Today is December 31, 2020 and I am finally able to write my NoFap recovery story. I am spending New Year’s Eve with the gorgeous girl I have been dating and I think it is fair for me to assume at this point that we will have some pretty great sex. This was not the case though for most of my life up until a few weeks ago. I am porn-free and porn-induced erectile dysfunction free today. But here is the story of how I got to this point.
I am twenty-six turning twenty-seven in January. Like so many others who have sent Noah their stories or who have posted on the reboot forums, I am a millennial who was exposed to high-speed internet porn as a teenager. I may be somewhat of a later bloomer when it came to looking at Internet porn and fapping because I did not do it until I was in the eighth grade at the age of 14. I did not really know what I was doing. I had somehow figured out how to search for naked girls and then accidentally touched myself until, well, you know. What would have been a natural coming of age event in the years before internet porn was an event that would lead me down a dark path throughout my teenage years and through my early twenties.
I had discovered internet porn, and at some point or another I began masturbating to it daily. Sometimes multiple times a day. Never anything too extreme (although to some people it might be) but looking back I can see how this warped my sexuality. I wasn’t interested in the feeling and the connection and the lust between two people, but I desired whatever girl was the most well-endowed and whatever girl could say the dirtiest things. And probably to my biggest detriment was the desire to open up as many tabs as possible. It was never enough. I have never been addicted to drugs or alcohol fortunately, but from my porn use I got a glimpse of what addiction must be like. I was never satisfied. Always opening a new tab, searching for something else, quickly growing bored of it, and searching for something else. Spending way too much time searching and fapping. Always waiting to climax until I found the perfect video or image. Skipping around the videos and wiring my brain to only respond to certain angles. It was all sickening looking back on it and definitely contributed to my low self-esteem and social anxiety. But I didn’t know any better.
I grew up mostly with my mother and grandmother. My father was around somewhat but when I was fourteen, he told me he was gay. My parents were and are great parents, but as a straight young boy, I really needed a straight male role model in my life. Sorry to all the SJWs I possibly just triggered but this was my experience. As a young straight male, I needed someone to tell me how to be a man, how to ask a girl out, how to act on a date, how to flirt, how to be confident and how to do all of these things that really only straight men learn because we need to learn them to get our desired partners. My mother would always say “Just be nice” and “Always respect women”. Those are things you should do obviously, but it isn’t everything you need to do to get a girl. And as a socially awkward boy I didn’t know what to do or how to act around women.
The absence of a father figure is what pushed me down the road of PMO addiction. Females confused me. I didn’t know how to talk to them or how to make them see me as a potential mate (to use Darwinian terms). As a result, I was forced to supplant all of my high school and college years with artificial sexual stimulation. Writing that really hit a nerve. All of my high school and college years I was fapping to Internet porn and was completely girl-less. Well, I did manage to get one hot girl the day after I graduated high school, but because of my lack of confidence and my lack of understanding women that only lasted about two weeks. Whether it was this girl or the dozens or hundreds of others I didn’t even get close to getting my mother would always say “You just haven’t met the right one” or some other naïve cliché that society tells our young boys to indoctrinate them as beta males.
Like I said, I went through college and high school without girls. I always believed I just had not met the right one. If I talked to a girl and she didn’t like me, I would tell myself “I guess she didn’t like me, nothing I can do about it!” Internet sexual stimulation was the thing that filled this hole of my sexual and emotional desires.
Things got slightly better after I graduated college. I lived abroad in Thailand for six months and I had a couple of sexual experiences. I was learning to be more confident and to take initiative with women. I asked a couple out and managed to get lucky a couple of times. No overly fond memories as I first encountered PIED in one of these situations. The thing was at this time, I didn’t even know it was PIED. I didn’t realize my penis was supposed to get hard relatively easily. Needless to say, the girls didn’t stick around long.
I moved back to the U.S. and went on a few dates. Most of them dumped me after one date because I still didn’t understand women. The ones I did get sexual with I had PIED unless they gave me head. I still didn’t realize I had a problem though because this was all I knew. I never knew anything but PIED because porn had long preceded any of my real sexual encounters. These girls who were highly interested in me dumped me after realizing my dick was broken and I didn’t even know this was their reason. They were just crazy I thought, I am great. How naive I was. In reality, not only did my penis not work but I suffered from low self-esteem. Additionally, I didn’t understand flirting or dating, and all of this led to the perfect concoction of women being unable to hold attraction for me.
In defense of my younger self, I didn’t know any better. No real father figure meant the girls didn’t like me and the lack of a father figure even caused the boys not to like me because nobody ever taught me to play sports. Looking back, I think I was destined to take the dark path by an unfortunate roll of the universe’s dice. I think these experiences made me stronger though and they definitely made me who I am today.
I first started NoFap at 22 and was on and off with streaks for two to three years, never taking it quite seriously enough. Like anyone starting off it was a struggle. I was incredibly addicted looking back. I could only go a few days at most before my brain forced me to grab the mouse and open up unlimited tabs of well-endowed women. It slowly got better, and I did some streaks. This wasn’t to recover from PIED because I still hadn’t realized this was a thing because I still wasn’t getting girls, it was just to quit because I could tell porn was messing with my head and self-image. The cravings slowly went away, and I would go a month or more at times without porn. Let me emphasize how hard it was at first though because I was truly addicted.
I started law school in the Fall of 2018 and was 24 at this point. I was fapping much less, had more confidence, and was starting a new chapter in my life. I still had not completely exorcised my demons though. Like all good stories though, I met a female who forced me to do just that.
I got an apartment and one day as I was walking to school, I noticed a girl who seemed to be quite attractive. As I had some self-confidence for the first time in my life, I struck up a conversation with her. It turns out she was my neighbor. The conversation was brief but over the next few months I got to know her a bit and I developed a major crush on her. I was still insecure and socially awkward, but it wasn’t as apparent at this time, so I was fortunate enough to attract her to me. One day approaching new year 2019 I asked her out on the way home from school and she seemed enthusiastic about the idea. To make a long and cringey story, I completely blew the date, acted like a total loser, and came on more than a little strong. It’s quite funny in hindsight, but I was heart-broken and confused at the time of why she wouldn’t want to go on another date with me.
“She liked me!”, I thought. What could have gone wrong from before the date to after the date? I had had a lot of girls dump me at this point in my life but this one was different. It felt so wrong to my core. I didn’t think I was going to marry this girl or something but the fact that I couldn’t get this girl to go on a second date with me felt so wrong. We liked all the same things, and I could tell we had a similar sense of humor and perspective on life. I told my mom about this and she gave me the same old “Sometimes it just doesn’t work out” and one of my gay friends said to me “O, I guess she’s just not that into you, what a shame!” I wanted to scream out loud when they told me these things. I accepted that answer for every single other girl who had dumped me, but this one felt so wrong. We were so similar, and she liked me before! If this girl, who liked me and is incredibly similar to me doesn’t like me enough to go on two dates with me, then what girl is going to? I needed to make big changes coming into 2019.
To start my transformation, I ended up reading pick up artist websites and watching their YouTube channels. For the first time in my life, I was beginning to understand how women thought and what they looked for in a man. I had always approached dating logically. If she likes me, she likes me and vice versa. I didn’t understand women weren’t attracted to looks alone like men and that they could be gamed by flirting, playing hard to get, and by acting like a confident, grounded man. This seems so obvious now, but I didn’t understand the emotional way that women approached dating at the time.
I won’t delve too much into the pick-up story as this is the story of my PMO recovery. I quit PMO to some degree when I first started pick-up and had some relapses as I wasn’t getting any girls those first seven months. After seven months in the game though I started to actually pick-up girls and pull them home. It was amazing! I went from not being able to get any girls throughout high school and college to being able to pick up a girl walking on the street. Approach her, flirt with her, tease her, build her attraction, set up a date, go on the date, invite her home, and… well the next part should be having sex, except at this point I realized how bad my PIED truly was. I managed to pull a couple of girls and at first I had some sex, but I couldn’t’ stay hard with the condom on. I just didn’t feel aroused enough. I started to think something was wrong.
Then COVID happened and I ended up getting trapped inside like the rest of the world and going on a decent binge for a few weeks. When I got out, I went on some dates and couldn’t get it up AT ALL. It was a combination of my porn use and now I was starting to get incredibly anxious about sex because I realized I had this problem. I brought one more girl home to test this in July of 2020 and I was again lifeless down there. It was embarrassing like it had been every other time. I knew I needed to do a full reboot. No porn, no masturbation, and very limited orgasms.
I started my reboot right around the time I met a girl. We would hook up at first and I knew she wanted me to have sex with her. I would avoid it because of the fear of my PIED. I could tell when we were hooking up, I just wasn’t that into it. What the FUCK is wrong with me, I screamed at myself in my head. I am broken! My brain was so miswired from the years of PMO and virtually no real sexual experience. At this point I was able to attract women and get them to want to have sex with me. I could literally pick them up off the street. But I couldn’t enjoy it or even get hard enough to have sex with them. I was a pick-up artist who couldn’t have sex! What a catch-22. This was the scariest time of my life, I thought I would be broken forever.
It was a few months into the reboot before I finally told the girl I was seeing. On this night, she frustratingly and jokingly said “Let’s have sex!” I couldn’t hide it from her any longer and I told her about my PIED. She was surprisingly understanding. I had told one other girl before and she had gotten incredibly angry. I was relieved she was OK with this. We attempted to have sex on a few different occasions, but I could never maintain my erection. This was debilitating and I wanted to scream to vent all of my pent-up sexual frustration that I had been cursed to carry.
After three months on no PM and only a few Os, I thought I would remain this way forever, but my girlfriend and I would hookup and things slowly seemed to get better. I started to feel more aroused and my penis managed to get hard and stay harder with ease as I felt it through my jeans. I still was nervous to have sex so sometimes we would just hookup. After about four months, we finally had some amount of sex without a condom where I managed to stay hard. I eventually went soft but this was the first glimpse of real sex I had had in my life.
I went into hibernation for about 2-3 weeks during finals and I could slowly start to feel my brain crave my girlfriend’s body and her femininity after my first real sexual experience. In the middle of December 2020, after my finals, I went over to her place and we started to hookup. I was horny and I could feel just how physically aroused I was. I instinctively knew I could have sex. We put on the condom, and without much trouble at all we had sex. We had sex, I stayed hard, I didn’t cum too quickly, it was perfect. We have done that three times now. I can feel how this has changed me as a person. I feel like a man for the first time in my life.
As I said at the beginning, I am going over her house tonight and I am already feeling desire for her. I don’t think I will have any trouble being with her. It was a long journey to overcome this addiction that plagued my life since I was fourteen, but I think I am through it. This addiction not only affected my sexuality but my entire being. It made me a socially anxious and awkward boy. I am so grateful to have overcome most of the hurdles that PMO put in my way. There is obviously more to this story than I wrote here but those are the highlights.
For anyone going through the struggle, you should know if I can recover from PMOing for ten years straight before almost any sexual experiences, then you can too. The tips I would have are quit PMOing all together for as long as you need. If you are like me, it will require more than the standard 90 days as my brain was so wired to the pixels on the screen. You will feel hopeless at times that you will never recover as you endure long flatlines where you question whether you will ever feel sexually stimulated again. But you will. The process takes time. Don’t PMO, and, if you can, find a girl to rewire with. Also, if you do relapse during your reboot it is not the end of the world. I Med a couple of times, had a few orgasms from my girlfriend, and looked at porn once, if you don’t let these things get out of hand you will be fine. The more you quit them the faster your brain can rewire and return to its natural state where you are lusting and ready for a real girl. You will lust for a real girl and for real sex, not for some picture or video or photoshopped Internet image. You will lust for the real girl and for the desire that she has for you.
I don’t know where to post this as I couldn’t figure out how to make a Reboot Nation account, but I will send it to Noah. Thank you to Noah, to Gabe Deem, and to the Reboot and NoFap communities. My sexuality is worth more than all of the money in the world to me. I feel like 2021 is the first year I will truly be able to live my life.
Very Truly Yours,
Anon
LINK – Lost and addicted since age 14, now at 26 finally pornfree and able to enjoy sex and intimacy
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