Getting married to avoid a porn addiction

I went to visit a LDS friend the other day and he told me something like this. “My son will be getting home from his mission in a few months and I want him to get married as soon as he can so that way he won’t develop a porn problem.

This has really bother me. Are we teaching our young men to get married and use women so they don’t get into the porn issues? He didn’t mention love, companionship, or any thing else. This kind of thinking just seems so backwards to me, but Mission Presidents have been telling their Elders to go home and get married ASAP for years. Is it just me and my new way of thinking or does this seem strange?

First, the church needs to learn the difference between ‘unhealthy habit’ and ‘addiction.’ I believe porn to be potentially addictive, but it’s not always an addiction.

I spent many a long hour as Branch Pres trying to convince a sobbing wife that her husbands porn issue had nothing to do with their sex-life.

Marriage will no more cure a porn addiction that alcoholism. Marriage, ironically, could even be the trigger that gets a guy interested in porn. A good Mormon boy who has lived a life of complete abstinence from sex/porn etc (they do exist!) could well have the floodgates open once they are “allowed.”

So yes, awful message from the guy you know

I went to visit a LDS friend the other day and he told me something like this. “My son will be getting home from his mission in a few months and I want him to get married as soon as he can so that way he won’t develop a porn problem.

This has really bother me. Are we teaching our young men to get married and use women so they don’t get into the porn issues? He didn’t mention love, companionship, or any thing else. This kind of thinking just seems so backwards to me, but Mission Presidents have been telling their Elders to go home and get married ASAP for years. Is it just me and my new way of thinking or does this seem strange?

FWIW I think that marriage is a stabalizing influence. The single adult years are years of growth and self-discovery – with the potential for many surprises. This is also a period when many young people fall away from the church. I believe this is why the YSA ward system was changed to geographical area only – to keep better tabs and have clear jurisdictional authority over the YSAs. If young people get shuttled from their parents home almost immediately into the mission field and then to marriage soon after there is more or less constant LDS structure and well defined roles = less chance for them to drift away. I’m not saying this is ideal for the individual, but if your goal is to keep kids in the church this is one way to do it.

Wow.

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I went to visit a LDS friend the other day and he told me something like this. “My son will be getting home from his mission in a few months and I want him to get married as soon as he can so that way he won’t develop a porn problem…This has really bother me. Are we teaching our young men to get married and use women so they don’t get into the porn issues? He didn’t mention love, companionship, or any thing else. This kind of thinking just seems so backwards to me, but Mission Presidents have been telling their Elders to go home and get married ASAP for years. Is it just me and my new way of thinking or does this seem strange?

The idea probably makes sense to him. Maybe he hasn’t ever looked at porn much if at all or at least not since he was married so maybe that’s why he assumes that being married is likely to help avoid it. Then if he heard some horror stories about RMs that fell away from the Church supposedly mostly because of porn and/or upset their wives that would make him worry about the same thing happening to his own son. I think many in the Church have the false impression that it is only very few in the Church that ever have a porn “problem” and that most men that are active in the Church never really got into it when it could actually easily be more than 90% that already viewed it and liked it before their mission and a majority that end up viewing it sometimes after they are married. That doesn’t necessarily make them addicts in most cases.

Even if he means well I definitely think the solution could end up being worse than the supposed problem he is trying to prevent at all costs. It sounds like people that get married at younger ages are more likely to get divorced in less than 10 years than those that are older and this doesn’t surprise me at all. Maybe waiting until after I graduated from college and was working full-time to get married didn’t help me avoid temptation by LDS standards but it definitely helped me avoid unnecessary stress when I mostly wanted to focus on my education and career goals at that point. In any case, there are no guarantees nowadays because even if someone is sheltered from supposed evil influences fairly well until they are safely married in the temple they could still easily be one internet search away from becoming a bitter ex-Mormon atheist and/or porn “addict” at any time without warning anyway.

If he’s that good a friend, I probably would look at him and say something like the following:

“I’ve been thinking about your comment about marrying to avoid a porn addiction. Do you have any idea how many married men deal with a porn issue of some kind? Marriage, in and of itself, is NO guarantee in that regard – and, in fact, a bad marriage sometimes contributes to the issue. Frankly, I’d rather my son be married to someone he loves, who loves him and who will support him if he ever faces a porn addiction than have him be married to someone he doesn’t love, who doesn’t love him and never have an issue with porn.”

I have no idea how he would react, but it’s how I probably would start the conversation.

Two 16-year-olds who end up getting pregnant are told to get married to solve the illegitimate child problem.

It’s important to point out that the official Church stance is NOT for those teenagers to get married. This is another case where most members don’t follow the advice of the Church itself.

So this friend of mine is a really good friend, the kind that we hang out a lot. He has always been very ultra conservative and TBM almost to the point of being annoying but he is such a good guy that I don’t let it effect our friendship. I am wondering if I should say something to him concerning this. He has been a gay basher in the past and after many long talks he has really soften up on that issue (I have to admit that my views on gays has changed a lot over the last few years also). Any thoughts about trying to discuss the downside to his thinking or should I not get involved in his family matters?

Hopefully the son wouldn’t get married before he feels fairly comfortable with the idea anyway just because his dad says he should so I’m not sure if you should feel like you need to say anything about it or not. If you want to then maybe you could say something simply to try to get him to think more about what he is really saying like, “Isn’t the most important thing for your son to be happy over the long term?; he’s the one that will have to live with the decision and if he rushes into it without taking his time to make sure he feels like he is marrying the right person for him then he could really end up regretting it later.”

Great point, if only he would stand up for himself. This family is very idealistic and the kids do just about everything their parents say. The oldest daughter is dating a boy and he “has some issues” so the parents told her to stop dating him and she broke it off and I am pretty sure that they listened to the YSA fireside about if a boy looks at porn than the Dad should step in and make sure that the relationship ends. I don’t think that the kids know how to think for themselves at this point in their lives. This need to control every thing is driving me crazy.