Last summer (now over a year ago) I met a girl…let’s call her Rachel. Rachel was different from every other girl I’ve hooked up with–she was more fun, cooler, had a better sense of humor. For the first time in my life, I had caught real feelings for a girl and no longer cared so much about having as many random meaningless hookups as possible so I could brag about how often I get laid.
The girl made me think, even if just for a second before I forced the scary thought out of my mind, about committing to her and being in a real relationship. The times we spent together were some of the best I’ve ever had, no matter whether we were having a fancy dinner date or just sitting around in my apartment. But even this understates how important Rachel was to me, because Rachel made me realize I was actually capable of certain sorts of feelings and of real intimacy and closeness with a girl, something I had always questioned to some extent. On top of all of this, she was beautiful.
Despite all this, I cannot remember a single sexual experience with her that I would label “successful.” From the very beginning, my erections were lackluster. Only once or twice was I able get it hard enough to initiate sex, and even then it went soft shortly thereafter. I was confused. At this point, I had never heard of porn-induced erectile dysfunction, so I would consistently blame it on being “tired” or “having an off-night.”
When the summer was over, I went back to school in another city. During the school semester, I had mixed success in terms of sexual function. With some girls I could get a pretty decent erection and have great sex. Other times, I couldn’t get it up at all. I started to notice a pattern, however. The more I hated a girl or found her annoying, the rougher the sex would be and the easier it was for me to get and stay aroused (a pattern I would later realize was attributable to the sensitizing and desensitizing effects of porn). This began to explain why my problems were worst with Rachel, even though she was the most attractive to me in certain respects. I felt so much affection for Rachel that I couldn’t even imagine having rough, hateful sex with her–all I had for her were the much less arousing feelings of love and affection.
When I went to visit Rachel over winter break, I couldn’t get it up whatsoever. One of the most confusing and distressing moments of my life was when my penis was in beautiful girl’s mouth yet couldn’t possibly be any softer. “What is wrong with me? How fucked up am I that this is even possible?” Having been exiled from Rachel’s bed to the couch in her living room, I couldn’t stop thinking these thoughts over and over while I lay alone desperately trying to sleep so I could escape this waking nightmare. Call me dramatic, but this was undoubtedly the worst night of my entire life. For all the meaningless, boring girls I had had amazing sex with, I couldn’t satisfy the one girl I actually cared about; and not only was I expecting to lose her love, but I had no idea what was wrong with me or whether I was ever going to return to having a normal, satisfying sex life.
In the morning, I left Rachel’s apartment and returned to my sister’s apartment where I was staying during my visit. Immediately after entering her apartment and seeing her, I broke down sobbing, the first time I had done so in possibly a decade and perhaps the first time my sister had ever seen me truly vulnerable. I described to her exactly what had happened, a notion I would have scoffed at if I hadn’t been in such a state of absolute desperation, but I was lucky to have done so.
As a therapist and an occasional attendee of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meetings, my sister suspected right away that the problem was related to porn use. She sent me a link to yourbrainonporn.com. All it took was watching one of Gabe Deem’s videos on the basics of rebooting and I was near certain PIED was my problem. I’m normally a pretty “skeptical” person, especially when it comes to ideas outside of the scientific mainstream, but the way Gabe Deem’s description of the symptoms of PIED matched up perfectly with everything I had been experiencing (from loss of morning wood, to unreliable or weak erections, to trouble using condoms, to strangely specific symptoms like the inability to maintain an erection while standing up and escalating porn use–eventually, I needed something almost unspeakably transgressive and shocking to get aroused, such as rape or incest porn) made it difficult to question this explanation.
And, of course, I passed the PIED test (get an erection with porn but be unable to get an erection with just your hand) with flying colors.
While the night before had been the most discouraging of my life, that morning eventually turned into the most encouraging. There is something absolutely invigorating about finding out in very concrete terms exactly what you need to do to fix the biggest problem in your life, even when you realize that actually having the self-discipline to follow through with it won’t be easy.
And it wasn’t, at least not in the long-run. It did start off very easy. Rachel and I were over. Things just felt “too weird” for her now, and she very reasonably maintained that she couldn’t be romantically involved with someone if there wasn’t an adequate sexual component to it. Of course, this was devastating to me. Not only had porn had taken from me the closest thing to love I had ever experienced, but, right or wrong, my self-worth as a “man” had been–and still is, to a large extent– dependent on my ability to sexual satisfy women, especially those I care most about. But this devastation made the initial reboot a piece of cake in terms of self-discipline. Every time I felt the slightest urge to watch porn, I thought about what porn had done to my life and how it had taken Rachel from me, and I channeled that energy into self-discipline.
(Before I get into the timeline of my reboot, let me say that I think my recovery was unusually quick, and this may have something to do with the fact that I had been sexually active with real girls since I was 15. I didn’t “grow up on just porn” the way some people who take much longer to recover did. So don’t get discouraged if your recovery takes longer than this.)
In just 2-3 weeks, I was consistently getting morning wood and having wet dreams, both things I hadn’t experienced in a long time. That’s when I knew I was making progress, and seeing this progress made me even more determined and disciplined. After about 1.5 months, I was kissing a girl, and from that alone I got the strongest erection I had had in years. I decided I was ready to have sex. I did wonder if I was ending my reboot too soon and was lacking self-discipline in a moment of extreme sexual desire, but I went ahead with it anyway.
I came in about 15 seconds…luckily, this girl was one of my close friends and one of the few people I had told about my PIED issues, so she was very understanding about why I came so quickly. She slept over at my place, and in the morning, as we were cuddling, I was perfectly hard again and we had sex (this time lasting much longer.) The rest of the semester I had numerous sexual partners and experiences and I never had any erectile issues whatsoever. I even had sex to the point of ejaculation three separate times in the span of about an hour on one night, a feat I never thought I was capable of (I think quitting porn completely made my refractory period much shorter than it had ever been.)
But there was an even more fundamental change in my sex life: completely opposite of when I was using porn, the most arousing sex to me became the slow, intimate, romantic, loving sex. The best sex I was having was no longer with the girl I hated the most but with the girl I liked the most. It was crazy just how fundamentally quitting porn could change my conception of what sex should or could be.
When summer rolled around, I moved back to the city where Rachel lives. We casually got drinks and lunch a few times, until I finally tried to take things back up to a romantic level. Things were just too weird, and there needed to be an adequate sexual component to any romantic involvement, Rachel would tell me. That final night when I couldn’t get it up at all had taken a toll not only on my self-esteem but on hers. She said my inability to get hard made her feel as though she wasn’t sexy enough or skilled enough at giving oral sex.
I realized the only hope of salvaging my relationship with her was to tell her exactly what I had gone through. She would hopefully realize not only that my inability to get hard was in no way her fault, but also that now that I was recovered, we could have the satisfying sexual relationship we had never before gotten. Despite my best attempts at explaining to her my experience and salvaging things in this way, Rachel was still confused and unsure. Impatient, frustrated, and desperate to prove myself to her sexually and regain my sense of “masculinity,” I put too much pressure on her and came across as “needy.” We drifted apart, only seeing each other very casually every once in a while the rest of the summer. At the end of the summer, she moved out of the country to teach English for the next couple of years. I saw her one last time before she left, and though we were very friendly, the romantic feelings were essentially gone.
Eventually I came to accept that I will likely never fix things with Rachel. As devastating as this is to me, I am also very thankful for it. I’ve always resisted labeling myself a “porn addict” as my urges never really reached the level of “compulsive”–porn was extremely stimulating, but I never needed it, I’ve always told myself. Nevertheless, the temptation of porn is strong. I still find myself google searching porn sometimes. But right before I click on a site, or right when my porn blocker asks if I want to temporarily allow access to this restricted material, I think about the amazing girl porn took from me…and how I refuse to ever let anything like that happen again.
P.S. Gabe Deem, if you happen to read this, I just want to say thank you so much. Your videos helped me so much during the darkest time of my life…you changed my life.
LINK – Porn Took Away My First Love…But that Gave Me the Strength I Needed
BY – camcam1994
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