According to his 6th grade school report, Rob was a “bright, intelligent guy and very popular among all of his classmates”. Rob had an amazing future ahead of him. It looked like he would go on to achieve great things and live a happy, fulfilling life.
Rob first found porn when he was 13. It started off with cut outs from tabloid newspapers — girls in their bra and underwear. Rob was excited when he masturbated to these pictures, but he started to crave more. Rob then went down to a local bookshop and started to look at some sexual books (with pictures). He was so excited by novelty that he tore pages out of these books, and brought them home to masturbate to.
Then, he discovered the internet and things got even better (or so he thought). Rob started to download loads of porn from Limewire. The videos took quite a while to download, but it was worth the wait.
Rob started off by looking at plain vanilla sex videos, but by the time he was 15 years of age, they done fuck all for him. So he decided to experiment with other porn. He downloaded a tranny porn video one day, despite having no attraction to cocks. He jizzed while looking at it and didn’t even bat an eyelid.
Rob’s lifestyle became extremely lonely. Yes, he had friends, but at 15 years of age, he spent 80% of his leisure time in his bedroom looking for new porn to download. Rob would often spend hours on chatrooms trying to persuade girls to add him on msn messenger so he could watch one strip off for him on cam. It was difficult to do, but he often charmed some girls enough to encourage them to bare all. This excited Rob immensly and gave him a feeling of power with women that he felt was missing from his life.
Rob often became depressed when he thought about the fact that he hadn’t done anything sexual with a woman in his life. At 16 years of age, the furthest he had gone was kissing. These depressive feelings became too much for Rob to handle, so he started to numb himself even more with porn.
Rob’s relatives would often remark about his quietness and his shyness. They expected that to be gone by the age of 16, but it seemed to be worsening. Robs behaviour became increasingly odd. He started to try on women’s underwear and jack himself off into them. He even stole a thong from a supermarket one day just to do this. He had reached rock bottom at 17 years of age.
Luckily for Rob, he never lost his natural charm. He was always a funny guy with a very good sense of humour, which lead him to somehow keep some friendships and form new ones while he was addicted to porn. Despite his quietness and social anxiety, Rob was and still is a down to earth, intelligent person.
Rob’s qualities lead him to finding a beautiful girlfriend at 18 years of age. He got lucky, because he was still a major porn watcher, but maintaining friendships lead him to never lose the ability to socialize. It was always there, it just rarely showed its face. Thankfully, on his 18th birthday, Rob saw a hot girl he recognized from a social networking site named Netlog. He had her friends number and decided to text her out of curiosity asking for this hot girl’s number.
Rob was shocked when he received a text from this beautiful girl who seemed open to the idea of meeting up with him that night. Rob went with 4 of his friends to meet up with her and her friends. After much hesitation (porn had fucked up any alpha bone in his body) Rob finally kissed her. It was an incredible kiss that lead to the start of a 3 year relationship.
Everything was rosy for the first year. Rob gave up watching porn, especially weird fucking porn that wasn’t even in line with his true desires. He fell in love with his girlfriend, and old Rob was back. The bright, intelligent charismatic guy had returned. He was always clever and he really started to excel in school and landed a place in a great university. Rob was on top of the world.
Unfortunately for Rob, things were about to take a turn back to the old days. Rob’s way of dealing with challenges during his teenage years had always revolved around escapism. If he faced something daunting, like having to socialize with the opposite sex, he would stay in his room and jerk it off, oblivious to what he was doing to his development as a man and as a person.
Rob’s next big challenge was going to university. He was intimidated by it — meeting new people wasn’t his strong point at all. He quickly crumbled due to the stress of it. The hundreds of movies he had watched depicting the college experience didn’t meet his expectations. Rob expected that his university life would be full of wild parties, sex and lots of new friends. Tragically, he allowed himself to fail before he even tried to succeed. One day, Rob decided that he would try join a sports club in college. He arrived to the place only to be told that the initiation meeting was cancelled. Dejected, Rob walked out of university back to his house and jerked off to porn again.
Daily porn use became a habit for him. Just like the old days, he would spend most of his leisure time in his room watching videos of increasingly disturbing porn. Rob skipped lectures and watched porn. It was easier for him. He didn’t have to challenge himself this way. He could get all the gratification he wanted without having to leave his room and talk to people. Rob started to lose touch with his real self, which isn’t in his pants but is in his down to earth, caring and humorous personality.
Arguments with his girlfriend became more frequent. One day when Rob was having sex, he lost his erection. Porn had blunted his sensitivity. He felt lost and humiliated. Despite being a clever guy, Rob somehow felt that watching porn would help. It didn’t.
Rob was eventually dumped by text message when his girlfriend got annoyed at his increasingly negative attitude, his anger issues and his complaining. Rob was making everyone around him unhappy.
He somehow found a job in 2012 with an insurance company. His girlfriend dumped him one month into that job. Rob was devastated. Life was challenging him again, and of course, Rob only knew one way to overcome these challenges — he avoided them by immersing himself in porn. He started to jack off in the toilets at work. Everyone at the office wondered how someone could be so reserved, quiet and withdrawn. Rob just didn’t seem bothered with people.
Luckily, Rob got his last chance at redemption in December 2012. He found Gary Wilson’s porn video and everything started to make sense. It was like Mr.Wilson was describing the cause of everything that had gone wrong for him in life. The video spoke to real Rob, the funny, easygoing guy that still existed underneath the porn addict shell.
From then on, Rob vowed to improve himself. He promised himself not to run away from life’s challenges. He stopped porn and started to interact with people at university. It was finals year, but he still managed to make friends. You see, Rob has always been able to form relationships with people, but he never realized that everyone feels the same nerves as he does when faced with life’s challenges. But the truth started to stick out like a sore thumb — Rob had been avoiding these challenges with porn, and it was fucking up his life.
Rob is now 25 years old. He still hasn’t beaten porn addiction, but he watches it a lot less. His life has improved immeasurably since he viewed the Gary Wilson video. He bought a guitar and can now sing and play at the same time, which gives him an untouchable level of self-fulfillment. Rob ventured to Southeast Asia alone and has since returned ten times to live there 6 months each year. Rob’s eyes were opened to the truth.
The truth is that heavy porn use caused Rob to miss out on many aspects of self-development that should’ve happened in his teens. Rob is five years behind normal people, but he is determined to never slip back into apathy again. You see, Rob just didn’t care. He never expressed his emotions, he never really felt emotions when he spent his days watching porn. He was content with wasting his life away.
Rob is by no means over porn addiction, he knows it’ll be a long struggle. He has been quitting on and off for 4 years, with two long streaks of 60 and 70 days and lots of intermittent shorter bursts of 7-10 days without watching it.
Just today, Rob broke a 23 day streak because he was hungover. Another challenge, another avoidance with sexual imagery. Rob still has many things to learn, but he knows he will get there in the end. The ability to laugh, cry, empathize, listen, and love is much more valuable to Rob than a few seconds of pleasure. The sense of calmness, serenity, and oneness with the world is infinitely better than the anxiety and depressive feelings associated with disattachment and isolation.
It has taken 10 years, but Rob finally knows the truth. He knows that porn is like anesthesia for the soul, it disconnects him from his true nature. His true self. Rob has woken up. And even though he just relapsed, he is smiling at how far he’s come in these last 4 years.
My name is Rob, and I’m a porn addict.
LINK - Read Rob’s story.
by somtamthai
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