It Was My Friend

I currently see myself as an attractive, mid-twenties young man, with a creative job i love with a steady and good income. I have my first novel under my belt, a reasonably individual dress sense, a good sense of humour and i'm pretty confident to boot. I've come to love women and the female sensibility very much, and enjoy going on regular dates and occasionally falling in and out of love, but i've not always been like this.

I was expelled from school at 14 for drug related reasons, and immediately became a very angry young man, i started writing ridiculously right wing manifestos and generally was full of hate and bile toward the world and the way it had treated me for experimenting with soft drugs. I became lonely and introverted and that's where my healthy / unhealthy relationship with porn came in.

I had recently acquired my first modem, 14.4k, and did not need anyone or anything else. My parents were technophobes at the time and didn't know how to operate the computer my dad had bought for word processing, and i basically went to town looking for and easily finding porn.

I delved deeper and deeper and as my connection got faster and faster i became more and more hooked, until i was only looking for the most perverse and often degrading forms of porn i could find. I came to rely on porn, it was my friend, it made me feel good through the actions of others. Although i was still socially quite active, my friends were racking up notches on their bed posts whilst i stood in the side lines getting drunk and never really meeting any girls. I had lost my virginity at 14, and although i did have a string of - very - short term relationships in the mean time, i didn't  have penetrative sex again until i was 21, and i largely put this down to a mix of confidence issues and the growing porn obsession. I feel, looking back on it, porn stopped me understanding what 'real sex' was like, and put the act in a very weird place in my mind, it made it something sex is most definitely not, and almost made me think that it was a terrible, degrading act.

Porn was my solace and nemesis at the same time. I loved it and if affected me from growing sexually. Today, i still revert back to my old friend and still have a large digital collection of all sorts dating back from over the years that i keep saying to myself 'i'll delete it soon' but never do. I came out of my 'porn shell' through the love of a good, sexually active and knowledgeable girlfriend, without which, i feel i'd still hold sex as a strange, difficult entity in my head. I'm so happy that i have come to understand and enjoy sex more than looking at porn, i thought for a long time that i might never get over it, and i feel for the men that never do - i'm sure they're out there.

although now i'm dating and it doesn't matter so much, i think i know and realise that when i do eventually meet a girl i would like to settle down with, my life partner, that they will have to appreciate the fact porn and i are in it for the duration, i don't think i could every fully give it up, it's just something i need every now and again off the back of my youth. I think convincing her that it means nothing other than a quick release, however, might be more difficult than i imagine. life takes funny turns.