(Sorry, this is going to be a three post job).
I wanted to make the title eye-catching. I know everyone loves a happily ever after success story where the recoverer ends up in a loving, successful sexual relationship. I suppose this is true in my case, after about two months or so of no porn. Having never been in a relationship before, this is something that would have been unthinkable to me before I found YBOP. For this I can’t thank enough every poor sod on here looking for a better life. I want to offer what help I can by telling my story. But there are so many areas of my life I want to improve on and my mood remains low most of the time because of that. It’s hardly a happily ever after story for me. Well this story is about an impossibly sweet guy who descends into his own deepest darkest hell (the full details of which the reader is spared from). He manages to claw his way out into a lesser purgatory, so let’s call it an uncharacteristic Kafkaesque success story. Excuse the hope-less, pretentious blurb. Anyway, sorry, but this will be an impossibly long post.
I’ve been looking through this site and found it incredibly helpful. I’ve read countless stories and now I’m finding myself writing my story because I’ve gradually become aware that it could very well help anyone else with similar problems, and I feel it’s my duty to contribute, even if it’s just in a small way. Be CAREFUL OF TRIGGERS. This is incredibly explicit and incredibly personal. Be warned that it starts very innocently but then gets to be a rather difficult read. If I offend anyone then I truly and deeply apologize. I’ve never really had a chance to share my story like this and I got rather carried away.
I’m 27. I’m of dual ethnicity (Asian mother, English father) and was born and raised in the UK. I still live here. My mum has very strong values and always taught me to consider other people’s feelings before my own. My dad was always around, but being a workaholic didn’t play as a big role in raising me. Although he taught me a great many things, what my mum taught me really seemed to stick. He’s the extrovert, and my mum is very reserved.
In my early school years I was the only non-white kid in school, although I was very popular. I was very sporty and everyone was very fond of me because I was kind and fair to everyone. I was always interested in what everyone else had to say, but never had that much to say myself, especially in crowds, when my contribution to conversation was close to nil. The other kids started noticing this in a big way when I was 10-11 and started giving me a hard time about it. I was very easily hurt, and, being an only child, I would mostly find solace in front of the TV. Only children always manage to spend a ridiculous amount of time alone, no matter how many friends they have.
Secondary school was a very different experience. I’m not going to go into all the details you’ll be glad to know – maybe a few… It was a school with a few other Asians, so I wasn’t the only one. I was initially quite popular there, but by age 13-14 the kids there started seeing me as a little odd. Some popular girls were interested in me, but I never acted on it. The girls who liked me eventually dwindled to practically zero but I managed to keep a circle of close friends. When I was 16-17 friends of parents, not so much my peers, started to mention how good looking I was. I also noticed a lot of girls were noticing me, but I had this crippling shyness, and being told I was good looking made me feel inadequate not being able get girls. I was quite friendly with most kids at school. I was even quite witty and quick thinking at this time, but not chatty. Even one of my Chinese friends at that time had girlfriends during his time there. I don’t recall really ever being picked on at school, but on any occasion I had to be around kids from other schools I could be quite certain I’d probably be called names for looking a bit asian.
At age 17 I became heavily addicted to internet gaming and gradually started losing my friends. Porn was also a bit of a problem. Softcore porn I’d been watching since I was about 10 or so, and hardcore porn since I was about 14. Luckily I didn’t get broadband until I was about 18 or 19. I wouldn’t say I was heavily addicted to it until I was about 20 or 21. I was addicted to internet gaming on and off until I was about 23. I always knew it was destroying my life and so it made perfect sense to stop when I eventually began to really tire of it. As for the porn, I’d been using it for material to improve my sexual stamina for when I eventually started having sex. I’m not sure what age I was when I did 10-12 hours straight of edging until my kidneys felt like they were going to implode and my tailbone went into spasm. I was probably 20 or so. I learned about kegels at some point before this, which made it easy to control my Os.
Alright, well as you can see, when it comes to written communication I can produce screeds of it. I’m pruning it as best I can though. However, I’m afraid my verbal communication is still very poor. Whenever there’s a chance to communicate in written language I become rather addicted to writing. Anyway, I think I’ll just jump straight to the sex.
So, moving forward a number of years, I’m 26, doing a PhD (but I’m a terrible disappointment to my supervisor), and I’m on a research visit somewhere on the other side of the world. I’m still a virgin and never had a girlfriend or had any experience with girls (unless you count silly kissing games when I was between 8 and 12).
I met up with a friend of my dad’s there and he took me out for dinner. When he asked me about past relationships I told him I hadn’t had any, and in response he said I needed to have some fun. He eventually convinced me to go to a strip club, but made it very clear he wasn’t going to be joining me. He’s a gay man and his part of town he assured me I would not want to go to. My fluency in the language here is pretty good, although my vocabulary is poor. It’s certainly enough to get by, and in this strip club I met a very pretty girl whose English was impressive. We managed to communicate just fine in both languages. We talked for a number of hours (which was something I’d never done with a girl before), but of course I was paying for her time. I had had a fair bit to drink even before entering that club and I was feeling incredibly confident. During our time together I gave her the most passionate kiss. I really surprised myself. Perhaps it was all those years of gradually having my confidence boosted by compliments on my appearance. Perhaps it was just the booze and she wasn’t as thrilled with it as I thought. I left with her number, but it was probably her work number. I went back to that club the following week to meet her and realized how much I’d missed her. We made plans to go for dinner on her day off. I left feeling like I was on top of the world. I felt such relief at the thought of finally meeting someone like her and finding a warm, lasting feeling of happiness that I’d never experienced before on any level. My memory improved, I could think quickly enough to take part in conversation, and I started really enjoying being around people. Life was suddenly easy, and fair.
This feeling lasted about a day or two. I’d given her my email address and not received any emails, I called her the day before we were supposed to go out for dinner and she wouldn’t answer. At that point life hit me hard. I was making a complete fool of myself. I thought back to the second time we met and, being able to view things more clearly in the cold sober light of day, I remembered the conversation drying up at various times while she looked fed up. She’d had her fun with me and then lost interest.
At this point of course I was incredibly disappointed and quite depressed, but I wasn’t all that surprised. I’d long since learned life is hard and nothing in life worth having comes easy (excuse the cliché). Over the course of my life I put no work into relationships. How could I expect to get into a meaningful relationship by paying for it?
What my dad’s friend said about having fun did stick in my head, so, with it being my last week in there, and knowing about some of the crazy, disreputable places I hadn’t had the chance or the nerve to visit, I didn’t want to miss out on having some real fun. I thought sex was a possibility, but I wasn’t sure whether I’d go through with it. I always thought that going to a prostitute meant having sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with you. This idea turned my stomach. Nevertheless I wanted to have a little look around.
Well, it seems if you want attention from a ridiculous number of women, all you have to do is wander around one of the red light districts by yourself. I somehow managed not to get physically dragged in to some of these places by some of the girls, but then I found myself standing in front of a very pretty girl who asked me if I wanted a massage. I asked her for directions to a hotel, half hoping that she’d talk me into coming with her to a massage parlour. She did. She was Taiwanese and had been working there for a couple of years, and teased me for being a half-breed. The next thing I knew I was in a small cubicle wondering what the hell I’d got myself into. She emerged after a few minutes, but only to give me a choice of girls to massage me. I didn’t expect that, but I asked her to choose for me who she recommended. The masseuse was quite pretty, petite, and a bit younger than me.
REST OF THE FIRST PART IS VERY EXPLICIT AND LONG. IS FOUND AT THE ABOVE LINK
The last part of the story I suppose is about me trying to find a cure for my copulatory impotence, and, as time went on, my ever-worsening ED. After getting back from London I searched for quite some time to find anything useful and initially all I found was articles telling me to work out more (which was no use – I already worked out more than I had time for), to eat healthily (healthy eating concerns were already starting to take over my life), and to masturbate MORE! I’d always linked masturbation with porn, and so I started daily PMO. This helped get rid of my sexual frustration from working out, but my PMO sessions were anywhere from 45min to 3 hours. I started noticing that I was sometimes having difficulty getting to more than 10-20% even with porn. I switched from looking for the perfect girl (tall leggy blonde) to looking for the perfect passionate scenes. Surely there was no harm in that. But my brain fog was getting worse and worse. My former relatively reliable photographic memory which, although nothing spectacular, often helped me to remember in minute detail things I needed for academic purposes, failed completely. I then found a video in which the two people in the scene were just what I was looking for, and it disgusted me. I didn’t want to be watching other people have sex. I wanted some sort of connection with another human being, with someone who can help me become a better person. I wanted to take care of someone, and let her take care of me. But I’d got to the point where I had no real interest in people anymore. I started seeing people as a collection of disturbing features and body parts, and the lives these people were living couldn’t be as important as mine, empty though it was. This process only took about 2 months, although arguably it was the continuation of process that began many years ago.
Excuse my language, but thank fuck for YBOP. When I watched the Gary Wilson videos and read some of the success stories from people giving up PMO everything fell into place. I knew my erections would probably come back, which is what excited me first, but I didn’t really believe the other benefits. Well, after just 3 weeks PMO free my memory started gradually improving, I started finding it an awful lot easier to concentrate on what people tell me. For the first time in my life I started having some real ambition, but it’s something I really have to actively work on. One interesting benefit is that my handwriting has once again become legible! I was so bored and listless when it came to any activity, that for years I couldn’t even find the energy to write legibly. No matter how hard I tried, my writing would not improve. I was aware of thoughts I had that what I was putting down on paper was worthless. It was a symptom of low confidence. My notes weren’t legible even to me if I read them just a couple of hours after I’d written them, and my memory had become so useless I couldn’t begin to work out what the notes meant. My ability to construct coherent sentences is returning. These aren’t things that magically happen when you give up PMO. The frustration which comes from not having a channel for some sort of release can be, with effort, converted to useful energy which can be used to drive your ambition. As a priest once told a sexually frustrated friend, “You have to channel it!” Well I finally get it, lol.
Of course it’s a huge relief to be able to get rock hard erections again, although if I get a spontaneous erection it’s anywhere between 40% to 95%. But better yet, I can once again feel pleasure just from getting erect. I haven’t experienced this since I was about 15. I can imagine that sex with erections like this must be (excuse my language again, but I’m afraid no other word will do) fucking amazing. Unfortunately though I’m sure sex wouldn’t last very long. With this level of sexual frustration I no longer believe I’d have much control over my Os.
Here’s one for the urologists. No leakage! How many recoverers are noticing they no longer have urine leakage after urination? No one has ever been able to explain this leakage to me, except by saying it’s the shape of the urethra, and that it can be “milked” after urination to stop it, or the PC muscles can be strengthened to help. No matter what I tried I could NEVER stop a fair amount of leakage since I was about 15. Now I’m pretty much cured of this problem. It would be fascinating if any other no-PMOers could confirm this is true for them too. I’m guessing it’s concentrated spunk blocking urine flow! Could it really be that simple? If so why has no one thought to say it?
I’ve told my dad about how I’ve quit porn because he’s the only one I can trust with the information, but he just sees it as something I should have done long ago and has no idea about how difficult this is. In my case, however, since I’d gotten so sick of PMO and needed something more rewarding from life, it really hasn’t been all that hard, yet. Being in public with a number of women around me is what got to be the difficult part. I sometimes really have to fight the urge to go up to a stranger and simply say, “Wanna fuck?” And I thought I was a nice guy… But it is quite a relief to be able to get all this off my chest, and, really, there’s no other way I could have done it.
As for girls in my life, well, I think I need to work on widening my circle of friends first. It’s already diminishing quickly into nothingness with everyone going off all sorts of places to do different things. Though on Valentine’s day I did have a date. I had a few dates with this girl and it didn’t go the way I would have liked it to. She was very cute and I was starting to develop deep feelings for her, although as time went on she became less interested in me. At times she seemed to me to be the most attractive girl I’d ever seen, although I’m really not usually into Asian girls. But I’m sort of glad now in retrospect. There was a chance for something to happen quite early on, but I would have had real trouble getting it up, and she was only here for a couple of weeks. There never could have been any real connection. I did have to rely on her to keep the conversation going most of the time, and it was all in another language. I’m surprised I was able to go so completely out of my comfort zone, but it’s cheating in some sense. Girls tend to forgive me the difficulty of having a proper conversation with me in their native tongue because it’s not a language I’m comfortable with, and the very fact that I’m making an effort shows interest. Usually girls don’t believe I’m interested during the ridiculously short exchanges I have with them, and if they do they’re pretty freaked out by how bad I am at conversation. Well anyway, a Valentine’s date! I’d never have believed this could happen for me a couple of years ago.
Maybe this will give someone else who also has little experience with women some incentive to actually get out there and get some experience with real girls after a lengthy and depressing reboot. The rush I get just from getting to know a girl is a different kind of rush altogether from PMO and just sex. And then spending time apart from a girl you’re developing feelings for can cause you to experience deep longing and desperation that eclipses anything else in life. Maybe I’m just an incredibly sensitive person and usually hide it very well, even from myself. Well I was apart from this girl for about a week and couldn’t get in contact with her, and I remember feeling like my heart was going to explode it was so full of intense emotion. For a while I honestly couldn’t understand how this feeling didn’t actually kill me. The anguish I felt from having given her the impression I wasn’t all that interested, when I couldn’t have been more interested, was so extreme I found myself almost in tears in public. That had never happened before. I suppose it was because for the first time I was interacting with a “normal” girl, and the prospect of finally getting into a relationship with someone who would be good for me was too much to bear. In the end it became clear nothing was going to happen, as I just mentioned, and I did eventually get over it (for the most part, I think), but not before boring my few friends to tears about it.
One thing I wanted to add was possibly something that might help the younger addicts. I don’t usually give advice, because generally advice can be quite worthless, but here goes. My first sexual experience, although fun (arguably), was really quite traumatic. I imagine it is in a lot of cases if you’re not with someone you know and trust. Even then it’s always going to be a bit embarrassing and difficult to get used to. It’s very easy to blame everything on porn and point to that as the problem. In a lot of cases it might be the biggest part of the problem, but don’t lose hope if you’ve already given up PMO and you’re still having issues. It takes time to get used to being with a real person. So clearly time, and a very patient partner are crucial to beginning a successful sex life.
Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m inadvertently stealing from something I’ve read on this site. In any case, for me, I needed many many months to get over the emotional damage the first experience caused me. Perhaps it was because I was with someone completely wrong for me, but even so, people mature at different rates, and only you know when you’re ready for that first time, or second time, and so on ad infinitum (ah, my idea of heaven).
I’m afraid you’ll have to forgive me if I seem to jump from experience to experience abruptly. I’ve been summoning up the courage to post this for more than a month, and have been adding things here and there. But the final part of the story was meeting my girlfriend of 11 days. It sounds a ludicrously short time considering how well we know each other. She says I know more about her than anyone else now. Somehow I managed to be the driving force behind what moved the relationship along so quickly. She says she can’t believe how quickly things happened and found herself crying to her mum telling her how happy she was. I suppose I won’t go into this much further, but I do need to mention about the sex. I know how worrying things can be as a recoverer and I feel I need to share some of the things that worked for me that could be useful to others. My girlfriend, although tall and blonde, initially wasn’t the sort of girl I thought I’d go for. She’s strong and independent and usually that turns me off completely. Perhaps it did initially. During our first sexual experience in the bedroom I had much difficulty getting to more than 50%, and the woman has skills. I dropped the idea of having sex and I took over and made it all about her. Afterwards she was stuck to me like glue. She started sharing so much with me and somehow when conversation turned to porn (… I know), I started spilling more than I wanted to. I ended up spending the night. Beautiful experience. We didn’t have sex that night but I had a pretty persistent (not 100%) erection the whole time. I stayed over the following week and we managed to have sex the first attempt, although I think I was at about 50% the 5-6 minutes it took for her to O. She just wanted to go to sleep after that. The next morning I think I managed 80-85%, and with it being tacitly agreed, I think, that it’d be mostly for me this time I managed to O after 5 minutes or so. Simply a huge relief followed by the feeling of having aged 20 years would describe it. Then after about 4 or 5 hours we had sex again. I could swear we were at it for 15-20 minutes or so. She stopped me after maybe 5 minutes making it clear she didn’t want to O so quickly, so we took it as slowly as we could until she got there again. The whole time I think I was 90% or so.
Some people talk about kissing and cuddling to help them relax before or during sex. But dry humping during foreplay can be quite a quick way to get relaxed while maintaining horniness. There’s no pressure to get hard and you can pass it off as teasing while you get to the level of arousal you need. But it does seem like porn needs to be gone from your mind first and it has to be gone pretty much entirely. It took me about two months of no porn to reach this stage (although I masturbated to orgasm about twice in this period), with the help of meditation initially to clear all thoughts from my mind, and then later when I was coming out of the first flatline about one month in. It’s a good sign you’re getting over the after-effects of porn if, after meditating 3-5 minutes, you can simply concentrate on your penis and get erect, with few or no thoughts in your mind except of the sensation in your penis. Perhaps the thought of a nice lady looming over it wouldn’t be such a bad thing… I realise I’ve just lost all credibility saying that, but some occasional thrills don’t seem to be such a bad thing. Some fantasy I think can be some benefit. I felt like a zombie when I didn’t allow myself any fantasy at all.
Anyway, I think no PMO to flatline and subsequent rekindling of sexual desire immediately followed by rewiring to real women/woman(!) is what got me through this. The whole process took about 2 months since I discovered YBOP, but I’d been a bit tired of the PMO for some years and always had the prospect of being able to take care of someone else’s sexual needs in mind too. Also, I’ve been getting used to the idea of having sex with real women for about a year. I’m not what one might term an “old-timer”, not by a long chalk, but porn has only on occasion been entirely about gratifying my own sexual needs, and so the relatively quick recovery time could be to do with this. Perhaps I’m not recovered at all. Time will tell. But being such a recluse for so long, I’d never considered the idea of finding a person attractive, rather than a face or a body, and porn certainly made this much more difficult. With a girlfriend it’s something I’m beginning to find easier by the day.
Well I’m completely drained having written that and even more drained having read through it. If you’ve read it through I hope there was something useful in there. My goals aren’t all that clear at the moment. I don’t think I’ll ever PMO again, so no PMO for life doesn’t seem much of a goal. I feel like trying to help one person every day, but I’m not exactly sure how realistic that is. A more realistic goal might be to just be more active in life in general, and to be less selfish, perhaps to be a good boyfriend. I still have a lot of self-esteem issues and don’t consider myself worthy of ever having the title of boyfriend. But it wouldn’t be fair to think of myself as less.
I’m quite sure I’m not fully healed, but to put all my focus on sex would be insane. There are so many other things in life which are more important. Having said that, if there are big issues in this particular area it can seem like it’s the end of the world. I can only say that in this area what seems to have worked for me is focussing on one person. With all the women out there it can be quite easy to lose your focus, but we do have to focus, and hopefully that focus isn’t too short-lived.
I’m so indecisive when it comes to posting such personal things I’m not sure whether I’ll post again, but I’ll make an appearance every now and again. For now this is my contribution, after the many hundreds of heartbreaking stories I’ve read, which I’ve somehow managed to reap some benefits from for my own selfish needs – to feel superior, to feel like I’ve learned something, to feel involved in some way.
Thanks for reading. Being used to being a listener and an observer I’m afraid I fall quite quickly for people I share things with. That means I now love you and you’re stuck with my love 
Peace. (I’ve never said that in my life, but the laddish, flippant tone seems appropriate after an indiscriminate declaration of love). Seriously, love y’all. And I can say that and mean it to a bunch of guys now who I’ve never met or communicated with without having to belittle it by putting “nohomo” after it, which I suppose I’ve actually now done, so let me be clear. Once again. I love you all.
LINK – A hard life without prostitutes…?
BY – Stiffenthesinews
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