Pornography is Incredibly Difficult to Quit

Pornography is incredibly difficult to quit.

I don’t like how impersonal that statement sounds. Pornography is incredibly difficult for me to quit. I am the one who can’t seem to quit pornography.

I am a happily married thirty-four-year-old man. I rarely use the term “man” to describe myself, but when customers at work call me “sir” and my sixteen-year-old coworkers were born when I was in high school, I realize I am. Or I have to be.

I mention being married because, as a married man, porn use affects my sexual relationship with my spouse, who I love dearly. My wife and I love each other a great deal, and really have a blast together. There honestly isn’t anyone I’d rather spend my days with. We are very different, but fit together.

I get depressed rather easily, and she does not. I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders, and she lifts actual weights. We are different, but like the world we have together. Our laughs, our joys, our struggles and fears, we like the life we are building toward. I like the life we are building toward. But life is hard today. If I choose to view it that way.

I grew up in the age of free, easily-accessible, infinitely varied internet pornography. It started when I was ten, when my friends and I would sneak into the office, lock the door and look at whatever naked pictures we could find. Later, when I discovered masturbation, I developed this other world, this escape I had. I can still remember the excitement and the feeling of the back of my head going numb from all the dopamine and serotonin being released. I liked it and chose to live in the world whenever I had the chance. In high school I got my own laptop, which increased the level of privacy I was able to find. Just a fun, exciting, detached world where anything was possible.

College, with its attached social dysfunction, feigned adulthood and substance abuse certainly fit the porn lifestyle. I could go to a party, get as drunk and high as I wanted, feel sorry for myself and tell myself what an unlikable, unlovable loser I was, then head home to my computer, where I was sexy, attractive and lovable, a stallion of pleasure and stamina. No matter how the night went, I always knew in the back of my mind at the end of the night I could feel better about myself. For a little while anyway.

I dated and was sexually active back then, and for the most part I kept the two worlds separate. My porn use had not yet impacted my sex life in any noticeable fashion, other than my complete lack of self confidence and my inability to talk to the girls I liked. The physical act itself was still in proper working order.

Then I got older. College ended, and my twenties started roaring. I started grad school, then dropped out. I moved a bunch. I tried to answer life’s questions with more drug use. Pornography became part of my daily routine. It did its thing, but the high was never what it once had been.

Eventually, I made the choice to remove mood-changing, mind-altering substances from my life. It was difficult. I didn’t get it the first time; it took me a while before I got the hang of it. I’m glad I did; my life is discernibly and demonstrably better because of it.

It was difficult, absolutely. It is still a choice every single day. But sitting here, years later, I am certain of one thing:

Pornography is infinitely more difficult to quit than drugs.

I know there are plenty of people who would disagree with that. I just know me, the neuro-pathways I’ve developed and hardened over the past twenty-four years of my life, my first addiction, the free one, the easy one, the private one. The world of fantasy and escape where my desire I could convince my brain that I was having sex with thousands of partners and should be rewarded accordingly. I got even older too, and the behavior caught up with the body. Suddenly sex with an actual person in real life wasn’t nearly stimulating enough. Suddenly porn had to be involved for there to be sexual arousal. Suddenly I was a happily married man incapable of being intimate with his wife. Suddenly ignoring and devaluing sex became the answer. Suddenly libido became something to minimize and of course, compartmentalize into periodic porn use.

Just as a normal person might tell a using addict, “So stop! Quit! Just don’t do it!”, it isn’t that easy. But there is light at the end of this tunnel. I believe I can get over this, rebuild my brain, live my best life. I have goals and dreams and those things are still possible. As stressed, overwhelmed, and defeated I may feel in my life today, I will overcome. We will overcome. I have so much to be grateful for, an amazing life and an amazing spouse who loves me through all of my flaws and foibles. To any of my fellow thirty-somethings (and any-somethings) who feel like failures, who berate themselves for not pursuing their goals, for settling, for procrastinating, for not making their mark on the world, for not achieving the success, stability and security you believed you could have, I have just one thing: your day will come. Our day will come. Keep morale up. For God’s sake, keep morale up. Just stay alive until midnight and give yourself a fresh start tomorrow. There are no mistakes. I love you. Our day will come.