For 100 days now I have not masturbated, I have however looked at porn on 4 different occasions and so cannot truthfully say I have been properly engaged in NoFap. I also have a girlfriend and so have not been without orgasm though we are often apart for over a week at a time. I began my NoFap journey after some sexual issues I was experiencing and I have made several discoveries along the way. I began NoFap as an experiment but I am now convinced of the negative effects of PMO.
Necessary backstory. My partner and I for a long while discussed the concept of polyamory (not limiting yourself to one partner). Last July after many difficult but productive discussions we decided to give it a go. I had some sexual partners intermittently and she soon found a sexual partner who was also Polyamorous.
My partner had no qualms about my other sexual partners but I quickly became incredibly anxious about her having another partner. But strangely enough I also became incredibly aroused. This began to destroy our sex life as I would became so aroused by the thought that sex would be very brief and immediately after orgasm I would become filled with a deep sense of shame and regret.
Her sleeping with someone else had become the most exciting and the most painful element of my life. During this time I had become deeply interested in Hotwife porn and porn involving multiple men which only added to my confusion.
Seeing that I was unable to work through these emotions my partner quickly ended her relationship with the other man and we returned to monogamy. However thoughts of the other man continued to plague me and continued to severely interfere with my sex life.
Let me be clear that throughout this time my Partner was honest, communicative and gave me endless support. The insecurity and anxiety I was suffering stemmed from myself not from my relationship. I decided to try NoFap because I was desperate for solutions and wanted my sex life to return to normal. As I said earlier I have occasionally relapsed into watching porn, but I have not once masturbated in this time. And interestingly every time I have watched porn I have gained a deeper insight into the negative emotions that motivate my interest in porn.
Today I indulged in my biggest and fourth porn binge and whilst watching porn I began asking myself why I was doing this and what it was that I found so arousing? I realised that Porn had reinforced two ideas in me.
1) Sex is abundant and it is normal to have lots of sex with lots of partners 2) However this is only true for “real men”
And so watching other people have sex throughout my admittedly sexless adolescence had convinced my brain that the only reason I wasn’t having sex was because of some deficit in my masculinity or personality. Because of this my arousal has been conditioned to watching others have sex, to watching a women having sex with a “real man”. And so knowing my partner was having sex with someone else triggered an intense crisis because I perceived it that she was having sex with a “real man” as opposed to me an “invalid man” triggering both intense arousal and intense shame and self-loathing.
I also see that my whole desire to have sex with women and to be sexually abundant is just my psyche’s efforts to “close the loop”, for me to finally be the person in the images that arouse me. I am not making negative judgements on either polyamory or wife sharing as these are irrelevant to the topic of NoFap, however I see now that porn reinforces a sexuality in which I myself am not present, a sexuality that reinforces my low sense of self.
Removing porn and masturbation from my life is empowering me to move away from this vicious cycle and begin to see myself as a worthwhile person. I am experiencing greater intimacy with my girlfriend and developing a newfound trust in myself. Thank you NoFap!!
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by lazarusborn
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