Is dating while rebooting doomed to fail?

My opinion is that if you start a relationship while in a reboot, you have to start it from a willingness to disclose a relapse as soon and as often as it happens. Or to discuss early on that you have an addiction and be willing to describe the extent of it if she needs that information to decide if she wants to continue dating you.

Do not start a relationship with a hidden addiction, insisting to yourself that you're going to quit for good "this time". Starting a relationship on a lie like this is absolutely devastating.

 

(my husband started our relationship insisting to himself that he was going to quit and that he didn't need to tell me because that was "the last time" and he "didn't want to lose me".
Four years later, I was seven months pregnant and found porn on his phone, did some tech digging and found all of it. He immediately got clean. I officially filed our divorce papers last week.)

 

Hello friend, would you care to elaborate on what the problem is some more? Maybe we might be able to offer you some help.

When you say you misunderstand the signals, what does that mean? Do you mean you meet friendly girls and confuse their friendship for interest? If so, that's a lot more common than you might think. As for "giving it a chance," do you mean that you relapse to cope with rejection? It seems like you're a good judge of character, because you've found people you have a lot in common with. Are these girls already in a relationship?

Why don't you send me a private message, assuming you aren't comfortable talking about this openly. Maybe we can get to the bottom of this and find some solutions.

 

No, actually, if you do meet a girl, I think it can help. I reached a 90 day streak about 1.5 years ago.

I was on day 3, a girl approached me at work, we hung out 2 times, had sex when I was on day 22, and we didn’t hang out again after that but I reached day 94 on that streak

by having sex and dating a girl I truly thought was attractive, it killed desire to PMO. I am confident if she still had wanted to hang out, that I’d never relapsed and might be in day 500+ today

 

Ive struggled with PMO through past relationships, although I have found times when it helped battle the addiction.

Its a double edged sword for me..because the HUGE emotional ups n downs of a relationship can send me into panic mode and sometimes relapse (although I need to take accountability for my actions).

sigh...Ive been single so long and it hasnt helped with PMO either. I think maybe starting dating is OK but if things get serious Id definitely have to come clean about the addiction. Watch Terry Crews videos about it, cause damn did it f*k up his marriage

 

To put things in perspective. Most men look at porn. Porn is intrinsically addictive and I'm the long term destructive. Most aren't trying to stop. Many if not most of these men are in relationships and most of them don't devolve into adultery or worse.

In my opinion - it all depends on what you want from yourself, in a woman, and from a relationship and why you are here. Porn addiction is a spectrum. It isn't an issue for most couples, at least not one that is addressed as an issue. (I would certainly agree that porn is always an issue whether or not the majority see it as one.)

If you want a "good Christian woman," or someone to practice sacred sexuality with, and you have a bunch of fetishes and compulsively masturbate you can't really be in a relationship until you've done a lot of work. Even if it's behind you it needs to be disclosed.

There are plenty of scenarios where it could work out. Only you know whether dating during a reboot is doomed to fail.

Again, remember most people just date and have relationships while addicted. Most people don't recognize their addictions. Porn will be a threat so long as you partake in the world. Lust will be a threat so long as you walk this Earth.

 

Check out ftnd.org. They have lots of useful data and stats on how PMO is F**king up relationships real, real bad. its an epidemic, and as an addict I've minimized it my own life. But a lot of women feel like its cheating, period. And why wouldnt they? Youre wacking off to another woman on your computer.

 

My opinion is, yeah. Dating while rebooting is, for all intents, doomed to fail. For every @500 type experiences I see, I see a lot more of the deleted account where it ends in divorce. Notice the guy quit immediately, she was pregnant, and she still dumped his ass.

Get 90 days clean before you ask anyone on a date. If they ask you, tell them you appreciate it, you're working on yourself really hard right now, and if they feel the same in X amount of days, you'll take them out and pick up the tab. You need the confidence, though, that you can live without O for at least 90 days, be that from porn or from S because guess what? When your wife gets pregnant one day, you're not getting any. Not any for the majority of her pregnancy, and definitely not any for a while after, and you have to have the confidence that you can do it, that you can keep your mind clean and your hand out of your pants, and you don't have to offer those whiney BS excuses about "mai neeeeeeedz tho."

 

Yea, I do think overall its best to quit completely... that was more of luck what happened with the girl... and it was BECAUSE of porn/PMO that I wasn't able to KEEP the girl anyways! I think I was emotionally blind to a lot of things

It did provide a boost of encouragement though because when I was talking to her I had a strong reason to not PMO/MO... I would think to myself "I can't relapse because then it will mess things up with her"... and the motivation worked haha... it was after she was for sure gone for good that I ended up relapsing

 

That's a good experience, it sounds like you've taken those lessons well. I think it's important to note, it doesn't look like you really did much about the addiction. It shifted from PM to S with a real person, which is better. Much better. There was still the dependence on O, though, and there's a question if you were using her instead of being with her, if we can make the distinction. S is about intimacy, about each other, the relationship. PMO gets us into a mindset, and a bodyset, where any erotic sensation is about me. It applies even when you think you're focusing on her, because P and M can only be about me. You need the distance of time from that practice so you can be fully present for your partner. Even in your case, it could have been a case of "I can't relapse because it will mess things up with her... and I don't want to lose my access to real S." What it's supposed to be is, "I can't relapse because she is better and deserves better."

Now, many women wouldn't understand this at all and claim, if you really loved her, you wouldn't even want to PMO. That's because, I think, the female sexual experience, from attraction to procreation and everything in between, is different from the male. It's definitely different from the male PMO addict. There will often be the urge to PMO even when you love a partner, because PMO is about way more than raw attraction and pleasure. It's a coping strategy. It's self-soothing. But it's easy to abuse and was never good for you on the whole anyway, like sugar. Or cocaine. You'll still want to PMO, sometimes. You still can choose to wait to be with a real partner, and wait until you're not doing it for selfish reasons.

 

thanks, yea those are some good points you make… that particular girl though openly admitted to watching porn and doing PMO, but still, your point is valid

Even if whatever girl I’m dating is possibly doing PMO, I still won’t do it, same with MO

idk what % of girls do PMO though… I’ve heard from some people it’s a lot… and from others it’s not so many

 

I think this is a lie we tell ourselves (ive done it many times). I think to meshuga's point, its not that she "for sure gone" that we end up relapsing - it's because we havent found a sober center to begin with, and rely on others to keep our streaks going...

in my case, the emotional rollercoaster of even 1-2 dates almost immediately leads me to relapse.

the only good thing i can say about dating in recovery is that it does help normalize what sex and intimacy can be. PMO sends us to so many dark and twisted realms that sometimes maybe a date or 2 is good climb back to reality. Personally, I try flirting a bit sometimes. but Im scared to really date.

 

Good points you make.. yea I guess truth is, it would be really rare to meet a girl AND defeat PMO addiction at the same time … maybe that’s a lot of our dream here on NoFap that it will happen that way.. but it’s not the truth

Yea, having a good, comfortable center of recovery is the better, more stable and long lasting solution

well, if you are scared to date, that’s okay.. maybe just focus be celibate and free from PMO for now

 

That's the way it works, though. Defeat the dragon, then you get the girl.

There's a lot of stories out there, especially now in modern film, about a joint effort in defeating the dragon. Or pulling off the heist, making the escape, putting the thing on the thing, whatever the primary conflict of the plot is. The protagonist forms a team, and they're all strangers at first, but there's flirting and sexual tension between the protagonist and the ridiculously attractive other person, and then maybe there's a cool guy or the clown but you know it's about this burgeoning relationship and they're going to win the contest and end up "together," whatever that means. It makes sense because we want to push this idea that both girls and boys can be competent and effective, and we're people. Not prizes. Princess Peach in OG Mario is a thing, in the recent animated film she's a character. That's a good thing, in a way, but film is short form storytelling and it's not accurate to real life. In real life, people have to make something of themselves to be attractive in the first place.

You get to recruit/be recruited by an attractive romantic interest after you've figured the PMO thing out, and after you have some sort of a track record that shows you have something to offer.

 

damn, well said.

 

Yes, and it's not all on your side.

Consider the fact that a lot of people have some kind of addiction or even deeper psychological issues, and the fact that traditionally, in old school recovery thinking like AA they suggest you not date for a YEAR.

Now I'm talking about from the other side, the person you're interested in may have a problem with alcohol, eating disorder, self harm, with a dual diagnosis of whatever psych issue to boot.

Frankly, even the period of a year is naive considering all that complication. Time does NOT heal all wounds, even if you got some self help group who just counts how many days you've been going to meetings, and most don't go every day they just count from the day they went to their first meeting and have "birthdays" because they have no way of really measuring like time being abstinent from a certain drug or behavior, because the truth is the kind of stuff they try to address is too complex and subtle for them to fuck around with and deceive themselves into thinking they are getting significant recovery.

Not only is it that both people may have addictive tendencies, they may have DIFFERENT ones and it is a STRETCH for BOTH people to be understanding of each others issue. Given addiction tends to make people self centered this is VERY unlikely, and you might even have someone who THINKS they are understanding when they simply have some fucked up narrative with little real capacity for metacognition, but convinced they understand and can give you advice when they won't listen if you come to see the issue(s) they have and seek help from qualified professionals, which may be very hard to find anyway especially if the kind of therapy is even rare.

In general a lot of what gets talked about, both online and in the rooms is actually seeking sympathy and has little to do with actual solutions, and my experience is people won't be able to hear actual solutions because they like to believe in something simplistic like do this program, or sorry but abstain for 90 days. There are people with more straight forward, single issues that are not complicated but I just don't think it's realistic in todays world, not for a lot of people. Rather than a lot of time getting me somewhere this realization has kept me away from PMO and fucked up porn related thinking for a long time, on the longest tracked streak now and I suspect forever, also away from messed up people and situations. I mean even if you fully recover and "reboot" if you're naive about the kind of conditions people may have and just try to connect with someone that looks good guess what? That's not going to work.

There may be a reason why they are good looking and are alone.

 

So... in summary... be prepared to date a horse with deep seated psychological issues. Because that's where we're at now.

Points for radical honesty, I guess.

 

It's not all doom if people are actually doing work that improves the situation, however slowly since it would at least be progress. My concern is there's confusion over what that is, and honestly I'm starting to think people with "just" substance issues might be easier to get along with in some situations. What is a problem is if it's kind of being brushed under the carpet when the supposed work is really just sort of agreed upon denial so it kind of gains perceived legitimacy. I guess we'll see but when lockdown started in 2019 I thought of that Imagine Dragons song "Demons." At least in the song they know it's there rather than be like maybe nobody will notice.

 

I don't know if I'm cutting to the essence of your post there, or hacking it to death. If it's the former, I agree all of the way. 110%, because I don't know what math is. The one part I'm not sure about is "just" substance issues. Does that mean, substance abuse without the psychological component? Because that would unquestionably be easier but I'm not sure such a unicorn exist. We use substances because our minds are broken.

My wife was raised in a cult, had an eating disorder, still doesn't have a great relationship with food and I try not to talk to her much because apparently I'm all kinds of screwed up with ADD and anger problems and porn addiction and ODD and maybe DID... When we were 24, I thought we had a challenging start but we'd mostly figured it out, we were good. NOPE.

There's a hard truth I've learned and relearned a dozen times over the years working through this forum; most people are here for the wrong reasons and they won't make it. Human beings want the easy out by default, and that goes double for porn addicts. Probably all addicts, but I know the porn ones.

But then that raises a question. What is "making it?" I have gone almost up to 200 days clean. If you don't count the one fantasy/MO slip I had in the middle of it, I made it almost a full year clean. I don't think I've ever "made it," I can swing into severe depression and struggle hard. I'm suspecting any O at all is a problem for me. I know a guy who has decided that, he lives in permanent monk mode, says his wife prefers that over the alternative. Is that "making it?" Geeze, I need to go to bed.