Hi there, Fapstronauts! I've been lurking for a few weeks, but made the commitment to NoFap a little over a week ago. About me: mid-40s, married for over 15 years, Southeastern US. I have PIED, but inconsistently. I am also diabetic, which I believed was to blame for some of my ED issues, and my wife thought the same thing. After reading up on things here, I'm convinced that it's PIED due to that "death-grip" that many of you are familiar with. I've been looking at P since I was a teenager after finding my dad's hidden stash of P and erotica. I looked at magazines for years, but would go through periods of throwing them out and trying to not PMO. I would occasionally watch videos, but it was very embarrassing for me to go into an adult video store. Then came the Internet... I started back on dial-up, downloading pics, only to find that some were not worth downloading, but others were. I built up a collection of probably 1000s of pics in hidden folders and CDs. I graduated to streaming vids, but would still use pics for edging. My wife knew/knows that I looked at P some, but she really had no idea of how much. I was inconsistent, but probably averaged 4-5x a week. My wife goes to bed much earlier than I get sleepy, so that has always been my time for P. I found myself many times edging until late into the night - 1am, 2am, etc. Even if I got 8 hours of sleep, I would still be in brain fog the next day pretty often. I have now been 8 days (9 depending on time zone) without PMO. I am not avoiding the O, but will only do so as part of sex with my wife. Unfortunately, the O was not possible for me when we had sex this weekend. (If I need to go completely O free for a period, I will try that, but for now, it is not in my plans.) I have only had one partial slip-up: flipping through channels on the TV, I stumbled across some of the "soft-core" P on HBO the other night. I did watch it for 3-4 minutes, but did not even touch myself before I turned it off. I'm not going to reset my counter, but will admit that as a slip. It has not been easy, especially when traveling for work. It's very easy to go into that PMO mode when in a hotel room by myself at night, but I've just kept some books with me to read, and my mind is soon distracted with those. My motivation for doing this is not religious or moral, but really for my relationship with my wife and my perspective of women. I realized just how desensitized I was and how every woman could become an object to look at. I know that it is not and will not be easy, but that's why I've joined here and wrote this really long note. I have not yet had this detailed discussion with my wife yet - not because I'm not committed to this, but because of how it will hurt her when she finds out. I do plan to tell her when I'm a few weeks along, hopefully after showing some improvement in the PIED area. But I have already deleted all of the P files in my hidden computer folders. That was really hard - especially looking at some of the names of the files, but all 15GB are gone. Now I just have to go look through any hiding places in the house to find any old CDs/DVDs that I've forgotten about. I'm ready to go. I look forward to talking to you all along the ride.
