Does a fish know it is underwater?

New here. Over 60. Started at 14 with Playboy etc. (ability to keep a heavy magazine, with fingers separating several pages of pictures for easy access, all in your left hand while your right is busy, is an unrecognized Olympic level skill); then older and moved on to porn theaters (gone now, floors so sticky it was like trying to lift your metal clad feet off the magnetized floor at the Supermax prison); then to VHS rentals (“Cashier, don’t look at me that way, i’m just doing an anthropological study”); finally to the keyboard. Almost a half century of porn dependency. I really can’t see how 90 days of abstention can cure me at this point, let alone lead me to a point where I can have a healthy ability to make love to my (amazing, pretty, sexy, funny and brilliant) wife without running a mental porn loop in my head to inspire me. But feel I have to try, because I owe it to her and myself. And no, please don’t recommend I be honest with her about my problem, I wouldn’t want to hurt her with the knowledge that this has been going on all these years.

 

So question- Been about 20 days of no fapping. But it’s been months since I’ve had sex with my wife (who doesn’t know about either the porn addiction or the current attempt at recovery, and I have no intention of telling her), and it’s time for sex. She’s human too, her body and her ego have rights and it isn’t all about me, and in a marriage sex has to happen. But even with an ED pill I won’t be able to do this without running a mental porn loop in my head while it’s happening, in order to maintain an erection. (And I have a real vivid and inventive porn imagination mechanism at this point so it’s almost the same as watching actual porn). So how is that not a relapse and reset moment since mental porn is needed to complete? And since, because in a marriage sex has to happen, how can one ever effectively get away from porn if the images in your head absolutely needed to have normal sex are also, effectively, porn?

 

Sante, except for the exotic cars and the age-differential on the marital end, very similar (even, without further detail needed, my personality, my appearance and my economics). In all respects a charmed life, yet I feel like a piece of crap because of my infantile addiction and the consequences to what should otherwise be a perfect marriage. The only thing working in my favor as far as getting off the beating path is the basic fact that ones horniness subsides with age. But I’m afraid I’m hard wired at this point and won’t be able, no matter how long I avoid porn, to re-wire, as Tango kind of says. But will try this and see if, even if I can’t reverse what I have done to my brain, I can at least ameliorate it somehow.

 

Well, first lapse, after 21 days, which was the longest abstinence streak in 45 years. (Must have logged onto the wrong website, Mofap, and nature took a bad course. Could happen to anyone right?). This detour, at least, did not lead me to the usual extreme sites. Starting right up again, let’s try and double that streak.

 

There was a recent science fiction movie, Arrival (Amy Adams). The premise was that while we see time and communication as both being linear, other patterns are possible. I recommend it. Well, my progress here and at the same time my lack of it does not seem to be following the linear “succeed or fail and get back on the horse” pattern of posters on this site. I have stayed away from porn and don’t miss it. But I have diverted to looking at and thinking about other sexual related material (hooker and mistress ads basically, not for nudity content) which call up thoughts and fantasies of sexual acts. I could be optimistic and say I am weening off porn, but I think I am just diverting the negative thought train. I followed your posts and don’t exactly have the younger, willingly kinky wife option you do, as great as my wife is. No anytime-playground here for me. Complicating that is the role long term psychological dependence on ED meds has played. I started using them many years ago when porn desensitized me to getting an arousal from vanilla marital sex, and after all these years I am very sure it would be useless to try to maintain an erection during sex without them. But they rob the spontaneity and make sex less fun, almost a chore. Bottom line from all this whining is I don’t see a road back to a healthy marital sex life. But I will stick with this, one thing I am realizing is porn is boring and not that hard to disengage from with a little effort.