I'm 25 years old, I'm working in my dream job, I'm very happily living with my loving girlfriend of 5 and a half years, and I'm a porn addict.
Like a lot of men my age, I discovered porn at something like 13 years old. I don't actually think there was anything unhealthy about my relationship with porn for many years, but it's hard to imagine my post-pubescent life without it.
At 17, I got my first girlfriend. She was hot and, being normal 17-year-olds, we couldn't keep our hands off each other. She was also manipulative and emotionally abusive. I won't claim to have been the perfect boyfriend, but the gist is that the whole relationship was pretty unhealthy. I think that's when my porn addiction really kicked in. Whenever she made me feel like shit, I'd self-medicate with porn. I never struggled with ED, but for much of our relationship I had trouble achieving orgasm. Of course, teenaged me thought being able to go for hours made me a stud, rather than being a sign of a problem, but I figured out what was going on, successfully managed to abstain from masturbation for long enough to correct it, and adjusted my technique to stop it from coming back. Big success!
But my porn addiction remains an issue even years after we broke up, despite a healthy relationship of many years with my current partner. I've always spent hours at a time watching porn, on a daily basis. I don't always masturbate, in fact most of the time I just watch. In the last year or so, things have escalated to the point that I silently watch on my phone or (peraonal) laptop at work, with my screen turned to the corner of the room so none of my office-mates can see. If anything, the danger makes it more exciting.
My tastes have strayed away from traditional porn to voyeur-style content, leaked nudes, and that sort of thing. Anything I feel like I'm not supposed to be able to see makes it more exciting. That's not healthy. I also play a lot of porn games - some of which I genuinely think are well-made games with good stories, so those will be hard to give up, but I know I need to.
I'm not struggling to perform sexually (although I am having less sex than I might without porn), but I'm concerned about my escalating niche tastes and the fact that my addiction has now encroached on my work. I feel like it's not fair on my girlfriend that I spend so much time fantasising about other women - including close female friends I genuinely care about as people but can't help but objectify. I've started thinking about ways to act out my porn-fuelled fantasies in real life, which is really not good. It feels especially sleazy when I look at porn on my phone with my girlfriend in the room. She deserves better.
I've tried to quit a few times before, but I've never really made an honest, all-in effort to reboot. I just delete my porn folder, tell myself I'm a bad man, and then go right back to it. So consider this my real start. I've successfully abstained so far today, despite being home alone, and even though that shouldn't feel like a big achievement, it does.
Over the past couple of months, I've already started exercising regularly, and in planning my reboot I've added meditation to my routine, which is something I've wanted to do anyway. I'm also going to read more books, and probably take a few more cold showers.
This is probably my most controversial decision, but I've decided not to tell my girlfriend yet. She knows I masturbate to porn sometimes, and she has no issues with that, but she doesn't know the extent of it. I know she'd be very understanding, but she has her own issues to work through at the moment and I think knowing about my addiction would just hurt her. I want to try tackling it on my own first, to prove to myself I'm strong enough to do that. I'll revisit this decision in a couple of weeks, and fully intend to tell her when I feel ready, if I feel like I need her help, or if withdrawal starts to have an effect on our sex life. But I want to do this for myself, and I think I can. ??????????????????
Like a lot of men my age, I discovered porn at something like 13 years old. I don't actually think there was anything unhealthy about my relationship with porn for many years, but it's hard to imagine my post-pubescent life without it.
At 17, I got my first girlfriend. She was hot and, being normal 17-year-olds, we couldn't keep our hands off each other. She was also manipulative and emotionally abusive. I won't claim to have been the perfect boyfriend, but the gist is that the whole relationship was pretty unhealthy. I think that's when my porn addiction really kicked in. Whenever she made me feel like shit, I'd self-medicate with porn. I never struggled with ED, but for much of our relationship I had trouble achieving orgasm. Of course, teenaged me thought being able to go for hours made me a stud, rather than being a sign of a problem, but I figured out what was going on, successfully managed to abstain from masturbation for long enough to correct it, and adjusted my technique to stop it from coming back. Big success!
But my porn addiction remains an issue even years after we broke up, despite a healthy relationship of many years with my current partner. I've always spent hours at a time watching porn, on a daily basis. I don't always masturbate, in fact most of the time I just watch. In the last year or so, things have escalated to the point that I silently watch on my phone or (peraonal) laptop at work, with my screen turned to the corner of the room so none of my office-mates can see. If anything, the danger makes it more exciting.
My tastes have strayed away from traditional porn to voyeur-style content, leaked nudes, and that sort of thing. Anything I feel like I'm not supposed to be able to see makes it more exciting. That's not healthy. I also play a lot of porn games - some of which I genuinely think are well-made games with good stories, so those will be hard to give up, but I know I need to.
I'm not struggling to perform sexually (although I am having less sex than I might without porn), but I'm concerned about my escalating niche tastes and the fact that my addiction has now encroached on my work. I feel like it's not fair on my girlfriend that I spend so much time fantasising about other women - including close female friends I genuinely care about as people but can't help but objectify. I've started thinking about ways to act out my porn-fuelled fantasies in real life, which is really not good. It feels especially sleazy when I look at porn on my phone with my girlfriend in the room. She deserves better.
I've tried to quit a few times before, but I've never really made an honest, all-in effort to reboot. I just delete my porn folder, tell myself I'm a bad man, and then go right back to it. So consider this my real start. I've successfully abstained so far today, despite being home alone, and even though that shouldn't feel like a big achievement, it does.
Over the past couple of months, I've already started exercising regularly, and in planning my reboot I've added meditation to my routine, which is something I've wanted to do anyway. I'm also going to read more books, and probably take a few more cold showers.
This is probably my most controversial decision, but I've decided not to tell my girlfriend yet. She knows I masturbate to porn sometimes, and she has no issues with that, but she doesn't know the extent of it. I know she'd be very understanding, but she has her own issues to work through at the moment and I think knowing about my addiction would just hurt her. I want to try tackling it on my own first, to prove to myself I'm strong enough to do that. I'll revisit this decision in a couple of weeks, and fully intend to tell her when I feel ready, if I feel like I need her help, or if withdrawal starts to have an effect on our sex life. But I want to do this for myself, and I think I can. ??????????????????