BCC Staff Note: You’re reading Part 7 of a BCC Grace & Truth blog series on marriage. Read Part 1: Counseling the Marriage Stuck in Neutral, Part 2: Vows, Promises, and the Problem of Love, Part 3: Winning Without a Word, Part 4: Counseling the Un-submissive Husband, and Part 5: Debt Is a Lot Like Porn, and Part 6: How to Confess the Sin of Pornography to Your Wife, Part 1.
BCC Staff Note: In How to Confess the Sin of Pornography to Your Wife, Part 1, Pastor Pierre shared four principles of confessing sin. Now in Part 2, he shares how to care for your wife as she grieves over what she has just learned.
Care
At this point, having confessed his sin of pornography, a husband should ask the wife to forgive him. She might respond in a few different ways:
- She may be unwilling to forgive at that point.
- She may be willing, but feel unable to honestly.
- She may be willing and able at that point, but then struggle with it later.
Regardless, don’t push too quickly for an answer. It would be easy for you to make the goal of the conversation to clear your conscience, but this goal must be secondary to caring well for the wife you’ve sinned against. But even in that, your goal should not be to resolve the existential crisis she’s experiencing, but to show your dedication to understanding it. In less fancy terms, you need to hurt with her. Don’t solve her problem.
Hurting with a hurting wife will likely involve having to respond to hard statements from her—conclusions she will naturally draw from the way you have sinned against her. Here are a handful of common responses that the husband should be prepared to answer with humility and wisdom.
“You don’t love me.”
A woman has a hard time believing a husband’s love in the face of this massive evidence to the contrary. Understand her logic: you claim to love her alone, yet you pursue sexual satisfaction in others. She understandably calls into question the entirety of your claim to love her.
She may lose sight of the distinction between the absence of love and an unloving act (or series of unloving acts). So, rather than shrink back at her accusations that you don’t love her, acknowledge that the desires of your heart and the behavior that came from them was indeed unloving, as all sin is (Romans 13:8-10). Agree that your sin was unloving, but don’t agree that you don’t love her. Your love for her will prove itself in time. Much like your love for God.
You see, the contest of loves is not primarily between her as a woman and the ladies on the screen. The primary contest of love is between the things of the world and God. In 1 John 2:15-17, the desires of the flesh and of the eyes are equated with loving the world. And whoever loves the world does not love the Father. You serve your wife in framing the sin theologically, by making the connection between the return of your heart to God and the return of your heart to her. There is a distinction between unloving behavior and a complete absence of genuine love.
A husband should repeat a thousand times that he loves her alone. Any desire for another woman is the product of sin, and he is learning to hate sin afresh as he loves God more.
“I wasn’t pretty enough to keep you satisfied.”
Many wives will immediately think about what her husband’s lust for other bodies indicates about her own. Their minds fall into a slough of self-consciousness, where they tumble about in feelings of inadequacy about their weight, their dated hairstyle, their inability to compete with the ultra done-up women on the screen. Busy moms will likely feel especially put off, since you made them that way.
The husband will serve his wife best by being very clear about one thing: the pornographic standard of beauty is a false standard, and it disgusts a man who is pursuing righteousness. Red lips, sultry expressions, and exaggerated curves are not life-giving. Assure her that what went wrong with your affections was, as we said earlier, loving the world and not God. You had not been cultivating affections for the purity of the marriage bed, but rather for strange women. Satisfaction with one’s wife is not the result of her sexiness, but a glorious outcome of seeking the wisdom of God (Proverb 5:1-23).
Moving forward, the husband should be certain to tell his wife frequently of how beautiful she is to him, even if she doesn’t buy it most of the time. A woman feels secure when she feels desired (Song of Solomon 7:10), and the way to make her feel desired is to pursue her. And such pursuit is the opposite of looking at porn—instead of seeking others, you are seeking her alone.
“I’ve lost all respect for you.”
Not many things can hurt a husband more than being made little in the eyes of his wife. In fact, the loss of respect is a major reason husbands shy away from being open about their porn problem in the first place. But sometimes part of humility is humiliation.
While this response from the wife carries with it some unrecognized self-righteousness (“Your sin is too terrible to allow me to respect you”), her poor response should not be your concern at this point because, in a sense, what she’s getting at is right: Sin is shameful. And a husband who is repenting in James 4 fashion (“be wretched and mourn and weep”, v. 9) will not fight to preserve his respect. This is the humility that will find the grace of God (v. 6) and, in the end, exalt the repentant husband (v. 10). The best response at this point is to acknowledge that sin is shameful and that only the cleansing power of Jesus Christ can bring about the righteous fruit that makes a man respectable.
Support
A wife in this situation usually feels very much alone. The thought of broaching the subject with someone else is intimidating to many wives; they may feel shamed by your sin or wish to protect your reputation. So they deal with it on their own.
For this reason, you serve your wife in preparing a relational safety net for the conversation, so that she is not the one who has to garner the courage to seek help. This safety net is ideally trusted, godly friends who will hurt with her, pray with her, and point her to Scripture. The safety net might include close female friends, a godly older couple, a pastor and his wife, or Christian family members. The husband does not necessarily have to let them in prior to the revelatory conversation with his wife, but he should make it clear to her that he wants to serve her in this way so that he can bear the intimidating task of seeking help for her.
Closing Thoughts
No one enjoys conversations like this. But God calls His followers through such furnaces of agony in order to reach the other side, refined and relieved. Christ Himself is dedicated to the work of redemption, and He is the only confidence a man has in approaching his wife with sin like this. What would it gain a man if he preserved his reputation or avoided conflict, but lost his soul? My prayer is that these guidelines might help a man who is currently hiding from his wife and thus languishing under sin’s power to find a way out. Jesus will stand by you.
Join the Conversation
What addition words of counsel would you give to a husband about how to care for his wife after he has confessed to her his sin of pornography
What questions do you have for Pastor Pierre about this process?
