Given how accessible porn is nowadays, it has inevitably caused certain dislocations in contemporary courtships. I do urge fathers to bring the subject up when prospective suitors first seek their permission to court their daughter. A father may feel it is an awkward subject for him to bring up, but it is certainly not going to get less awkward later on, when more is at stake.
But suppose the father doesn’t ask, and let’s say a courtship is moving along nicely. At some point, the courtship gets to a tipping point — the place where things are serious enough to talk about sexual history. Depending on how serious it is, porn is part of that history. And depending on the circumstances, sexual history can and should be a deal-breaker in a prospective courtship. This means there should be a point where it gets addressed.
The issue is a delicate one. Even if the father is doing his job, he can only address part of the issue. It is fully appropriate for him to ask the suitor whether or not he has a bad porn habit. But it would not be appropriate for the suitor to answer those questions honestly, and then turn around and ask the father — turnabout is fair play! — whether or not his daughter has a problem with porn. If she did, her father would almost certainly not know about it, and he would feel fully justified in chasing the suitor down the front walk with a snow shovel.
But incidentally, this is not a ludicrous example. It is not a hypothetical situation. In the counseling that my wife and I do, we have had to deal with it more than once. The sexual history talk could quite possibly include a feminine porn problem. The percentages are obviously significantly less with women (given the nature of the case), but young women do possess the ingredients — computers, curiosity, and sinful hearts.
So the issue is not whether or not you are considering marriage to a sinner — hopefully, everybody already knew that. The issue is the present and future, not the past. A young man and woman should want to know the basic character issues; they want to know it will go. But isn’t a fairly reliable predictor of what is going to go on in the future a man’s past behavior? Perhaps. If a man is a selfish pig, that is not going to change simply because he got married one day.
But there is a reason why the “past as predictor of the future” is not as reliable when trying to understand your average porn temptations. In what follows, I am contextualizing this, but it should be noted that I am not rationalizing anything. Sin is sin, but sin x is not necessarily sin y. To say that theft is not murder is not to say that theft is okay.
I am a pastor in a college town. I have no idea how many Christian young men I have counseled and taught about their problems with pornography, but the number would have to be a high one. These young men can be divided into two broad categories. By far the largest category is made up of those men for whom marriage is the solution to their problem. God’s answer to sexual temptation turns out to be (surprise!) sex. I have not measured this precisely, but let us say this group is in the 90% range. They are not gifted with celibacy, obviously, and so the apostle Paul shoos them toward the altar, telling them in his typical Pauline fashion, to get the lead out (1 Cor. 7:9). In this sense (and only in this sense), a struggle with sexual temptation is actually a qualification for marriage, not a disqualification. It is a reason why a man should get married, not why he shouldn’t.
For a young man (who does not have the gift of celibacy) to resolve to sweat bullets for the next three years so that he will prove himself to be worthy of the matrimonial estate is wrong-headed. He will take the hand of the fair maiden when he has proven to himself that he doesn’t need a fair maiden. It is like the bank giving you a loan only after you turn in a bunch of documents proving that you don’t need a loan. It is like being banned from the showers until you are clean.
But here is the catch. There are some men for whom marriage does not help, and these men need counseling and biblical help. They need counseling for a deeper problem, something other than sexual temptation. They need help with their attitude toward women, their relationship with their parents, their down-to-the-bone laziness, or their own sense of pig-headed entitlement. Sex is only the symptom here.
I am leaving out of this equation another symptomatic manifestation of porn in marriage, which is the result of a couple drifting apart for other reasons. There the problem should be addressed by getting counsel on those other reasons. But that is a post for another time.
So what should a father (and/or his daughter) do when they are processing what to do with a suitor who has answered questions about past porn use honestly? What they should want to know is this: will this young man treat his wife right? They should want to know whether the suitor is in the larger category I have described, and not in the smaller category characterized by a much more serious problem. The mere presence of porn in the past does not answer this question. Some questions about the porn itself would be relevant (how demented it was, like child porn, whether it was daily use or intermittent stumbling, and so on), but the real questions to ask here would concern the rest of his life. I am referring to the warmth of his relationship with his parents and sisters, his work ethic, his reputation with others, his zeal for the things of God, and so on. In other words, a porn problem should be motivation for deeper probing in the standard areas for suitor-grilling, and not (once the questions above have been answered) deeper probing in the world of porn.
And of course, I realize that on a subject like this, I have probably generated more questions than I have answered. Maybe another day. But for those just joining us, some of them may have been addressed earlier.