Can I be honest with you? If every time I saw pornography I felt like the very first time I saw it, I would watch porn again.

Yes, you read that correctly.

When I think back to being 14 years old, the first time I truly saw hardcore pornography, I can still remember those first moments of stumbling across it. Dopamine flooded my brain in amounts my brain couldn’t handle. My brain received signals and imprints that this was the most pleasurable moment of my entire life. Adrenaline, fuelled by the feeling that this was definitely something I was not supposed to be doing and that I could be caught at any moment, pounded through my bloodstream, adding a layer of excitement like I had never experienced before.

I can still remember it clear as day.

Now it’s 18 years later. Today I’m having a really hard day: within the span of a week several people I have counted on have let me down in big ways; my wife and I are trying to figure out some financial stuff and it isn’t fun, or encouraging; the aggressive flu season had it’s way with our family and we are still feeling worn out.

I could really use a pick me up.

And if porn could do for me what it felt like that first time, I would watch it again.

But it won’t. I know this because I chased that first feeling for 10 years. For 10 years I turned to it to deal with stress, depression, loneliness, boredom, financial worries, relationship problems. And it did not work. It can’t. Scientifically, it just doesn’t work.

When I talk about “the first time seeing porn” and what that felt like, I’m talking about a moment that lasted maybe four seconds. Porn started letting me down around second five. That’s how long it took for my brain to not experience the same amount of pleasure, that initial rush.

Within about 15 minutes I felt….strange. I physically shook from the sheer amount of chemicals that had just rushed through my body and brain. It wasn’t a nice feeling. I also knew that I was going to have to go back. I went outside and walked my dog down the street, away from the house. I knew exactly where I was ultimately headed; that it already had a hold on me; and, that I wasn’t happy about it.

Have you ever seen a dead body? Even at a wake or a funeral. It looks so wrong, as if it’s hard to believe that a life actually used to reside there. There is a creepiness to it like an abandoned house.

Porn is like that. It’s the act of love without any love involved. It’s unsettling and unnatural and devoid of any real humanity. It’s the corpse of love.

Running back to porn would have all the joy, fulfillment and comfort of running into the arms of a deceased loved one.

My feet felt heavy as I walked back to the house; my brain was desperate for another hit, yet my mind already weighed down by porn’s emptiness.

It took me 10 years to find the will to actually fight back against porn as much as I needed to. 10 years to really come to grips that it was never going to feel good. Not really. Not long-term. Sure, I could lose my brain in it’s fog for a time, but it wasn’t really going to be all that pleasurable. It never was.

It took me 10 years to realize that I needed to find another way; another way to deal with pain, loss, sadness, disappointment, stress… And today I’m making that same decision: I’m not going to go to porn because I know there is nothing there for me. I will call my friends, I will pray with my brother, I will talk to my wife and maybe even go for a walk in the snow. I’m going to do something that is NOT watching porn, and I know I’m better for it.

Are you tempted to go back to porn? Did you use it yesterday, or this morning to try to take the pain away? It didn’t work, did it?

It’s not going to.

It never, ever will.

What are you going to do about it?

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