First Time Joining an Online Community

Hello! This is my first time participating in an online community, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to do so. Here's some information about myself:

I most struggle with feelings of loneliness. After graduating from a college in the U.S. two years ago, I moved to a non-English speaking country and have never been back. I do not experience a terrible language barrier, but my ability to express myself in the local language is quite limited; I lack the precision in vocabulary I feel is necessary to have a deep conversation about how I'm feeling, for example. So despite being surrounded by the friendliest of people, there is nobody in the vicinity to whom I can really open up.

I am 24 years old and a virgin. If we were to construct some hierarchy of degree of intimacy, I would not have experience with even the first level. You would be hard pressed to find more of a virgin than me. Notwithstanding frequent bouts of loneliness, anxiety, and feelings of hopelessness, I have been stagnant on this front.

I can identify many other sources of distress, but my isolation and virginity are the largest two.

Now, to get to the point, I often masturbate to mitigate painful feelings. The most troubling consequence of this for me is my reflexive and near-constant projection of sexual fantasies onto the women I meet. On an ethical level, this makes me tend to view them as if they were fancy appliances purposed to elicit sexual pleasure, an outlook which makes me hate myself when I recognize it. On a practical level, I believe that humans empathically pick up on things in their interactions with each other, that many of the women I meet in daily life pick up on my dehumanizing sexual desire directed towards them, and that as a result of this my relationships with these women are damaged. A downward spiral follows in which I experience more painful feelings, masturbate, and exacerbate the said unhealthy dynamic in my relationship with women, ad nauseam.

I am setting a goal for 90 days PMO starting at the time of this post, around midnight July 22nd-23rd. I hope to develop a community here on which I can fall back when the painful feelings I've been masturbating away come unmitigated. I appreciate any and all support.

 

Thank you all. Strange to say, but I'm already feeling stronger from reading your replies. Fight!

 

Thank you, brother!