People More Likely to Divorce After They Start Watching Porn

Especially if they’re women

As film genres go, pornography is the most divisive; few art forms elicit such ardently different feelings from critics and fans. Now a new study suggests that pornography may actually physically divide people too, namely those who are married.

Married people who start watching porn are twice as likely to be divorced in the the following years as those who don’t. And women who start watching porn are three times as likely to split, according to a working paper presented at the American Sociological Association on Aug. 22. However, porn appears to have a less negative impact on marriage if couples watch it together.

The paper also finds that stopping porn-watching lowers the likelihood of divorce for women, though not for men.

While porn’s effects on relationships has been much discussed in academic literature, and even this magazine, this is the first study—if its findings hold up under peer review—that traces the effect on marital stability.

The authors used longitudinal data from the General Social Survey, which tracks, among other things, marital happiness, porn-consumption and marital status. It analyzed results from more than 2000 participants over three time periods, focusing in on participants whose porn-watching habits altered during that period. That is, the individuals did not watch pornography when first interviewed but had taken it up by the time of their second interview, or they did watch during their first interview but had given it up by the second.

The analysis found that 11% of people who started to watch porn between the first two time periods were divorced by the second time they were interviewed. This compares to 6% of people whose porn watching habits were unchanged, but who were like the new porn-fans in every other way. Among women who started watching porn solo, the proportion who divorced was 16%, or almost three times as much.

Conversely, female porn watchers who gave up the genre were only about as third as likely to be divorced as those who kept up the habit. Male abstainers’ chances of getting unhitched were not that different from guys who kept up the habit, although the authors caution that so few men give up porn that the sample size is too small to be reliable.

The findings also suggest that porn’s effect on marriage appears to be strongest among younger, less religious people who initially report higher levels marital happiness.

Could it be that people started watching porn because their marriages were already unhappy? “We don’t think it’s the relationship quality leading to the porn use and divorce,” says says lead author Samuel Perry, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma, because this is data taken over time and not just a snapshot. “We are pretty confident about establishing the directional effects.”

Read More: People More Likely to Divorce After They Start Watching Porn, Says Study