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Married couples need to have some fun together! And one of the best ways to do that is to find hobbies for couples.

We’ve had some heavy topics at To Love, Honor and Vacuum lately, and so I thought it was time to revisit one of my favorite posts ever and run it again, with some fun changes, so it could be higher up in the queue!

Let’s emotionally connect and have fun together again! No matter where you are in your marriage, you need some hobbies! A hobby is simply an activity or pursuit that you do together. And during COVID, we all could use some new ideas, too.

Hobbies can bring couples close because of two communication principles:

We all need shared activities, because that builds shared memories. You feel more like a team. You start chatting again (and the more you talk about little things, the easier it is to talk about big things!). And you laugh. Whenever you laugh together, walls come down. Tension dissipates. And you feel close. Often those petty things that bug you about each other seem to disappear!

Besides, it’s just plain fun to share hobbies as couples.

It’s fun to spend time away from a screen. It’s fun to build a memory or be productive or experience something new. And it’s fun to learn together! Here’s the neat thing about pursuing hobbies for couples, too: you don’t each have to love it to the same extent. The goal is not the hobby itself. The goal is spending time together and having those opportunities to laugh and chat. My husband and I go birdwatching. I enjoy it. It gets me outdoors; we get some exercise hiking; I learn more about photography.

But Keith will trek 2 miles through brush to sit still at dawn in the hopes that he might see a king rail (it’s a bird!). He will stand still at the base of a tree for 10 minutes to verify whether that was a white throated sparrow or a white crowned sparrow. He is WAY more into it than I am. But we still go birdwatching together, because I’m in it for the memories, not just for the birds. And when he wants to do something intense with counting birds, he goes without me.

I’m going to share a whole bunch of ideas for hobbies you can pursue together. Take this post as more of a brainstorming session. Maybe something I’ll mention will twig something in your brain and you’ll find an entirely different hobby to share with your husband! But what I’d recommend is this:

Finding a Hobbies for Couples

A Comprehensive List of Hobbies for Couples

Outdoorsy Hobbies for Couples

My son-in-law David is really into foraging, especially mushrooms, and i want to join him in that this spring because I just love the idea of eating off the land as much as possible. Plus apparently some of the mushrooms taste really good! (and, yes, he knows how to tell the difference with the poisonous ones). We bought him a dehydrator for Christmas, too, so he can preserve some of them.

Domestic Hobbies for Couples to do Together

I’m already planning out my garden for the spring! I love growing herbs, and I dried and preserved so many last year, and made a ton of pesto.

Even if you’re in an apartment, you can make a balcony garden! But I love this garden tower for a house, too, because creating raised beds can be a hassle, and this I can put right on my deck and see it as I have my tea in the morning and it just makes me happy. Creating pestos and teas and salsas and hot sauces out of your produce can be another hobby you can do together.

And, seriously, it’s amazing how much you can grow in one of these garden towers!

And planning the garden can be so much fun as well. The yield on these towers can be incredible. Do you want to do herbs? Salad greens so you have fresh greens every night? Tomatoes or peppers? I’m planning on a variety of hot peppers myself!

Sporty Indoor Hobbies for Couples

Keith and I take ballroom dancing classes online, even during COVID! Before the last cruise we took, we learned the chacha really well, along with reviewing the foxtrot and the swing. And it’s just fun to do for 15 minutes a night. Each video is only 3-5 minutes long, and they teach you one thing at a time. We really enjoy it!

And Connor just went rock climbing again this weekend for the first time in, well, forever! The COVID lockdown is over here, and a new rock climbing gym opened in our hometown right before COVID hit. He’s determined to use it enough to keep it open! When Rebecca and he were first married, they loved rock climbing together (and they will again!).

Rebecca and Connor at the rock climbing gym!

Events to Attend Together

These may be all closed for the foreseeable future, but when they reopen, consider season’s tickets for something. It gets you deliberate date outings, and it supports something in your community.

Games Hobbies for Couples

We’ve also got a board game cafe in our hometown, which are getting increasingly popular. Go out to play a board game (or stay in), and you can try new ones and figure out which ones you like!

Educational Hobbies for Couples

Income Producing Hobbies as a Couple

The side effects of porn addiction are devastating.

Pornography is ravaging marriages. In our culture porn is treated as if it’s harmless, but it’s not. Porn will wreck the arousal process in your brain and end up wrecking your sex life in marriage.

I receive emails everyday from women who are desperate to fix their marriages, but they don’t know what to do. They married men who never seem to want sex. Or their husbands are never satisfied. Or their husbands call them boring or unattractive. And the root of many of these problems is porn.

Here’s the really devastating part: Because so much of what porn does to you happens chemically in the brain, the porn use doesn’t have to be going on NOW to have these effects. A boy who grew up on porn in his teens, and then managed to stop watching it in his twenties (with occasional relapses) will still suffer from many of these things.

The good news: There is healing! You can rebuild those chemical pathways to arousal. But first we have to understand 10 ways that porn affects the brain, and thus wrecks many couples’ sex lives.

Because I get so many questions about this, and because we’re all stuck inside for the foreseeable future and porn use apparently is on the rise, I thought I would dedicate the month of April to a series on pornography. So let’s start with this one, that I actually ran a few years ago, but I thought I’d update to launch our series:

The Top 10 Negative Side Effects of Porn on Your Sex Life

And remember–women use porn, too! While some of these apply just to men, many of them apply to both genders.

1. Porn Addiction Means You Can’t Get Aroused by “Just” Your Spouse

Do you remember reading about Pavlov and his dog in Psychology? Pavlov would give the dog a nice juicy steak, but right before he did he would ring a bell. He conditioned the dog to associate ringing the bell with getting great food. Eventually Pavlov took the food away, but kept ringing the bell. The dog kept salivating at the bell, even though there was no steak, because the dog associated the bell with the food.

The same thing happens when we see porn. Porn stimulates the arousal centers in the brain. When it’s accompanied by orgasm (sexual release through masturbation), then a chemical reaction happens and hormones are released. In effect, our brains start to associate arousal with an image, an idea, or a video, rather than a person.

When you don’t watch porn and keep sex in a committed relationship, then all of those chemicals and hormones are released for the first time when you’re with your spouse, and it causes you to bond intensely (and sexually) to your spouse. But when you spend a ton of time teaching your brain to associate arousal and release with pornography, your brain doesn’t associate arousal and release with a person anymore.

Either you have to fantasize about the porn, and get those images in your brain, or you have to watch porn first. Often people can “complete the act”, but it’s not intense for them the way porn is. You’ve rewired your brain, and now you’re salivating at the wrong thing.

2. Porn Wrecks Your Libido

It’s only natural, then, that many people who use porn in the past, or who use porn in the present, have virtually no libido when it comes to making love to their spouse. The spouse is not what turns them on, and so the natural drive that we have for sex is transferred somewhere else. I get so many emails from young women in their twenties who say, “my husband and I were both virgins when we married, and I thought he’d want sex all the time. But after our honeymoon sex went to maybe twice a month, and that’s only if I pressure him. He says he just isn’t interested.” With so many men growing up on porn, this is just to be expected.

So much of what porn does to you happens chemically in the brain, the porn use doesn’t have to be going on NOW to have these effects.

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3. Porn Addiction Makes You Sexually Lazy

In porn, everyone is turned on all the time. You don’t have to make any effort to arouse someone; it’s automatic. There is no foreplay in porn. And so if your spouse isn’t aroused  you start to think that it’s somehow their fault. There’s no expectation that we will have to “woo” someone or be affectionate and help jumpstart that arousal process. It’s almost as if we approach sex as two different beings and we’re just using each other, rather than thinking of each other. And thus we never learn how to please the other or become a good lover because we’re always thinking that the other is somehow “frigid”. Pornography teaches you that sex is about getting my needs met; it isn’t about meeting someone else’s needs or experiencing something wonderful together.

4. Porn Addiction Turns “Making Love” into a Foreign Concept

Those arousal centers and pleasure centers in our brain are supposed to associate sex with physical pleasure and a real sense of intimacy. But the intimacy doesn’t happen with porn, and so the pleasure is all that registers. Thus, porn makes sex all about the body, and not about intimacy. In fact, the idea of being intimate isn’t even sexy anymore; anonymous is what’s sexy. We may call “having sex” “making love”, but in reality they aren’t necessarily the same thing. Someone who has used porn extensively often has a difficult time experiencing any intimacy during sex, because those arousal and pleasure centers zero in only on the body. And that’s another negative effect of porn: porn users often need to objectify or degrade their partner in order to achieve pleasure, the exact opposite of intimacy.

God made sex to actually unite us and draw us together; He even gave us a bonding hormone that’s released at orgasm so that we’d feel closer! But if that hormone is released when no one is present, it stops having its effects. Sex no longer bonds you together.

5. Porn Makes Regular Intercourse Seem Boring

An alcoholic drinks alcohol for the “buzz”. But after a while your body begins to tolerate it. To get the same buzz, you need more alcohol. And so the alcoholic begins to drink harder liquor, or drink larger quantities.

The same thing happens with porn. Because porn teaches us that sex is all about the body, and not about intimacy, then the only way to get a greater “high” or that same buzz is to watch weirder and weirder porn. I think most of us would be horrified if we saw what most porn today really is. It isn’t just pictures of naked women like there used to be in Playboy; much of it is very violent, extremely degrading, and very ugly.

“Regular” intercourse is actually not depicted that often in porn, and so quite frequently the person who watches porn starts to get a warped view of what sex really is. And often they start to want weirder and weirder things.

Now, I’m not against spicing things up, and I do think lots of things can be fun! But when we’re wanting “more” because we’ve programmed ourselves to think “the weirder the sexier”, there’s a problem.

​6. Porn Addiction Makes it Hard to Be Tender When You Have Sex

It’s no wonder, then, that people who use porn often  have a hard time being tender when they have sex. Sex tends to be impersonal, rushed, and “forced”. I’m absolutely not saying that all porn users rape their wives, but porn itself is often violent. There’s no foreplay. There’s no waiting to arouse someone. It’s just taking what you want.

Being tender means to be loving. It’s to give and to express affection. Because these things aren’t paired with sex in the porn users brain, tenderness and sex no longer go together.

7. Porn Addiction Trains You to Have Immediate Gratification and Have a Difficult Time Lasting Long

With porn, when you’re aroused you reach orgasm very quickly, because porn users tend to masturbate at the same time. Thus, orgasm tends to be very fast. The porn user hasn’t trained his body to draw out sex so that his spouse can get pleasure; his body is programmed to orgasm quickly. Many porn users, then, suffer from premature ejaculation.

Some porn users go to the other extreme when they start suffering from erectile dysfunction. They have a difficult time remaining “hard” enough during sex because the stimulation isn’t enough. In their case, orgasm can take an eternity, if it’s possible at all.

While both seem like polar opposites, the simple fact is that sexual dysfunction of some sort is one of the big negative effects of pornography.

God made sex to actually unite us and draw us together.

8. Porn Gives You a Warped View of what Attractive Is

Sex is supposed to bond you physically, emotionally and spiritually with your spouse. But if porn addiction has made the chemical pathways in your brain go haywire, then sex becomes only about the body. And porn shows you that only certain body types are attractive. It’s not about the whole person; it’s just a certain type of person.

If a woman gains even ten pounds, then, she’s no longer attractive, and the porn user has an honest to goodness difficult time getting aroused, because he associates only a certain body type with arousal. Porn has taught your brain that sex is only about the body, and not about the relationship, so if someone’s body isn’t exactly right, no arousal happens.

9. Porn Addiction Makes Sex Seem Like Too Much Work

All of this combines to often make sex with your spouse too much work. You’re not aroused; you find your spouse not attractive; sex is blah; and sex requires you to make an effort for your spouse, while you’re used to immediate gratification.

Thus, many people who use porn retreat into a life of masturbation. Even if the porn use stops, they often find it easier to “relieve” themselves in the shower than to have to work at sex.

10. Porn Addiction Causes Selfishness

All of this causes a spiral of selfishness where the person ignores his spouse’s needs and is focused only on getting what he wants, and getting it instantly. Often this manifests itself in other areas of the relationship as well, where the spouse becomes annoyed if they have to wait for something, or if they don’t get what they want. Porn has sold them the message: you deserve pleasure when you want it. You shouldn’t have to work to get what you want. Your needs are paramount.

It’s no wonder that shows up in other areas of your relationship.

Sex is supposed to bond you physically, emotionally and spiritually with your spouse.

People who think that porn addiction is harmless and simply helps people “get in the mood”, or “relieves frustration”, are kidding themselves. The chemical processes in our brains are really complicated, and when you start messing with them, it’s really difficult to develop a healthy sexuality again.

However, it absolutely can be done! Later this year I’ll be working on an ebook about it, but for now, these posts may help:

• Marriage Recovery after a Pornography Addiction
• Rewiring Your Brain After a Porn Addiction

Also, let’s remember: too often we tell teenagers not to use porn because it’s a sin, and they’re not supposed to lust. I think we need to start telling them these ten things. If you want amazing sex when you’re older, don’t use porn now. If you do, you’re setting yourself up for a world of hurt. Ask teenagers, “who wants amazing sex when you’re married?”, and pretty much everyone will put up their hand. Then tell them: Use porn now, and you’ll make that far less possible, without a major work of God in your life. Tell them the truth.

And make sure that in your house everyone–girls, boys, women, and men–are protected from temptation. I’m a big supporter of Covenant Eyes. No, we can’t rely on it alone, and yes, we need a work in the heart. But if we need to reduce the temptation so that God has time to work, I think that’s worth doing. Covenant Eyes sends emails to people of your choice to tell you when someone has accessed an inappropriate site. If kids know their parents will get an email if they try to find porn, or if men and women know their accountability partners will get emails, they’ll be less likely to surf inappropriate stuff.

Show Grace

One last word–if your spouse is actively fighting a porn addiction, and doing all the right things–getting accountability; embracing truth; being transparent–then please show grace to those who have been ravaged by porn. Especially if the associations in the brain happened when they were young, these people often want to change the most, but it seems really helpless. Rather than pointing the finger in blame, join together to fight the problem together! If your spouse refuses to address the problem, though, then please read this on 4 things you must do if your husband uses porn.

Porn is serious. It wrecks people’s sex lives, it makes people selfish, and it ultimately wrecks marriages. Let’s spread the word, and fight against it!

What do you think? Has porn impacted your marriage? What have been the effects of porn for you? Let’s talk in the comments!