They Lied to Us

The Truth About Porn, Philandering, and Marriage

Relationship failures and divorces have continued to rise, but still, we rarely discuss one of the most significant factors undermining marriages today. Our culture celebrates sexual freedom without acknowledging its long-term costs. We promise young people that their pre-marriage behaviours won’t affect their future commitments, but this might be one of the most damaging lies we tell. The epidemic of infidelity, dissatisfaction, and broken homes isn’t just about bad individual choices — it’s about how modern habits shape our capacity for lasting love.

No one wants to cheat on their wife. I mean, rarely does anyone enter a marriage thinking, “I’m going to be unfaithful to my spouse,” yet infidelity happens in countless marriages. When you hear about situations like this, you may think, “Well, they are just horrible people.” But is it that simple?

What if the trouble starts way before the wedding, rooted in habits like sleeping around, philandering and porn?

You are living the single life, where sleeping with multiple women in a month is routine, where porn is a daily scroll, and Instagram feeds a steady drip of half-naked women. It’s not just fun — it’s a lifestyle that trains your brain. You’re picking women like they’re gift cards: swipe, use, exchange. And it does something to you. It’s not about right or wrong yet — it’s about what’s happening in your head. Years of chasing novelty and instant gratification don’t vanish because you sign a marriage certificate. Your nervous system doesn’t hit reset — it’s been marinating in a pattern that screams more, new, now.

Psychologically, this makes sense. Habits form through repetition. Sleeping around or binging porn floods your brain with dopamine, the feel-good chemical tied to reward. Over time, you crave that hit, and monogamy — a slower, deeper game — can feel like a letdown. It’s not that you’re a monster; it’s that you’ve built a sprinting habit when marriage demands a marathon.

It’s like swapping soft linen for a cold, hard floor. That soft bed is the thrill of variety — multiple partners, endless porn clips. The floor? One spouse, one reality, no quick fixes. After years of luxury, that shift isn’t just uncomfortable — it’s a shock to the system. And most people don’t even know how hooked they are until they’re in it, until they’re staring at their spouse, wondering why they feel restless.

Those old habits don’t just sit in the past — they follow you. If you’ve spent years treating women like they’re disposable, it’s tough to flip a switch and see your wife as different. If porn’s been your thing, real sex might not measure up. Online, it’s all perfect — fake bodies, no effort, instant fun. Your wife’s real, though. She can’t be that, and she shouldn’t have to. But that gap? It can leave you restless, even troubled.

It’s more than just sex, too. It’s about where your mind goes. If you’re used to bouncing between women or screens, locking in on one person feels off. And, Marriage isn’t always smooth — fights happen, life gets heavy. When it does, those old escapes start calling. Cheating. Porn. Whatever’s quick and familiar.

The constant exposure to endless women on screens makes it nearly impossible to genuinely connect with real women. Walking down the street becomes a dehumanizing experience — when you see a woman, your first thought isn’t about her as a person but something lewd or sexual. Your brain has been warped to immediately objectify.

You become a walking shell of a human, incapable of seeing women as complete people. Every woman is mentally compared to the impossible standards set by carefully curated, filtered, and often surgically enhanced bodies seen online. Regular women can’t measure up because it’s a fantasy(everything is flawed, no one is perfect).

The standards become impossible. No real woman can compete with the composite fantasy created from thousands of images cherry-picked from millions of women worldwide. The ability to see beauty in ordinary people erodes. The capacity for genuine connection withers.

There was a case of a woman who shared her nine-year marriage experience. She saw her future husband as a nerdy, awkward guy from a religious family who held his faith close to his heart. She couldn’t have imagined him any other way. During their “talking stage,” their connection seemed genuine. They prayed together. He would wake her for fajr prayer. His parents would ask for updates on helping him regain his memory from his hifz of the Quran.

Their early married life in a small one-bedroom apartment seemed nice. The nikkah (Islamic marriage) brought them contentment. They watched YouTube together to find recipes, took neighbourhood walks, and enjoyed the closeness.

But appearances were deceiving. The sweet, awkward, religious man had a hidden life. Behind closed doors, he had watched porn with his roommates in college. He maintained this habit throughout his marriage, even storing fetish videos across multiple devices for nearly a decade.

For the wife, the unravelling began when her husband started rating their intimate life after each encounter, providing “feedback” that compared her to other women. The man she thought she knew was revealing himself to be someone else entirely.

Within months of marriage, he was a different person than the one she had courted. As she discovered, he simply could not keep up with the excitement and variety that pornography had offered him for decades prior. She was not the multiple women he jumped between different days of the week. No matter how willing she was, the singularity of one woman could never compete with the titillating novelty of the multitudes he had accessed before.

Marriage cannot compete with this artificially inflated reward system. A real woman, with real needs, emotions, and limitations, cannot match the fantasy world a man has constructed in his mind through years of conditioning.

As the woman painfully learned, “Your wife isn’t a human being, she’s just one boring old account you follow with the same old content that you can’t just scroll past.” A spouse can never compete with the fantasy of the masses that exist in one’s mind.

For many of us raised in the current age, most of life happens on screens. Outside is almost foreign, even feels like it’s an unreal place sometimes. We consume sexualised content developed to warp expectations of what women should look like and how they should behave. So, we mentally grade every woman we encounter against an impossible standard.

Regular, healthy bodies become “flawed” when constantly compared to the most physically perfect specimens on the planet, often further enhanced by lighting, makeup, camera angles, and digital editing. Natural variations in bodies become “imperfections” to be criticized.

This creates a toxic cycle where the consumer of such content becomes increasingly dissatisfied with real women while simultaneously becoming less appealing as a partner themselves. Their perception is skewed, but they believe it’s everyone else who fails to measure up. Why doesn’t she look like that? Probably because most people don’t actually look like that, it’s the editing, filtering, a nip here, a tuck there that makes them look that way. I’m not discounting that natural beauty exists in the world — it absolutely does — but the Barbie-like proportions, that “Frozen” perfect look, the complete hip, perfect shoulders, and flawless blond back? Oh, please, be realistic. No one actually looks like that without serious digital manipulation or surgical intervention.

A lot of people enter marriage believing their past behaviours won’t affect their future commitment. They’re wrong. Their brains have been rewired against monogamy. When the honeymoon period ends, when real life sets in, and when stress accumulates, they find themselves unable to remain satisfied with their wife alone.

The urges return stronger than ever. The mind wanders. The eyes roam. The browser opens to familiar sites. Messages are sent to other women. Boundaries are crossed that were never meant to be crossed.

For the woman who shared her story, her husband’s addiction led him to create fetish videos with non-Muslim women who resembled the ethnicities he enjoyed watching in pornography. When rejected by women, he would lash out by seeking one-night stands on Tinder and paying for sex.

This isn’t justification for infidelity. It’s recognition of cause and effect. Actions have consequences. Habits form neural pathways. Choices made before marriage directly impact choices available within marriage.

For those on the receiving end of this betrayal, the damage is profound. Women enter marriage with their eyes wide open, hoping to build a life with someone who values them. Instead, they discover they cannot compete with pixels on a screen.

This devastates a woman’s self-perception of her attractiveness, her sexual desire, and her worth as a wife. She is written off as an “expendable card” compared to the endless variety available online.

Being divorced after such an experience carries additional trauma. The knowledge of how rampant pornography is makes it difficult to trust again. As the woman noted, she now knows multiple marriages where men entered, thinking, “Now that I have a wife, the porn and external validation will be easy to drop.” But it becomes harder precisely because the senses are used to cheap hits always available at their fingertips. What you do now sets up what you’ll deal with later.

Of course, there is another side to this story. Some men make different choices. The men who walk the harder path enter marriage with clarity. They don’t battle years of regret or work overtime to unlearn bad habits. They’re able to give their wives something increasingly rare — their full presence.

When things get tough, they don’t immediately look for an escape. They’ve trained themselves differently. They’ve protected their capacity for commitment and satisfaction in reality.

According to some Islamic scholars, a man’s portion of “lazzat” (pleasure) in this world is limited. If he exhausts it before marriage, his married life becomes troubled. This isn’t just spiritual wisdom; it’s psychological truth. The habits formed before marriage shape the future. Your choices today hit your marriage tomorrow. You have to train your brain to find good in what’s real, not just what flashes by.

The solution isn’t easy. It requires recognizing the problem before marriage. It demands deliberate rewiring of the brain.

For young men in their early 20s entering university or the working world, the temptations are everywhere. People are dating, flirting, consuming things they shouldn’t, numbing themselves with cheap dopamine hits. The world doesn’t make it easier. Everyone says it’s fine to live it up before you settle down — date around, watch what you want, get it out of your system. But that’s a setup. The more you dive in, the harder it is to climb out. Your brain gets hooked on the rush, and real life starts feeling dull next to it.

The truth is, the path to marital fidelity starts long before the wedding day. It begins with recognizing and understanding that sexual behaviour is not consequence-free. It continues with deliberate choices to protect future relationships by making difficult sacrifices in the present.

The peace gained, the confidence carried into marriage, the stability brought to a future family — these are worth every battle fought now. But it requires making tough choices that may make one feel like an outsider in their own generation.

The cold, hard truth remains: the habits formed before marriage will shape the reality within marriage. The neural pathways established through years of behaviour will determine what feels natural and what feels like torture when committed to one person.

Marriage doesn’t change men. It reveals who they’ve trained themselves to become.