Newbie questions...

There's no right or wrong way to do NoFap so no one can tell you that you broke the rules if you have sex with your spouse or masturbate.

I have similar goals as you and do not want to look at porn. Genuine sex in a serious romantic situation is ideal and masturbation without porn is acceptable to me.

My problem was that once I started looking at porn it took over my sexuality and I had to go without all three aspects in order to break free from the porn. Here's how it worked for me:

I first told myself that I was just going to keep masturbating but just not look at any porn. This failed because I couldn't get aroused enough to do so but since I was intent on still masturbating I always ended up returning to porn to enable the masturbation I had set out to do. To break masturbation away from porn I had to take a break from both first. The other reality I had to face was that the masturbation frequency I had grown to expect was not possible without the porn.

I did my second reboot recently for 90 days without PMO. Now, I masturbate about 1-3x a week but it's different. It was a lot more fun to PMO 2-3x a day but I didn't like that lifestyle for several reasons. One of them you mention; I didn't have any drive for a real relationship or genuine sex.

The thing that ended up causing me to relapse and go back to porn after my first reboot was the expectation that I deserved to masturbate a certain amount. One day I found myself trying to do so and I decided some sleezy photos would be okay as long as they wore swimsuits. By the next day I was watching full feature videos of hardcore porn 3x a day.

In regards to sleep, the reality for me has been that it's simply not possible to masturbate every night before bed and for me to do that in a healthy way. It does help me sleep but for me, being a healthy sexual adult also means some nights (actually many nights) won't find me naturally aroused because I'm just not. The addition of porn to artificially turn up my arousal so I can masturbate so that I can sleep is a bad cycle.

 

Hey man. Welcome!

My thoughts and opinions re your questions…

1. if you’re trying to cure ED/DE, cut out M for awhile too. Like @StevenR said/implied, P and M are probably so closely linked that you will be tempted to go to P if you try to just M. In addition, even if you can M without P in front of you, you’ll probably be thinking of P, and that’s not good for a reboot.

Sex with spouse is definitely not a relapse. Healthy sex with your spouse is the goal after all, but if the goal is to cure DE/ED, hard mode for a hit might be better. Maybe 30 days? You could even plan a special date for your spouse for Day 30 too!

re sleep. Yeah, that’s a big worry. O’ing takes so much energy that it just naturally makes you tired. So you have to put that energy somewhere else. Working out might be best. But it could really be anything that takes any physical or mental energy. Think about all the cumulative time you have spent on PMO. What do you wish you had done with time? Try to go do that thing(s) instead.

Good luck! It’s hard to quit but I promise you it’s worth it.

 

Going without Masturbating and orgasming is a must at least for a while I believe. I went 35 days after being pretty much impotent then had the best sex with my GF EVER one morning. I honestly should have waited longer and still have problems. At least try to go 30 days without orgasming. the longer the better. I'm just saying that personally 30 days did wonders for me.