4.9 • 7.1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2020
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Fr. Mike talks about how to navigate discussions with your partner about sexual sin—whether it’s pornography, masturbation, or other impurity.
It’s important to realize that sometimes a person doesn’t have a right to know everything about you immediately. Keeping this in mind, at what point does a couple have to be vulnerable about their sexual sins? After two months of dating, maybe six months? It’s quite possible—actually likely—that a person’s sexual sins are the most shameful part of his or her life, so when someone is not exposing those sins—no matter how long the couple has been together—it may just be that the person is not comfortable being that vulnerable with their partner yet.
A person has a right to be hurt and mad if their partner is not revealing their sexual sins, but he or she should also ask if they had a right to that knowledge.
Father Mike asserts that such knowledge doesn’t have to result in the end of the relationship. Once the sin has been revealed, it should stay revealed. Neither partner should just assume that it’s in the past and done with. It’s bound to come up again.
If you’re struggling with sexual sin, your partner needs to know you are doing everything you can to defeat the sin. He or she probably shouldn’t be your accountability partner, but should be informed. If your partner is the one struggling, you ought to help him or her defeat the sin in whatever way you can. Both of you should champion romantic love, since it is a strong combatant against sexual sin.
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0:00.0 | Your long-term boyfriend or long-term girlfriend or fiance or spouse, this is the kind of thing that they actually ought to know because it actually affects them. |
0:11.0 | How many of you have spoken to me? |
0:20.0 | How many of you have spoken to me? |
0:23.0 | Recently, I've gotten a number of emails or people contacting me, maybe even some in-person conversations with couples, basically. |
0:31.0 | And one of the questions that has come up, or when the issue has come up, I'll just give you a description. |
0:36.0 | Here's Jack and here's Jill. Jack and Jill have been dating for X amount of time. We'll say like a year or two years somewhere in there. |
0:42.0 | And when they first started dating, they said we really want to be honest with each other about a lot of things, about everything, right? |
0:48.0 | And so what about, what we'll say it delicately, or indelicately, I'm not sure we'll just say it, where are you at with pornography and masturbation? |
0:56.0 | Where are you at with impure images and impure actions along? |
1:00.0 | And they had that conversation and Jack or Jill says, oh, not a problem. That's not part of my life. |
1:08.0 | Then they'd keep dating for say a year, a year and a half. And then at one point, Jack or Jill says to the other person, okay, I have to confess something to you. |
1:18.0 | This is a part of my life. Now whether it's a small part of my life, an occasional part of my life, or like a bigger part of my life, that's up for debate. |
1:26.0 | But here is Jack or Jill, then here's this news. And it's like, wait a second, what do I do with this? Because there's two issues. |
1:32.0 | One is because you weren't honest with me originally. And I've been kind of entering into this relationship and growing with you, maybe under some false pretenses. What do you do with that? |
1:40.0 | The second thing is, what do we do now? Because this is a part of your life. I don't know how do I know that I can not just trust you to be honest with me, but trust you in this particular area. |
1:49.0 | So I see two issues right here, right? The two issues are, up to this point, have you been lying to me? Is that something I can get past? Does that kind of eat away, chips away at trust? |
1:59.0 | The other is, can I trust that you are growing? Can I trust that you are doing something about this and not bringing this into our relationship? |
2:06.0 | The difficulty comes from the fact that in our country, I think the average age of anybody, maybe boy or girl, doesn't matter. |
2:13.0 | That they see pornography is roughly seven years of age or eight years of age. It starts so young. And because pornography in our culture in our country has the three A's, it is available, it is affordable, typically free, and it's anonymous. |
2:27.0 | And so we have this problem, and that problem is that it's everywhere around us, every one of us has been affected by this. |
2:32.0 | It also has this other issue that is, it's a bit embarrassing, or that if your actions with oneself are particularly embarrassing or particularly shameful. |
2:42.0 | So now you have this conversation, you just started dating this person and like, okay, you've been dating for a month and you seem like a great person, and we're kind of, this is getting more and more serious. |
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