A group of researchers led by a University of Oklahoma sociology professor has established that married people who sit around viewing pornography by themselves are more likely to end up divorced.
The lead professor behind the study is Samuel Perry.
“I had been looking at marital quality,” Perry told The Oklahoma Daily, the OU campus newspaper. “That’s how I got interested in this topic. I was looking at what made marriages work.”
Perry and his colleagues presented their study, entitled “Till Porn Do Us Part? Longitudinal Effects of Pornography Use on Divorce,” this week at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting.
In a nutshell, the researchers used long-term, longitudinal data collected every two years — from 2006 to 2014 — to determine that married people who start consuming porn increase the chances they will get divorced.
For husbands who begin to view porn, the risk of divorce increases 6 to 11 percent.
For wives who start dabbling in porn, the risk of divorce increases 6 to 16 percent.
The collection of longitudinal data is a major advantage of the study, Perry said.
The professor and his colleagues “are able to say with more confidence that we think it’s actually pornography use that’s predicting marital dissolution,” he told The Oklahoma Daily.
Perry suggested that married couples who sit around watching porn together — as a couple, as a team — might not be at a higher risk for divorce.
“The negative effects of pornography use on a romantic relationship are typically for those couples where only one person is viewing pornography alone,” he told the student newspaper.
Also, actively religious couples in which one spouse begins some porn-watching binge are less likely to get divorced.
“Religion has a protective effect on marriage, even in the face of pornography use,” according to the Daily Mail.
And porn-viewing is less likely to ruin already-crappy marriages. Married couples who previously reported being “very happy” were more like to end up divorced because of pornography.
Up to one-third of all women spend time watching some kind of pornographic content at least once a week, according to the Mail.
A majority of women who cop to watching porn say they like to use their mobile phones to do their porn-watching.
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