The Day I Quit Porn
After years of addiction, something happened that finally broke the cycle of self-sabotage and denial.
At the age of fifteen, my friend David had his first kiss with a cute girl named Beth, at a party that a guy from school was having in his parents’ empty beach house. I wasn’t invited to that party and instead spent the night watching porn in my room.
When he was sixteen, my buddy Patrick went on his first date with a girl he had met through mutual friends. They spent the evening in a nice little coffee shop and nervously flirted their way to a goodbye kiss. That same evening, I had indulged in an eight-hour-long session of porn that had carried me well into the night and didn’t end until my penis gave up and lost its erection.
The night that my friend Matt, always a bit of a late bloomer when it came to relationships, lost his virginity at the age of twenty-one, I was laying on the couch zombiely staring at the TV, drained after having watched dozens of girls allegedly have sex for the first time on camera in awkward castings ran by creepy fat dudes.
Throughout all those years, porn was the only thing I had. It was my first kiss, my first date, whom I lost my virginity to, and my first reverse gangbang… Porn is, without a doubt, the longest relationship I’ve ever had, and while it was in my life there was no room for anything else.
You could call this a codependent relationship, and those usually lead to one of two things: either a painful breakup, or gradual but complete self-destruction.
Pick your poison, but I know I would rather destroy porn before it destroys me.
I’m not sure my relationship with porn was ever healthy. There was always a taste of guilt about it, and it didn’t come from puritanism or a sense of moral wrong-doing that I associated with porn in and of itself. It came from the way I consumed it.
The feeling was latent, but never too explicit. See, what happens is that porn, strangely enough, is at the same time normalized and taboo, so it is widely accepted that everybody watches it but nobody really talks about it. This created the false illusion that there was nothing wrong with me watching porn, because it’s just something everybody does. What it was not exposing was how fucked up my particular habits were. In this context, it took me a while until I realized I had a problem.
In retrospect, you didn’t have to be Sherlock to catch on to how profoundly wrong my situation was. I would binge-watch porn for hours on end, sometimes taking the whole day in sessions that could last eight to twelve hours. I was neglecting my studies, my hobbies, and my social life in favor of porn, and even physically hurting my penis in the process. And yet, it wasn’t always obvious how big of an issue porn was for me.
The sense of disgust and regret that followed immediately after ejaculating would only last me for a day, and then I would get immediately back at it. For a long time, I failed to see the bigger picture or understand how my binges followed a pattern common to addictions: I was using them to evade my problems and cope with stress at the expense of severe short and long-term consequences.
Little by little, porn was taking over my life, more and more days spent watching video after video. Evidence mounted to a point where it was hard to ignore: such a constant display of young and vulnerable girls having sex for money right in front of my eyes could be nothing but a clear sign of trouble. Jeffrey Epstein’s neighbors figured that out, and now I too was finally beginning to realize.
The first time that I tried to quit porn, I was at one of the worst phases of my addiction. One day, I stumbled upon a TED talk about the harms of pornography and its addiction and saw myself reflected in many of the things described there. I then found a subreddit for people that were trying to get rid of porn in their lives (likely /r/NoFap in its early days) and for the first time got a sense of community and saw the topic being openly discussed by people in situations similar to mine.
Although this was years ago and porn addiction was an even less well-understood and publicized matter than it is now, those early resources helped me open my eyes to many of the realities of my addiction. While I needed no one to tell me that watching porn for ten hours wasn’t quite right, the information that I found painted a broader picture: what the mechanisms behind porn addiction were and the many consequences it had, how other people were fighting it and benefitted from quitting. It pushed me to finally reflect seriously on my situation and provided me with enough motivation to, at last, resolve to stop watching porn.
In January 2011, I decided to quit porn for the first time in my life. It would last two months — in March of that same year I had already forgotten my plans and was watching porn again, just as often as before. During that one-off attempt, I struggled but managed to avoid porn, only falling occasionally into substitutes (hunting for erotic images on places like Google images, social media, or even wallpaper sites). For a while, I felt more energized and even convinced myself that avoiding porn was by itself helping me break out of my shell with a new, sassy personality. The truth was, horniness was pushing the limits of my shyness a little bit, but my life and myself were mostly the same, and the problems and conditions that had always triggered me to watch porn were still there and still strong.
After a while, I realized I was feeling more excited about the idea of watching all those weeks of accumulated new videos than about the idea of giving continuity to the streak. When I crossed day 60 off my calendar, I figured it was a good symbolic number and, satisfied, decided to celebrate with a good-old session of porn, shamelessly relapsing and putting an end to my achievement.
They say falling down is part of life, but what defines a true hero is how you rise back up from every fall. Well, I think Peter Parker would be very disappointed in me, because I stayed down on that floor and made it my home for a few more years.
My unhealthy habits around porn went on unaffected for a long while. I kept abusing it throughout college, denying myself every opportunity to do in real life anything close to what I was watching in all those videos.
It wasn’t until after some time that I decided to make important changes in my life. I had always entertained the idea of moving out and trying new places and experiences, and I felt like my miserable situation at home was the ultimate incentive to do so. I finally summoned the courage and immersed myself in a completely different environment — a new country, a new language, a new social circle. I started to break out of my shell and, after so many years of frustration, had my first real dates, kisses, and sexual experiences. Eventually, I fell in love with a wonderful girl and started a relationship with her. We struggled through our first months together but ultimately went on to celebrate our first year anniversary, and then our second.
If this all seems like the perfect redemption story to you, it’s only because I made it sound like it. The reality is that, even through that period of many positive changes in my life, I kept watching porn. The day after that first kiss, in between Tinder swipes, right after an unsuccessful date — porn never abandoned me. It was a witness in the dark to my progress, watching with jealousy, occasionally claiming back some of the attention that it had always received — and getting it.
My habits got better but I would still masturbate to porn regularly and even occasionally indulged in those long, self-destructive sessions. The switch of context truly worked wonders in my life but, as they usually say, there is no running away from your problems, and all my years of abusing porn soon came back to bite me — right in the dick. The addiction was so ingrained in me that, by the time I got the chance to lose my virginity, I found out I couldn’t. Porn had already wreaked too much havoc: I suffered from erectile dysfunction all throughout my dating life and well into my relationship.
It took some time until I managed to function enough to have penetrative sex with my girlfriend, a long while until I was able to feel somewhat comfortable doing it, and even longer to start actually enjoying it. My partner was always nothing but supportive and helped me loads navigating myself through the situation with a positive and constructive attitude. However, while the progress was always there, it was excruciatingly slow, and the relationship was suffering from our struggling sex life. The hard truth was that, once again, and even through this difficult process, I was still watching fucking porn.
My girlfriend knew about my history with pornography and we were both well aware of its negative consequences on me and its impact on the particular problems that we were facing. We both agreed it was absolutely necessary that I cut down on my porn usage and put an end to those terrible, long binges.
I started to actively try to avoid watching porn again, and we decided I was to report my progress with that to her. However, with no real self-awareness or an actual strategy, essentially with nothing but good intentions, I was inevitably falling back down again and again. What’s even worse, I was hiding it from her most of the time out of embarrassment. For the first time in my life, porn was not just hurting myself but also the person I loved, and putting at risk the beautiful thing that we were trying to build together. My improvements with sex were also starting to feel a bit at a standstill, and I knew I could never make real progress with porn holding me back. And yet, it seemed like I still needed a final push to give it up completely.
One day, after my erectile dysfunction had come back to frustrate another attempt at enjoying our time together, she asked me if I had been watching porn again and I confessed my last few relapses from the previous weeks. We both decided it was time to end the experiments and take it seriously. It was time to admit to the gravity of my situation and stop the half-ass attempts. After so many years — essentially half of my life — masturbating myself away, it was finally time to face my addiction and commit to fighting it with everything I had.
That day was the day I quit porn.
Almost a year has passed since that day. During this time, I have relapsed a handful of times, but I’ve been able to go without porn for months and overall have made tremendous progress in my sexuality, my relationship, and my life.
I am now, I strongly believe, on the right path towards recovery. Looking back at that first attempt years ago, I recognize how my approach to the problem was not using the right tools nor relying on the right mentality. Back then, I turned to porn abstinence in a desperate swerve to try to change my life and get rid of many of the problems I was facing. In a way, I was looking at the issue upside down, as I was failing to directly address the core issues that were feeding my addiction in the first place.
Lacking that necessary self-awareness and with nothing but willpower, my efforts were bound to fall flat. Only much later, after many positive changes in my life, a lot of introspection, and the greatly helpful context of a supportive relationship, was I able to face my addiction with a renovated attitude — one that recognizes recovery not so much as a battle between a man and pornography, but as a path of self-discovery and personal growth.
Ultimately, it’s not about that one day when you see the light and resolve to quit porn. It’s about what brought you up to that point and what keeps you on the better path. With time, you realize how your issues were larger than porn, and how that path to recovery that you started has many more gratifying rewards than you had imagined.
What’s in your math folder?
What made you decide to quit porn?
In moments of weakness, it’s easy to forget why you are even doing this in the first place. If this is not clear to you, it becomes easier to delude yourself into a relapse.
Remind yourself what brought you here. What’s your history with porn? How has it affected your life? Why did you decide to quit? Keep this in mind, write it down if you have to — that way you’ll have something to come back to when you are feeling uncertain.
Share your insights in the comments below, on social media, or in your favorite porn addiction community, and if you know others that are struggling with porn, help them by sharing a link to this story.
Let’s start a conversation!
Hi, this is James! Thank you for reading!
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