One reason porn is harmless is that it doesn’t cross over into our everyday lives. You can simply spend a few hours isolated from human contact (your own doesn’t count) and stop whenever you like, returning to spend some good quality time with your girl or boyfriend, completely unaffected by watching strangers have sex.

Right?

Wrong!

If anything, porn intrudes into most areas of our life, unfortunately often invited.

Slowly but surely, how you view sex and how you view people will be greatly affected by your porn habit. You might not notice it at first but gradually the line will be blurred until eventually you don’t even recognize yourself.

So how does porn affect our sexual behavior and relationships exactly?

You will read it and hear about it a lot here at xxxchurch but it’s so true; porn is not real. So if we are taking what you see on a screen to be how it really is, you will be hugely disappointed. You will start to view all women and/ or men through a porn lens. This is the simplest manner in which porn affects our behavior. For as long as you expect women to be a toy that men can do what they like with, you will become disillusioned with what is real.

So your girlfriend won’t be putting out enough for you. Or your boyfriend’s slight belly will not compare to the ripped six packed males of porn. Or your girlfriend will actually want to talk to you about stuff that matters and it will bug the heck out of you.

Porn is not real, so when real life gets going, you won’t be prepared for it.

The ironic thing about porn is that instead of making you want to be intimate with your partner, it actually drives you away from them. You have an image in your head of what a girl should look like and no matter how pretty your girlfriend is, no matter how comfortable they are in their own skin, you won’t desire them. You won’t want to hold their hand. You may even become embarrassed of them. All because they don’t live up to your idea of what a women should look like.

This is called objectification. Maybe you didn’t see it like that but that is what it is. You think that women are meant to look one way and when they don’t, you turn back to your ideal image through porn. This is objectifying not only to the people you see in porn but to your boy or girlfriend.

But this doesn’t just affect your behavior with your other half; it affects all your relationships. From your best friends to strangers. You will become more dissatisfied with your friends that you will withdraw from them. You will feel insecure, low and down about who you are. You will withdraw from God because you don’t think He hears you. You will say one minute that you are done with porn only to look the next. You will lie to yourself and others. You will try to be happy when around others, only to feel guilty when you are on your own.

And all these behaviors are unfair to two people.

The people you interact with and yourself.

Your behaviors will increasingly be in isolation. You will be robbing the world of the person that the world deserves to see. That it needs to see. That would make the world better for it.

The underlying issue is that porn changes how you think and how you see the world.

And in turn how you behave. Changing you into a person that can’t live in healthy, fun and rewarding relationships.

Porn is not real.

And when you keep turning to it, slowly it’s almost like you aren’t either.