When Watching Porn becomes the Default

It's not only young people who struggle with porn addiction, it happened to me too

It started with a flicker of awareness. A moment where the veil of autopilot lifted, and I realised I wasn’t really there. Not in the room, not in my body, not with the person I was having sex with. I was somewhere else entirely: in a fantasy stitched together from countless hours of watching porn, an alternate reality that, at the time, felt more exciting and stimulating than the one I was actually in.

It wasn’t subtle, this disconnection. My boyfriend at the time noticed. We were lying in bed next to each other and he said, “When we have sex, I feel you’re somewhere else in your head.”

He was clocking my absence, and I had no answer for him. I knew something was wrong and I felt embarrassed and ashamed. I knew I needed to do something about it otherwise our relationship wasn’t going to last.