Hey
@AlexthenotsoGreat,
Thanks for sharing this. I know the pain of getting into your 30s without a relationship.
Sorry to hear that the rejection led to you “acting out”. Was it just a minor slip? Have you been able to get your recovery back on track?
I’m almost 40 and I’ve basically never tried to be in a relationship. Deep down, I think I always felt I wasn’t ready. And I do mean that. I know it’s easy to say “I’m not ready” when you’re actually just scared or something like that. But I genuinely wasn’t ready. Most of the time, I wasn't taking basic care of myself or enjoying much in my life. I was in no fit state to try dating. The idea of a relationship with a woman was something I kept in the realm of fantasy and couldn't remotely connect to reality.
I made a few attempts - one unrealistic and poorly thought out attempt when I was a teenager, one half-hearted attempt at university. At university, there was this other young woman who did actually seem interested in me. Other people who saw us interacting said so as well. I liked her a lot too but something was holding me back. I think it was my issues with sex and porn use. I couldn't imagine sex as part of a "healthy" relationship. We stayed in touch on an off for a few years and I really wanted to try and get into a relationship with her. But by that point, I was convinced that I was perverted and felt irreversibly damaged. I didn't feel that starting a relationship with her would be fair to her.
A lot of this goes back to childhood stuff for me: messages of sexual shame from my family, bullying at school (which was often quite sexual in tone and felt very humiliating and "emasculating"). I felt like my sexuality was a a sick joke. Sometimes I tried to present myself to the world as someone who had no interest in sex. I didn't feel worthy of sex. It felt too humiliating to admit that I wanted sex but didn't feel worthy of it. I guess that was one of the roles that porn served for me. It was my secret world where I could be sexual and attempt to deal with the way that I found my sexuality shameful and degrading.
Sometimes it feels like my chance for a relationship has passed. I've been alone too long. I've missed out on too many essential social experiences. Even if I did find myself in a relationship, there's a strong chance that I'd be too insecure about my lack of life experiences for the relationship to be a positive one. And this could all actually be true. I've had to face up to that possibility recently and I've felt a lot of grief. I posted about that on here recently and you were one of the people who replied. When I was feeling that grief, I felt drawn of looking at porn again but I managed to resist. Acknowledging the grief that I feel actually helped me to resist - imagining the sad teenage boy that I was, trying to come to terms with his sexuality in fantasy and porn - trying to picture how I would reach out to him, if I could.
I know that porn will never give me what I need but on some level it always felt like it could give me what I needed. The intense feelings I had when looking at women on my screen gave me a fleeting sense or almost intimacy with them. It was that feeling that it could almost give me the intimacy that I craved that kept me coming back to it. Yes, dopamine was involved but understanding the way that I was feeling is also important. One of my favourite quotes about addiction is "it's impossible to get enough of something that almost gives you what you need". It has been a big step in my recovery to acknowledge my longing for sex/intimacy that I felt that porn and fantasy were *almost* meeting. It's been very difficult emotionally but I think I'm coming through the other side of it now.
I've recently discussed issues about sexuality in general with people at my Church and they say things like "we should try to not allow our sexuality to crowd out other important aspects of our identity". I think that's a good approach to start with. I can acknowledge how sad it is that I've missed out on being in an intimate relationship in my youth and how sad it is that I may never being in an intimate relationship. But there are other things about me, other things in life that I can enjoy. Just being part of a Church community and feeling valued has been really important for me and has really helped me to take the pressure off myself when it comes to the idea of a sexual relationship.
When it comes to working on myself, I'm trying to take a different attitude to it than the one that I've taken in the past. I think that I've always attempted to work on myself from the mindset that I'm defective in some way and I desperately need to fix myself.
The reason I'm saying this is that when I try to work on myself with regards to being in a relationship, it can feel like I'm trying to make myself worthy of sex and that just feels so demeaning that I can hardly even begin. What I really need is love and affirmation and I'm learning that I don't need to depend on having a sexual relationship in order to have those things. Finding love for myself is giving me a stable foundation to build on and really start working on myself as a person - to really want to work on myself and enjoy doing it rather than trying to escape feelings of worthlessness or in order to obtain the sexual experience that I thought would make me feel worthy. I can already see myself as worthy and I now have people in my life who see me as worthy. I need that more than I need to be in a sexual relationship.
I've not given up on the idea of a relationship but I need to take the pressure off myself now. To "get out of my own way". To learn to enjoy living a healthy life and enjoy working on my growth because I want to work on my growth rather than to get any affirmation, sexual or otherwise, from other people.
I know I could have worded some of this better. I hope I'm making sense.
Best wished in your journey and feel free to message me if you want to talk.
Sam
