Before You End Your Marriage Over Porn

The issue of spouses watching pornography is one that can tear a marriage apart. For some couples pornography is okay, while for other couples, the use of pornography is a deal breaker.
The Pornography Issue
When a wife discovers that her husband apparently prefers viewing pornography over having sex with her, she often has feelings of rage, repulsion, hurt, and mistrust.

While many wives consider pornography to be insulting, degrading, and a form of cheating, there are husbands who don't understand their wives' anger about the use of pornography and don't see themselves as being unfaithful.

"But the attention paid to the connection between porn and infidelity doesn’t translate into anything like a consensus on what that connection is. Polls show that Americans are almost evenly divided on questions like whether porn is bad for relationships, whether it’s an inevitable feature of male existence, and whether it’s demeaning to women. This divide tends to cut along gender lines, inevitably: women are more likely to look at pornography than in the past, but they remain considerably more hostile to porn than men are, and considerably less likely to make use of it. (Even among the Internet generation, the split between the sexes remains stark. A survey of American college students last year found that 70 percent of the women in the sample never looked at pornography, compared with just 14 percent of their male peers; almost half of the men surveyed looked at porn at least once a week, versus just 3 percent of the women.)"
Source: Ross Douthat. "Is Pornography Adultery?" TheAtlantic.com. 10/2008.

"This is a very common question and concern. Let’s start by dispelling a major porn myth; there is absolutely nothing “unhealthy” or abnormal with watching porn in and of itself. As long as we’re talking about legal adult movies, and as long as everyone who is watching is consenting, there is nothing inherent in pornography that makes it bad. That doesn’t mean that people do use porn in unhealthy ways, watching too much of it or becoming obsessive about it. But people do this with drugs, work, even sports, and we don’t consider those things “evil” (well, some of us do I guess). ... The first thing I want to suggest is that you talk to him about it. Without being judgmental, it would be interesting to know what he likes about porn. Is it the fantasy? Are there things he sees that he wants the two of you to try? Is it boredom or habit?
Source: Cory Silverberg. "Is Watching Porn Okay?"

Additional Reading:
Can Pornography Undermine Your Marriage?
What is Pornography?
Pornography is difficult to define because it is different things to different people and not all porn is illegal.

Pornography is generally defined as material (magazines, pictures, videos, movies, internet web sites, etc.) that depicts individuals in sexually explicit ways. Although porn is also described as adult entertainment and a harmless habit, it is also described as a gateway drug that can lead to betrayal and infidelity.