Two Marriage Killers:  Alcohol and Porn

Drunks and pervs make pretty poor spouses.  You’ve heard that your personality is a pretty permanent thing, right?  Don’t you believe it, even for a minute.  The Bible says the wages of sin is death and if you want to start dying really quickly, all you have to do is find a sin of choice and give your heart to it and pretty soon your personality will degenerate to the point where your old self will be barely recognizable.  You’ll be a shell of a person.

It’s pretty difficult to have a happy marriage when one or the other or both are serving the god of the bottle or the idol of pornography.  And you say you do it because its fun and you are just trying to have a little excitement and I say your idols are going to demand more and more of your loyalty and time and resources until there’s little of you left and your fun will have become bondage instead and rather than looking at naked nameless bodies in contorted positions for a buzz or drinking your sorrows away, both, or either of these will be your master and pretty soon you’ll be doing it, not because it feels good, but because you HAVE to.

And then your wife will come talk to me and she’ll lament the loss of her husband, that she loved her husband, but somehow he disappeared into a world of make-believe or perversion or both and she’ll tell me her husband’s alcohol or porn use feels to her like an affairee and she’ll be right on the money and I’ll tell her other people have told me the same thing and I understand perfectly.  She’ll say he’s not the same person I married.  I love my husband when he’s not drinking or escaping into perversionland.  I don’t even know who he is.  I don’t like him when he’s drinking.  He’s mean.  He says horrible things.  Or if her husband is doing the porn thing she’ll describe to me how her husband turned into a sexual predator with her as the object and instead of sexuality being a gift from God to them as a way to connect spiritually and intimately and tenderly, sexuality has become this scene from a medieval torture chamber with her husband having the look or horror in his eyes and she’ll describe to me what it feels like and if I closed my eyes I could see a terrorized 4-year old girl being perped on by Uncle John when he so graciously offered to watch his little niece while his brother and his sister-in-law when on a little trip.

So much for alcohol and porn kicking up anyone’s fun.  It’s just the opposite.  It’s like turning on a vacuum cleaner from Hell and sucking all the life out of the marriage and your own life as well and what is left is barely recognizable.  Of course, I’ll tell you you can’t expect your marriage to improve if you keep looking at your spouse through the lense of a bottle or through a thousand other peoples’ body parts and you’ll tell me it’s not a problem and you can stop and you will stop and we’ll all take a wait see, because, actually, some people can stop, but none of us know which group you are in or not, but if you are in the group that can’t stop even if they want to, then you are going to need more than a marriage dude-guy to help you and you’re going to have to go get some treatment from some counselors that are a lot meaner than I am who have the ability to confront your demons and denounce your lies and delusions and to instill in you the fear of God so that you can cast these taskmasters away.

Or not.  Not everyone who wants to be free of these masters is able to cast them off.  The addictions counselors can help, but, aw, you will need to show up.  The problem is these masters are so fun, you know, and they take your ability to think away and it remains to be seen if you’ll be able to master them or not.  They won’t leave without a fight.  They have a way of taking fight away.  A soldier who’s surrendered is out of the fight.  He’s not a soldier anymore.  He’s called a prisoner of war.

Is that really what you want to do?  Sell your dignity and freedom and marriage and kids down the river?  What a legacy you’ll leave.  Clients will be telling their counselors stories about you for years to come.