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Making a Change

My morning erections came back, then erotic stories took them away again

I quit masturbating and within a month my morning erections were hard again. Three months later I went back to it with erotic stories, and the weak erection crept back.

I’m 29. I masturbated practically every day from the age of about 13, and from about 17 while watching harder and harder porn.

I’ve always had a weak erection: instead of standing at attention, my penis only ever rose to horizontal. With some partners that was enough to have sex, with some it wasn’t. After the last failure I’d had enough :(( and I decided I had to do something about it.

About half a year ago I stopped masturbating. After about a month I saw a big improvement: my morning erections came back, I had them almost every day, and they were hard.

After about three months I started masturbating again, but without porn, only reading erotic stories. I didn’t even notice when the problem of weak erections and no morning erections came back.

Now I’m starting over. It’s much easier than the first time I tried; I don’t feel such a strong need to masturbate, I’m very rarely tempted to watch porn now, and I don’t watch it at all.

So now I keep wondering whether masturbating on its own, or with erotic stories but no porn, is enough to weaken my erections.

I don’t have a partner, so I have no way of checking whether everything is OK, and I don’t want to go through another disappointment and that shame again :((

A thoughtful conversation.

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