H
HumbleRich
Guest
Hello all,
10:20 am on a Saturday morning and I am sat down with a cup of tea making breakfast. My wife got called in to work today, so I am going to be cleaning the house while she is gone. I got on immediately today to talk about some really weird stuff that has been happening after a week of being clean. I woke up this morning while having dreams about myself and one or two high school crushes. I have no idea what this means. And this is part of why I don't feel comfortable disclosing my continued problems with porn, and my difficulty maintaining sobriety with my wife. I would NEVER EVER cheat on my wife. I did cheat electronically with her while we were dating, which is why I followed through when she told me to delete individuals I flirted with, cheated with, online while she and I were dating, after I deleted Facebook recently. (I am not on any other social media.) I realize what a huge mistake cheating was. It was during a time when I was doing a lot of stuff I shouldn't be doing, and in a bad place, though that is not an excuse. I was a full fledged alcoholic when she and I met and dated in graduate school, drinking every night or every other night. I was off and on with her because of my difficulty with commitment and my difficulty dealing with my feelings for her and wanting to get settled down. A part of me resisted the idea of courting my future wife, and wanted to be a bad boy or something. I don't know.
All I can really guess is that these dreams are a response to me giving up porn, erotic images, and masturbation. But what if it is more than that. I do feel resentment, entirely separate from my relationship with my wife, before and after getting married, from not getting much action in high school. Are my old insecurities back to haunt me now that I am no longer drowning them with constant porn-based lust activity? To explain, I went to a tiny boarding private high school where it was virtually impossible to be sexually active. Students were banned from entering dorms that housed the opposite sex. Some students did find ways to do the dirty by doing it in other locations on campus, or by going on summer vacations together, etc. But I never found that appealing. The single girl that I dated during my years there approached me, but our relationship ended up sizzling out after little more than three or four months over the inability to have any sort of sexual relationship. When I look back now I think that going to this high school, though it did wonders for me, ended up setting me back for years. It turned sex into this alien thing, that I would not experience until I was a Junior in college, losing my virginity to my then girlfriend. Sex became this thing I always wanted, something I put on this weird pedestal of things I wanted to achieve, but simultaneously seemed out of reach.
At the same time I had horribly bad social skills and so had a very hard time approaching girls I liked. Not that, again, these relationships would have lasted due to the almost impossibility of having sex. I would find out much later, when I started talking to these girls again in college (while I was single, before meeting my ex girlfriend, and then my wife) that several of these girls would have agreed to date me. This only made me feel more shitty (for lack of a better word) for not asking them out.
This all led me to be horribly screwed up, in my opinion. I had virtually no experience romantically between the two adult relationships I have had (my wife and my ex girlfriend). My wife pointed out to me once, that I have only had one adult relationship, with her. She defines adult around behavior, like the other 90% of people do. That we live together, have been in a long term relationship, and were preparing for marriage. I, of course, define adult around sex. Obviously one of these ways is better than the other.
I can't help but think though, that that is not the whole story. I do remember that the first time I acted out to porn was in high school. In my dorm room I would masturbate to dirty anime (light porn) or porn I could find online. I started my porn addiction way back in high school, which means I have been a porn addict for around about 15 years. That really says something to me.
What if my problems talking to women were the result of my porn addiction, not the other way round. I am not saying that my lack of a romantic history was solely caused by porn addiction. I did start high school, after all, not being addicted to porn. But I think that I got on the computer, or looked at magna, as an escape from my lack of social skills. Instead of improving my social skills, and approaching girls, I masturbated in my room. Before I knew it, the ball was set rolling and I was in the viscous cycle that would rule my life.
But those days are behind me, my rational mind says. Those days are long gone. I am a happily married man, in an epic quest to understand my wife and live the best married life I can.
Which is why I hope that I am right. I hope that these are simply symptoms of my porn addiction of more than a decade trying to pull me back in, and not signs of a much deeper, more severe problem.
My rational mind knows that I am a very lucky man, for my life to have turned out this way. Married, with a good job, and a teaching career on the horizon.
I would be insane to rock the boat.
I am fairly certain that there is nothing deep about these dreams I keep having. I have not cheated electronically since long before my engagement to my wife, more than three years ago. I have accepted the realities of married life, that I am a taken man.
The insanity of my past will die and wither away.
In other news: I am undecided about whether to bring up my ongoing troubles with porn addiction to my wife. I feel it would be much better to tell her about success overcoming an addiction, than to tell her I am having difficulty overcoming it.
Maybe I am just procrastinating. I don't know.
Anyway. That was way more than I planned to write. But that is what this is here for.
Be back later.
Checking out, 6 days sober.
Rich
10:20 am on a Saturday morning and I am sat down with a cup of tea making breakfast. My wife got called in to work today, so I am going to be cleaning the house while she is gone. I got on immediately today to talk about some really weird stuff that has been happening after a week of being clean. I woke up this morning while having dreams about myself and one or two high school crushes. I have no idea what this means. And this is part of why I don't feel comfortable disclosing my continued problems with porn, and my difficulty maintaining sobriety with my wife. I would NEVER EVER cheat on my wife. I did cheat electronically with her while we were dating, which is why I followed through when she told me to delete individuals I flirted with, cheated with, online while she and I were dating, after I deleted Facebook recently. (I am not on any other social media.) I realize what a huge mistake cheating was. It was during a time when I was doing a lot of stuff I shouldn't be doing, and in a bad place, though that is not an excuse. I was a full fledged alcoholic when she and I met and dated in graduate school, drinking every night or every other night. I was off and on with her because of my difficulty with commitment and my difficulty dealing with my feelings for her and wanting to get settled down. A part of me resisted the idea of courting my future wife, and wanted to be a bad boy or something. I don't know.
All I can really guess is that these dreams are a response to me giving up porn, erotic images, and masturbation. But what if it is more than that. I do feel resentment, entirely separate from my relationship with my wife, before and after getting married, from not getting much action in high school. Are my old insecurities back to haunt me now that I am no longer drowning them with constant porn-based lust activity? To explain, I went to a tiny boarding private high school where it was virtually impossible to be sexually active. Students were banned from entering dorms that housed the opposite sex. Some students did find ways to do the dirty by doing it in other locations on campus, or by going on summer vacations together, etc. But I never found that appealing. The single girl that I dated during my years there approached me, but our relationship ended up sizzling out after little more than three or four months over the inability to have any sort of sexual relationship. When I look back now I think that going to this high school, though it did wonders for me, ended up setting me back for years. It turned sex into this alien thing, that I would not experience until I was a Junior in college, losing my virginity to my then girlfriend. Sex became this thing I always wanted, something I put on this weird pedestal of things I wanted to achieve, but simultaneously seemed out of reach.
At the same time I had horribly bad social skills and so had a very hard time approaching girls I liked. Not that, again, these relationships would have lasted due to the almost impossibility of having sex. I would find out much later, when I started talking to these girls again in college (while I was single, before meeting my ex girlfriend, and then my wife) that several of these girls would have agreed to date me. This only made me feel more shitty (for lack of a better word) for not asking them out.
This all led me to be horribly screwed up, in my opinion. I had virtually no experience romantically between the two adult relationships I have had (my wife and my ex girlfriend). My wife pointed out to me once, that I have only had one adult relationship, with her. She defines adult around behavior, like the other 90% of people do. That we live together, have been in a long term relationship, and were preparing for marriage. I, of course, define adult around sex. Obviously one of these ways is better than the other.
I can't help but think though, that that is not the whole story. I do remember that the first time I acted out to porn was in high school. In my dorm room I would masturbate to dirty anime (light porn) or porn I could find online. I started my porn addiction way back in high school, which means I have been a porn addict for around about 15 years. That really says something to me.
What if my problems talking to women were the result of my porn addiction, not the other way round. I am not saying that my lack of a romantic history was solely caused by porn addiction. I did start high school, after all, not being addicted to porn. But I think that I got on the computer, or looked at magna, as an escape from my lack of social skills. Instead of improving my social skills, and approaching girls, I masturbated in my room. Before I knew it, the ball was set rolling and I was in the viscous cycle that would rule my life.
But those days are behind me, my rational mind says. Those days are long gone. I am a happily married man, in an epic quest to understand my wife and live the best married life I can.
Which is why I hope that I am right. I hope that these are simply symptoms of my porn addiction of more than a decade trying to pull me back in, and not signs of a much deeper, more severe problem.
My rational mind knows that I am a very lucky man, for my life to have turned out this way. Married, with a good job, and a teaching career on the horizon.
I would be insane to rock the boat.
I am fairly certain that there is nothing deep about these dreams I keep having. I have not cheated electronically since long before my engagement to my wife, more than three years ago. I have accepted the realities of married life, that I am a taken man.
The insanity of my past will die and wither away.
In other news: I am undecided about whether to bring up my ongoing troubles with porn addiction to my wife. I feel it would be much better to tell her about success overcoming an addiction, than to tell her I am having difficulty overcoming it.
Maybe I am just procrastinating. I don't know.
Anyway. That was way more than I planned to write. But that is what this is here for.
Be back later.
Checking out, 6 days sober.
Rich
