Maybe my story is the same as everyone else’s, though I can’t shake the feeling that it’s different. Most of my friends see me as someone who’s doing really well in life: a very good degree combined with work experience. Some say I’m good-looking, I take care of myself, I have lots of female friends, and women are interested in me. But for about two years now I’ve been withdrawn. As you can probably guess, there aren’t many women who start talking to you just because you’re good-looking. It does happen, but then I magically push them away (maybe it’s my passivity and withdrawal). Usually it ends at eye contact. I won’t take a step, because what’s the point anyway, why waste the time? I’m not saying this to make myself feel better or to stroke my ego. I’m saying it because “perfect people” have problems too. Probably none of my friends would say I’m addicted to porn.
Am I really? Yes, because I don’t control it. I’ve lost count of my attempts to quit fapping. The longest so far was three months. I felt incredible, but a moment of weakness and not understanding how the whole thing works brought me back to it. For very many years I told myself that fapping was my choice and that I was in control of it. It was the same with smoking, but at some point I realised I didn’t control the smoking, so I picked up a well-known book about quitting smoking, which really did help me quit. I haven’t smoked for over two years and don’t feel any need to. I noticed similarities between the two addictions: we know we’ll regret it, but we make the decision anyway, whether it’s smoking or fapping. I’m not religious, but sometimes after fapping I have terrible pangs of conscience and feel like shit, feeling it can’t get any worse, promising myself I’ll do better, only to do the same thing a few days later.
In my opinion it doesn’t matter whether you fap once a week or every day. An addiction is an addiction. For me it varied, from once a week to three times a day, to two-week breaks followed by even stronger comebacks. Each time I felt worse and worse, withdrawing into myself, rejecting reality, rejecting the chance to get to know the women around me, rejecting their sexual energy in favour of easily available porn. Relief in a few minutes, without dates, without butterflies in your stomach and without a bill for dinner. That seems very tempting in today’s rushed world. We have a shortcut for everything, from instant soup to instant sex in a video file. Is that really what it’s about? Do I want to stay stuck in my own head for the rest of my life, getting down on myself every day? Do I want to give up on women? They must sense it somehow. I have no idea how, but they just do.
I also want to mention my erection problem. Despite my young age (I’m 24 now), the first symptoms appeared when I was 19. It started with my first time, which was a failure, and then later encounters with different girls, with varying results, but there were practically always erection problems, smaller or bigger. I had no trouble getting hard during oral sex, but when it came to penetration I went soft quite quickly, or I came too early. Our failed sex life was one of the reasons I broke up with a woman I’d been with for quite a long time. I was also her first, and I blame myself that I might have put her off men, because I couldn’t give her what I wanted to give her. I know the problem wasn’t my health, it was my sick head: the addiction to porn and to the stimulation it gives us.
You put porn on, watch the beginning for a few seconds, skip to the foreplay and the pounding, then a change of position and the finish. The whole thing can be over in five minutes, for me often in two. How can you expect stimulation that strong during NORMAL contact with a woman, when sometimes it takes two minutes just to get your clothes off? Often during sex, while I was inside a woman, I felt it was pointless, that it took so much effort to get any pleasure, not to mention the whole stage of getting to know someone and dating. Very often I went soft in the middle of sex, and I blamed it on being tired. Maybe you can fool a woman, but you can’t fool yourself. Besides, do you want to build a relationship on a lie?
Porn bends reality for us and dulls the senses, so that we forget about sensitivity, about passion, about the times when an “ordinary” kiss turned us on. I remember my first erections while dancing with a woman. Now she could rub up against me naked and oiled and I wouldn’t get hard… At some point even oral sex couldn’t beat my erection problems, and as a result I withdrew even more and gave up on meeting women, because I associated it with unpleasantness. The strange thing is that not for one moment did I think it was porn’s fault, not women’s. I should have rejected porn, not women. On top of that there was a visit to a sex worker who, despite trying hard, couldn’t get me hard. I told myself it was because it was mechanical and without feelings and I couldn’t get into it, hence no erection. But when I watch porn I get into it very quickly. In the mornings I have strong erections, and at night I’m hard practically the whole time (I wake up to drink water, because the air in my room is very dry), so it’s probably not a health problem, or at least I hope not. Although after just a week off porn, my erections in my sleep are much weaker and even disappear.
What crushes me most is what my friends think of me: that I’m a guy who sleeps with a different woman every week. They ask me for advice, admire me, look up to me. Living with the knowledge that it isn’t true is awful. It wrecks my self-belief even more, and I’m slowly starting to feel that either I change something in my life, or I’ll fall into a deep depression and never get back on my feet.
I want to change my life, to date women, to have wonderful moments with them, to share passion. To get my spark and my self-belief back, to stop digging my own hole, to stop putting more obstacles in my own way. I’ve slowly been reading about all this, and I know there’s no point counting days without fapping, because that keeps your focus tied to porn in some way. Other people’s stories give me hope, a belief that it’s possible, that somewhere out there are people who have beaten this addiction.
Today I felt the urge to write this down, more as an admission to myself, because I’d been running away from it for a very long time. This whole addiction makes no sense, and yet it can take control of me. It’s hard to explain rationally, but that’s how it is.
I hope that one day I’ll get the chance to write something again, maybe less chaotically.
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