Yeah. I think the issue for me is, I always feel like that if I wanted a marriage relationship, I could just get up, abandon my life, and go get one. I think there is a pursuit process that I will have to do, and that process will likely be harsh and take longer than I expected, but if I want something, I'm pretty confident that I can just go get it for myself. Thus I am confident that my singleness is voluntary and it's a proverbial jacket that I can ditch at any time if it proves to be an inconvenience.
But I don't know how to manufacture that self-confidence and give it to you - I wish that I could. I've never really blamed myself for not wanting to be married or the reasons why I felt that pursuing marriage was not a good idea for me in previous times. I also feel like, if I pursue marriage and fail, it's God's will for me and something that I'm willing to accept, and God knows best. In that case it would not be my fault, because I stood up and advocated for myself and what I wanted. God controls the results, not me.
So I guess I actually don't understand incels. Time to start over in my thought process. Whoops.
do you have any insights you would like to share to Christian incels who feel be tempted to, or actively looking at porn, subscribing to onlyfans, and how that would affect their souls?
The soul is not an area that I am qualified to address. If you're just watching these shows, you're just inhaling lies about how sex works, and that damages your ability to function in a real sexual relationship because you will expect it to be like the illusion on screen, rather than how a real relationship actually works.
But an incel may be thinking: why bother having correct thinking about this if I'm never going to do it again for real? I might as well give in. I'm screwed (or unscrewed lol). The issue is that the human brain is not programmed to believe lies, so by inviting lies and deceptions into your life, you're inviting mental health issues to just walk right in. And lies grow - believing lies about sexuality will leak into other areas of your life. Remember that marriage is a picture of the relationship between Christ and His Church, so believing lies about sex impairs your relationship with God. If you reject a true picture of the relationship between Christ and the Church, how can you accept the real thing? You're just playing with your mind and turning it against each itself, and your brain is not designed to handle contradictory information. You'll get more mental paralysis out of the deal.
(This is why I, a virgin, have put so much effort into researching sex - I wanted a better relationship with God. How could I understand the relationship between Christ and me if I didn't understand the picture he painted to show me what was like? The idea of hiding information about this doesn't seem to be the wise course. As it is written in Hosea, people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.)
The second negative effect is that it impairs your relationships with married people you might know. If you think that your friends' relationship is like that on a porn film, you won't be thinking too highly of them.
Obviously pair-bonding would not apply there.
This is incorrect. If you just watch the show, sure, but the real appeal of these shows is that people touch to them. This damages your body's ability to bond properly, because sex has to bond to something, so it will actually bond to the images on the screen. This will make it so your body only gets turned on by the image or something similar to it.
This also happens, of course, with serially promiscuous folks. Over time, the pair-bonding mechanism of sex learns that it cannot bond to the person, because the person changes, so it is will bond to something else: an object, an image, a pattern of events. Unbelievers, of course, simply assume that's how sex works, and make it a game to figure out how to trigger the other person's bonding mechanism by guessing or determining what it has bonded to.
The danger of having your sexuality bound to something else, whether a porn film or a pattern of events is that any person can arouse you without your consent - your sexuality is out of your control. This can lead to actual sex with someone you wouldn't have ever considered if you had never seen the show, outside of marriage. They got you. You become a victim.
And then, many porn films are violent, which means that you then get turned on by violent people and think that they are the best. You're crushing on them, which causes you to overlook their faults, and then you can end up in a 50 Shades of Grey style situation. It's similar to how parental abuse victims are attracted to abusers - the pair bonding mechanism is tuned by our parents - we want people like them to bond with. If you bring an abuser into your life via the screen, you'll get the same effect. And take it from me: you don't want that in your life. It took me years of hard work to recover from my parent's abuse, weathering the awful attractions, learning from them by applying Scripture to each situation in order to heal up. You don't want to have to deal with that if you don't have to.
The last important item, which might be helpful for your specific situation, is that the pair-bonding mechanism can recover itself. It can take a long time to do so, but it does, and it's my understanding that men have a much easier time of it than women. Also, the bonding mechanism is designed to bond to a person, so bonding to that is more satisfying. I know of a male unbeliever who slept with over 100 women and then decided to get married. His opinion: marriage is better. What happened? His bonding mechanism recovered inside that relationship. There are likely many other reasons why his married life is better, but yeah.
So what will likely happen is that you will feel attracted to women who are like your former wife in some way for awhile (unless the divorce was years ago, in which case, ignore me a little bit) and the attraction will likely bring back all of the painful memories of the divorce and what she did, all of the guilt and pain, etc. I know this because all of my attractions reminded me of my abusive father (the original tuner of the mechanism) and the pain he caused me, and I projected all of his abusive qualities - fairly or unfairly - onto them. It hurts. (I also know this because, literally weeks after I ended my father's abuse, I met a poor guy who was blackmailed into an affair and got divorced, and we understood each other on a very deep level almost immediately. It was scary, but it was God trying to open my eyes. As NF says in "Outcast": "I've never been married but I've felt divorced.") Take whatever insight these attractions and these people give on your past, but don't pursue them for a relationship until you heal up. The insight is what helps you heal.
And thus, given all of that, I have no room for judgement. Damage to the pair-bonding mechanism of sex isn't always the fault of the person who has the damage. Sometimes people are just victims. Sometimes people don't understand sex and they make mistakes. I trust that God can heal, because God has been healing me and if I need more healing, God will provide it. Follow the Scripture from now on, take care of the wounded people, and God will take care of you.