(This sort of relates to the escalations that I mentioned; more on those soon.)
The first semester of my sophomore year in college (Fall 1998 ) was one of the hardest times in my life. It really began the summer before that semester and continued through the holidays.
During the summer of 1998, I dated a girl who dumped me after a few weeks. While I had kissed girls prior to that, this was the first real physical relationship I had ever had (we didn’t have intercourse, but we did just about everything else). I became attached rather quickly. When she dumped me, I was devastated. I cried a lot. I drank a lot. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what followed the breakup was a very long porn-binge, for lack of a better term. It wasn’t just about the girl dumping me, of course, as it is now easy for me to see.
My best friend was also dumped by his long-time girlfriend that summer (they weren’t really together that long, maybe a year, but much longer than that girl and I were) as well, so the two of us often commiserated. I wanted to be there for him, but given our emotional states, it probably didn’t help either one of us. Hanging out with him often brought me down, so I would go home and use porn to bring myself back up. I didn’t realize that was what I was doing, but it is pretty clear now. To be honest, hanging out with him sometimes made me feel better, too, but just in the “he’s got it worse than me” sense. I’m ashamed to say that, but it’s true. Other friends of ours were happy in their relationships, and having just been dumped, that did not help my emotional state, either. That led to more self-medication with porn.
My mom was sick again, too; she found this out late in the summer if I remember correctly. I was worried that she would die (a constant worry for me for several years), so that added to the stress of my life. (This isn’t really the venue to talk about her illness, but I will say that she was sick off and on from the time I was 9. Looking at the various “flare-ups” of my porn addiction over the years, it’s obvious to me now that I often was trying to cope with my fears of losing her. I also feel the need to stress now that I was never abused in any way by either of my parents…at times I felt neglected given that they were both concerned with her illness, but they never abused me in any way.)
That summer, I worked two jobs and stayed out late with friends (often drinking) several nights a week. There were a lot of “parties” and “get togethers” that summer, as well as a lot of “come over and have a beer.” Often, after going to a friend’s house, I would then go home and use porn (either videos, magazines, online, or some combination thereof) until dawn. I tried to set time limits for usage, but that never worked — I would have to make myself go to sleep when I would see the sun coming up. I still lived with my parents at the time, and I had a TV (with VCR) and a computer in my room. I did not stay up until dawn every night, but that did happen many nights. I would then wake up, go to work, and then do it all again the next night.
It was weird; I had never before spent so many hours using it on such a regular basis. I do not understand how I didn’t know it was a problem when I started literally losing sleep over it, but I really didn’t.
During that time, almost every weekend, I went to a strip club with some friends. My non-work life pretty much revolved around sex, though I was oblivious to that fact. I did hang out with friends outside of a porn/strip club context, but I was definitely in the midst of a binge.
Despite the lack of sleep, I still felt like I was in control (clearly, looking back, I was far from it – not only was a full-blown porn addict, but I was a borderline alcoholic as well).
And then the fall semester started. I took some pretty difficult courses (13 credit hours, all fairly difficult) and I still worked both of my jobs (to be fair, I cut one of them back to four hours per week, but the other was about 25). That semester, my week was essentially as follows:
Sunday – Breakfast. Work 10am-3pm or so at job #1. Lunch. Homework/study. Dinner. More homework. Use porn. Sleep.
Monday – Breakfast. School from 9am to 2pm or so. Lunch. Work at job #2 for four hours. Dinner. Homework/study. Bar with coworkers until 1am or 2am (they served me, even though I was underage). Homework/study. Porn. Sleep.
Tuesday – Breakfast. School from 9am to 2pm or so. Lunch. Homework/study. Dinner. Work job #1 6pm-11pm or so. Homework/study. Porn. Sleep.
Wednesday – Breakfast. School from 9am to 2pm or so. Lunch. Homework/study. Dinner. Homework/study. Porn. Sleep.
Thursday – Breakfast. School from 9am to 2pm or so. Lunch. Homework/study. Dinner. Work job #1 6pm-11pm or so. “College Night” at dance club.* Go home after 1am, often followed by porn. Sleep.
Friday – Breakfast. School from 9am to 2pm or so. Lunch. Work job #1 3pm-12am (with dinner break, sometimes shift over at 10pm or 11pm). Strip club.
Saturday – Breakfast. Work job #1 10am-3pm. Lunch. “Leisure activity” (could be porn, but usually wasn’t; going to the movies, etc. Sometimes napping.). Dinner. Dance club.* Go home after 3am, often followed by porn. Sleep.
[*I would often chug a 40oz. beer before going in to the club, as they were more strict about serving minors than the Monday night bar. It was at these dance clubs and due to my reduced inhibitions brought on by the drunkenness that my addiction began to escalate away from porn and towards frotteurism. Essentially, I’d find a girl who was dancing and start dancing with her, rubbing against her. Almost invariably, this resulted in the girl walking away, thankfully. The guys that I went to the clubs with would do the same thing; they had been doing it for a while and they actually introduced me to it. I always felt extraordinarily creepy about doing this, and gave up on it after a while. I am really glad that frotteurism was never an ongoing problem for me, as it could have led to a lot more issues (legal and otherwise). Even thinking about the fact that I ever did this makes me feel really creepy and gross. I continued to go to dance clubs after giving up on this sort of act, instead dancing by myself and “enjoying” my drunkenness.]
Wow, writing my routine out like that makes it look pretty pathetic. Which it was. The times weren’t always the same (ie., I didn’t always work the same shift at job #1), and sometimes days were switched (ie., sometimes strip club was Saturday, though if I recall correctly, it was never twice in a single weekend), but you get the idea.
I remember more than once that semester falling asleep in one of my classes in particular (the first class of Tuesday morning). I still have my notes from that class, and there are several instances where mid-word, the ink sort of trails off down the page. How did I not see that as a problem? That class wasn’t even boring!
By about the mid-semester point, I was not satisfied with my grades in most of my classes. I did not know what to do. I knew something needed to change, but it never really occurred to me to try cutting the porn out of my life.
One Monday night after going to the bar, I came home and got on my computer. I chatted online (nonsexually) with a friend of mine who went to college in a different city. He asked me what I was up to, and I told him that I was about to start doing my homework (it was after 2am). He told me that I was crazy for staying out so late on a school night if I hadn’t done the work I needed to do (coming from him, that really hit home, as he is one of my oldest friends and was somewhat of a partier himself), and that I needed to be careful to not lose my academic scholarship. I said something along the lines of “yeah, sure,” but I did logoff and do my homework, then I went to bed. After that, I decided to cut back on the late nights with porn and to cut out the weekly Monday trip to the bar (I kept going to the dance clubs and the strip club, though I’d usually just go to one dance club per week). Additionally, I stopped studying in my bedroom because of the temptation of the computer and the VCR. Of course, I fell asleep on the couch in the living room a few times because of this, but my grades improved slightly over where they were at the mid-semester point.
My GPA that semester was the worst of any semester in my academic career. As a result, I decided to cut back on everything I was doing aside from school. I asked for fewer hours at job #1. I stopped the Monday trips to the bar altogether. I even cut back on the strip club visits (I still went, just not weekly). Additionally, I “quit” using porn. I put “quit” in quotes because that didn’t last. When I did start back up, I instituted a “no porn on school nights” policy that I was somehow able to uphold (most — but definitely not all — of the time) during subsequent semesters. Of course, that meant that weekends were often porn-filled as a result. Still, my GPA improved after that semester, and I felt better. (I didn’t see the correlation between porn reduction and feeling better, but now it’s clear as glass.)
I wish I would have told me friend about what all I’d been doing (I told him about working and drinking and clubbing, but not about the porn-filled nights); maybe he could have helped me. I wish I would have told my parents, too; they knew about my grades, but they thought that it was all because I was working too much (which I probably was, but that was hardly the major issue).
I am so glad I am finally working through this. And I am also very glad that I was able to stop the frotteurism before it became an ongoing problem for me. I wish I would have gotten through this 10 years ago, but better late than never.
For a long time, I didn’t understand why that semester was so bad academically (even after I made some changes to my routine). I thought that it was just all about the combination of difficult classes. They were hard, definitely, but they were not unmanageable. It was my life that was becoming that way.
I never want to have a “porn binge” again. Writing about this really helps. More soon.
Quitting Pornography 