What Does It Mean That He's Been Using Porn?

I'd like to spend this session on a question that sits underneath almost every other question we've talked about so far: what does it mean that he's been using pornography?

Before I answer that, I want to draw a distinction I think is one of the most important things I'll say in this entire series: the difference between what something is, and what it means.

Here's what it is. He used pornography. He sinned against you. That's simply what happened. It's a fact, and I'm not going to soften it or explain it away.

But what it means can be a very different question, and it's a question your own mind is already trying to answer, whether you've noticed or not.

The Fact and the Meaning Are Two Different Things

Our brains are pattern-recognition machines. We're meaning-makers by design. We see something happen, and almost automatically, we start assigning it significance. Most of the time that's a gift, it's how we learn, how we stay safe, how we make sense of the world. But sometimes it goes wrong, because we assign the wrong meaning to the right fact.

Think about a fever. A fever is a fact, your body's temperature has risen. But what it means could be a hundred different things. Most of the time it means your immune system is doing exactly what it's supposed to do with a minor virus. It doesn't usually mean cancer, even though fear might jump there first. Or think about a racing heart, or a knot in your stomach. Those are facts too. But they don't always mean danger. Sometimes they mean you're anxious about something that was never actually a threat at all.

The fact and the meaning are two different things. And when we skip straight from the fact to a meaning we invented ourselves, usually the most frightening meaning available, we can end up suffering over something that was never actually true.

That's exactly what I want to help you avoid here. So let's look outside your own mind for a moment, at what Scripture and honest reality actually say this means.

What It Means, Plainly

1. It means he was tempted, and he sinned against you.

But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death.

James 1:14-15 (ESV)

That's a real, serious sequence, and it happened. I'm not minimizing it.

2. It means he needs God's forgiveness.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

1 John 1:9 (ESV)

3. It means he needs your forgiveness, too, in time, and as part of the process we've talked about throughout this series.

Bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other, as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.

Colossians 3:13 (ESV)

4. And it means he's normal.

That last one might surprise you, and it's the one I want to spend the most time on, because I don't think most wives have any idea just how normal this actually is.

I don't say that to excuse anything. I say it because I think it changes the emotional weight you're carrying, and because Scripture itself tells us this isn't a strange or exotic problem.

He's Not as Rare as You Think

No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man.

1 Corinthians 10:13 (ESV)

Common to man. Not rare. Not a mark of some unusual defect in your husband specifically. Paul is telling the Corinthian church that whatever temptation they're facing, someone else has already faced the very same thing.

Here's a fact that I think will help put this in perspective. In 2009, a researcher at the University of Montreal, Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse, set out to study the effects of pornography by comparing young men who used it with young men who didn't. He couldn't complete that comparison. In his own words, he said, "We started our research seeking men in their twenties who had never consumed pornography. We couldn't find any." He ended up studying only the group that did use it, because he simply could not locate the other group at all.

I want to be honest about the size of that particular study, it was a small sample, about twenty young men, not a massive national survey. But it's a striking, well-documented illustration of something much larger surveys have confirmed again and again: exposure to pornography among men, especially young men, is close to universal in our culture today.

Here's a second fact, from more recent and much larger research. A 2023 study published in the Journal of Sex Research compared web traffic to the internet's most visited sites. The three largest pornography websites were ranked higher in total traffic than Amazon, Netflix, Yahoo, TikTok, and Zoom. The gap wasn't small, the single largest pornography site had roughly seven hundred million more total visits than Amazon.

Think about what that means. More human attention, in raw numbers, currently flows toward pornography than toward one of the largest retail companies in human history.

I'm not sharing that to shock you or to make you feel worse. I'm sharing it so you understand something important: your husband is not a member of some rare, especially depraved category of men. He is, unfortunately, part of an enormous and very ordinary population that includes men from every background, including pastors, including sincere Christians, including men who love their wives and love God.

Here's the part I think helps explain why this became so common so quickly.

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9 (ESV)

Sexual temptation itself is not new. It's as old as humanity. What's new is the delivery system.

It used to be that pornography required real effort. You had to go to the wrong part of town, find a sketchy convenience store, and ask for a magazine kept hidden behind the counter. Access required deliberate, embarrassing, effortful pursuit, and that effort itself acted as a kind of natural barrier.

Then the internet came along and made pornography accessible anonymously, freely, and instantly. What used to take a humiliating trip across town now takes about thirty seconds and no human interaction at all. That sudden shift, that tidal wave, hit an entire generation of men that our culture, our churches, and frankly our own fathers were not prepared to help us navigate.

Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

1 Peter 5:8 (ESV)

I don't think it's an accident that the enemy's oldest strategies found their most effective delivery mechanism in exactly this kind of technology. When that tidal wave hit, it forced an entire generation of men to grapple with new ways of coping, new ways of resisting temptation, and new ways of fighting a battle nobody had trained them for. That's what your husband has been doing, however well or poorly he's been doing it.

What This Does Not Mean

Let me be just as clear about what this does not mean.

• It does not mean he's a special class of pervert.
• It does not mean you were not enough.
• It does not mean you need to leave him.
• It does not mean he will never change.
• It does not mean he's not a Christian.
• It does not mean he didn't take his marriage vows seriously, or didn't mean them.
• It does not mean he doesn't love you.

I Know This From the Inside

I know all of that because I struggled with pornography myself, and I sinned against my wife, while I was pastoring a church at the time.

I did sin. I'm not going to soften that word or reach for a gentler one. But here's what that sin meant for me, and what it still means for every believer who sins.

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

1 John 2:1-2 (ESV)

I needed an advocate. Not an excuse, not a technique, not simply more willpower, an advocate, someone to stand in my place before God when I had genuinely failed. And that's exactly what Jesus was and is. I needed the atoning work of Christ, the same way every other sinner who has ever lived has needed it. My sin wasn't a special category that put me beyond that atonement. It was ordinary sin, met by an extraordinary Savior.

What it meant for me wasn't that I was secretly unbelieving, or secretly unloving toward my wife and children. What it meant was that I was unprepared for the brutality of this specific struggle, and I didn't realize how quickly and how deeply it could take hold of me.

I loved my wife. I loved my kids. I really wanted to do right. I even loved God. But I wasn't sure how to get free of this specific thing, and in the meantime, I needed exactly what 1 John 2:1 promises every believer who sins: an advocate, and a Savior whose atoning work was sufficient even for this.

That's the situation I suspect your husband may be in too.

Steps You Can Take This Week

1. The next time you catch your mind assigning a meaning to what happened, pause and ask: is this the fact, or is this the meaning I've invented? Write both down separately if it helps.
2. Read 1 Corinthians 10:13 slowly, and let "common to man" actually land. This doesn't make it acceptable, it makes it something other than a verdict on your husband's character alone.
3. If you've been quietly believing any of the "what it does not mean" list, write out the specific one you've believed most, and set it next to Romans 7:19-22. Let Paul's own words push back against that specific lie.
4. Resist the urge to explain this away to yourself using culture and statistics alone. Understanding why this became common doesn't remove your husband's responsibility for his own choices, hold both truths at the same time, the way this whole series has tried to.

Now that we've separated what this is from what it means, I want to spend our next sessions helping you understand your husband a little more specifically, starting with what's actually happening in his brain and in his spirit when temptation hits, so you have real, shared language to use together as he fights this battle.

Now that we've separated what this is from what it means, in the next session we'll look at what's actually going on inside your husband: why does he feel so much shame?