Today is the end of day two. I have now gone 48 hours without compulsively masturbating or looking at Internet porn.

Hello, everyone. My name is James*. I’m a married thirty-something engineer. I work hard. I’m active with my church and civic organizations. I volunteer in the community. I work out at the gym. I live in a nice house in a nice area of town. I’m the picture of normalcy.

I’m also an Internet porn addict and compulsive masturbator. Not just an addict. I’m the Internet porn version of Keith fucking Richards. If I’d been doing heroin instead, I’d probably be dead.

I’ve known I have a problem with porn and masturbation for a long time. I’ve even tried to quit once before – back in 2005. But I relapsed pretty quickly. But here I am, going to try again to give up Internet porn and compulsive masturbation.

I guess I should tell the whole story from start to finish – I think that’s a good way to get this blog moving.

The Beginning.

I first discovered porn when I was a kid. This was the late 80s – I would have been less than 8 years old. We lived on the edge of a community that was growing quickly, so my neighborhood was on the edge of a forest. One night, while my parents and a friend’s parents were having a dinner party, me and my friend where running through the woods. We happened upon a clearing and, near the base of a tree we found a small plastic container. Stashed inside the container were copies of Playboy. This was obviously some teenager’s private stash that he hid in the woods.

A few years later I discovered my Dad’s “private stash” or Penthouse magazines that he kept at the back of the filing cabinet in his office. I also discovered masturbation around the same time. My first time masturbating to orgasm I was laying face down in my bed, rubbing myself while staring at an image in Penthouse. This was the beginning of a long downward slide of masturbating to porn and looking at porn to masturbate.

As I entered my teenage years, masturbation became a source of relief to me. I was not a popular kid – I was nerdy, with bad acne and thick glasses, interested in computers and other geeky topics. Girls generally weren’t interested in a guy like me. Of course, in retrospect, I see that I didn’t really actively pursue them. What was the point? I had porn and masturbation. A minimum of two times a day, every day. Some weekends six plus times a day, especially if I was home alone. Who needs women when porn is always there for you?

Then came the Internet.

We got hooked up to the Internet earlier than most families, I would be willing to wager. I’m guessin 1994 or 95 if my memory is correct. Being the computer nerd that I was, I quickly glommed on to the Internet. And before long, I discovered Internet porn. Even then, it was pretty easily available. Back then, the best source was Usenet news groups, and I did plenty of downloading. Every now and then I would find my stash had been wiped out when someone found it, so I got better about hiding it.

Because I was constantly monopolizing the computer, in 1996 I got my own. Though I wasn’t allowed to have it in my room, I still managed to carve out a niche in the computer room where I could have privacy. It was even easier after everyone went to bed. I developed a technique where I could masturbate with my clothes on and just my hand in my pants. I could catch my emission and wipe it somewhere out of sight. I could do this sitting at the computer without arousing much suspicion. I would print pictures off and hide them in my room so that I could masturbate in the mornings and evenings without being caught.

While other people were out dating or playing sports, I was at home masturbating. I had periodic girlfriends throughout my high school years, but I never got physical with any of them mostly due to lack of interest. “Maybe I’m asexual” I told myself. But in the back of my brain, even then I knew that there was no way that could be true because of all the masturbation I did. At least 2 times a day and often more. Every day. Always with porn.

College life.

I moved into the dorms at college. I had made it a point to request a dorm where I could have a bedroom to myself. I wanted my privacy after all. When I moved to college, it took away my favorite source of porn – Usenet groups – but I more than made due. I discovered sites that had lists of passwords to paid porn sites. Plenty of porn to be had there and there was no shortage of privacy.

My first semester away from home I spent a lot of time masturbating. Again at least twice a day. Somehow my second semester, I was able to get out of the dorm and away from the computer long enough to join some organizations on campus. In at least one of them I acquired the reputation of being “that guy who had all the best porn and knew where to get more.” Not only was I corrupting myself, but I was enabling others. But to me, it just seemed natural.

I didn’t date much in college. No interest in real women. I had masturbation and porn. Porn never had an attitude and never judged me. Porn was always there and was always ready when I was. Some days I would skip class to masturbate. I would be late to work because of masturbation. I had porn pictures hanging on my wall.

The “low point” for me (even though I didn’t realize it at the time – I thought I was having a good time), during college was one day while living alone in an apartment off campus. I hit upon the idea of seeing how many times I could masturbate in a single day. So I ordered in pizza and spent nearly the whole day masturbating. I hooked my computer up to the TV so I could watch porn on a bigger screen, and I rubbed my dick that day until it was fucking raw. Eight times. I figure I was awake about 16 hours that day, so I was masturbating every 2 hours! Figure an hour a time and I was nearly constantly masturbating. Just spent the whole day masturbating, eating, watching porn and masturbating. It was like a gluttonous orgy of hedonism. By the time I ended that day, it hurt to pee and even walk.

And yet, the next morning, I masturbated again. Just felt that “I had to do it to start the day.” The pure essence of compulsion.

After college

Despite spending far more time masturbating than studying, I somehow managed to graduate from college and shortly thereafter, landed a full time job. The job was, compared to what I had been making, very well paying and afforded me the luxury to indulge all my excesses. I lived alone in a huge apartment in a nice complex where I had a super-fast high speed connection. The apartment had a great view of a scenic lake, and yet I always kept the blinds closed. Unlimited privacy and (nearly) unlimited bandwidth equaled massive amounts of porn viewed. When I moved in, the first thing I did, before even unloading the moving van, was hook up my computer and masturbate. “I had to christen the new apartment,” I jokingly told myself.

Most weekends I wouldn’t even wear clothing. I would spend the days lounging around naked and masturbating whenever it struck me. One weekend even I borrowed the projector from the office and shot eight-foot tall porn videos on the wall.

Then, the unthinkable happened: I got a girlfriend.

My first attempt to get clean

It was a girl I had known from my school days. How we hooked up again I’ll never know, and how I was able to overcome all the same issues that had plagued every romantic relationship I had ever tried to have I will also never know. In the show Futurama, Zoidberg once asks if “love” is having feelings for a woman for reasons other than mating. That’s how I began to feel about her. We got closer and closer together and then, one night, at her place, it got physical.

Here it was! The big moment I had masturbated to all these years!

WORST. FUCKING. NIGHT. OF. MY. LIFE.

My dick would not stay hard no matter what I did. Even me trying to rub it had no effect. Her touching it had literally no feeling. A blowjob had no feeling. And having another person there was weird and distracting. I just wanted to get off. Here I was, 24 years old and my first time having sex, and nothing functioned at all. I fucking panicked. She was so loving with me and told me it was probably nerves. We cuddled and went to bed, but as you can probably imagine I didn’t sleep at all. We tried again the next morning and, though I brought her off with my fingers, I couldn’t reach orgasm or even stay hard. I had to masturbate myself later (and cried while I did it, too).

That week was tough. I did a lot of reading and even saw a doctor about it. Some of it was performance anxiety, without a doubt. But the larger portion was due to 1) my masturbation technique, which I later discovered is called Traumatic Masturbation Syndrome or TMS, and 2) my addiction to Internet porn and compulsion to masturbate to it. I literally could not get off unless I was in front of a computer screen or printed image.

So I resolved to go clean. I decided to stop looking at porn and I – yes me – deleted my entire stash of porn. 200 something gigabytes of porn gone with a keystroke. I felt so empowered! I was going to beat this. I even went to a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting.

Relapse

Five days.

It lasted five days until I masturbated to Internet porn again. On the plus side, I masturbated in the “traditional” way (on my back using my fist), but I had still masturbated to Internet porn. And it opened the floodgates for me to start again.

Thinking it was performance anxiety (and some of it probably was), my doctor gave me a sample pack of Levitra. I hoarded those fuckers and cut them into quarters to make them last longer. The next time me and the girl were together, I took half a pill. The result? Rock hard penis. I was thrilled. Who cared if I was 24 and had to take a pill to have sex? I could have sex! Well, kinda. I could have sex. I could relax and start to even enjoy it some. But I still couldn’t reach orgasm with a blowjob or actual sex. The only way she could get me off was with her hands. I even showed her my favorite techniques. Sigh. But against all odds (perhaps proving to me that a relationship is much more than sex) we stay together.

Porn costs me my job

The company I worked at at the time was a startup. We were in a big open room with a bunch of desks. But as we grew, noise became an issue so eventually we had cubicles installed. Here, at long last, was some privacy I had craved. You can pretty much guess what I did. With an unmonitored Internet connection and a place to browse privately, my work computer soon had a little mini porn stash of its own.

Well, after I had been there a year or so, it was time to upgrade to newer computers. Without even thinking, I backed all my “important” folders to our main file server and copied them over to the new machine. I wiped the old machine’s hard drive, but forgot to remove them from the server.

A few days later my boss asks me to step outside. With his laptop he shows me the secret porn stash I had left on the server and asks me why all this is on the server. Fortunately, everything that was in there was, by my standards, pretty tame. I had to think fast, and quickly made up some bullshit about it actually being off my laptop and I had just put it there temporarily to move it to a new hard drive. Didn’t matter. They didn’t fire me, but my boss told me I had 15 minutes to get all the porn off the server and that they were cutting my pay.

Even though I wasn’t fired, work was now way too awkward. Within a month, I had quit and found a new job.

But on the relationship front, things were actually going pretty well. My girlfriend eventually moved in with me. This necessitated a change in my habits. By this time I had a laptop, and I started taking the bathroom to masturbate. I would spend hours “on the toilet” masturbating to Internet porn. The job she worked at started well before I got up, so she was already gone by the time I woke up. I would masturbate in the morning and masturbate again in the evening in the bathroom, unless I knew we were going to have sex. Then I would try my hardest to abstain from masturbating until we could have “sex” (which usually consisted of her giving me a handjob).

We were in love and decided to get married. Our wedding night was much like any other “sex” night – she gave me a handjob and I rubbed her to orgasm. I made time to look at Internet porn on our honeymoon – I would sneak into the bathroom after she went to sleep and would masturbate. I felt amazingly guilty about that.

Present day

This brings me to the present day – or more specifically, a few nights ago. I was still masturbating twice a day as of then, and as a result, our relationship is mostly sexless. We may “have sex” (which usually as above consists of her giving me a handjob) once a month. Things have progressed in our relationship slowly. Recently I’ve managed to be able to sometimes stay hard long enough to penetrate her and, one time, a few weeks ago, I finally “finished the deed.” I hadn’t looked and porn or masturbated in 5 days because we had been camping with family and I literally could not find any way to get away and masturbate. I had no choice but to endure five very difficult days without porn or masturbation and, as as result, I was hard as a rock and had an orgasm without difficulty.

There was the answer. But I still refused to accept it.

So that night comes along. We’ve decided recently that we’re ready to try to start a family as neither of us is getting any younger. She’s been testing herself daily and last night, the fertility test came out positive – this was her most fertile time. For the previous three days, I’d been trying not to masturbate. I still looked at porn “to tease myself” but didn’t bring myself or orgasm. We made plans to try to have “real” sex that night. She was going to take a bath and get all smooth.

And while she was in the bath, without me even realizing what I was doing, I masturbated. I didn’t even internalize what I had done until I had blown a load all over my chest. It was the craziest thing that I think I’ve ever done. Total auto-pilot. No one in the room, feeling horny, better fire up some Internet porn and masturbate!

Total. Fucking. Fail.

I have never felt worse about myself in my entire fucking life. I almost broke down in tears after realizing what I had done. I’ve never felt as out of control as I did at that moment. Like my entire life was just spiraling down. I faked that I was’t feeling well (we both have been sick recently, so it wasn’t that unusual) and we cuddled and went to bed. But I couldn’t sleep. In the middle of the night, I got up and started surfing. Previously when I would get up in the middle of the night and surf, I would absolutely masturbate. But this time, I did something different. It’s time make a change. That’s when I found NoFap on reddit.

Time to fix my life

So this is where I’m starting from. For me, this is rock bottom. I am ready to make a change in my life. I’m ready to stop my secretive, shameful compulsive masturbation, break my addiction to Internet porn and start having a healthy sexual relationship with my wife. It’s time for me to stop living my entire life in the shadows and shine a light on everything.

I didn’t masturbate in the middle of the night last night. I didn’t masturbate this morning. I haven’t looked at porn all day. Most days I would have masturbated at least once by now. Last night I deleted one terabyte of porn. No “last hurrah” or going on a last bender before sobering up. It ends now. I will get control of my life back from this compulsion.

You know, the act of writing this down has brought so many emotions out. It as been difficult and cathartic. But most of all, as I read over it, I’m sad. I’ve missed out on so much of my life so far because I spent so many years strung up on Internet porn and masturbating like a cheetah with a bag of crack. I did’t even realize it at the time, but now that I see it all here, spread out before me, I can no longer deny the damage I’ve done to my life. So many opportunities missed and chances at good times gone that I will never get back because I was stuck in the haze of porn.

Compulsive masturbation and Internet porn turned me into a total fucking loser. Someone totally incapable of having a normal romantic or sexual relationship, with strained interpersonal relationships and an obsession with privacy and protecting my stash. Someone willing to take far too many risks for the pleasure of just rubbing one out.

Hopefully my tale will serve as a warning to others who may be following down this same path as me. My addiction to Internet porn and my compulsive masturbation has robbed me of so much. If any of this seems even remotely familiar to you, please, stop now. It’s easier to quit if you don’t let it go on for 17 years. Help is available.

Don’t let an addiction to Internet porn and compulsive masturbation keep you from having a good life. You don’t have to suffer alone.