Ready For Change

Hello all,

I recently discovered this forum online. I'm really encouraged by the transparency, support and challenge to accept a better life. Bear with me as I share the story that I never get to dwell on or speak about to many people and let me be honest with this community and myself as I enter this journey. I'm 31 and married for almost 4 years now. As cheesy as it sounds, I love my wife. I've been through a ton of terrible relationships prior to my marriage. My wife is far and away the best person I know and the most beautiful woman I've ever met. She is precious to me. I value her so greatly. But PMO is such a silent killer...a shadowy plague to our marriage. It hurts intimacy, it leaves me feeling ashamed and it would absolutely crush her if she knew. I want it out of my life. I don't PMO as much as I did when I was younger, but its still around and I'm grateful for a community like this to be honest with. I'm looking for support for moving on from years of porn addiction.

I first engaged in PMO....jeez....I had to have been 10-12. I honestly can't remember. The first time I watched was when the stuff was on VHS (do those even exist anymore?). In high school, I moved on from porn and became sexually active. I lost my virginity at 15 to a 26 y/o...a fact I've shared with my wife and confessed to my priest. As a teenager, it was something to brag about. But sharing it with my wife years later, felt much much different. I continued to be active when I was a teenager. I entered the church at 18 and chose to be abstinent until marriage, which lasted for the next 8 years until I met my wife. The church really helped me set boundaries regarding sex, but by quitting cold-turkey and the accessibility of porn online, my PMO activity sky rocketed for those 8 years. I watched in college all the time...at least once or twice a day. I really wrestled with a lot of shame and embarrassment over the issue, but I was really bound to it. There was plenty of people that I confessed it to that I thought I could trust for the purpose of accountability, but it often did more harm than good. I honestly think people don't know how to wrestle with such powerful, accessible addictions. But it was a huge part of my life and was so suffocating...so binding. I really couldn't break free from it even if I wanted to.

When I met my wife, I was able to scale back a lot. I took a cue from AA and 12-step groups. I cut out a lot of areas that I knew contributed to it: avoiding private internet-browsing, avoid bs websites that use sex to attract visitors, set restrictions on my phone that I couldn't change, etc. Once we got married, I was finally able to let myself enjoy sex for the first time ever, because in the past, sex for me wasn't about intimacy. It was definitely a power thing and about performance. Now its so much different: there's beauty, hope and, as a Christian, there's worship. Its just joyful.

But it absolutely kills me to say that PMO still lingers in my life. Maybe once a week or so. Once every two weeks sometimes. I just feel so guilty about it. So I appreciate this community. I've never had a healthy community to talk to about these struggles. I'd like to utilize this community to get control. I don't want to eliminate my urges for sex (never gonna happen), but I just want repurpose how I express it. I'm hoping to use this community to just be honest with myself and be honest with a group of people who share the same struggles, receive help and perhaps offer help through solidarity. Ultimately, I think porn sucks. The real thing is so much better. I hope this group will help me get there!

Thanks for listening/reading. Just had to work through it in my own mind and writing.