I’m new to this app, I’m 23M who is healthy and fit and have been in a long term committed relationship for nearly 6 years. My girlfriend and I have had some form of sexual issues pretty much throughout our relationship. I feel like most of it was able to come back to stress for me while I was in school and I was able to rationalize it as my lack of desire from just being so insanely stressed out with how my day to day during school looked like. I’ve also had issues with porn addiction and masturbation for a long time in one way or another. There was a point earlier in the year where my girlfriend and I were having regular sex and I feel like things were going well but all of a sudden I noticed I really stopped feeling horny and there was an time where I got soft in the middle of it and In subsequent attempts I wasn’t able to stay hard and my girlfriend started getting really sad which put more pressure on me after the fact. I’ve noticed since then it’s been hard to really get my libido going it feels like it’s lying dormant. I haven’t really even felt the desire to watch porn or masturbate recently. And when I do I feel like I’ve been almost forcing myself to as a way to prove to me that I can still feel or get aroused. Ive got a couple of other things going on externally unrelated to sex such as undergoing a lot of changes in my life from graduating school and settling into being an adult. But there was an incident with a family member a couple years ago which negatively shaped my perception towards sex and porn. I’ve been feeling pretty down and anxious about what’s going on. Sometimes it’s really been causing me to spiral and feel like I’m not a man or something’s missing or freak out about potentially being gay and losing someone very important to me even though I know these aren’t necessarily true considering we were having good sex only a few months ago. I wanted to use this post as a way to vent/get advice/words of encouragement on how I could potentially recover from this. I know I’ve had issues with sex with my girlfriend before but I haven’t really dealt with issues around feeling like I don’t even want to watch porn or touch myself.
I can’t really relate since I pretty much always have the desire to watch porn and masturbate. This desire is only enhanced by problems with sex, so I have the opposite problem where I need to restrain myself.
I would suggest you view your lack of desire to watch porn and masturbate as an opportunity to fully resensetize yourself to intimacy with your girlfriend. There are ways to be intimate without having a boner or being fully aroused. For example, you could just focus on pleasuring her or you can try sensate focus exercises. Do this regularly (you can schedule two times a week for example) without putting pressure on yourselves, just trying to enjoy it. Eventually, your arousal and erections should return and you can start banging, but dont force it and wait till it comes naturally.