St. Paul didn’t pull punches. When he wrote, “It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion” (1 Corinthians 7:9), he wasn’t sugarcoating anything. But does that mean marriage is the fix for struggles with porn and masturbation? Not at all.

When we talk about porn and sexual addiction, we tend to focus on the obvious: explicit content, physical cravings, and compulsive behaviors. But emotional intimacy—and the ways we handle it—plays a significant role in the cycle of addiction. To get to the root of this, we need to define a term that gets tossed around a lot in Christian circles: emotional unchastity.