While regular porn use doesn’t require you to live your life in a cave, away from other people, on some level it can feel a lot like that. Many porn users tell us that one of the worst side effects of porn is how lonely and isolated from the important people in their lives they have become. This consequence of porn is ironic given that our early curiosities about it often involve a desire to vicariously reach out and touch someone. Porn users are often shocked to discover that what they thought were fun visits to a fantasy world could actually in time make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to maintain close and genuine loving connections with real people.
Regular porn use is isolating because it involves tuning out and turning away from other people. Porn users often talk about how they have taught themselves to “compartmentalize” their porn use—separate it off from their real life and access it at times when they are alone. As one man said, “My porn use is not part of my real life. It’s just a little something I do on the side for entertainment and sexual relief. It doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of my life or my relationships.” Problems arise because maintaining a secret “compartment” for porn means you have to be secretive and dishonest with others. Habitual porn users automatically and instinctively pull away from others in order to hide and maintain their behavior. Given this dynamic, it is easy for porn users to start choosing porn over people.
Finding time alone with porn and searching out porn that “does the trick” drains time, attention, and energy that might otherwise be spent in social activities or with an intimate partner. Simon, a college foreign exchange student, told us that he’d often spend his Saturday nights alone in his dorm room in front of his computer looking at the “coed porn” sites instead of going out with friends to events and parties on campus.
Anyone who spends a lot of time online eventually feels lonelier and more isolated from the real world. Technology may be one of the major reasons that Americans have on average only two close friends, down from three in 1985, before the Internet influenced so many of our lives. Being hooked on Internet porn interferes with developing close, meaningful relationships, including relationships that are physically intimate and mutually sexually satisfying. This is an important issue because genuine, personal, face-to-face connection is a basic need for all humans.
Porn users may be fearful and anxious about building new relationships. What if that new friend or lover judges them for their porn use? What if they reach out to someone only to be rejected? What if they can only have an intimate relationship if they agree to stop using porn? Worries about socializing with others can lead to an isolating nervousness. One former porn user explains, “As long as I was doing pornography I was unable to have an intimate relationship, either a sexual relationship or even a friendship. I felt guilty about using pornography and masturbating all the time. My relationships only went so deep. I didn’t want to make good friends or get involved with anyone who might expect me to be totally honest with them about what I was really doing in my life. I had too many guilty secrets.”
For Len, a thirty-three-year-old man, porn has become a roadblock that is stopping him from meeting someone and getting sexually involved with a partner. “Porn actually makes it more difficult for me to find a relationship. It gives me a ready source of release and gratification. I don’t have to deal with the fear and difficulty of meeting new people and trying to connect.”
Another way porn use can isolate a person is by teaching an approach to relationships that turns other people off. Using porn regularly can cause you to become increasingly self-centered. After all, when you’re in a relationship with porn, it’s all about you. Porn also plants and reinforces the idea that when it comes to sex and relationships, power and control are more important than empathy and caring. If you regularly use porn, especially during the years in which you could be learning the crucial skills that enable you to be empathetic, caring, sensitive, and loving, you can become emotionally stunted when it comes to interpersonal intimacy. Sex with your partner can become “porn sex” rather than an intimate, loving connection.
As a sexual “partner,” porn can be very possessive. It seduces you to be alone with it, and limits your ability to experience intimacy in a loving relationship with a real sexual partner.