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How Can You Know if Your Husband is Hooked on Porn?

Truth in Love 16

A wife should avoid the extremes of ignorance and suspicion, but approach her husband with care if she suspects he is looking at porn.

Sep 21, 2015

Heath Lambert: We live in a world that is overrun with pornography; our culture has truly been pornified. And in a world where there is so much pornography, we deal with many, many marriages who experienced the great pain of a revelation of pornography use in them. Sometimes this pornography use is happening on the part of wives in marriages, but more regularly, men are addicted to pornography. And it creates the question on the part of many spouses and many wives. How can I know if my husband is hooked on pornography? As we sort through this issue, I have invited the producer of Truth and Love, Amy Evensen to come and ask some of the questions that so many people have.

​Amy Evensen: ​How does a woman know if her husband is looking at porn or how does she figure out if he is? 

Heath Lambert: That’s a great question. Many women are not going to have to try to figure this out at all because they’re going to stumble upon it. They’re going to find a trail in their husband’s internet history, they’re going to walk into a room where their husband is looking at pornography or some other painful discovery. And so, they’re just going to be confronted with here is this difficulty. The real issue that you’re asking about is if I don’t know whether my husband is looking at pornography, how can I be sure that he’s not? And I think it’s helpful for wives to balance, two extremes, one extreme is ignorance, and one extreme is suspicion.

On the extreme of ignorance is the assumption that, well pornography is not going to be a problem in my house, or my husband would never look at pornography, or something like that. That overlooks the reality, that pornography is a struggle for so many men. It’s a problem for women, too, but particularly for men, this is a big problem, and we wouldn’t want to overlook it, and ignorantly assume that this is not a problem in my marriage. The other extreme though is suspicion where you operate under the assumption that, well pornography is a problem in our culture, of course, it’s going to be a problem in my marriage. And that fundamentally approaches your husband from a standpoint of distrust and a standpoint of lack of love.

So, if we want to avoid ignorance on the one hand and suspicion on the other, the best biblical response is the response of care and love. And that would be an acknowledgment that pornography is a problem in our culture, it’s a threat to your home and you want to protect your home and your family from it. And so, the best way to do this, I think is for women to go to their husbands and say, what are you doing to protect yourself from the problem of pornography? Who is in your life that you are talking to, and what kind of protections are on your computer and on your telephone? And your husband is going to respond the way he responds, he’s going to say that’s a great question, here’s what I’m doing, here’s who I’m talking to, here’s what’s on my phone, here’s what’s on my iPad. Or he’s going to say you know that’s a great question, I’m not really doing anything, I probably should let’s think that through together. Or he might be defensive and if he is defensive or if he’s angry that begins to point in the direction of a problem.

​Amy Evensen: ​Finding out that her husband has a problem with pornography would lead to some sort of emotional response. How should she deal with this emotional response? 

Heath Lambert: So, a discovery that your husband is hooked on porn will lead to an emotional response and should lead to an emotional response. It will lead to a response like anger or sorrow and that is completely appropriate and the reason it’s completely appropriate is because God is angry and sad about sin. If a wife learns of a husband’s problem with pornography and she is neutral about it or happy about it, we would say that that is a significant problem. And so, we actually want wives to be sad and angry when they find out that their husband has violated the covenant of marriage in this way. But the thing to keep in mind is a passage, like Ephesians 4:26 it says, “be angry and do not sin.” That’s one example of the Bible countenancing an emotion, but prohibiting a sinful expression of that emotion. So, a wife should be angry, but not sin, she could be sad, but not sin. And so, what we want to be on the alert for is a sinful expression of an emotion and a sinful expression of anger or sorrow. And what all that means is more than we have time to talk about today. But at the very least, it would include a lack of willingness to forgive. So, right in the same context of, “be angry and do not sin,” just a few verses later in Ephesians 4 verse 31, it says “let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you along with all malice be kind to one another tender-hearted hearted forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.” So, the big indicator that your emotion is sinful is if you find yourself saying or thinking, I will never forgive him for this. That is an emotion that is devoid of the grace of Christ. Because the Bible says Jesus, forgave you for your sin and just as he forgave you for your sin, you need to overflow in forgiveness for others. And so, this doesn’t mean you won’t be angry at all, it doesn’t mean you won’t be sad at all, but it does mean that in your anger and your sadness, there includes the willingness to forgive for sin. 

​Amy Evensen: ​What should her involvement be in his accountability to not look at porn? How much of an active role should she play in this accountability? 

Heath Lambert: So, in general terms, a wife should not play an active involvement in her husband’s accountability. She should know that he is being accountable to someone, and she should know what he is doing to hold himself accountable with these other people. But she should not be actively involved in that. One of the things that I always say is that it’s really important for a wife to be a wife and not a cop. And so as soon as she becomes the one who is asking him the accountability questions, as soon as she becomes the one who is examining his accountability reports, she begins to adopt a role that is number one more appropriate for a Christian brother, and number two is going to undermine her role as a wife and is going to undermine her trust and her husband.

So many women want to be involved in these activities, they want to ask the questions they want to see the reports because they want to get their trust back, they feel betrayed, and they say they want proof that their husband isn’t doing what they knew him to be doing before. The problem is when you engage in those kinds of behaviors, that doesn’t train you to trust your husband, it trains you to trust the internet reports and the things you’re doing to check up on him. And so, what a wife needs to do is know who he’s meeting with, and know that someone is holding him accountable. She also needs to know that she has the freedom to go to that person and say, hey, I’m concerned about my husband, does everything seem ok? She needs the freedom to ask him questions and his accountability partner questions if she starting to have concerns about things. But she’s not the one who’s going to be involved in a regular way and checking up on him.