Hello,
Wanted to type this out before I get lazy. In the beginning of July, I made a point to stop masturbating and porn cold turkey. It was pretty great! My confidence rose, however it wasn't as magical as I thought it would be.
I still had bouts of racing mind, impulsiveness, anger, many days being depressed where I couldn't find joy in anything. It was incredibly frustrating as you can imagine, because I thought abstaining would ideally fix a lot of my issues, including some of my POIS.
Physically I slept better. I would knock out at 10pm every night, and frequently wake up at 4am on my own before my alarm ready to go. However, because of my employment situation and other issues, this would only give me more time to be depressed! Bittersweet.
In that span of time I've met a woman who unfortunately does not live where I do. Long story short, things have gone very well, to the point where we've exchanged personal info and are....satisfying our needs through a creative way online due to the distance.
In other words, I broke my streak with her because I felt she was worth enduring the POIS pain for, and I was more than curious to see if things have improved after a month. Suffice to say, the first experience after abstaining was incredible, and like nothing I've experienced before on my own.
The euphoria was certainly different, but so was the "bounce-back" phase. My bounce-back recovery phase (before abstaining) would take 2-4 days. In these days, I would feel extreme fatigue, irritability, shakyness, racing thoughts, etc. However, after this experience and after the 45 or so days, my bounce-back phase was literally about six hours.
Upon finishing, I remember feeling a bit crazy for about 4-6 hours. I had euphoria, bouts of laughter, I saw the little details in everything, it was amazing. Then after the six hours, I crashed, but not as hard as when I was PMO'ing basically daily. I slept like a baby that night, and woke up feeling totally normal...percentage wise maybe 90%. I still had some anxiety but not to a crushing level.
The intensity of that experience was pretty much on par with what I used to experience on my own.
I still haven't told her about my POIS, and I'm not sure I will until we move forward enough to where we see each other physically. However, I am worried about her being accepting of it since it seems her libido is sky high. Mine is as well, but I need to be more careful about it. This is always a touchy subject that can unfortunately derail a relationship.
I plan to "reserve" myself to every week / week and a half going forward or as long as we want, really. That way it's more of an authentic experience as opposed to a quick fix.
Thanks for reading, just figured I'd share my experience so far. I hope this community and researchers make more progress as time goes on. We just have to remember to notice the silver lining whenever we feel very down.
