Of them the proverbs are true: “A dog returns to its vomit,” and, “A sow that is washed returns to her wallowing in the mud.” (2 Peter 2:22)
Pornography and boredom go together.
One psychologist noted that most married couples spend only 1 hour with each other during the week. To be healthy they need to spend at least 8 hours a week with each other. What is more tragic is that they will spend at least 15 hours with the person they are having an affair with.
I suppose their time with pornography would be even more damning.
Many couples with 1 hour of time with each other co-exist. They are not engaged. They are not engaging. Any sense of excitement that was once in their engagement has been lost. There was once respect and mystery. Now there is neither. The Jewish word shalom means peace. It is active engagement with each other: sometimes in war, sometimes in love, but never indifference.
King Solomon is celebrated for his wealth, his wisdom, and his wives, but he really is a pretty pathetic person. Listen to his last will and testament:
1 The words of the Teacher,[a] son of David, king in Jerusalem:
2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
In some translations “meaningless” is translated as “vanity” which means that Solomon is in love with himself. He spends all of his time in front of his mother's vanity mirror asking of the mirror like the Queen of Love in the fairy tales:
"Mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all?"
He looks at the mirror to consider his own worth like a person who reads the Wall Street Journal who turns to where the market finished the day before. Another name for the goddess of Love is Juno Moneta where we get the word for "money". Cupid's mother is Cupidity or Greed or Venus or who Jesus calls "Mammon" or "Mammy."
Solomon's first wife is only know to us as "Pharaoh's daughter" (1 Kings 8:24) Solomon must have been attracted to her because of her personality! Not!
Song of Solomon is not the celebration of romantic poetry it is soft porn itself to stimulate himself. (Oh sure it is an allegory of the Church, right? And men read Playboy for the articles right?)
No wonder he is bored! Jesus had him in mind when he explained why it is so hard for a rich man to enter heaven. His head is too big. Opportunities to enter another person’s world are always small. In terms of marriage, arguments feel pointless because each person wants to be right instead of being right with each other. It seems as if there is almost a fear of novelty masked by boredom.
Listen more to Solomon:
What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
9 What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
What do people gain? There is nothing new under the sun?
Solomon is like Bill Murray in the movie Ground Hog Day. This character is bored, boring, and trapped in a life that goes nowhere except a return to his original mud and his own vomit. He is so predictably selfish that he does not get another day until he learns to be a Life Giving Spirit instead of a consuming soul, the Quick instead of the Dead.
Solomon’s question is “How can I be happy?” That road leads to Nirvana which in Sanskrit means “extinguished” where all passion is put out, all care becomes indifference. The religious objective of the addicted one is for all passion to be put out so one can never get hurt again.
In Job 3 Job thinks there might be peace in death like one's mother's womb. The dream of final equality of the slave and the master is found there in the morgue:
"Captives also enjoy their ease; they no longer hear the slave driver's shout. The small and the great are there, and the slave is freed from his master." (Job 3:18-19).
As you keep out the hurt, you also keep out the engagement.
The question Jesus teaches us to ask is “How can we have fellowship with each other?” Addiction becomes a substitute for real fellowship, real meeting, real astonishment, and real refreshing. Addiction is incest with mother, a longing for peace in darkness when one was in one's mother's womb.
Pornography is an addiction to avoid suffering and empathy. And it often is the only thing the couple has in common: avoidance of each other.
To break the cycle of avoidance consider David after he committed murdering Uriah and having adultery with Bathsheba before God:
"You (God) do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God you will not despise." (Psalm 51:16-17)
Pornography promises everything but takes everything instead. Give God your broken heart, your broken spirit, and He will open a fellowship first with God, then yourself, and finally your other half.
Engagement beats indiffernce.
One woman we worked with said she always thanked her husband for the big things, and waited and waited for the big things that never came.
It all begins with little things as small as a mustard seed, that grows to be a huge tree you would never imagine. A simple thanks, humoring your spouse, a start, a habit, a passion, and finally a new place to live: In Delight, In Eden.