Hey everyone!
I recently downloaded this app because I wanted to find a free timer to quit PMO and stumbled upon this app. I thought this was a timer only for drug/alcohol addiction, but then I found this forum and it’s a relief that I’m not the only one using the app to quit PMO.
I’ll try to make my story as brief as I can, but no promises. I am a 23 year old male who completed undergrad just last May. I truly discovered porn after a buddy of mine showed me a video when I was about 12 years old. About a year later, I began experimenting with porn and masturbation. I always felt like I did it a healthy amount growing up. I remember throughout high school, I would do it once a day. When I got to college, it would come to range from once to three times a day. But now when I look back from high school up until now, I think I was developing a bad habit. I think I unintentionally created a sex addiction from this habit. I had two separate relationships (one in high school and one in college). In both relationships, I almost always focused on the quantity of sex that we were having and how hot it was to me instead of the true intimacy of the whole thing between two partners. This is not to say I was never a gentleman or was a complete piece of crap in how I treated them, but I feel like the real love was ruined because of how much pornographic content I would consume on a daily basis. And with both relationships, my problem led to their respective downfalls.
I started dating someone in July 2023 and everything has been great. I’m pretty sure this is the woman I am supposed to marry. She has not presented one red flag to me and is everything I ever need in a spouse. The past couple of months, my problem has started to affect our relationship. I have recently been more hyper focused on how she looks sexually instead focusing on her true beauty and how she is as my best friend. And (again) ive been worrying more about how much we do it and what I gain instead of the intimacy between us. She means the world to me but my sex addiction and porn has been driving a wedge between our relationship, and I fear the wedge will only grow bigger if I keep up my ways.
In fact, she took time for herself to think about her life and us. She told me a couple of days ago that she believes that I am a sex addict. Even though I was denying it in my head at first, the more we talked, the more I could see how much of a problem I had and how it’s affecting our relationship now. I feel so ashamed that my issue could ruin this all for me.
Since then, I’ve been getting better at respecting her boundaries and decided to not touch her in any way sexually this weekend. However, this made me feel depressed and scared. We talked about what’s been going on in my head, and she clarified that she DOES want me to touch her sexually, but I just touch her sexually TOO MUCH. Later, when she made me touch her sexually and she reciprocated, I started crying because I was scared that my mind was going to act in the toxic manner that it always has in terms of sex. I really don’t want my bad habits to take control of me anymore. She calmed me down, and we hugged and everything felt a little better.
After a couple hours of sitting down and contemplating tonight, I’ve decided that I was going to officially tackle this issue of PMO and put it to an end. From what I’ve been reading in this forum, it won’t be easy. But nothing ever worth fighting for is easy. I will say that I’ve experimented with going without porn for a week about a month ago and it actually made our sex feel better and more intimate in my opinion. But once I did it, I relapsed.
I’ve downloaded this counter as an accountability tool and to keep me motivated. I will use this forum for the same. I’m hoping to use some meditation and guitar playing/song writing to substitute my cravings, but who knows. Maybe I’ll find something even better to do the further along I am into this journey! I’m glad to be part of this community! I’ll try to be as active as I can to help others out, but as with everyone else, I do have a life outside of this app so I can only guarantee my best with responding! I’d like to maybe share my progress every week or two just to give everyone something to read about and hopefully inspire anybody in my shoes.
I am a big fan of WWE and current rising star LA Knight, so I’ll probably sign out every progress note with this: PMO can kiss us goodbye! Cause whose game is this??? The community, and Chi-Town-Knight! YEAH! (Might need a little work, but it’s a start😃!)
