He keeps looking at porn. He doesn’t value your marriage as much as you do. You are trying to heal, he isn’t. He thinks you are the problem, but you’re doing everything you can to make this better. He slips. A lot. You find him staring at commercials or magazine covers. He doesn’t think he should have to change the way he views women or the world or sex or porn. He thinks glancing twice at an immodest woman is normal and not considered lust.
He won’t change.
You’ve cried. You’ve gotten angry. You’ve tried to seek God and allow your own heart to heal, your own insecurities. But he’s still hurting you. He’s still betraying your wedding vows. He’s still making you feel like a major pile of dirt.
He’s muddied your engagement ring with porn and selfishness.
What can you do?
You know, there’s not much I can tell women who email me with these desperate situations, besides this:
Your husband is selfish. Don’t be like him. Refuse to focus on yourself, your pain, and your insecurities. Instead, look to God and try to see this situation through His eyes.
Your marriage will suffer because of his actions. That’s definite. Relationships are not one-sided. If he cares about his self-pleasure more than you and your marriage … well, your marriage will slowly deteriorate. It takes two to make a relationship work. If he isn’t into the idea, you can’t force him. You can’t control him. You can’t force him to have a filter on his computer if he doesn’t want it.
He has to want change before he will change. He has to want to despise sin and cling to purity. If he still wants to seek his own desires, well, you can only pray, and hurt, and pray some more. I always tell women … whether or not your husband is changing, you can change. You can ask God to heal your heart, even if your husband refuses to allow your marriage to be healed.
Husband’s need to set their own desires aside (so do wives). After a husband betrays a wife in this way her heart is in pieces. There is no wound that compares to this one. It shakes the core of a woman. A woman could cheat on a man and it wouldn’t harm him the same way it does a woman. So as much as the man wants compassion and sympathy and understanding for his issues, he has to put his wife first if he wants to see his marriage thrive again. (Really, a wife should be doing the same.)
He should be willing to do whatever it takes to regain his wife’s trust, express genuine love, and grow closer to God. He should be willing to get rid of the TV if it makes her uncomfortable. He should be willing to eat a bowl of maggots if she asks him to. In essence, he needs to do whatever it takes, so long as he is obeying God and seeking Him first. We should never sin when our spouses ask us to, but if a wife is asking a husband to do something that benefits his marriage, his kids, his own purity, and his wife’s heart … he should never fight her.
I think a big problem for all of us is that we like to control our lives. Men don’t want to feel like a baby being controlled by his mommy and they want to save a little slice of their self-pleasure, no matter the cost. Women don’t want to allow their husband’s to choose lust over their marriage. It hurts. It hurts for a man to give up his self-pleasure (cutting out our eyes isn’t meant to be easy or painless), and it hurts for a woman to be stepped on by her husband’s selfish desires.
So, instead of dealing with the pain we take our lives into our own hands, don’t lay them down for others, and control. We take the steering wheel from God and keep things safe and comfortable, just the way we like them. But we have to be willing (both husband’s and wives) to change, to grow, to step out into the uncomfortable, and to seek God and follow Him even through thorns and whips. If we keep seeking our own comfort, our own self-pleasure, our relationships will die and the only relationships we will maintain in our lives will be surfacey.
We have to lay our lives down for each other. And if a marriage is suffering because one person isn’t willing to do so when the other is doing all they can … shame on that person and their selfishness.
True relationships inhale selflessness and exhale love.
I will be praying for all of you hurting women who email me about your husband’s unwillingness to change, to love you, and to seek God with all of his heart. I will be praying for clarity in his mind and purity in his heart. I will be praying for your heart, that through the pain of your crumbling marriage and broken heart … you will seek God and not make your husband an idol. That you will always, always know that regardless of how much someone in this world loves or does not love you … God loves you so much more than anyone else could ever hate or love you. He loves you. Rest in that. I know it’s hard. I know you’re broken. But He is your rest. Cling to Him in this time. It’s really all you can do.
