I was exposed to pornography at an early age. I started masturbating at about 10 years old. I found my dad’s playboy and at some point tore a bunch of the pictures out and stashed them in a folder under my mattress. It was like a taboo novelty at the time. I watched softcore porn from Cinemax on the weekends as a teenager. However in 1997, we got a computer and an internet connection for the first time. While it was less than 56K speed, I found my interest in prowling the porn sites slowly get more pervasive. I was a teenager that was a troublemaker drug user in high school. I had been pulled out of the normal classes when I was about 12 or 13, so I was in special education classes that were almost 100% male. Therefore, I did not see very many females and because I was 6 feet and 115 pounds, I felt insecure about myself. I had no dates, never went to prom, graduation (though I did graduate), or ask any girls out. I felt very isolated and disconnected to the average things people were all doing or dreaming about a short time before they also did them.
I pretty much just went to school, listened to metal, smoked weed, argued with my brother, as he argued with them, and felt like I was never good enough. Beyond that on the weekends, I would just spend hours looking up porn, cybering with some women and a lot of men in AOL rooms. I told myself, what woman would have me, so I might as well be gay. Getting back to the point, porn was always there to make me feel better. Like any addiction, it got where my tolerance had changed, starting out with very simple porn: girl-guy, then guy-girl-girl, gangbang, bukakke, interracial, older women, Asians, ebony women, S&M, gay, overweight women, transsexual, etc. Last year I told myself after nearly two decades of amassing a huge porn collection saved on about 25 data disks, and three external hard drives full, I deleted and broke every disk I had kept. I put porn blockers on my browser, so I could keep it out of my system. After some point I thought maybe I had gone too extreme on it, so I took them off and it slowly came back in again.
Recently I started to do NoFap, or no masturbation, and did not look up any porn for almost two weeks. This was a long time for me, I think it was the summer of 1997 when the last I went a personal record set at 15 days without masturbating. During this time a fortnight ago, I started to feel differently, I had more empathy even for the smallest of things and people. I had come to realize that porn had warped my view of women and how I saw them as people. Prior to this and unbeknownst to me, I had been looking at the average woman on my college campus as merely a sex object or a source of physical pleasure. It has to be said, I have never had sex and all my interactions with women are purely online or through porn. I have never asked a woman out, been kissed, or even been told by a woman that she loves me in person. These things that I have not happen does make me feel inferior to all the guys that have done that a bunch of times that they would not understand how a man could be 37 having not.
A friend of mine and I had a conversation about my preoccupation with porn and he said, as a recovering alcoholic, what it sounded like I was suffering from was self-loathing because of my station in life. I have many online and a couple in person friends that don’t understand how I don’t have a girlfriend, but I think I wouldn’t know the first thing as to how to make that work. In my inexperience, I feel like no woman wants a starter kit that is 37. I am an unemployed college student that drives a nice car that has an abundance of free time and nobody but people online to talk to and most of all using porn to hide my feelings of inferiority. There have been days when I think about my life and the next I am on some porn blog or site and saving and spending hours clicking. However, what used to make me feel good, now I feel miserable and worthless knowing that no matter what I watch or see, I am not involved in the sex scene.
My brother told me that I just need a girlfriend to care for and love. Yet I know if I ever found one or the person developed into that role that I would love her and not me. I don’t know how to love myself because I have put so much in what has never happened. I don’t feel like a man having not had sex, there is no perk to having not had this happen. While nobody would know that I had not, it is enough for me to know that I haven’t been graced with even the most basic intimacy from a woman. In truth this all depresses me, and I escape from this with copious amounts of porn just to not feel so naïve or pathetic. Sometimes I wish I could cut that part out of my mind: this need for sex, intimacy, love etc. If I looked into the mirror and I was an ugly man or had some noticeable deformity, I would just excuse my datelessness on that and it would actually feel kind of okay. Sometimes I think it would be easier to just accept that this is how it will just be for me and for me to forget that things will ever be any different. However, my real enemy is my inability to just love myself not being dejected from the love, intimacy or sexual life. I find it easy to absorb into the porno-world when I feel at war with myself the strongest. There is a fear that all this porn over the years has warped my view of what sex is and what it will feel like when (if) I ever do experience it.
In all that long winded detail, I do not really know what I’m supposed to do. Watching porn these days just makes me feel so awful and low that I can’t use that as a coping mechanism much now. Plus masturbating 3-4 times a day isn’t an option because it makes me unmotivated to handle the challenges of a day. I’m just tired of feeling worthless and lame. So do you have any answers, because I’m fresh out. Any advice would be welcomed.