Looking for some perspective on a few issues.

Hi,

I am a 50 year old guy.
I am new here ,but have reached this forum on an earlier occasion, by chance, bookmarked it and forgot all about it.

I have been hooked on porn for the last 35+ years but in the last 4-5 years it has really gotten to the stage where it was(is) occupying all my waking hours. I went from being a collector, to being an avid collector to being an obsessive&compulsive collector of porn. In the last year it has rarely actually turned me on, but the obsession & compulsion to get more and more and more just occupied all my waking hours. Sometimes I would watch it while browsing and fap, but mostly it has just been this compulsion to get more of it. I have(had) filled more than 2 TB of space with porn pics/movies.
In between I have managed to "go clean" for a few months on a couple of occasions, but have eventually drifted back to it.
I has also been that a couple of my girlfriends and my wife have enjoyed watching porn with me, so that kinda made it that IT WAS OK!.
I would lay in bed at most nights and fap to fantasies that I built in my head including on recurring one and then drift off to sleep (more on that later)

Now, a little over a month ago there was a girlfriend from my teenage years, in town and we got together and there being many unresolved issues from our teenage years, actually spent time to understand what went wrong and why. The amount of time we spent together during that week actually broke me out of the vicious cycle of porn downloading and watching.
Since I had spent a week away from the stuff i decided that this was a good time to "get on the wagon" and do something about it. I deleted all current downloads, all saved stuff on my comp and cleared 2 of the 4, 500gb HDD's that were crammed with porn. I actually couldn't find the other 2........
While deleting the porn bookmarks, I found this forum again, and it feels great that I DID!

What made realisation finally dawn on me as to how bad my porn obsession was that I just could not get wood with my girlfriend. I enjoyed making love, enjoyed eating her out but just could not do much more. In addition we have not had sex for over 10 months due to some medical issues she is facing. It just became easier for me to just fap myself to sleep. On a few occasions she has made an attempt to initiate sex (I could see that she was doing it to satisfy my lust) I have gently but firmly pushed her away (metaphorically) and turned over and fapped myself to sleep with fantasies of her friend. When she has asked Why?, I have always used the excuse of her pain/condition and say that "we need to be careful" She seems relieved by that and has never pushed it. She does however have a problem with our lack of intimacy and I have on many occasions told her that it is very difficult / impossible for me to get intimate without letting it progress to full blown love making. The few times I have tried cuddling / holding her she pushes me away with..... "cause it hurts"...... so it's like a no win situation either way.

To come to "her friend" (and the "more on that later issue), my girlfriend, has a friend(girl) who spends most weekend evenings with us. This has been a practice for some years now.The 3 of us, have on a few occasions in the last 10+ years have gotten quite drunk / high and have been marginally naughty together. Never full blown sex, but like nude massages, hands down pants/ shirts etc. This girl, or I should say woman has now, for the last few years, taken over my sexual fantasies to the extent that I fantasise about her all the time and even when I am making love to my girlfriend I use this woman as a fantasy to get off.

I managed to "stay clean" for just over a month before "falling off the wagon" 2 days ago. It started with seeing some pics, of an actress I fancy, on a news website and then looking for nude/fake nudes of her and then before I knew it I was watching porn.

I have managed to stay away from it since then and think that I can, but I'll just have take every day at a time.

The way I see it is like I say about smokers, you can never ever become a non-smoker if you were once a smoker, you are just a smoker taking a break. I know I am / was /and am again!

Any perspective / suggestions/ thoughts on this disconnected rambling of mine would be really appreciated.

Cheers guys and thanx for being there for all of us addicts

 

Septimus......... many thanx for your welcome and suggestion and link.

Finally Done........
I am so so so glad that you brought up the issue of my user name. Honest to goodness I AM!
You will probably not believe this but I spent a great deal of time deciding whether to use that handle or not.
I have used it for years to remain anonymous on Porn sites and I did realise it was probably out of place on this forum.
Finally I decided that I would use it for 2 reasons:
1. I hoped that it would draw some criticism (it did- yours)
2. It would keep reminding me of where I have been and how silly I made myself look.

I totally get what you are saying about diminished respect of loved ones and its associated diminished self respect and
self loathing. It got to point where like serial criminals want to be caught for their crimes, I wanted to be caught fapping.

Guys I am truly grateful for your observations, suggestions and support !

Being away from P for a week since my last relapse, I now find myself waiting for my girlfriend to ask to watch
some so I have a "valid reason" for doing it! Any suggestions? any help ? how does one overcome these urges?
I am fighting it and refusing to give in but as all of you know its a tough battle.
I really do understand addicts now that I have realised that I am one and addictions are not so easy to overcome.
Its easy to be judgemental in so many ways about addictions but until one has been an addict one
doesnt know what it truly means.

I have to confess that I have only been able to strip away the P and still look for the MO, but less frequently than before.

Thank you again and look forward to your continued kindness and support.

 

Its now 2 weeks since my second reset and its going OK. Still get the urges when I am bored, but have not relapsed.