The stream of consciousness of a deluded dreamer...

Hi everyone,

I am not even sure where I should start from, so I guess I'll just start from the very beginning and let my thoughts guide my fingers over the keyboard (WARNING: is going to be a long post, maybe not even a cool one, but I really need to do this).

To give you a broad idea of how long I have been fighting this, I'll just tell you that the very first porn pic I have ever seen in my life was saved on a floppy disk. For those of you who don't know what a floppy disk is, think of it as the grandfather of the USB flash drives.

I wasn't older than 12, probably even younger. As far as I can remember I used to be the stereotype of the "good boy": best in class, brilliant mind, I could study for hours and never lose the focus. I used to spend some time on the PC drawing with Paint or playing offline games. Internet wasn't a thing just yet - lucky me!

One day I was looking for a device where I could have saved some files - I can't remember what, but the naughtiest thing would have been a pic of Goku from Dragonball - but I didn't want to waste a CD-ROM for it, so it mustn't have been something important. I found this floppy disk - a 2MB plastic device, thin like a disk and small approximately like a post-it. "Physics homeworks" was written on the label, so it must have been my brother's.

Since that moment my life changed forever. The pictures stored in it weren't even that extreme: it was just women, totally or partially naked, posing in several ways. I guess I was just too young to process everything alone. In my family relations have always been quite formal, I have never had any father-son talk, not even with my older brother. I was old enough to understand that men liked and married women, that they kissed. But I had no clue that sex even existed.

Internet arrived very soon after that period, but it was already too late. I remember I used to play with a girl, she was 1 or 2 years younger than me and was the daughter of some friends of my parents. Our houses were literally in front of each other, so most of the afternoons we were together. No need to say that after that floppy-disk day our games changed. We already used to play as if we were a married couple, or that I was a doctor and she was a patient, so we had already kissed some time, but now I wanted to explore more.

Don't take me wrong, nothing "practical" ever happened - I wouldn't even know how to do it. But I remember we started kissing way more often, and the doctor's game was the perfect opportunity for us to get naked and look at our different bodies. Luckily, our innocence made sure we never touched each other in places where we shouldn't have.

A few months later my meetings with this friend of mine became less and less frequent. I don't know if her parents ever suspected anything, or if we had just lost interest in what we were doing. In any case, my mind was already corrupted and the arrival of internet in everybody's home made the rest.

I started watching (and consuming) porn very soon. The first times was even embarassing - I didn't even know what I was doing or what was coming (literally) out of me. Can't remember how it started, but it became an addiction before I could even notice it.

No need to say that as a former "best in class" and good mama's boy, I wasn't exactly someone popular at school. A few years later - when I was 14, 15, 16 - my friends started having their first experiences of petting or foreplay (or at least they said so, and I was believing that) and I was feeling more and more like a loser, unable to have girlfriend or to be interesting for anybody.

My PC was my fortress of solitude. It wasn't just porn, but it was equally destructive: I used to play videogames from The Sims' series to create the life I knew I would have never had. Beautiful houses, cars, lots of money, but - most importantly - those school girls who barely talked to me in real life were now part of "my" life. I managed to create a world where I was the person I wanted to be: I was important, popular, loved and successful.

All this clashed with the reality I was facing everyday when I was going to school. I wasn't a kid anymore, I was in high school, but still this thing continued until I was 17 or even 18, I am afraid (and ashamed). Now my (few) friends were starting having sex, real sex, and the closest thing to sex that I could do instead was to masturbate in front of the PC.

To complete this toxic mix, I had my first romantic disappointment at the end of High school. My crush was a girl I could daydream about for hours every day: most of the songs in my MP3 player were talking about her. I used to draw her when I was at home, and of course she was my wife... in The Sims' world on my PC.

Well, in the real life I barely knew this girl. Well, I knew her, but she barely knew me. She was in my classes, and she was really one of the best in class. She would barely talk to me, but not in a bad way. Even if she was beautiful she was kind of shy, so she was respected but never became really popular at school. She was still way out of my league (I mean - was I in any league at all?), but she was always so kind when she talked to me that eventually I believed I should have done something some day.

I never had the bravery to declare my "love" for her, my low self esteem kept me save for a long time. One day, however, once High school was finished, I have decided to text her wishing her the best for her life and telling her I had always been in love with her. I didn't expect anything, not even a reply at all, but she did reply and with her usual kind ways told me that she wished me the best too, and that she hoped I could find one day the girl I deserved. The fact that she didn't insult me and she didn't laugh at me was already a victory for me.

A circle was finally closing, until one day some former classmates organized a reunion. I would have never joined that dinner, I simply couldn't. I had founded the courage to text her about my love because I was sure I would have never met her in my life. I simply couldn't see her again after that. Well, in fact I did not go, but a friend of mine who was there told me that she was showing my message to everybody laughing at me. I started hating her, hating myself for being able to attract only mockeries, and maybe I started hating women too. For sure I was hating my life, if not even life at all.

It didn't take a psychotherapist to understand I was depressed.

In the meanwhile I kept masturbating over porn for all those years. It was satisfying, easy, and I had no clue of all the damage it was doing to my body and brain.

The years of the university were so much better. I was studying in a humanities faculty, which usually means lots of girls around and very little competition. Also, all those years wasted daydreaming in my bedroom, or masturbating with porn, heavily impacted my ability to focus, study, and learn. I wasn't a nerd anymore, but in turn I people - and especially girls - were treating me normally.

During the second year of university I met the girl that eventually would become my first girlfriend ever. I was 22 years old when I could finally say I was not a virgin anymore. I had finally discovered sex, the real one. The good, healthy, dirty and romantic sex I had always dream of. This led me to reduce drastically the use of porn, and I would have eventually quitted it forever. I was happy, in love, sexually satisfied.

All of a sudden all the humiliations and the years of pain I suffered meant nothing. It was all gone, and for the first time in my life I was looking at my future with confidence and willing to make plans.

However, as you can imagine we broke up. Badly.

After 2 years and a half of relationship we ended our studies and after the degree we decided to move together abroad for a master's degree. While I could already feel that something was weird, I was completely unprepared for what I was going to find out.

My girlfriend, my first girlfriend, the first real love of my life, the girl who made me finally discover the world of sex, the person I imagine by my side for the rest of my life, had started cheating on me for months.

This time it hurt. A lot. I am not even sure today if I have ever recovered from it. Not from her, but from that break up. I was in love and I was believing in love like never before (nor after). The fact that even a person who really loved me at some point in her life was able to betray me completely destroyed any faith I had for my self, for my life, for love, and for sure for my self esteem and sexual life.

I changed country, I started working and the economic independence gave me the tools to focus on myself for the very first time. I started going to the gym, browse hundreds of YouTube channels and websites of these gurus I am sure you know as well. They call them PUA, pick up artists.

I must say that among the mountains of garbage that these youtubers sell, some of them said something here and there that really touched me and lit a spark in me. I was motivated, slightly less unsecure than before, but I was still alone in a new country, so I have downloaded Tinder and I started hanging out with strangers. It was the best thing I could have ever done.

Not every date was a success, but the fact that I could get out of my place to go and meet a strange girl, alone, against my fear of rejection, against my shyness, against my depressing past, it was something that made me feel alive and full of possibilities.

I started having some adventures, short relationships and even one-night stands. My confidence was skyrocketing and all my fears collapsed like a sandcastle. I had reached a moment when I could have approached an 8 with absolutely no fear. For months I was meeting 2-3 girls per week, and managing to have sex with most of them. Sometimes I was hanging out with more girls during the same period, and some days I managed to have sex with 2 different girls in the same day!

It may sound like a little achievement for most, but for me - with all my loser background - it was the turning point of my life. I was still masturbating here and there in those weeks when I was not meeting anyone, but it was way more under control and - most importantly - it was happening less and less.

One day - once again thanks to Tinder - I met a wonderful girl: the most beautiful girl I have ever been with. Gorgeous, smart, fun, a kind-hearted person. It's not for nothing that I decided to stop using Tinder for her and since then 4 years have passed and we are still together.

Our relationship is quite balanced, healthy, and happy. Everything seems to be working as it should. The only flaw is that she doesn't know about my problem with porn. And at this point I think she never will. Too much time has passed and if she knew I hide this for so long she will never trust me again.

But that's not all. In fact, masturbation and porn is not something of the past. Even if I still can control my urges, I still need to masturbate on porn sometimes. We are not 20 anymore, which means that I don't perform as I used to, and she doesn't really have a lot of sex drive. There's also some lack of chemistry between us that makes sex not that satisfactory.

For example, always because of porn, I like certain positions or certain things that she doesn't really enjoy. On the contrary, she only wants to make it the same way and - even if she's still beautiful to my eyes - sex became very boring.

I thought I had achieved everything I needed in life. A loving, caring, beautiful partner who really loves me and wants to live the rest of her life with me. Well, maybe I did achieve all this, but I have realized I want more. I don't want to break up with her, but I feel like that sparkle, that drive I had when I was single and I met her is not shut down.

If I see a beautiful girl in the street I cannot look the other way. If a new colleague at work is a nice girl, even not better looking than my girlfriend, I feel like I would like to flirt with her and see what happens.

I still enjoy porn as a consequence. There's simply so much variety - both in terms of girls and acts - that it seems impossible for me to quit. Recently I have realized that even Instagram is a trigger for me. It is full of girls ready to get naked or doing everything on Onlyfans just to make some money. It is so denigrating for the role of women, and still it fits perfectly into the role that women have in porn.

I also feel sexually attracted by some friends of my girlfriend. I don't have the spine to do anything about it, but I can find myself masturbating thinking about some friend of her or looking at their pictures.

To conclude - even if I don't think anybody read till here - I feel like my sex drive is still so strong that it is impacting my life. And the only way to prevent me from doing something stupid like cheating on my girlfriend, is to masturbate on porn. But porn is what wires my brain in a way that makes me look at girls like objects, body before people. So eventually I feel like in a vicious cycle from which I am not sure I will ever be able to get out.