Connor Beaton breaks down research on couples showing porn use itself doesn't wreck relationships, but hiding it does. Secrecy about pornography correlated with lower satisfaction, less intimacy, and emotional distance. When partners talked about it, the damage shrank.
The biggest relationship problem with porn isn't porn itself, it's the secrecy surrounding porn. And one of the most interesting studies followed couples, and every day couples recorded whether they watched porn or not, whether their partner knew or not. They rated and ranked their level of relationship satisfaction, and then they talked about their intimacy in these daily journals. And here's what the researchers found. Porn use itself on its own didn't automatically destroy the relationship, but the secret about porn use did. So it's the fact that it's not being talked about, it's being done in secret when the other person's not home. So when somebody used pornography without their significant other actually knowing, they reported lower relationship satisfaction, less intimacy, more distance emotionally, psychologically, and sexually, but when pornography use was communicated, the negative effects were much, much smaller.
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