Josh.Thomas1989
Member
25 year old in the process of recovery.
Hey guys, I wanted to write this both to share my story with the world for the first time and to hopefully find a little support and encouraging words along the way.
I am 25 years old. I have been addicted to some variation of porn since I was around 14 years old. I have masturbated almost daily since that age. At the highest point (around age 15-16), I was masturbating 3 times a day.
Not surprisingly, I followed the same path of escalation that most addicts do. It started off as simply imagination. Then I moved on to scenes in movies, then YouTube videos, then by the time I was 18 I started watching soft core porn. When I was is high school, I was kind of a peculiar case. I was well liked by all of my classmates, I played sports but I never dated anybody. My first real date was right before the end of my senior year.
By the time I was 19, I somehow found a girlfriend. My interests were still in soft core porn but out of respect, I quit watching while I was dating her. However, we were not the typical near 20 couple; we abstained from any form of sex. We dated for only about 2 months and once it was over I headed back to porn. This stands as the longest I went without watching porn or masturbation.
As I went through college I had friends and tried dating a few people but I was not successful in doing so. I began watching more hardcore porn on occasion but I would usually feel guilty after so I didn't go too far into it.
I graduated college and started working at the age of 22 and that's when things started to fall off of a cliff. I would come home stressed out from work nightly. I stopped feeling the guilt and I would watch whatever porn I wanted to on a daily basis. The forms of pornography I found myself watching kept getting more and more intense. Things continued like this until I was 25 years old.
By this time I had noticed that I wasn't getting good erections anymore. The shaft would get slightly less soft and the tip would stay soft. I figured that it was from masturbating too frequently but out of stubbornness or general lack of concern, I never tested myself. I continued to masturbate daily and told myself I could stop for a day or two when I needed to. Over the last 11 years, I had never stopped for longer than a week except when I was dating the girl I mentioned earlier. However, at 25 something happened to make me address my issue of porn induced ED; I got a girlfriend.
This relationship was much better than my previous one. We were genuinely thrilled to spend time together and we were both enticed by each other. By our third date I was ready to lose my virginity. I could already see myself going places in the future with this girl so I had no concerns about losing it to her.
We went out drinking for a couple of hours both got a pretty good buzz but it was definitely not sloppy. We got back to her place and went to the bedroom. After a few minutes of foreplay, she was ready for sex. I noticed as hard as I tried, I couldn't get any more than a soft, weak erection. My girlfriend positioned right to make the best of it but it was a very sad attempt on my first time. I couldn't stay hard and there was no way in the world that I was going to orgasm. Although she was disappointed, I did my best to keep her satisfied in other ways.
I was a little confused by what had just happened. I was very attracted to my girlfriend and I wanted to have sex with her, but I couldn't get myself hard. I justified the situation by saying that I was drunk and it was my first time so that probably led to problems with my erection. To address this we attempted sex sober--same result. I officially knew something was up.
I thought it had to do with frequency of masturbation and was totally unaware that I had permanently changed my brain. I had been following my rule of not watching porn when I was seeing someone special so it had been 4-5 days without watching any. A few more days passed and I still noticed no progress. I decided to give myself a test. I watched porn to see if I would get hard and orgasm to that. I noticed that I got a much better erection. It still wasn't great but it was better and I masturbated to that.
I found myself masturbating to porn 2-3 times a week even though I was dating somebody and having problems that stemmed from that very thing. One night she asked me if I had been watching porn lately (I had told her before that I used to watch it frequently). I couldn't make myself blatantly lie to her, so I fessed up that their were a few times lately that I had. She got rightfully angry because I exacerbating our issues in the bedroom by doing this.
I felt sick. The look of confusion on her face and somehow thinking it was her fault made me want to crawl under a rock and die. I couldn't take that happening again and I told her that I was done and wouldn't watch porn any more.
I quit cold turkey and we took some time off of sex to help me rewire. The plan was to wait a month but after a week my girlfriend was ready to try. We tried and it was much better. I was at least able to get semi hard and stay that way for a few minutes. We continued having sex like this daily and although I was slowly improving one thing was missing; I couldn't ejaculate from sex. It got to where I would finish her with my hand and every third time or so, I would finish myself with my hand.
She wanted me to orgasm from sex with her but she was proud of my effort to quit porn and that I would do everything else in my power to keep her satisfied sexually. I became determined to climax from penetration. After about 3 weeks of no finishing myself, (6 weeks of no porn) I finally ejaculated inside of her. The excitement in her eyes was obvious as I had finally achieved this. We were on the right track finally.
Sadly, this wasn't enough to save our relationship. This is a story about my ED so I'll focus on that instead of my past relationship. We broke up and I went right back to porn. Just as intense and just as frequent as before meeting her. I found myself trapped again.
This continued on for about 3 months until one day I discovered a link attached to one of the videos I was about to watch. The link was to this site and it was a video of a man telling the story of his battle with porn induced ED. Even though I had done a little research and had a vague idea of what was going on with my erections, I had yet to discover this website and the exact nature of my problem.
The testimony I watched could have been me reading my story. We had so many similarities and it was then that I decided I had to quit if I was ever going to have the sex life with a partner I want to have, and even more so be the person I want to be.
It's been 16 days since I vowed to quit watching porn. I have had 0 relapses and 0 orgasms. I am already noticing my erections becoming harder and longer lasting. I have thought about things to arouse me on a few occasions but I have determined I need to stop that and give my recovery 100%. The way I look at it, if I do it right this time, whether it takes 6 weeks or 6 months, I'll have my ED issue fixed forever. I look forward to that day and it is a huge motivational factor for me. I wanted to post on here to share my story and as a form of holding myself accountable. Please feel free to comment, message me or whatever you wish. Thank you for reading!
Hey guys, I wanted to write this both to share my story with the world for the first time and to hopefully find a little support and encouraging words along the way.
I am 25 years old. I have been addicted to some variation of porn since I was around 14 years old. I have masturbated almost daily since that age. At the highest point (around age 15-16), I was masturbating 3 times a day.
Not surprisingly, I followed the same path of escalation that most addicts do. It started off as simply imagination. Then I moved on to scenes in movies, then YouTube videos, then by the time I was 18 I started watching soft core porn. When I was is high school, I was kind of a peculiar case. I was well liked by all of my classmates, I played sports but I never dated anybody. My first real date was right before the end of my senior year.
By the time I was 19, I somehow found a girlfriend. My interests were still in soft core porn but out of respect, I quit watching while I was dating her. However, we were not the typical near 20 couple; we abstained from any form of sex. We dated for only about 2 months and once it was over I headed back to porn. This stands as the longest I went without watching porn or masturbation.
As I went through college I had friends and tried dating a few people but I was not successful in doing so. I began watching more hardcore porn on occasion but I would usually feel guilty after so I didn't go too far into it.
I graduated college and started working at the age of 22 and that's when things started to fall off of a cliff. I would come home stressed out from work nightly. I stopped feeling the guilt and I would watch whatever porn I wanted to on a daily basis. The forms of pornography I found myself watching kept getting more and more intense. Things continued like this until I was 25 years old.
By this time I had noticed that I wasn't getting good erections anymore. The shaft would get slightly less soft and the tip would stay soft. I figured that it was from masturbating too frequently but out of stubbornness or general lack of concern, I never tested myself. I continued to masturbate daily and told myself I could stop for a day or two when I needed to. Over the last 11 years, I had never stopped for longer than a week except when I was dating the girl I mentioned earlier. However, at 25 something happened to make me address my issue of porn induced ED; I got a girlfriend.
This relationship was much better than my previous one. We were genuinely thrilled to spend time together and we were both enticed by each other. By our third date I was ready to lose my virginity. I could already see myself going places in the future with this girl so I had no concerns about losing it to her.
We went out drinking for a couple of hours both got a pretty good buzz but it was definitely not sloppy. We got back to her place and went to the bedroom. After a few minutes of foreplay, she was ready for sex. I noticed as hard as I tried, I couldn't get any more than a soft, weak erection. My girlfriend positioned right to make the best of it but it was a very sad attempt on my first time. I couldn't stay hard and there was no way in the world that I was going to orgasm. Although she was disappointed, I did my best to keep her satisfied in other ways.
I was a little confused by what had just happened. I was very attracted to my girlfriend and I wanted to have sex with her, but I couldn't get myself hard. I justified the situation by saying that I was drunk and it was my first time so that probably led to problems with my erection. To address this we attempted sex sober--same result. I officially knew something was up.
I thought it had to do with frequency of masturbation and was totally unaware that I had permanently changed my brain. I had been following my rule of not watching porn when I was seeing someone special so it had been 4-5 days without watching any. A few more days passed and I still noticed no progress. I decided to give myself a test. I watched porn to see if I would get hard and orgasm to that. I noticed that I got a much better erection. It still wasn't great but it was better and I masturbated to that.
I found myself masturbating to porn 2-3 times a week even though I was dating somebody and having problems that stemmed from that very thing. One night she asked me if I had been watching porn lately (I had told her before that I used to watch it frequently). I couldn't make myself blatantly lie to her, so I fessed up that their were a few times lately that I had. She got rightfully angry because I exacerbating our issues in the bedroom by doing this.
I felt sick. The look of confusion on her face and somehow thinking it was her fault made me want to crawl under a rock and die. I couldn't take that happening again and I told her that I was done and wouldn't watch porn any more.
I quit cold turkey and we took some time off of sex to help me rewire. The plan was to wait a month but after a week my girlfriend was ready to try. We tried and it was much better. I was at least able to get semi hard and stay that way for a few minutes. We continued having sex like this daily and although I was slowly improving one thing was missing; I couldn't ejaculate from sex. It got to where I would finish her with my hand and every third time or so, I would finish myself with my hand.
She wanted me to orgasm from sex with her but she was proud of my effort to quit porn and that I would do everything else in my power to keep her satisfied sexually. I became determined to climax from penetration. After about 3 weeks of no finishing myself, (6 weeks of no porn) I finally ejaculated inside of her. The excitement in her eyes was obvious as I had finally achieved this. We were on the right track finally.
Sadly, this wasn't enough to save our relationship. This is a story about my ED so I'll focus on that instead of my past relationship. We broke up and I went right back to porn. Just as intense and just as frequent as before meeting her. I found myself trapped again.
This continued on for about 3 months until one day I discovered a link attached to one of the videos I was about to watch. The link was to this site and it was a video of a man telling the story of his battle with porn induced ED. Even though I had done a little research and had a vague idea of what was going on with my erections, I had yet to discover this website and the exact nature of my problem.
The testimony I watched could have been me reading my story. We had so many similarities and it was then that I decided I had to quit if I was ever going to have the sex life with a partner I want to have, and even more so be the person I want to be.
It's been 16 days since I vowed to quit watching porn. I have had 0 relapses and 0 orgasms. I am already noticing my erections becoming harder and longer lasting. I have thought about things to arouse me on a few occasions but I have determined I need to stop that and give my recovery 100%. The way I look at it, if I do it right this time, whether it takes 6 weeks or 6 months, I'll have my ED issue fixed forever. I look forward to that day and it is a huge motivational factor for me. I wanted to post on here to share my story and as a form of holding myself accountable. Please feel free to comment, message me or whatever you wish. Thank you for reading!
