Why Porn Is So Hard to Quit: The Monkey's Paw Problem
By Eddie Eccker, MS, LMFT. Marriage and family therapist, co-owner of Voyages Counseling in Colorado, host of The Voyage Cast.
Porn is hard to quit because it works. That is the short answer, and it is the one most men never hear, because the people talking to them about porn are either selling a program or defending a habit. Porn delivers relief on demand, every time, with no questions asked, and it collects its price from a direction the man is not watching. The best description I have found of that arrangement is a ghost story from 1902.
The story
In W. W. Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw, an old soldier brings a dried paw back from India and says it grants three wishes. He throws it in the fire. Mr. White pulls it out. That night he wishes for two hundred pounds to pay off the house. The next afternoon a man from the mill stands at the gate for a long time before he can make himself knock. The son has been caught in the machinery. The company accepts no responsibility, but in recognition of his service they would like to present the parents with a sum. Two hundred pounds.
The paw never lies and never fails. Every wish comes true. That is the horror of the story.
What the man in my office says
A man sits down, usually a man who is doing fine in most of his life, and tells me about something he has been trying to quit for years. He is ashamed. He has quit a dozen times. What he says is, I don't know why I keep going back.
He is talking about porn. What he does not say is that it works. It takes the edge off. It is there when nothing else is. He experiences it as a weakness. It is closer to a bargain, and the story has every moving part of the bargain in it.
Why porn is hard to quit: the paw pays
Mr. White wished for two hundred pounds and got two hundred pounds, to the pound. The wish was not a trick. That is the part that gets skipped in most of what is said about porn, in church and in therapy both. If porn did not work, quitting would be easy. People quit things that don't work all the time. Porn is hard to quit because it delivers, fast and reliably, to a man who is lonely, or bored, or angry at his wife, or awake at midnight with nothing holding him.
What porn costs a marriage: the bill comes sideways
The money came as compensation for the son's death. The Whites were watching the money. The cost arrived from the one direction they weren't looking. The man in my office is watching for the obvious costs, whether he will get caught, whether it is a sin. The real bill lands somewhere else. His desire for his wife goes flat and he does not know why. His ability to be known by another person gets smaller. His expectation of what sex should cost him drops toward zero. None of it comes with a label on it. It shows up as, I guess we're roommates now. Proverbs 7 describes the same move three thousand years earlier: the young man is not warned that it will feel bad, he is warned that it will cost him his life and that he will not see it coming. I wrote about that passage, and about how affairs actually begin, in I Never Thought I Would Be the One.
Why trying harder fails: the second wish
The mother wishes the son back, and what knocks at the door is not what she wanted. Every fix a man attempts while still holding the paw is a second wish. The streak he counts. The promise he makes at two in the morning. The filter he knows how to get around. The secrecy, most of all. Secrecy feels like protecting the marriage and is the thing that kills it.
What the research on porn actually shows
I go through the studies on the episode, including the ones that don't help my case. The largest review, fifty studies across ten countries, finds that men who use porn report lower sexual and relationship satisfaction, and the finding holds in surveys, in studies that follow people over time, and in experiments. The average effect is small, which is what a slow burn looks like in a spreadsheet. A University of Denver study found that viewing alone, rather than viewing at all, is where the measurable damage is. Beginning porn use roughly doubles the chance of divorce within a few years, and the association is strongest in marriages that started out happy. Whether porn is an addiction is contested: the DSM does not recognize one, and the World Health Organization files compulsive sexual behavior under impulse control. The one treatment with a randomized trial behind it, acceptance and commitment therapy, got most men much better and a minority all the way out. In the only placebo-controlled drug trial, nobody beat the sugar pill.
How to quit porn: the third wish
There is a way out, and it is the one Mr. White finally takes. He does not resist the thing at the door. He finds the paw and wishes it gone, with his wife in the house. For a man that means the paw out of the house, somebody who knows, and the long work of getting the real thing he was going to the paw for from the people who were supposed to give it to him. On the episode I lay out the six things I tell the men I work with, and I tell the story of a friend of mine who finally told his wife. She was angry. She cried. She changed the password on the computer. Then they went out for Chinese food.
The episode is not kid-friendly. It is for the man who has tried to quit more times than he can count, for the wife or girlfriend who found it and cannot understand why he won't just stop, and for the friend who is about to get a phone call.
If you need help, Voyages Counseling can help. We see men on their own and couples together at our Centennial, Lone Tree, Castle Rock, Denver and Colorado Springs offices. New clients: (720) 729-7372.
Three questions I get asked
Is porn addiction real? The DSM does not list it. The World Health Organization recognizes compulsive sexual behavior disorder, filed under impulse control rather than addiction, and most people treated for it report problematic porn use. Brain imaging shows the reward regions of men stuck on porn lighting up the way an addict's do. The word is contested. The pattern is not.
Does porn ruin marriages? Not every one, and anyone who says so is overstating it. The average effect on satisfaction is small. But the arrow towards distruction has never been found to point the other way, viewing in secret is where the damage concentrates, and beginning porn use roughly doubles the odds of divorce in the following years.
What is the first step to quitting porn? Tell someone safe, today. A friend, a pastor, a therapist, a group of men doing the same work. The single thing that separates the men I have watched get out from the men who stay stuck is whether it is still a secret.
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