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I am a woman who has been married for a month and a half. I found out that my husband looks at pornography, and I feel very bitter and sad, and my life has changed from happiness to misery. I love my husband, but I cannot accept this situation. I live abroad with him, and I was hoping that he would be an ideal husband for me. I do not deny that he treats me kindly, but I deteriorated psychologically after I found out about this matter. I am always crying and am always silent, which is completely out of character for me. I thought of going to a psychologist who could help me to solve my problem, but because I live in the West and I have no friends here, it is difficult for me to go without telling my husband, because I do not want him to know that I am seeking help from a specialist doctor. He also told me that he is a smoker, and I did not know that before I got married or even for a while after I got married. I have begun to think that he is not enjoying intimacy with me, or he is not happy with me. I hope that you can help me know how to deal with my husband. Does his looking at pictures and clips of the third sex, who look like women but have male genitalia, mean that he is homosexual?
Praise be to Allah.
Many young men in our ummah nowadays are facing addiction to pornography, because it is so easily available online. This type of addiction makes a person unable to be content with real-life, permissible intimacy with his wife, because he is addicted to a haraam virtual reality and because of his following his whims and desires.
The issue is not merely one of whether he feels happy with you and enjoys intimacy with you; rather it has to do with his addiction to viewing other women, especially as he did this in the first month of his marriage to you.
This addiction is a sickness which needs a remedy.
Some of the greatest and most effective remedies for addiction include: keeping away – voluntarily or otherwise – from the source of this addiction; keeping oneself busy with things that will benefit one in this world or the hereafter; and visiting a psychologist who can intervene with medicines and talk therapy, if necessary.
This requires effort on your part to help him give up this addiction, by trying to distract him from electronic devices that opened the door to that, and speaking to him about research that warns against addiction to these devices. You can also try to fill his time with beneficial matters, both worldly and religious, and help him to strive to obey Allah, the Lord of the Worlds.
If you find that he is reluctant and rejects these attempts, then you can suggest to him to go to a psychologist, to try to rid himself of his addiction to these devices and the symptoms of anxiety that result from that.
We advise you, as a matter of urgency, to consult a trustworthy and religiously committed female advisor, even if that is online, so that she can advise you in detail about how to handle different issues of life with him in general, and your marital relationship in particular.
Please note that it is not permissible to divulge details of your marital relationship and the like to any man other than your father, whether he is a psychologist or otherwise, because of what that may lead to of opening the door to temptation or haraam infatuation.
In brief, your aim here is to distract him with yourself from others, and make him content with that which is halaal so that he will not seek that which is haraam. Strive hard to achieve that and seek reward with Allah with regard to this important matter.
With regard to him looking at clips of the third sex – may Allah guide us and him – this is perverse behaviour, because he is enjoying looking at something that is perverse. But that does not necessarily mean that he is homosexual, because a homosexual man does not usually enjoy looking at female forms; rather it is the exact opposite.
We ask Allah to guide us and you, for He, may He be glorified, is indeed able to do that.
And Allah knows best.