FEATURED TERM

LOVE

The act of caring for other people, including our sexual partners. It is also a transcendent value that, if emphasized in a person’s life, may help cure a porn addiction.

Caring relationships and love are needed for a happy, fulfilled life. Porn can keep the user from finding and retaining romantic love. Some men cannot “settle” for women close to their own age or for women who don’t approach the appearance of online sex models and performers. When porn users do get into a relationship, their porn viewing may result in breakups or divorce.

Porn is almost always detrimental to love relationships (Gottman & Gottman, 2016). Romantic partners often feel they are in competition with online sex models and performers. The porn user’s sexual energies are dispersed around the internet rather than focused on their partner. The partner is likely to feel neglected, and in the most serious cases of addiction, may have a boyfriend or husband who is largely absent from the relationship because of his porn use. In this situation, Mr. Hyde constitutes the larger part of a man’s persona; Dr. Jekyll is in retreat. It is Dr. Jekyll who loves his partner, not Mr. Hyde. In addition, the porn user may lose his ability to get erections with a real-life partner, and eventually with porn as well (see erectile dysfunction, pornified, and PIED). As noted earlier, porn kills sex (Wilson, 2017, p. 6). It also kills love.