Just Started - Ready to have control over my addiction

I posted this originally on the over 40 board, but I realized it should go here, so I moved it.

Oct 6, 2019 is the day I gave up PMO for good. I am not sure whether to include the O as I plan on continuing a sexual relationship with my wife, but the O is gone when it comes to masturbation and pornography. I am done, I can't do it anymore! I thought it might be helpful to write out my story, its going to be long, but I think I need to really reflect on what has brought me here.

TLDR: I started looking at pornographic images when I was 13, I am 44 now and been married twice and have been an addict all of my adult life. PMO has pretty much destroyed my sex life up until I met my wife, my lovely, beautiful, and supportive wife and I am done with PMO risking that relationship too.

My story starts the way most people's do. I was about 12 or 13 and came across a book on sex and birth in my parents basement. It was one of those 70's jobs with lots of pictures of naked women and men engaged in sex and then took you all the way through the birth of a child. Looking back it was actually a beautiful book, but it was my gateway into obsessing over finding naked women and sex.

About a year later, my dad got into an accident and one of the "gifts" his co-workers gave him was a whole bunch of skin mags. He hid them from me and my mother but I found where they were. I would sneak into his room and steal one at time and masturbate 3-4 times a day, carefully trying to hide my tracks. My mother, who was a devout Catholic, found one of the mags in my room and freaked out at me. That was my first negative experience with sex, but wouldn't be my last. I would look for this stuff where ever I could find it. I got a job at 16 in a drug store, they used to sell playboy and pent house. If a magazine didn't sell for that month, you could just rip off the cover and return it. I would steal the magazine, then rip the cover off and through it back in the box at the end of the month. Once again, my mother found one and ripped me a new one again. However I think this had the opposite effect and made me want to do it more and more. I continued this way until 1994 when I first got AOL and that opened up a whole new world of porn and unhealthy sexual relationships (all virtual, never physical). I remember the first month I racked up $250 in charges (AOL charged by the minute) mainly in chat rooms about porn and cyber sex. I was on AOL constantly. Since I was 18, I also got my own video rental card and would rent porn now and then to keep the fix going.

During all of this, I found out my brother, 17 years my senior, was gay. This was around 1992, then a year later we found out he had HIV. I became deathly afraid of real sex, that I too would contract this disease. This irrational fear, on top of my mother's Catholic teaching that sex before marriage was a sin lead me further and further down the "virtual" sex path. It was safe and free from worry.

In 1993-1994 I had my first real girlfriend, I was 17. She was...quite a handful and liked making out and lots of sexual contact. However because of my fear of sex, I never allowed myself to have sex with her. One more bad sexual experience, but I was always able to go back to my safe cyber space and have all the safe sex I wanted there.

My brother died in 1995 sending me into a spiral of depression. I always just returned to my safe cyber world, and even met a few people from those chat rooms. As you can imagine the results were disastrous. In 1996 I met my first wife, it definitely was NOT love at first sight, but she kind of liked me and I was lonely, so I thought why not? It became very apparent early on, that she wasn't that interested in sex and that, I think in a way, was a relief to me. I wasn't really happy with her, and thought about breaking up with her many times throughout our relationship. I was still using PMO on a regular basis which controlled the sexual urges. Finally on our 2 year anniversary of dating, that's right two freaking years, we had sex for the first time. Afterwards, she ABSOLUTELY freaked out insisting that I got her pregnant. I was a virgin until 22 and my first sexual experience was a disaster. Well she wasn't pregnant and eventually this too passed. I proposed to her 4 months later and we made a pact to not have sex until we were married. Still using PMO to control everything...and the sick thing is I let myself believe my own lies that this is just how things worked.

We got married in 2000 and I had ED problems on our honeymoon. Once we got back I was once again able to drown my sorrows in porn. We continued for the next 4 years this way, the ED becoming a bigger and bigger problem. I would say in 4 years we had successful sex no more than 2 or 3 times. Sex always ended in frustration, tears, and anguish making it easier and easier to go back to porn. It was always there for me. It never made me cry. It never judged me. It never told me it was my fault that our marriage was falling apart. I finally went to the doctor and tried Viagara. While it kept the ED at bay, I couldn't ejaculate. Again porn was there for me, and it treated me just fine.

In 2005 we decided to try for a kid, because that is what you do when your marriage is falling apart. She stopped taking the pill, and we commenced one of my most hated words of my life: "Baby Sex". I hated that she called it that, I hated the connotation, I hated that we didn't love each other enough to just have sex, we had to have "baby sex". For the next year and half we had exactly 1 successful sexual encounter and sure enough, that was all it took. In 2006 she got pregnant with my son. From 2 months into the pregnancy until nearly 6 or 7 months after, we abstained from any sex, but porn was there for me.

Shortly there after she discovered that I was using porn. She called me disgusting and pig and claimed that I was cheating on her. In a way she was right, I was talking to and having cyber sex with women on the internet, always justifying it. Again this angst and anguish over porn just drove me to do it more, to be MORE secretive about it, to hide it better. I just dove head first into my secret life. I began traveling more for work which meant more and more time alone with my porn. It began to become darker and more hardcore, luckily I never got to the point of fetishizing or watching hurt-core, but the more I looked the more I wanted. We had many fights about porn over the next few years.

Fast forward another 3 years to 2010 and she decided she wanted a second child. She wanted baby sex again, and baby sex led to the same results. More ED, more shame, more embarrassment and more porn to cope. One day that she told me she made an appointment with a fertility doctor and we were going. I was in such a fog and funk, I didn't even care. I went. I came (ok bad pun). Turns out, I was perfectly healthy. In fact the doctor told me I had "super sperm". None of the fertility problems were my fault. We started the fertility treatments, but never had sex. I continued to turn to porn. I remember the day we found out she was pregnant with my second son, I got the call because she didn't answer her phone and she wasn't even excited. Something then snapped in my brain, and I knew for the first time in 14 years that this had to end soon, but I was stuck. I remember doing an experiment of not initiating ANY contact with her, no kisses, no hugs, nothing. And NOTHING happened, she didn't even notice, but my porn was there for me. I knew I had to end it and in 2010 I told her I didn't love her and I wanted a divorce.

Later that year is when I met my current wife. We did have a love at first sight moment even though we were both very broken people. The first time we had sex was unbelievable and has been ever since then. Its like all of the sexual problems went away, no ED, no shame, no embarrassment, no tears, no frustration. Unfortunately my porn addiction stayed. Even with all of the love we had for each other, with the very passionate and fulfilling sex. I continued to use porn nearly everyday. She was ok with the porn use, or at least she told me she was. We had a few small fights when she found stuff on my phone but we had our first big fight about porn when she found out I spent $300 on this stupid package of stuff. Yeah, I paid that much (ugh). I had a few times of clarity from that point on where I would delete my "stash" and try and go clean. I would go 2-3 days and be right back where I was. We had a healthy sexual relationship so I thought I could make the porn and our relationship work.

Two years ago, we had the biggest fight of our marriage. I had joined a Patreon and paid $30 to get a level of access. A few days had gone by and I didn't get what I paid for and I messaged the owner, which was the girl and said I wanted what I paid for. Well my wife found this and flipped out, thinking I was talking to this woman. My wife told me she hated me. That jolted me awake. I gave up porn for 14 days that time, but easily slipped back into it. I told her I was using again but that I wouldn't pay for it anymore and that I think I could manage it without it being a problem. Our sex life continued to be good, but that didn't stop the porn.

 

Finally on Oct 6th, my wife found something else on my phone, not related to porn at all, but it was something I hadn't told her about. We got into a huge fight and it came out that she didn't and couldn't trust me. I had lied to her for so long about the extent and usage of porn and she couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't blame her. She was 100% right and I realized that moment that if I didn't want to lose this amazing woman, I needed to change right there. I put a block on my phone so I couldn't open incognito tabs and gave her the password. I deleted the stash on my computer and put blocking software on the computer. I did decide to keep having sex with my wife as that has been the only good constant in an otherwise really poor sexual history.

I will try and write a few times a week. Right now I know I am withdrawing, but I am working hard on identifying my triggers and dealing with them. I started meditation and I am learning how to note and not react to urges. So far I feel like I can think and see more clearly than I have in a long time. I am not allowing myself to go back.

 

Absolutely! Same for me. The longest I went before nofap was 14 days