D
djdevilct
Guest
I am a 44 year old man on Day 14 of no PMO. In fact, no P or M or O at all. Pretty much at flatline the whole time so far. Actually I was having problems getting hard WITH porn before I quit it, trying to force myself to stay hard or get off to even my favorite vids and pics. If I had no physical symptoms I might have gone much, much longer without doing anything about it at all. But now that I've recognized my destructive addiction to porn I am committed to not going back to that pattern of time wasting and escapism.
Since I?m pretty new to the process of rebooting, the only thing I can do today is share my story. As I sit here trying to sort out which details about myself and my past are significant to where I?ve gotten myself, suddenly it ALL seems relevant to my addiction in some way. This didn?t happen overnight. It?s been a lifetime of incidents and feelings that led me here. My REALLY long-winded story may get too involved for you so I?ll boil down my own personal experience with porn to the simplest bullet points:
- From my earliest memories of my sexual awakening, porn provided me with a way to see what I wanted to look at without having to involve other people.
- As a male teenager in the 1980s who was interested in males as well as females, I felt it was in my best interest at the time to keep the details of my sexual feelings private.
- Watching a lot of porn gave me a terrible self-image in terms of body and dicksize, causing performance anxiety in any real-life sexual situations with both males and females. My anxiety was treated with ED pills from doctors who said I needed the confidence boost, and then eventually from online pharmacies when doctors asked too many questions. They rarely worked the way I needed.
- Gay porn VHS tapes and DVDs were pretty much the only exposure I had to anything gay in the 1980s and 90s and I formed my vision of ?normal gay lifestyle? from its ridiculous exaggerations of male-on-male sexuality. Since I didn?t identify with this vision, which was (is) also perpetuated by TV and movie media, it kept me from believing I could possibly be ?gay? at all which caused major confusion in accepting my sexuality.. or even identifying it.
- As someone with a strong fetish interest (legs and feet) it has always been embarrassing for me to talk about or mention even to my partners some sexual activities that turn me on the most. But an abundance of the right porn vids and pics allowed me to watch it without having to participate in it.
- Escaping into hours-long daily sessions of fapping to porn allowed me to get the rush of brain chemicals without having to address my relationship issues, or most other issues in my life either.
- Over time it got harder to find stimulating enough porn to get to the orgasm and those precious brain chemicals.
If any of this interests you or strikes a chord with you, feel free to keep reading. At the moment I'm having a hard time deciding what to warn you about that might be a trigger for those of you reading this. I'd like to talk freely about the stuff going on in my head. I will be conscious of not getting graphic or needlessly explicit, but if you're very sensitive to triggers at your phase of where you are you may decide to skip this initial post. I won't hold it against you.
--------------------------------------------
I've been in relationships with women and men over the years. The two most significant ones were 9-years with a girlfriend during my teens and 20s, and my current boyfriend for the past 17 years. Sexuality is a funny thing and bisexuality even more so. All my life I used to watch straight and gay porn interchangeably, it was all exciting to me. But in a world where male sexuality doesn't allow for the same sliding scale of expression and exploration as female sexuality, a man is generally given the option to either be 100% straight or to jump off the cliff into the abyss and wear the permanent label of "Gay." In my opinion and experience it's not nearly that simple. Males were the object of my earliest urges and memories, and I developed intense guilt over it when I was told that boys were supposed to like girls. From the very beginning of my sexual awakening I learned I had to hide it, and using porn to enjoy what I liked was just easier than dealing with the pitfalls of real interaction. And I found out first hand what a hassle it was to have interactions with other guys on any intimate level. As a teenager in the 1980s I felt a lot of social pressure to get with girls, so I did... and I discovered that I liked them too! And man, it was so much easier on a social AND intimate level being with girls, so that's when I started my first significant relationship. And even tho she and I had great sex together all the time, I was still using porn to fill in an element that was now not an option.. men.
The discussions of marriage and starting a family made me realize that I wasn't willing to get into a situation where I had to abandon the possibility of being with men altogether. Because in my mind that's what had to be done.. pick one side and live with that for the rest of my life. It was a gut-wrenching decision but I knew that given the choice of being exclusively with a man or exclusively with a woman, I would miss the external organs more than the internal ones. It was a terrible breakup for both of us, because we had such a strong connection.
So I started dating guys exclusively. And I had my porn. I watched a LOT of 1990s gay porn on the VCR. That was my only exposure to what gay life was at the time. The few dates I had with real men weren't anything like those porn movies. I don't know that I necessarily wanted them to be but it seemed like the other guys expected it, so I somehow became anxious about why it wasn't. Why weren't my sexual exploits like all the ones I see in 1990s porn?? And why was I not loving this life I specifically chose to lead? There must be something wrong with ME. I became so nervous at each sexual opportunity that it often turned into performance anxiety, which was embarrassing on top of confusing.
When I met my current boyfriend where I worked in NYC it was natural and relaxed. We "dated" in the old fashioned sense. There wasn't the rush to get into bed to try out all the intricate maneuvers I learned from watching porn. It was just spending time with another guy I liked. I couldn't guess he was 12 years older because he didn't look it or act it, and anyway it wasn't an issue for me. He was fairly new to gay sex and we explored together. He made me laugh. He made me comfortable. It took 2 years to move in together and in Jan 2000 I gladly left the comfort of where I grew up in NJ to start a new life with him in CT. Working together, living together, going on vacation together plus being in a relationship. Pretty intense, huh. Among the fun things we could share with each other was watching porn. Since he had been a 38 yo virgin, there was a lot of porn going on in his world also. This was great! A partner to watch porn with! Right around that time the "Bear" community was rising in the gay world. Bears are gay guys who are generally big and hairy and aren't afraid of being regular guys instead of the stereotypical groomed and girly image that's perpetuated in TV and movies (and the media). We grabbed all the Bear porn we could find as this was a primary interest for both of us. And we found social outlets where we met with Bears in real life.
Very quickly we learned that Bears are VERY playful. Open relationships and playful exploration are normal in the community, and encouraged. My bf and I talked over what we were comfortable with and decided to open our relationship to play sexually with other guys together. All of a sudden with exposure to many naked men in real life performing sexually, I was surprisingly uncomfortable with my body even among guys who are specifically relaxed about body image. I became especially conscious of my penis size. To be fair I've been concerned about my penis all my life from constant exposure to professional porn stars who are there BECAUSE of their large pieces. I'm a tall, broad guy and I've been told by enough guys into Bears to believe that they find me attractive. But it doesn?t matter. I still feel below average to the rest of the world and down there I'm just plain average, and I'm ok with it now. I mean, I HAVE to be ok with it.. It's what I've got here to work with, right?
But the body image and penis image and expectations from porn culture and social/sexual pressures of a new community... It's when I started having marked problems with ED. With my bf alone it wasn't an issue. But with other guys it depended on the situation and my comfort level. I guess I could have suggested going back to just being with my bf.. but I didn't want to. I still wanted to pursue the images of sexuality I saw in porn, and I did enjoy the contact with other guys. I don't want to sound too much like a victim here.. This was all my choice. I decided to see a doctor about my erection problems and he had me try different ED pills saying it would give me the confidence I needed to just relax and not worry about getting an erection. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn?t. Even though I was selective about who I would consider getting naked with, an erection still wasn?t a sure thing in the heat of the moment. I couldn?t shake all those images in my head I had learned from watching porn about how sex was supposed to go. But I kept at it.
We were still using porn all the time even with the increase in real-life sexual activity. And a funny thing happened.. I started to see that my bf and I gravitated to different scenes of the movies (VHS, DVD, not much internet yet) according to our differing tastes. We started watching porn separately more and more. I was watching some straight porn again mixed in with gay porn. When high-speed internet porn became available, we began retreating to our own computers watching an abundance of individual snippets of scene after scene of our own personal taste. It was also around this time when we stopped having sex with each other as a primary sexual outlet. I'm not blaming internet porn or the open relationship for that. There's a million things in life that make two people have less sex with each other. But both internet porn and the open relationship made it easier to continue with our day as before, have our own sexual releases, and NOT address what was wrong in our relationship.
Autopilot engaged.
Working together, living together, going on vacation together and being in a relationship. And we both spend (spent) hours on the internet separately getting off. I can?t possibly blame him for any of his part since it was me who pulled away sexually. We both have online friendships with guys on hookup sites having conversations that run on for years, many of which never involve meeting in person. But at least those are interactive conversations with "real" people. While my bf's thing is fapping on cam with other guys, I had an affinity for prerecorded porn. I was happier skipping to exactly what I wanted to see - if it even had what I wanted to see - and move to the next one.. as opposed to having to wait for the other guy to decide when and if something was going to happen at all. Plus I was still having performance anxiety and ED even on cam, which is just as embarrassing as in person. Porn videos allowed me to explore what I wanted at my own speed without embarrassment. Neatly disconnected. Eventually I stopped hooking up with real people altogether and just spent more time online. A good part of the time was also spent on sites like Facebook where I could keep in contact with friends and make lots of new ones that I'll never meet. But by far the most time was spent on internet porn. My self-employment setup allows me to make my own schedule and I could spend 2, 3, 4 hours every day in bed with my laptop fapping to porn. All kinds of porn.. more and more extreme. Eventually I needed it to be more extreme to get to the same level of excitement. Sometimes my hardon would crap out on me in the middle of edging to porn, even during my favorite stuff. That was really confusing to me, and annoying. It happened more and more often and eventually I had to force myself to get hard and stay hard with just the right visual stimulation long enough so I could at least O. I needed that O and the rush of brain chemicals, even when the images I used to get there were repulsive to me after it was over.
At some point over the last year I decided it would be "healthier" for me to try getting into cam sites like my bf does, to try introducing the "live" people back into my sexuality. I encountered the usual ED performance anxiety but got a nice rush from the interactions. The cool part was that my bf and I were doing it together some of the time and even showing off some sex acts on cam.. some of the only physical interaction he and I would have together in our week. About 6 months ago or so, someone new came into our lives unexpectedly. We met him on a camming site and the three of us got along equally, which is pretty rare for us. When we met in person it was clear we instantly had chemistry together in all dynamics. I get hard with him naturally and can?t explain exactly why it?s different. But my patterned brain won?t let me stop worrying when my dick is going to inevitably fail, so even tho I didn?t need it I took an ED pill anyway.. for the confidence. I know I don?t need it but I care what he thinks so much that I?m afraid of something going wrong in that department. He seems to keep wanting to come back more and more so I guess my fear is unfounded..? But when he's not here I slip back into my PMO routine and this last time is when I ran into the more serious PIED incident that made me stop all porn.
This is new territory for all of us. I don?t know what I think about three in a relationship but I?m learning that sometimes you just have to go with what feels right and see where the ride takes you. I?m not deluding myself into thinking this is fixing my relationship with my partner and I know I need to deal with those issues separately. But having ?our new boyfriend? in the picture has given me incentive to snap out of my comfortable, escapist routine and to take action on things that need to be addressed. I want to be able to have a healthy sexual life with any and all of my partners and I won?t accept porn altering the way my brain and dick work anymore.
Time to disengage autopilot.
As I go through this process I?ll try to give updates on my progress. If nothing else it will give me something to do online besides surfing for porn! But since being online so much is a trigger for me, my hope is to spend less and less time online in general. I apologize if I disappear for chunks of time. We?ll see how this goes.
Thanks for getting this far. Hope it helped in some way.
DJ
Since I?m pretty new to the process of rebooting, the only thing I can do today is share my story. As I sit here trying to sort out which details about myself and my past are significant to where I?ve gotten myself, suddenly it ALL seems relevant to my addiction in some way. This didn?t happen overnight. It?s been a lifetime of incidents and feelings that led me here. My REALLY long-winded story may get too involved for you so I?ll boil down my own personal experience with porn to the simplest bullet points:
- From my earliest memories of my sexual awakening, porn provided me with a way to see what I wanted to look at without having to involve other people.
- As a male teenager in the 1980s who was interested in males as well as females, I felt it was in my best interest at the time to keep the details of my sexual feelings private.
- Watching a lot of porn gave me a terrible self-image in terms of body and dicksize, causing performance anxiety in any real-life sexual situations with both males and females. My anxiety was treated with ED pills from doctors who said I needed the confidence boost, and then eventually from online pharmacies when doctors asked too many questions. They rarely worked the way I needed.
- Gay porn VHS tapes and DVDs were pretty much the only exposure I had to anything gay in the 1980s and 90s and I formed my vision of ?normal gay lifestyle? from its ridiculous exaggerations of male-on-male sexuality. Since I didn?t identify with this vision, which was (is) also perpetuated by TV and movie media, it kept me from believing I could possibly be ?gay? at all which caused major confusion in accepting my sexuality.. or even identifying it.
- As someone with a strong fetish interest (legs and feet) it has always been embarrassing for me to talk about or mention even to my partners some sexual activities that turn me on the most. But an abundance of the right porn vids and pics allowed me to watch it without having to participate in it.
- Escaping into hours-long daily sessions of fapping to porn allowed me to get the rush of brain chemicals without having to address my relationship issues, or most other issues in my life either.
- Over time it got harder to find stimulating enough porn to get to the orgasm and those precious brain chemicals.
If any of this interests you or strikes a chord with you, feel free to keep reading. At the moment I'm having a hard time deciding what to warn you about that might be a trigger for those of you reading this. I'd like to talk freely about the stuff going on in my head. I will be conscious of not getting graphic or needlessly explicit, but if you're very sensitive to triggers at your phase of where you are you may decide to skip this initial post. I won't hold it against you.
--------------------------------------------
I've been in relationships with women and men over the years. The two most significant ones were 9-years with a girlfriend during my teens and 20s, and my current boyfriend for the past 17 years. Sexuality is a funny thing and bisexuality even more so. All my life I used to watch straight and gay porn interchangeably, it was all exciting to me. But in a world where male sexuality doesn't allow for the same sliding scale of expression and exploration as female sexuality, a man is generally given the option to either be 100% straight or to jump off the cliff into the abyss and wear the permanent label of "Gay." In my opinion and experience it's not nearly that simple. Males were the object of my earliest urges and memories, and I developed intense guilt over it when I was told that boys were supposed to like girls. From the very beginning of my sexual awakening I learned I had to hide it, and using porn to enjoy what I liked was just easier than dealing with the pitfalls of real interaction. And I found out first hand what a hassle it was to have interactions with other guys on any intimate level. As a teenager in the 1980s I felt a lot of social pressure to get with girls, so I did... and I discovered that I liked them too! And man, it was so much easier on a social AND intimate level being with girls, so that's when I started my first significant relationship. And even tho she and I had great sex together all the time, I was still using porn to fill in an element that was now not an option.. men.
The discussions of marriage and starting a family made me realize that I wasn't willing to get into a situation where I had to abandon the possibility of being with men altogether. Because in my mind that's what had to be done.. pick one side and live with that for the rest of my life. It was a gut-wrenching decision but I knew that given the choice of being exclusively with a man or exclusively with a woman, I would miss the external organs more than the internal ones. It was a terrible breakup for both of us, because we had such a strong connection.
So I started dating guys exclusively. And I had my porn. I watched a LOT of 1990s gay porn on the VCR. That was my only exposure to what gay life was at the time. The few dates I had with real men weren't anything like those porn movies. I don't know that I necessarily wanted them to be but it seemed like the other guys expected it, so I somehow became anxious about why it wasn't. Why weren't my sexual exploits like all the ones I see in 1990s porn?? And why was I not loving this life I specifically chose to lead? There must be something wrong with ME. I became so nervous at each sexual opportunity that it often turned into performance anxiety, which was embarrassing on top of confusing.
When I met my current boyfriend where I worked in NYC it was natural and relaxed. We "dated" in the old fashioned sense. There wasn't the rush to get into bed to try out all the intricate maneuvers I learned from watching porn. It was just spending time with another guy I liked. I couldn't guess he was 12 years older because he didn't look it or act it, and anyway it wasn't an issue for me. He was fairly new to gay sex and we explored together. He made me laugh. He made me comfortable. It took 2 years to move in together and in Jan 2000 I gladly left the comfort of where I grew up in NJ to start a new life with him in CT. Working together, living together, going on vacation together plus being in a relationship. Pretty intense, huh. Among the fun things we could share with each other was watching porn. Since he had been a 38 yo virgin, there was a lot of porn going on in his world also. This was great! A partner to watch porn with! Right around that time the "Bear" community was rising in the gay world. Bears are gay guys who are generally big and hairy and aren't afraid of being regular guys instead of the stereotypical groomed and girly image that's perpetuated in TV and movies (and the media). We grabbed all the Bear porn we could find as this was a primary interest for both of us. And we found social outlets where we met with Bears in real life.
Very quickly we learned that Bears are VERY playful. Open relationships and playful exploration are normal in the community, and encouraged. My bf and I talked over what we were comfortable with and decided to open our relationship to play sexually with other guys together. All of a sudden with exposure to many naked men in real life performing sexually, I was surprisingly uncomfortable with my body even among guys who are specifically relaxed about body image. I became especially conscious of my penis size. To be fair I've been concerned about my penis all my life from constant exposure to professional porn stars who are there BECAUSE of their large pieces. I'm a tall, broad guy and I've been told by enough guys into Bears to believe that they find me attractive. But it doesn?t matter. I still feel below average to the rest of the world and down there I'm just plain average, and I'm ok with it now. I mean, I HAVE to be ok with it.. It's what I've got here to work with, right?
But the body image and penis image and expectations from porn culture and social/sexual pressures of a new community... It's when I started having marked problems with ED. With my bf alone it wasn't an issue. But with other guys it depended on the situation and my comfort level. I guess I could have suggested going back to just being with my bf.. but I didn't want to. I still wanted to pursue the images of sexuality I saw in porn, and I did enjoy the contact with other guys. I don't want to sound too much like a victim here.. This was all my choice. I decided to see a doctor about my erection problems and he had me try different ED pills saying it would give me the confidence I needed to just relax and not worry about getting an erection. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn?t. Even though I was selective about who I would consider getting naked with, an erection still wasn?t a sure thing in the heat of the moment. I couldn?t shake all those images in my head I had learned from watching porn about how sex was supposed to go. But I kept at it.
We were still using porn all the time even with the increase in real-life sexual activity. And a funny thing happened.. I started to see that my bf and I gravitated to different scenes of the movies (VHS, DVD, not much internet yet) according to our differing tastes. We started watching porn separately more and more. I was watching some straight porn again mixed in with gay porn. When high-speed internet porn became available, we began retreating to our own computers watching an abundance of individual snippets of scene after scene of our own personal taste. It was also around this time when we stopped having sex with each other as a primary sexual outlet. I'm not blaming internet porn or the open relationship for that. There's a million things in life that make two people have less sex with each other. But both internet porn and the open relationship made it easier to continue with our day as before, have our own sexual releases, and NOT address what was wrong in our relationship.
Autopilot engaged.
Working together, living together, going on vacation together and being in a relationship. And we both spend (spent) hours on the internet separately getting off. I can?t possibly blame him for any of his part since it was me who pulled away sexually. We both have online friendships with guys on hookup sites having conversations that run on for years, many of which never involve meeting in person. But at least those are interactive conversations with "real" people. While my bf's thing is fapping on cam with other guys, I had an affinity for prerecorded porn. I was happier skipping to exactly what I wanted to see - if it even had what I wanted to see - and move to the next one.. as opposed to having to wait for the other guy to decide when and if something was going to happen at all. Plus I was still having performance anxiety and ED even on cam, which is just as embarrassing as in person. Porn videos allowed me to explore what I wanted at my own speed without embarrassment. Neatly disconnected. Eventually I stopped hooking up with real people altogether and just spent more time online. A good part of the time was also spent on sites like Facebook where I could keep in contact with friends and make lots of new ones that I'll never meet. But by far the most time was spent on internet porn. My self-employment setup allows me to make my own schedule and I could spend 2, 3, 4 hours every day in bed with my laptop fapping to porn. All kinds of porn.. more and more extreme. Eventually I needed it to be more extreme to get to the same level of excitement. Sometimes my hardon would crap out on me in the middle of edging to porn, even during my favorite stuff. That was really confusing to me, and annoying. It happened more and more often and eventually I had to force myself to get hard and stay hard with just the right visual stimulation long enough so I could at least O. I needed that O and the rush of brain chemicals, even when the images I used to get there were repulsive to me after it was over.
At some point over the last year I decided it would be "healthier" for me to try getting into cam sites like my bf does, to try introducing the "live" people back into my sexuality. I encountered the usual ED performance anxiety but got a nice rush from the interactions. The cool part was that my bf and I were doing it together some of the time and even showing off some sex acts on cam.. some of the only physical interaction he and I would have together in our week. About 6 months ago or so, someone new came into our lives unexpectedly. We met him on a camming site and the three of us got along equally, which is pretty rare for us. When we met in person it was clear we instantly had chemistry together in all dynamics. I get hard with him naturally and can?t explain exactly why it?s different. But my patterned brain won?t let me stop worrying when my dick is going to inevitably fail, so even tho I didn?t need it I took an ED pill anyway.. for the confidence. I know I don?t need it but I care what he thinks so much that I?m afraid of something going wrong in that department. He seems to keep wanting to come back more and more so I guess my fear is unfounded..? But when he's not here I slip back into my PMO routine and this last time is when I ran into the more serious PIED incident that made me stop all porn.
This is new territory for all of us. I don?t know what I think about three in a relationship but I?m learning that sometimes you just have to go with what feels right and see where the ride takes you. I?m not deluding myself into thinking this is fixing my relationship with my partner and I know I need to deal with those issues separately. But having ?our new boyfriend? in the picture has given me incentive to snap out of my comfortable, escapist routine and to take action on things that need to be addressed. I want to be able to have a healthy sexual life with any and all of my partners and I won?t accept porn altering the way my brain and dick work anymore.
Time to disengage autopilot.
As I go through this process I?ll try to give updates on my progress. If nothing else it will give me something to do online besides surfing for porn! But since being online so much is a trigger for me, my hope is to spend less and less time online in general. I apologize if I disappear for chunks of time. We?ll see how this goes.
Thanks for getting this far. Hope it helped in some way.
DJ
