Age 28 – Virgin, ED, Rebooted With Girlfriend

Day 1 Yesterday I was up at my Mum’s house doing some work, preparing for my interview at a large manufacturing company near where I live that I am due to have on Wednesday. I had pretty much completed my work for the day and I masturbated to some porn on my laptop. It wasn’t great, the whole thing probably took a maximum of 5 minutes and as soon as I had ejaculated and wiped up the small amount of mess then it was back on with the remainder of the work and the rest of the day. I then deviated from the work I was doing and Googled something like “porn erectile dysfunction” and without a lot of reading or further Googling I came across a fantastic and incredibly helpful website. I watched the videos and read the articles, and it was as if someone had written down a brief synopsis of my life and put it on the internet.

Now it didn’t have all the details that were pertinent to me such as being an only child, parents getting divorced when I was 5, not having any strong male role models in my life, not liking myself, feeling inferior and then sorting out my life correcting things with 4 years of hard work through life coaching. It certainly didn’t have anything about being a virgin until the age of 28.

But there were other details that were incredibly similar and it made me realise that the reason I have been slow to become aroused with a real life girl on a number of occasions has been nothing to do with the girl and nothing to do with my physical health. I am 28, soon to be 29, I am in great physical shape, eat healthily, hardly drink any more and have never smoked a cigarette and have never done drugs in my life. But what was stopping me getting a fully hard and consistent erection was the fact that I had become desensitized to the female form and basic sexual acts because of internet porn use. Plain and simple.

From what I have read I am not a bad case and I KNOW that I can heal myself. It’s an addiction like any other drug or alcohol addiction and it’s all about how it affects the brain and dopamine levels and has very little to do with my penis or testosterone levels.

Finding the YBOP website seems to have been fate. I do believe in fate to a degree and it helped out when I found that site. Why? Because I have met Rachel. She is amazing. She is someone that I really connect with in a way that I have never even come remotely close to connecting with anyone else in the past. She is intelligent, funny, driven, caring, loving, tender, sweet and ridiculously physically attractive. She’s damn hot. She has an amazing body. She may not think so, but she is gorgeous and I am so lucky. Why? Because she is now my girlfriend.

But here is the deal. As one of the articles said (https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/how-i-recovered-from-porn-related-erectile-dy…) on a cerebral level I am fully aware that Rachel is physically attractive. As objective and horrible as this may sound in some ways, if I compare her physically to all the women I have ever dated (not many), the women I have worked with or women that I have just known in some way, be it friends, family, acquaintances, girls from way back at school etc, Rachel, comes out on top, way above everybody else. She is, without being too cheesy about it, exactly what I look for in a girl. She’s lovely. Truly lovely.

Yet when we’re together I only get partially hard and can’t keep that level of partial hardness for very long. I wondered if it was nerves. It’s not. I don’t feel nervous like I do before a job interview or a speech at toastmasters or like I know I would be if I was forced to do a bungee jump from a helicopter or something crazy like that.

The problem is that I have, without knowing it, and so have millions of other men worldwide, been damaging my brain by watching too much porn. The basic explanation is that I have tampered with the wiring in part of my brain by watching too much porn.

“The issue lies not in viewers’ perfectly healthy penises, but in their brain’s reward circuitry—and there is no quick fix. Normal dopamine sensitivity in the reward circuitry is critical to normal sexual responsiveness, and too much stimulation appears to weaken the dopamine response of many brains.”

My brain no longer releases enough dopamine to get aroused and I don’t have enough dopamine receptors in my brain to pick up the little bit of dopamine that is being released.

Thinking back, we never had broadband internet in the house I grew up in and the internet as a whole was very much in its infancy and I don’t think I ever really looked at porn. I can remember just surfing the internet back then and these were the days before Google. It took a good 3 minutes for a standard website to load and for all the component parts of it to be assembled in the screen with things like (31 items remaining) showing in the bottom left and hand corner on the status bar. Even looking at nude photos of women would have been ridiculous because it would have taken minutes for just a single image to load. Also, in those days I was not as computer literate and internet savvy as I am now and I think I was still conscious that Mum might find out if I did anything vaguely naughty be walking in on me.

I do remember that I had one, perhaps two copies of what we here in the UK term as lads mags lying around and I used to masturbate to them. They’re pretty tame. Basically girls in underwear or bikinis and no exposed nipples or genitals. It was easily enough to get me absolutely rock hard though. Crazy hard. If I had met Rachel back then I would have been able to carry her around on my erection alone with no hands.

So, fast forward to September 2001. I go to university in a major city. The internet isn’t that big a deal. I take my PC to uni with me but there is no internet connection in the halls of residence where we stayed in the first year. I don’t miss it though. I had only just got a mobile phone and could barely use that. Facebook and Gmail didn’t exist, and Google wasn’t around.

In halls I had no internet and no printed porn. I masturbated over memories of pretty girls I had seen on campus, many of them unobtainable to me, because, back then, I was not the man I am now. I was barely a boy. I would use my imagination and nothing more. I would picture them in underwear or topless and that would be enough. I might picture them having sex with me, but that was it. Just very tame sex. Vanilla sex you could say.

In the second year, September 2002 to summer 2003 I lived with 5 guys 3 of whom were on the Computer Systems and Networks course and without being harsh, they were massive geeks. We got broadband as they needed it and they sorted the whole thing out and connected it all up for me. Thinking about it, this was the first time in my life that I had experienced broadband. I didn’t know what speed it was and I didn’t know anything about it really other than it was always on, and it was always fast.

So that meant that everybody could surf the net and download things at the same time with no loss of performance. Other peoples music collections were bigger than my hard drive and they were downloading TV series from the USA and watching them before they were released on TV in the UK. We didn’t have YouTube or iPlayer but the internet was growing.

I remember that someone downloaded what they thought was the film Panic Room with Jodie Foster in it but it turned out to be a 3 hour Danish porn film. I watched some of it with one of the guys in the house in the same way that you would watch a normal film and found it funny but that was it. I also watched a porn film with briefly with another friend in my room because it was hilarious. Two guys were having sex with a woman on a beach. At this point I found that quite extreme and comically bad. It was mechanical sex and none of them seemed to be enjoying it. I remember that I wasn’t really aroused. At points we laughed at how awkward the whole thing seemed. I could imagine the director shouting at them to continue but they were probably just complaining at how cold the water was. There was a musical soundtrack. It was retro porn.

I remember that in the second year someone left a magazine in the lounge with erotic stories in it. It did have pictures, but I thought they were rubbish. The women were attractive, but I didn’t see the point. I read some of the stories however and got massively aroused within 10 seconds and had to put the magazine down and concentrate on something else to make the erection go away. They were very descriptive stories and got right to the point. Again, it didn’t take much to get me going. If I had seen a woman in her underwear at this age I would have had to have concentrated very hard on something else not to become aroused.

In the 3rd and final year, September 2003 to May 2004 I lived with two friends from home as well as a bunch of other people and I now understood the importance and the value of having broadband internet installed in our house as it meant we could access the university portal and get lecture notes etc and email our tutors and basically do everything that could be done in the library from the comfort of our own rooms. The library was always crammed with loads of people and was a nightmare to use.

The porn I used in that year was still images of women with topless, or in swimwear or sexy underwear. The images loaded quickly because of broadband. I would load the one I wanted and look at it occasionally while masturbating to remind me roughly what the women looked like, but other than that my mind would wonder. I would still create my own fantasies. The woman and the scenario might change and become completely fictitious but that was it. I do remember as well that I downloaded maybe 30 short clips from a series of sites that I used to look at. I may have downloaded then in either the second year or that and final year, I can’t quite remember.

The clips weren’t long. Just over 1 GB in total for all of them. I remember sharing them on the house network with a friend who at the time was into porn. I’m sure all the boys in the house were apart from one guy who had a girlfriend and another who went through women quicker than I drank pints of beer. I can’t remember much but I was not a heavy user of porn. In fact I don’t think the volume of porn or length of the sessions is important with this addiction. It’s the intensity of it with regards to dopamine release and the frequency of the sessions. If you’re mentally turned on and ALSO using material that turns you on, then the time to climax isn’t going to be very long at all. That’s my experience from a decade of porn use.

About a month after I left uni we moved and I got broadband install for Mum and I. I had used it at uni for the last 2 years and was NOT going back to dial up. So we got it installed at home and my porn use continued. I am not sure what it was like when we originally moved in. I was still using image websites. I would look at images to get revved up and then go and get into bed and think about a select one or two girls from the images and then mix that with women from real life and fictional women that I would create in my head. I would then masturbate to made up scenarios.

At some point I started watching videos at home. Either really short clips online that you could get for free because you had to pay for the full ones, or I would download some clips using Limewire like I did at university. Just blowjobs and things like that. I can’t remember masturbating at the PC whilst living with Mum. I still preferred to use images or videos to initially get turned on and then return to bed in order to pleasure myself once I had become aroused enough.

I moved out of home aged 25 in June 2008 and went to live in a house near the town centre. Initially I can’t remember what my porn use was like. I remember showing my female housemate a video because she was curious and wanted to know about porn for her work as some kind of therapist. That was actually on my hard dive. Shortly after that I deleted the files as I didn’t like having them on my PC. Porn 2.0 sites kicked off in a big way in mid 2006. YouTube and appeared in February 2005 and it didn’t take the porn world long to implement a similar style of site but with an adult theme. So these tube sites were well established by the time I moved out in 2008.

At some point I think I found Youporn.com and then not long after that a friend who was also single told me about Pornhub.com and I used those two sites extensively. I would never be on them for more than about 30 minutes at a time and often only once every 2 or 3 days. I never really surfed for porn for more than about 30 minutes per session as once I knew what sites to use I just went straight to them which reduced search time massively. Add in a 10 MB cable connection and tabbed browsing in Firefox and it made things easier. I had also learned to type faster working as a result of working in an office and using MSN and Gmail at home and had geeked out a lot learning keyboard shortcuts for Firefox. All of these little things coupled with the privacy of my own room in the house made getting my fix very quick and very easy.

Pretty soon I had taught myself to masturbate in a proper position sat in my chair rather than lying down rubbing my penis against my thigh as I had been doing. I was fully gripping my penis with my hand and really going for it. That was the proper turning point. This now mean that I could masturbate at the PC rather than going back to bed and it wasn’t long before I was no longer thinking about my own fantasies, but was purely using the video that was on the screen in front of me. I wasn’t being creative in my own mind and I wasn’t even adapting what I was seeing, I was just using it exactly as shown. I was now just a viewer. I always wondered how other guys could do that, but I had finally become one of them. I felt a strange sense of achievement, because I was masturbating like a grown up.

It was brilliant initially but the way the internet had evolved meant that I could as the YBOP website revealed to me only yesterday, start hunting which is something that dopamine does. It hunts. It seeks rewards. The reward system in my brain was being screwed up slowly but surely.

I began to load multiple videos from certain categories on the sites like anal and bondage, rather than just generally browsing or just using the first video clip that caught my eye, which is what I had been doing for a while. I was now going to the section of thee tube sites specifically for anal, bondage, doggy style or whatever it was that took my fancy. That was another indicator of further desensitisation. I could also quickly skip through the videos to find the exact bits of the clips that would stimulate me the most, that would release the biggest amount of dopamine in the shortest amount of time. There was a really useful feature were you could hover your cursor over the time bar at the bottom of the clip and see a small snapshot image of what was happening at that point in the clip. I use this to hunt further, but this time not hunting for the clip, but hunting through the clip itself.

I would leave out any striptease, talking, flirting, anything like that, and cut straight to the hard fucking or the cum shots. Over the last 3 years and no more, I have needed harder and harder porn to arouse me. Nothing dodgy, just heterosexual stuff, men having sex with women, fairly rough sex, and some light bondage stuff but that was it. It is however light years away from the bikini clad images that I started with back in 2003-2004. But thinking about it I can safely say that now when I see images of pretty girls or pretty girls in real life even if it’s just random cleavage on a beach or something, I should be getting turned on but I am not.

Now I don’t just need porn I need specific sections of multiple, hardcore, tailored videos in order to get me off and I have noticed that I am able to masturbate and ejaculate with a soft penis. That always made me wonder what was going on. I did read somewhere ages ago that the penis should be rock hard at the point of ejaculation, but I know from personal experience that this is not the case.

So, there we have it. No need to say much more apart from this continued when I moved to my current flat in June 2011. I had the added bonus of being made redundant shortly before the move and that gave me more time alone in the flat during the day and time that I could be spent masturbating. Funnily enough I probably looked at porn for less than one hour a day even when unemployed. But it’s like a drug addicted. They shoot up in the morning and they may not need another hit for a while.

For quite some time whilst unemployed I didn’t watch porn more than once or twice a fortnight.

Once I had Rachel on my radar as someone that I would like to talk to and get to know more, then I stopped masturbating completely. Perhaps it was coincidence, or perhaps the social interaction and connection had filled a void. I ceased to masturbated in late August, and only did it a couple of times in September and a couple of times in October. Once with porn and the rest of the time without.

The fact that I had low self esteem and no girlfriend for many years can’t have helped this situation. Those two factors and the porn use probably fed each other in a destructive, downward spiral.

I have without knowing it been going through the initial stages of withdrawal symptoms as described in the recovery article that I linked to earlier.

“I feel nothing. It’s like I just don’t have a libido. No morning wood. No wet dreams. No spontaneous erections. No cravings. Haven’t been horny. I’ve had opportunities to have sex but my body is not responding. I’m taking tango classes, so I’m reasonably social but still no sign of my libido. I can dance with a beautiful girl and have no physical reaction whatsoever. I’m aware cerebrally that a girl is attractive, but I don’t feel it physically.”

That feeling is quite common to me. My porn use and general masturbation habits have diminished but because they have not ceased completely I believe that for the last year or so I have been locked in a cycle of partial rehabilitation and relapse, never able to fully escape from the clutches of porn. I have never had many wet dreams, only one that I can remember waking up from ejaculating everywhere and that was before I had any internet connection many may years ago. I haven’t had morning wood properly in years. I think that the problems have only become properly apparent in the last 3 years when real women have had some part to play for the first time ever.

I can remember talking about it with with my life coach and putting it down to performance anxiety. I am now guessing that genuine performance anxiety would have been responsible for no more than 10% of the problem. Shocking really, but the main thing is that I now know what is wrong with me and I know that it can be fixed without spending any money or seeking professional help or anything like that.

Porn, Masturbation, Orgasm or PMO for short. I need to go without PMO until New Years Day. That is my initial goal, any day from then on will be a bonus. If I take today, 18th October as Day 1, then New Years Day will be day 75. If I can go without PMO between now and then, I fully believe that I will be back to normal. It may not take as long as that, but it may take longer, I don’t know. One thing is for sure, I will succeed. My motivation? Rachel. I don’t need any stronger motivation than her. Thinking about it, there is no stronger motivation for me. I want our relationship to be the best it can be, and me functioning properly on all levels will help that. I am helping myself to help us. I will need her help, awareness, understanding and support as well. I will beat this.

Whilst I do want to have sex with her I don’t necessarily want to be banging her brains out over the kitchen table or something like that, I know that she is much more special than that. We have such an awesome connection and enjoy that way more than just sex as a physical act. I think that my fear of not being able to properly enter her has in a way forced me to enjoy the non sexual side of the relationship and actually look at her as a person and get to know her and become attracted to her, fully for who she is and every aspect of her personality.

I want to fall in love with Rachel, I want to be her boyfriend, I want to make strong, passionate love to her. I want her to become incredibly aroused by how big and hard my penis is. I want sex to be fun and enjoyable for us both and not just her.

She mentioned not having sex and focusing on other stuff and at the time I didn’t like the sound of that. At that point I hadn’t discovered YBOP and that I have an addiction. Having learned about my addiction and given it some thought, I would like to do that, and I think she would appreciate it too. I have no problem pleasuring her manually or orally, and she can touch me as well if she likes, but the simple thing is that I must not PMO on my own.

My only source of porn is the internet on my laptop. There is no printed porn anywhere, and no files saved on my hard drive. It’s all out there on the web and can be accessed with just a few clicks. It’s just going to be a question of remaining strong and using my relationship with Rachel as motivation for not giving in and being weak.

Another thing to overcome will be my own thoughts of sex and porn like images. It’s not actually that bad. From now on when something like that pops into my head I will just think of Rachel, and not necessarily in a sexual manner.

But alongside that there will be a plan of action.

Now when I want to masturbate I will do press ups instead, aiming for sets of 20. This will serve as a distraction, use up physical energy, build muscle and strength that I can then use in the gym or real life, help hormone production, make me look better and feel more confident.

Once I get back to work, office hours, combined with all my hobbies, keeping this PMO diary updated, and the need to cook, shop, do housework, see Mum, see friends and spend time with my wonderful loving girlfriend Rachel will mean that I don’t have much time to spend thinking about porn and that kind of stuff.

Distraction and diversion of focus is the key along with abstaining. The most difficult time will be falling asleep at night when I am alone. I used to masturbate to help me fall asleep a fair bit, but that won’t be an option now. I will have to get Rachel to where the least sexy pyjamas possible when we sleep together so that I can be sure it won’t tempt me.

I’m actually genuinely pumped up and excited to have discover the YBOP website and identified my problem. I know it’s a genuine site because a) it isn’t trying to sell me anything or get me to sign up for anything, b) it’s no covered in adverts for anything and c) when I read the articles and accounts of other men, I can identify heavily with what they are saying and it’s so incredibly similar to my own personal experience that I am 100% certain that this is the affliction I have been suffering from.

As the website says, your doctor won’t be able to help you as medical practice is years behind and cannot adapt at the same rate that the internet is evolving. I am convinced that many men suffer from this, and that the trend in porn related erectile dysfunction mirrors the increase in the speed and availability of broadband internet.

[This guy is a great writer. View his intervening posts on his blog.]

Day 78

I had sex with my girlfriend Rachel on Day 76. She went to bed shortly after we had welcomed in the New Year and then she surprised me by wearing some nice lingerie. During foreplay I got really hard within about 2 minutes and with minimal touching and no fantasy, simply focusing on the physical sensations that I was experiencing through my 5 senses at that moment in time.

After quite a lengthy foreplay session I went on top which was good. It felt amazing. Much more sensitive than it had done back in mid to late September when I was feeling nothing and barely able to maintain an erection. I was pounding away and it felt completely numb. This time however we took things far more slowly and we both enjoyed it a lot more. We were laughing and joking during sex as well which was great. I think that the previous numbness was not only due to porn but also the overly aggressive death grip that I used to employ. I can now see that I would end up gripping it far harder than a vagina can and the strokes I used were way too aggressive although at the time you don’t realise that.

I got tired and Rachel went on top. It didn’t feel quite as good for me and my erection faded slowly over a period of about 10 minutes and we had to stop when I went soft. I didn’t orgasm, but it was great. I then pleasured Rachel with my hands and then we went to sleep. In the morning we had brief foreplay and then brief sex with Rachel on top taking it far slower than she had been and I orgasmed as result. We then slept in for a few hours. I felt no hangover or brain fog from the orgasm. Nothing at all. It shows that orgasms resulting from human interaction are very different than those resulting from PM.

Thee next day we had a 2 hour cuddle session on the floor of the lounge in the afternoon, kissing and talking and it was amazing how connected we felt. The time flew by.

We have agreed that we can only have sex at the weekend and that I will continue being abstinent during the week just as I did during my initial 75 days. At weekends Rachel and only touch my penis if it is already hard. This should keep us away from trying loads of manual stimulation in the event of me not getting fully hard.

On day 77 we didn’t really try anything sexual. I wasn’t feeling like it at all, so I think it’s a good thing that we’re limiting sex to weekends only, and even then Rachel has assured me that there is no pressure. I guess it’s similar to working out a masturbation schedule if you’re fully recovered and single. I am so very thankful that she is being so considerate and supportive regarding this. It means that we are both thinking long term. We’ve talked it through a number of times and I can see that after 75 days there are great improvements, but there is still a long way to go.

I will be seeing Rachel this weekend but then the weekend after that 14th and 15th of January she is working and so I won’t see her at a weekend for 2 weeks which should help things.

In the meantime I am feeling good. I am back at work after the Christmas break and everything is going very well. I am keeping myself busy and I have a Toastmasters meeting tonight. The next landmark I am aiming for is Tuesday 31st January 2012 which will be Day 106. I am going to take 2012 a month at a time.

Day 119