of the rulership of the husband over the wife as a trigger for his episodes of violence. In the absence of pornography, he used the teaching of the submission of women in sermons to feed his desire for a violent relationship. Instead of pornography, the sermon itself was repeated back to me, and his sinful desire for domination was fed by the words “submission” and “rulership.” These words must have created a similar physical effect in him that pornography creates in other men.

In particular there is the passage in one Christian leader’s sermon about women who chafe and buck against their husbands. This kind of thing in the pulpit is especially triggering of sexual exploitation of the wife by the husband. These words have a similar effect to pornography.

I suppose that if these sermons were to teach a gentler domination than most pornographic websites it would not be so bad.

However, in my case, sermons fed a habit that was especially violent involving requiring me as wife to engage in humiliating and degrading expisodes.

I have written many poems, but none of them graphic. Somehow writing about the submission of women, the snot and tears, the bruises up and down my legs and arms, lying in a fetal position for hours, while I was berated with the most recent sermon, having my children told that mommy would not be going to heaven being told to leave the dining room table, being dragged out of the car by my hair, lying on the parking lot pavement and being kicked in the ribs in front of my children and all of this because of the most recent sermon on the obedience of the wife, somewhow I never managed to make that sound poetic.

Anyone who wants to talk about real life violence against women has to consider what the rulership of the husband does to a wife. It it as degrading and dehumanizing as any pornography.

May God forgive those who preach the leadership of women by men from the pulpit. If only they could imagine living without freedom of either the body or the soul from the age of 20 until one dies. But I ran away.