I feel uterly lost and baffled by my ignorance.

bit long, sad, and miserable you've been warned.

I am a 28 year old male, i am a virgin. The reason why i'm a virgin is because i've been obese since early childhood with a host of insecurities that clouded my entire life, spent the majority of my life a shut in, unhygenic, unattractive physically and personality wise. I never even attempted a relationship or even asked a girl out before because I disgusted myself whenever i looked at a mirror. I had no role models, no father to consult, and a crazy religious mother that responds with "you need to go back to Allah and start worshipping him seriously again" whenever i tried to seek her advise about my mental health.

Naturally porn was always my only source of sexual release, i masturbated daily from 17 onwards. I never went crazy with fetshes, and remained within the ranges of vanilla porn.

The past year and half caused a major shift in how I work, and the isolation from the early months of quaratine motivated me to start working on myself so I did, lost 34KG of fat, gained about 6 kg of lean muscle and now do Brazillian Jiu Jitsu. Went to therapy to deal with early childhood trauma. bought an apartment, moved to a very lucrative career, and for the first time in my life I actually look attractive, i have visible abs, an actual jaw line, I'm in great halth, ran alot, became a gym rat. things were going great. when i started going to events (small mind you because of lockdown rules) early this year, i get approached by women, one time i went to a house party my friend threw together and the day after she said a couple of her girlfriends asked her about me. I saw all of these as signs that I finally made, i'm finally ready to start a new life and potentially find a partner, something i've been desperately craving my whole twenties.

Sadly, through out that entire time i was improving my life, i still masturbated every day, like clock-work. I did it because i genuinly believed I was doing nothing wrong, my friends do it, people always talk about how good it's for you, it's healthy etc etc. boy was I wrong.

Little did I know i was about to hit a wall on my self improvement path. I went on tinder, and was relatively successful and managed to get someone in my place within about 3 weeks of signing up, my main concerns were not knowing how to make out, not knowing to to do oral, and most importantly premature ejaculation. as the night went on, i passed the first checkmark, the woman wasn't aware, but I was having my first kiss with her... at 28.

we got to the part where I was going down on her, and that went great too, but slowly, i realised that I never went hard, my penis was soft as can be, no sign of life. I felt incredibly embarassed, i was confused, i wanted to disappear into a black hole at that very moment. how could this be ? I literally woke up with a raging boner this morning from excitement about my date, why is my dick dead now that I'm with this beautiful woman in my bed?

Safe to say nothing was happening, i went down on her again and made her get off (techniques I learned from porn go figure), and she ubered back to her place afterwards. I couldn't sleep that night, i thought it might be because i was nervous, so I tried again a week later with a different woman, again, same sequence of events happened, dead dick, can't get it up.

and then tried about 3 more times, with the same result. So i went searching and started discovering a whole world of porn induced ED filled with terms like PMO, flatline, hard-mode, etc etc etc none of these meant anything to me before, i was completely clueless of the damage i was inflecting upon my self for over a decade. I thought i'd go off porn and try again in 2 weeks with one of the girls that i had already failed to get it up with already. again, absolutely no difference.

That attempt was 2 weeks ago, i haven't masturbated, looked at porn, or even stroked my dick in almost a month purely from the shock of what happened. I've been reading story after story after story about this and one thing became clear, I literally have one of the worst cases of Porn induced ED, I spent my teenage years and entire early adulthood seeking sexual fullfillment from porn, never having kissed a woman, had sex, or even looked at a female and thought " i should ask her out". my brain is literally unaware of what it feels like to get romantically involved with a woman. these realizations have devastated me, i did all this work for a year and half, and this the final result, a somewhat attractive but impotent man.

I've gone off porn, Everytime i even think about masturbating the shock of me discovering what i've done to myself snaps me out of it immediately, i genuinly cannot imagine how i can watch porn again. my goal is to go hard mode and I don't think it's going to be that difficult ( i've already done almost a month of no porn or masturbation), I uninstalled tinder and pretty much given up on the idea of seeking out anyone romantically anytime soon, and i'm back to exactly where I started, a shut in who is desperately seeking a partner in life, but isn't man enough to statisfy that partner.

i am very motivated. but for how long? most of the stories i've read that are close to my level of severity are talking about years of recovery. is this really how long i'm going to need to be able to go out and seek people romantically again?

I'm going hard-mode no matter how long it takes, but how long do I wait before I try again? 1 year? 2 years? am I going into my 30's a virgin? I just need someone lay it out for me honestly so I can adjust my expectations, even if the answer is that my situation is unfixable.
 
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faenoe

Active Member
What a story! Thanks for sharing it. What an incredible transformation you've gone through. That is seriously inspiring.

Like you have noticed, the porn induced ED is real and that seriously sucks that you had to go through finding that out with that experience with the girl. Porn messes up your brain. But the wonderful thing about the brain is its ability to change and adjust itself. Of course you didn't have the experience you wanted with the girl after 11 years of being able to choose the perfect figure out of millions for however you felt that particular day.

I think most people would say 90 days is the general goal for "rebooting" your sexual circuitry although it's different for everyone. I don't know if you've thought about this but you come from an unbroken line of successful sexual partners from the beginning of the human species. The sex drive is embedded deep within our nature. You'll be able to figure it out.
 
What a story! Thanks for sharing it. What an incredible transformation you've gone through. That is seriously inspiring.

Like you have noticed, the porn induced ED is real and that seriously sucks that you had to go through finding that out with that experience with the girl. Porn messes up your brain. But the wonderful thing about the brain is its ability to change and adjust itself. Of course you didn't have the experience you wanted with the girl after 11 years of being able to choose the perfect figure out of millions for however you felt that particular day.

I think most people would say 90 days is the general goal for "rebooting" your sexual circuitry although it's different for everyone. I don't know if you've thought about this but you come from an unbroken line of successful sexual partners from the beginning of the human species. The sex drive is embedded deep within our nature. You'll be able to figure it out.
Thanks, 2020 has been an incredibly transformative year for me, i took full advantage of the extra free time and lack of distractions to truly focus on myself and it paid off (well untill i got to the part where I discovered i killed my dick with porn).

one of the funniest things that I experienced while trying to get it up in one of my attempts was literally my brain going " i need to change tabs" because that's how i used to watch porn, get bored mid video, switch tabs to another video and keep going, get bored, switch tabs again. I can't switch tabs in real life, there's no constant stream of changing scenery, it makes soo much sense in retrospect

90 days doesn't sound too bad I'm already a month in, but I think i'll wait till next year and do 6 months hard mode, mainly because i've built up so much anxiety from failing 6 times to get it up with a person i need time to clear it off mentally and forget about those experiences before trying again.

Although i do have to admit, I've read countless stories so far about recovery, and my prospects are very poor, there are people my age who have had on and off sex and even raltionships and still took them years to recover, i'm still a vrigin and not sure if there's even a pathway in my brain to recover into desiring real life women, sure i might kill my porn addiction, but my hopes of being with a woman again are basically 0.

thanks for the response.
 
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Hey mate, well done on your achievements! Takes a lot of hard work and perseverance to get where you are. You should be proud of yourself!
Use your frustration as fuel to not consume porn.
Also- you're young! don't be so tough on yourself. I think it would really help if you found a partner who you could connect with on a personal and emotional level. Build some trust and open up. There are plenty of understanding women out there that will appreciate you for being honest about yourself.
I remember first experiences being full of nerves and was never as I'd imagined it in my head.
Be kind to yourself, be persistent and find an understanding partner. Sounds like you got a lot going for you!
Again - well done. Good luck.
 
I think it would really help if you found a partner who you could connect with on a personal and emotional level. Build some trust and open up. There are plenty of understanding women out there that will appreciate you for being honest about yourself.
this is going to be incredibly tough, i highly doubt i'll be comfortable engaging anyone knowing how deeply flawed I am. I have to fix myself and test my progress periodically either through one night stands or escorts before i make another serious attempt, it's too much burden for anyone to bear and I don't wanna put that burden on anyone let alone a potential partner.
 
this is going to be incredibly tough, i highly doubt i'll be comfortable engaging anyone knowing how deeply flawed I am. I have to fix myself and test my progress periodically either through one night stands or escorts before i make another serious attempt, it's too much burden for anyone to bear and I don't wanna put that burden on anyone let alone a potential partner.
Fair enough my man. You need to be comfortable with your own decisions. Best of luck with whatever path you choose. You clearly have the desire and drive to get through anything you put your mind to. Look forward to hearing about your future success.
 
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