Why Marriage isn’t a Complete Solution to Masturbation

This post will mostly focus on why marriage isn’t the complete solution to becoming filth free, BUT it can be a large and influential force in becoming filth free. I will write up a post that  includes mostly ideas about how thinking about marriage before you are married can help you become filth free. I write in the male heterosexual perspective, which is why I mostly use phrases like “your wife” – but feel free to interchange the word with husband if you are a female.

• Both can play a huge role in staying filth free,  depending on how you think about marriage. Eg: Do you only think of marriage in terms of having sex?

• If you are addicted to masturbation and porn, there is a 99% chance that you will be addicted to it 5 years after you are married
• Why? Because the sexual gratification of marriage is different than the sexual gratification of masturbation and porn
  • the entire idea of sexual intercourse  is about two people communicating in a very special way that is really a blessing from Allah SWT. It is about GIVING pleasure to your wife or husband out of love and affection. It is about caring about your wife’s pleasure more than your own, it is about sacrifice, it is about making sure she is comfortable the whole time, that she isn’t hurt or treated with out consideration, that she is treated with respect.
  • The entire idea of masturbation and porn goes against sexual intercourse because it is about TAKING, and SELF-SERVING. You just please yourself until you are satisfied and you move on, and that is why you feel so empty afterward, because there is someone else that is supposed to be there sharing the experience with you, who loves you and who you love.
  • Masturbation and porn teach you mental attitudes that completely oppose the mindset needed for a healthy marriage. Pornography is riddled with themes that reduce women to insatiable whores who worship men. It also is riddled with themes about power and authority, and it attempts to associate sex with power and authority and that should never be the case. Intercourse between husband and wife should be mutual, selfless, and harmonious. Pornography makes intercourse look savage, animalistic, selfish, and like a satanic ritual of  the worship of flesh, and this is where the power and authority association comes from.
    • So when you are so used to pleasing yourself, all you will want  is for your wife to please you, and you won’t even care about pleasing her. Your sexual life will be diminished and you will resort to porn and masturbation where you will please yourself as you always have done.
  • because the animalistic themes in pornography are not something that your spouse would feel comfortable with
  • because your spouse isn’t as unlimited in offering sexual gratification as pornography is
  • because your spouse will have a real human body, and the bodies and themes that are shown in pornography are exaggerated caricatures molded from plastic surgery and chemical enhancements, you will see your spouse as unattractive in comparison to the women in pornography
  • The reality is that Allah SWT has created our bodies, and if you find the artificial body of a whore more attractive than the natural one of your spouse created by Allah SWT – then you have deceived yourself by choosing filth over beauty. Moreover, there are perfectly good women out there who have no bad moral qualities and have never done any cosmetic surgeries or chemical treatments that may happen to be more physically beautiful than your wife. Just as there maybe some good and noble men that are more physically handsome than you are. However, what is important to note is that the best of judgments is the judgment of Allah SWT – and how just is He that he does not judge by the beauty of our bodies or our faces, but by the beauty of our hearts! He SWT judges us by our deeds and the purity of our hearts. So what right do we have to judge people, especially our (potential) wives by their appearance, when it is Allah SWT who created all of our figures and from the wisdom of our deen, we shouldn’t judge people for their appearance for which Allah SWT chose, and they had not chosen
  • you will forget that a relationship means much much more than sex
  • when your wife gets pregnant or older, you will undermine her, and betray her f0r what you think is more attractive in pornography
  • because when you are older and have kids, your life will be so busy that it will be hard to find time to have sex with your wife, and you will resort to porn instead because you didn’t give it up before your marriage

• In conclusion, leave masturbation and porn before you get married. That’s what I am trying to do, and that’s what I want to do. It’s not as if you can’t leave it when you are married, but if you aren’t married yet, be sure to become filth free before you marry someone. No spouse deserves the burden of having a partner addicted to filth.

Next post will be about how thinking about marriage CAN help you become filth free.

Interesting Experiment

• if you are addicted to masturbation, try planning ahead when you will masturbate in that day, and try to do it sooner than later. By planning when you masturbate you give yourself control of the situation, instead of just reacting to urges, you can plan and give yourself rules to follow.
• if you feel the slightest urge, run to the washroom, and start masturbating – yes I know I just said that
• except – don’t think about any sexual thoughts at all
• start counting the tiles in your washroom, start calculating what you think your marks are this year, think about car models, think about computer parts (if you are into technology), start counting all of the colours that are in your washroom including the clothes you are wearing, try to remember the first names of your old teachers, try to remember the names of your childhood cartoon characters
• all the while masturbate, masturbate without thinking any sexual thoughts
• what will happen —> it will be very hard to climax, very hard. In fact, I doubt that you will even be able to climax unless you give in and start thinking porn-like thoughts

Uses:

• if you keep masturbating while shutting your mind off to sexual thoughts, you will eventually get bored and tired and stop, or if you keep going for a long time (45 mins – 1 hour), you might climax
• Why is this good?
  • because it means you can relieve the physical side of sexual tension without having to think of sexual thoughts.
  • this isn’t a great solution, but it is a good crutch, a good intermediate and definitely better than watching porn or thinking porn-like thoughts while masturbating
  • the best benefit is the conclusion you come to when you follow through with the experiment

Conclusion? –> it is ALL in the mind. There is no real “addiction” to sexual gratification, there is an addiction to sexual thought. You aren’t addicted to masturbation, you are addicted to thinking about sexual imagery, and as a result you masturbate. Masturbation is a result not a cause. Sexual thought is the cause.

• If you are counting tiles – you’re body could be having sex, but your mind isn’t and you won’t be able to climax. That means sex is the act of the mind before it is an act of the body. If you control the mind, you control the body. Mind over matter, Mind over matter.
• So i think the key to being filth free lies in
  • a) preoccupying your mind by having an active lifestyle
  • b) changing how you feel about sexual imagery or pornography by linking pain to these thoughts

Things that I have learned over the past few months about Filth

1. Porn is extremely hard to leave
2. Porn is worse than masturbation
3. Porn is what causes masturbation 95% of the time
4. The more you consume porn, the larger your appetite becomes
5. This appetite grows by doing the following (I haven’t had any personal experience with some of these, but they are still extremely destructive):
   • live webcams, cartoon pornography, sex forums where people post up pictures of themselves,
   • sex stories –> which have a disturbing popularity for incest themes, rape, torture, and cheating,
   • going to strip clubs, hiring prostitutes,
   • completely leaving the idea of a possible marriage to having sex with multiple people by looking for girlfriends, etc.
6. Exposure to the above completely changes the way you think about the opposite sex, especially women, and is the beginning of creating a mental complex that is deadly, not to mention it destroys your self-respect
7. The more you do it, the less guilty you feel
8. After watching porn, and feeling guilty, I sometimes make ghusl (take a shower) and pray –> while I am praying images of pornography flash in my mind, and it is horrible
9. The only way to leave pornography is cold turkey – leaving it ALL at once, and never looking back –> why?
   • A pornographic image has an incredible ability to arouse emotions and these emotions feel good at the time
   • Those feelings are difficult to remove from your mind, and even if you stop watching porn for a few days, that image will stay in your mind, and your imagination will drift into porn-like thoughts
   • Those porn-like thoughts will eventually bring you back to watching more porn which will restart the whole process. So if you are watching 2 hours of pornography everyday, and you think that it will help if you reduce that time to 1 hour a day – it makes NO difference, because seeing a single image for a fraction of a second will arouse emotions that will be engraved into your mind, bringing you back to watch more porn unless you completely preoccupy yourself with something positive that has the same arousal (and there aren’t many things that can do that)
10. When you are searching for porn, you completely lose track of time, you can search porn for 8 hours at once, literally, without truly realizing it
11. If you are addicted to pornography and masturbation, pornography is MUCH WORSE and you should focus all of your efforts on ridding yourself of pornography. Why? Pornography arouses abnormal amounts of sexual thought – masturbation relieves some sexual tension, and although it does arouse some sexual thought it is not as invasive to your mind as is pornography –> however masturbation will still send you to hell,
12. If you watch episodes of your favorite shows, it is inevitable to see a woman without hijab. In reality, TV in general should be haram when you think about it, because we are supposed to lower our gaze even while women have their hijab on, so if we are watching TV, we are directly opposing the idea of lowering the gaze because you are looking wide-eyed at women who are exposing themselves to levels way beyond what the hijab envelops.
    • Watching TV, and TV episodes leads you to think about sexual thoughts because many of today’s shows have sexual themes, not to mention sexual advertising
    • If watching episodes online, it is very easy to open a new browser window and start looking at porn – the thought of which being inspired from the show

Changes

I’ve been extremely inconsistent with this blog, I haven’t posted in months, and I don’t update “Fallen Seeker’s Record”.

It isn’t surprising that the same inconsistency lies in my success at being “filth-free” of pornography and masturbation.

I think I’m going to leave Fallen Seeker’s Record until I get some consistency in my life. Pornography and masturbation have carved out such a great amount of time in my schedule that when I try to not masturbate or watch porn, I feel bored because I have little else to do, which eventually gets me to start thinking about porn again. If I focus on positive aspects of my life that would fill up that hole in my schedule, I can preoccupy myself and deal with my urges less.

My priorities include:

1) Deen Development –> praying 5 times a day with khushoo, praying in Jamma’ in the masjid, going to weekly halaqas, going to seminars, being involved in the muslim student association in my university, etc.

2) University –> focusing on keeping a high grade point average, preparing myself for exams, completing assignments, extra curricular activities, being a part of student clubs that suit my interests, going to little club events like a talk by some political scientist.

3) Goal tracking –> I need to be actively improving the above two areas in my life by making a daily record of my activities, my downfalls, my victories, and lessons that I learn. If I keep this consistent, I have a much better chance at success.

Until I fix myself up somewhat in the above 3 goals, there’s no way I can successfully kill the monster of pornography and masturbation that is consuming my life. Only when I get stronger in my deen, the positive aspects of my dunya, and my goal making/tracking abilities will I ever have a chance of staying filth free.

What I will do in the mean time is make little posts about thoughts I have about pornography and masturbation, and share useful links. This will keep my mind on my agenda of being filth free, and will be of great benefit to you the reader.

My next post is entitled: Things that I’ve learned over the past few months about filth.