couples and cybersex: dealmaker or breaker?
I read an interesting article recently in The Guardian by the excellent Mariella Frostrup on whether a reader’s boyfriend, who was having “Skype sex” with another person was, in fact, cheating. Frostrup said yes, and as a couple therapist who normally likes to remain neutral in these matters I’m inclined to agree with her.
The issues come down to a kind of agreement or understanding between couples as to what’s in our out of the relationship. There’s actually three domains to this: what’s in, what’s out and what’s iffy. The iffy bit we can normally negotiate or attempt to clarify, what’s out is out, as sure as the shutters have gone down, and may represent something very real and true about either partner’s morals, ethics, beliefs, faiths or orientations.
The problem is that the kind of agreement that most couples have at the beginning of the relationship is often an unconscious one, or at least one filled with unspoken assumptions about each other-it might appear logical and reasonable to assume that my partner would never use pornography, for example, because my ethical stance is against porn, so I’d be aghast if I discovered my partner using it. Of course, it’s not really practical to go through every little ethical rule or the minutiae of rules and boundaries, but when we discover that our partners have crossed from in or iffy to out, we really need a frank talk about this to them, and perhaps with ourselves.
But there is something else here, and it’s something which goes beyond the relativity of who’s right and wrong about cheating, pornography, affairs (one person’s affair might be another’s simple understanding; cultures have different ways of managing a third in relationship).
When a third enters a couple relationship as a person, whether this affair is an emotional or sexual affair, it’s managed in mostly real time with real people, when it’s a cyberaffair this is quite a different phenomenon. This third caries a more powerful algorithmic charge to it which turns it from a habit to something akin to an addiction.
It’s still an affair or cheating, (the human brain in its old, reptilian brain reactivity, can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy) yet contemporary research shows that pornography for eanple carries this kind of supercharge which may be more likely to hurt couple relationships.
Deirdre Barrett in Supernormal Stimuli describes this kind of activity as an impulse that causes normal human stimuli to wane. Internet pornography may be a supernormal stimulus. With cybersex and pornography use the experience might be habituated into this sugar rush; as such it has that constant craving-but-never-satiated aspect that other forms of addiction carry. The impact of this can be that normal sex becomes much less interesting for porn users. In fact, use of pornography by one partner can lead to the couple having far less sex, ultimately reducing relationship satisfaction and promoting disconnection.
There are other factors about cybersex and porn use that can rupture a relationship:
- intimacy for couples is a source of connection between two people. But when one person becomes habituated into engagement and release by porn-i.e. a third, they are actually turning away from the other.
- when viewing pornography, the user is in total control of the experience, in contrast to normal sexual relationships in which two people are in negotiation and are working towards satisfying each other. Thus, a porn user may form the unrealistic expectation that sex will be under only one person’s control or “it’s all about me”.
- the porn user may expect that their partner will always be immediately ready for intercourse. This is unrealistic as well.
- some porn users rationalise that pornography is ok if it does not involve partnered sexual acts and instead relies only on masturbation. While this may accomplish orgasm the relational goal of intimate connection is still muddled and may be ultimately lost.
Worse still, many porn sites include violence-physical and emotional- toward women. Viewing porn therefore could be seen as actually agreeing and colluding with this violence-or at least encouraging the commodification of womanhood.
It would seem that cybersex and pornography could pose a possibly severe threat to couple relationships; as such a serious and prolonged debate about this is long overdue.
See
Original article http://bit.ly/2iUM38l
the way the internet changes the brain http://bit.ly/2hHjk6I
