My life led without PMO or the past 3 years has been amazing. I’m over one year since ever intentionally seeing P. I’m not totally cured, but it’s good to be free. Thanks nofap for being there, and my wife for hearing me out and being forgiving and helping me to grow and overcome addiction.
LINK – married life without PMO is awesomely better (self.NoFap)
by vxlccm
ADDITIONAL POSTS
I started MO when about 13, was addicted bad by 18, then started buying P and PMO became an even worse addiction (harshly stronger). It always pretended to feel good, but made me feel disgusting and hurt my marriage to the point I’m sure that’s what caused my divorce. So, I was hooked to PMO for 20+ years. Being free of that demon on my back feels amazing.
Mostly, I’ve started (yes, only STARTED) to finally have a healthy sense of self-worth. Not vanity or pride, but just the regular self-esteem I guess everyone else had. I’ve really never had that since being a pre-teen. I still struggle with doubts and even guilt to a degree, but feeling good about trying to be a good man and being a father and working to help provide for a family is now a new part of me. It’s like a new limb or a new glowing light in my mind, it really just is a part of who I am.
Specific benefits. Don’t want to get too graphic. I am Mormon and like to watch my words carefully, and don’t want to use trigger language anyways. But, trust me, the marital intimacy is light years better than it was. Not so much the mechanics of “what” happens, though that is better, too, but more is about how I feel about it, and how I know my wife feels knowing I am 100% devoted to her. Well, 99.99% because I do have occasional struggles with P subs and I am working on that. The feeling of sex now is, as I said in OP “awesomely better”. Probably more frequent, too. Sometimes, I think it’s because I pursue my wife more often, and even if she never asks me to be that way, I think it flatters her and makes her feel good to be a female being pursued. Hard to explain without sounding sexist, and maybe not the same for everyone, but that’s our experience so far. I am not unreasonable, and it’s still very hard to find confidence to think she wants me, porn broke that in my head because it does whatever you want whenever you want and isn’t a real person that may say – wait 30 seconds or wait 30 minutes or wait until tonight. Rarely does my wife make me wait until the end of the week, but it can happen, and I have learned to be strong enough to deal with that. My addiction was so bad before, and this is really sad, but even if my wife was like ‘wait 30 seconds’, I would be like nevermind and then go look at porn. It really is disgusting how porn makes you reduce people to objects, and I was not treating my own wife like a person, much less the person I love so dearly.
Telling my wife was BRUTALLY hard. You know what, though, it was actually mostly just hard on me. It wasn’t actually the end of the world to my wife. I mean, it was bad and a shock, but my fears were way worse than what actually happened.
I was a coward (or perhaps wise) and did not talk about it until after I was successfully on a 90-day no PMO reboot. Why? Because I rationalized I had to be prepared to have no sex for a while which would have probably killed me into relapse if I wasn’t strong for myself yet. Also, this was somewhat like peeling an onion. I had to outright just tell her I’ve had a porn problem, but then still let her ask questions for a few weeks and be open about what exactly was my problem. I’m glad, because saying it in little pieces made it less impossible to talk about. I was ashamed of having lied to her about working and instead staying up late looking at porn instead of being in bed with her. I was ashamed that so often when I was looking at porn, it was also to MO. All those details did come out of our self-marriage therapy discussions, though. The incremental approach made sense to me because it took years to dig the hole of the addiction. I didn’t mind talking about it a couple times a week or even every night. It definitely killed the “mood” almost every time, but eventually there was less questions and more time for intimacy. After just pushing through it, we totally had better sex, and more regular sex since I wasn’t checked out of the relationship and drained or numbed into no emotion (what P does), after maybe a month. I may have gotten off lucky there – 1 month after all that worry and guilt and shame and self-doubt?! I should have had her involved in helping me WAY sooner! Don’t get me wrong, things weren’t completely right until more like a year later, but still, it was (no, is) totally worth it, being where we are now.
Religion helped a lot in my case. Not as a total solution, but as a constant influence to help my wife and I stay close together despite me still working on fixing my problem. God in my life didn’t cure me, and I wish that could have happened, but for me it was required to work on it a lot myself, and have a little extra help to get over the finish line when Yet Another Day 1 was going to be too hard and I might have fallen down. My wife didn’t save me from lust every time; sometimes God helped us. Yes, I know, I’m a very lucky man. But, I’m willing to wager that a LOT of wives out there are willing to forgive for the man that will treat her right and work on his problems, and make their marriage better.
A little more detailed account is written out in my journal on the nofap.com website: http://www.nofap.com/forum/index.php?threads/vxls-journal.36735/#post-236933
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