Married women who starts watching porn are more likely to want a divorce than men according to a new research.
The study will be presented at the 111th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) which analysed nationally date collected from thousands of American adults.
The date was collected as part of the General Social Survey with adults interviewed three times every two years from 2006 to 2010, 2008 to 2012, or 2010 to 2014.
Participants were interviewed three times every two years in each wave. Surveys from a total of 6,067 individuals were captured in the first wave, with 4,668 of these participants re-interviewed in the second wave, and 3,875 interviewed again in the third wave.
Around 44% of participants were men and around 56% were women.
Beginning pornography use between survey waves nearly doubled one’s likelihood of being divorced by the next survey period, from 6% to 11%, and nearly tripled it for women, from 6% to 16%.
The study also found that the risk of divorce was greater in younger adults (the younger the participant ; he or she began watching pornography), the higher his or her probability of getting divorced by the next wave of interviews.
Those in a happy marriage, newly married or from a non-religious home were also more likely to separate if they begin watching smutty films or images.
The report also said that they were ”very happy” with with their marriage in the first survey wave were also more likely to get divorced by the time of the next wave, if they began watching pornography.
Apparently, pornography use use didn’t have the same effect on those who reported a lower level of marital happiness, with Samuel Perry, lead author of the study, commenting that pornography use “doesn’t seem to make an unhappy marriage any worse than it already is.”
The study found that stopping pornography use lowered the risk of divorce, at least for women but not for men, with the researchers explaining that as men are often more consistent in their pornography use, the smaller sample size of those who had begun to use pornography may have been too small to observe a possible connection.