just joined!

Hi all. I've finally decided to join this movement, officially. Sorry for this rambling post, but it's been helpful for me to read what's on here, and I thought it would be helpful for me to be honest, too.

I've tried to quit PMO before, but haven't made it more than a week or so. I tried reducing it instead of going cold turkey, and that didn't work either.

This failure is likely because I wasn't taking it seriously enough. I hadn't considered myself addicted. I've been a medical student for a few years now, and I've seen terrible addiction in my patients. Crippling, crippling addiction that I could not relate to with my porn use. I like porn, sure...and a lot. I used it a lot. But I couldn't be addicted to porn, I thought, because it didn't control me: it didn't make me late for my obligations, I didn't choose it actively over sex with my girlfriend, etc. Or at least that's what I thought.

Then I watched Gary Wilson's TedTalk on "The Great Porn Experiment," and I realized I was brushing over a lot of signs of porn addiction in my life. I did many of the classic behaviors fundamental to that unending quest for novelty: opening multiple tabs, fast-forwarding, increasingly extreme searches, etc. I realized I was watching porn because I was bored or anxious or happy or had a free moment. Sometimes I wasn't even horny. Sometimes I did it multiple times a day. I liked to do it to help me fall asleep, or when I woke up on a weekend day and had nothing else to do. And then I thought, wow, hey, this is pretty similar to the kind of questions I ask patients whom I'm screening for alcoholism.

Then I became even more self-reflective. I had had a bunch of sexual encounters two years ago when my girlfriend and I were on a break. It was fun. I did well with social interaction (I consider myself fairly extroverted), and in a date or two, I'd have these women in my bed. But, and I guess I never really thought about how consistently this was happening, but things would progress and then I couldn't maintain an erection, or sometimes I couldn't get one period. I found myself being overly critical (internally) of these women's bodies. And it would be the stupidest, tiniest things. One girl had a mole on her belly that shockingly turned me off. I blamed it on being nervous to be with a new girl. But in fact it was likely the opposite: the novelty just wasn't enough. I had become oversaturated with pixelated fantasy and the reality of intimacy with a real person, with a real person's body, just wasn't enough. It was textbook porn-induced erectile dysfunction (or at least, it would have been, if there were PIED when I was a science major in college). I hadn't realized this was such a thing until I had read about it on all these forums. It felt good (and terrifying, too) to give it a name, and made me realize this was absolutely something I was doing to myself.

And the more I reflected, the more I realized just how much of a hold porn had on me. Despite my porn-induced ED with several women, the one I never had a problem with was my on-again off-again girlfriend (who has now been on-again for the past year or so). We love each other very much and have a ton of sex when we see each other (we're in a distance relationship). I've been very open with her about my porn use (we even sometimes watched some together to spice things up every now and again, and at her suggestion). In the past years, I've justified my porn use because of our distance relationship- and she said she was fine with it, too (claiming, hey, it would keep me away from other girls). But when I thought about it, I think the novelty seeking of porn bled into my real relationship and made me feel unfulfilled by being with one person. When we took breaks, always at my insistence because the distance got to be "too much", I would join online dating sites, like Tinder, and I found the novelty exciting (but not, as I just described about, apparently exciting enough). Porn wasn't a saving grace of my long-distance relationship...it didn't act as a stop-gap measure for alliterate pleasure seeking in my real life, but rather encouraged it.

And while erectile dysfunction hasn't been a problem with my girlfriend, I now see that porn was still affecting my sex life with her, even if it wasn't super obvious to me at first. Sometimes I found I wanted to think about other girls during sex...sometimes I found I wanted to think about something I had seen in porn. In the past few years, I've found that I couldn't just be in the moment with her. This all culminated for me when, earlier this year, I suggested we make a sex tape (something to keep me busy while we were apart), and she enthusiastically agreed. It was probably the most turned-on I had ever been, and I think that largely has to do with the fact that I was approximating all that internet porn that I had become accustomed to being aroused by. While some people had used porn to mimic a sex life, I had used my sex life to mimic porn. The more I consider that notion, the more disgusted with myself I get.

I've explained this to my girlfriend, and she's very supportive of my quitting PMO. I really want to reboot my brain and recalibrate how I approach real sex with real people. Additionally, I want to improve my energy and not waste so much time looking at something that really, at the end of the day, doesn't add anything good to my life.

Reading the success stories has encouraged me. And because I know how difficult this will be, I know I'll be relying on sites and forums like these to bolster my resolve. It's been a tough first five days or so since my last PMO (tons of cravings), but I'd like to reclaim my life in this big way.

All the best to those who are continuing along this path, whose support has made it possible endeavor and struggle and succeed communally. Thank you for the opportunity to be inspired, share my story, and start my journey with you.