It might seem quite strange to bring up sex addiction on a site addressing the issue of adult virgins, but I notice two things within and without me. One thing is that there was an element of addiction both before my healing and after. Initially, I was involuntary celibate for a long time, and suffering limerence, i.e. obsessive romantic love for an unobtainable partner (over thirty years). So there was the element of compulsion, intrusive thoughts, powerlessness, it taking all my time, this was an addictive quality.
There is more than one way to be cured
Then I was cured and when I got over myself, in my forties, I went the other way and became sex addicted, having partners well into triple digits, which, let’s be frank, isn’t normal. Now you have to remember the context. In the West, to go with over a hundred women would take a degree of commitment, resources and time that would be clearly obsessive, but I’m living in an Asian context where this isn’t highly abnormal or unobtainable. It’s simply a routine and no big deal in some ways. It’s just what I do at the weekends when the malls are too busy for me to sit and write in.
There are different types of addictions with one underlying dynamic
But there , is the addictive element to it. There is a collecting element, I’m meticulous in recording names, keeping count, sorting photos and videos of encounters. This isn’t bad per se, but it isn’t really normal. I get a bit anxious when all these visuals and notes aren’t all safely backed up and there is an element of compulsion. The other thing I notice is that, when I’m out looking for someone, say it’s been longer than a week, I feel quite despondent not to find a partner. This is very rare to be frank, but again, it isn’t normal particularly.
The other thing I notice, outside of me, is looking online, at the Adult Virgin (and related) communities: is the frequent discussions about porn addiction, which I think is fairly common. Now when I talk about ‘the community’, I’m talking about, what I call ‘the love sick’ as an umbrella term, meaning Adult Virgins, Forever Alone and Involuntary Celibates. The original cause of these identities can be very varied, often abuse and neglect in childhood, but also disability, mental health issues, assault survivors and so on. I don’t think there’s an underlying addictive personality that creates involuntary celibacy, I think there is usually some other issue, or issues, that sparks that lifestyle, which then progresses to somehow losing control. I want to make the term wider than addiction, because I think ‘obsessive’ is also a term, for these intrusive, constant thoughts.
In the communities I mentioned there is often many, many posts of people ‘obsessing’ about their self-worth, that they don’t have any, why would anyone want them, how ugly they are, their body issues and so on. I mean, we all think like this now and again but somehow this thinking becomes obsessive rumination, it’s non-controllable, as is addiction.
The neurology of porn addiction
In studying this, I realized that it helps to understand what is going on neurologically, in the brain, during these type of obsessions. I’ll focus on porn addiction as it is likely to be more of the issue with people finding this site. In one study, (Brand et al, 2016) researchers found that an area of the brain called the ventral stratium was active when self-described porn addicts were looking at their preferred pornographic images, although not when looking at general pornographic images. The ventral stratium is linked to feelings of desire and gratification and is also the area of the brain which is active during experiences of other types of addiction, such as alcohol, gambling, and similar – which lends weight to the idea of an addictive personality.
The interesting point about this study is that, for the relevant area of the brain to light up, the participants had to be looking at their ‘target pictures’, meaning pictures of their particular fetish. The addicts had a certain type of image or sex act that they wanted to see. I mean, perhaps this isn’t something that we bring up in polite conversation every day, but really, we all do in a way. If I go to a porn site (rare nowadays), then there are tabs at the top for the categories and I choose what I like, consistently the same, but quite broad. But before I was healed and sexually active, then my preferences were very specific.
This is what the researchers found. Porn addicts have these very specific tastes and are looking for these specific images, a certain type of people, dressed in a certain way doing a certain thing, and because of the specificity, then it isn’t so easy to find images like this, and when they do, they are happy and gratified (for a time) and meticulously collect the images and enjoy them. This activity, of desiring the images and finding them, lights up the ventral stratium.
From porn addiction to sex addiction
The thing I notice about myself is that, when I got over myself, became sexually active, went with a LOT of women, the same behaviour carried over. I have a very specific taste in sexual partners, a certain type of lady, a certain look who will do a certain routine that I don’t vary, and I meticulously photograph them, record their names and any notes about them, memories, occurrences, any detail out of the norm, and file them away. It’s a bit like a well-kept porn collection but in real life. I’m pretty sure it’s the same behaviour carrying over. If I had have been aware of it then perhaps I could have addressed it before I ‘healed’.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am forever grateful for getting well, for being in such an emotional and sexual dessert to being fully free and perhaps over-compensating. I never hurt or forced anyone, I was on good terms with all these people, am still friends with many of them, I’m OK financially and never had an STD, so it’s not really a huge addiction. I am a million times ten happier to be over myself and sex positive, although I want to acknowledge that there can be this addictive style to my sexuality and it’s underlying, it was perhaps there before I was healed, as a tendency. It is perhaps the same mechanism in terms of neurology that was driving my limerence.
The theory with porn addiction is that what the ventral stratium wants to do is guide our behaviour to seek gratifying behaviours that are in our interest, and then find them and feel gratified. In terms of sex, it wants us to feel sexual desire, go find a partner, have sex, feel gratified, rinse and repeat and the human population is maintained. But with the Forever Alone population then this avenue is blocked, for whatever reason, something is keeping the sufferer as involuntary celibate. But the brain still needs to fire this desire/gratification pattern and so it switches the sexual energy from a hard to obtain sexual partner in the real world, to a hard to find specific sexual image online (Augustin Pavon et al 2008). It sets up the desire, causes yearning, and then gratification (relief) when finding the image, collecting it, enjoying it (generally masturbating/climaxing to it), then, when after a while when the hormones have had a chance to recover, rinse and repeat.
Now in a way, it could be argued that, as long as people appearing in porn are consenting, then this is all OK and no one is hurt. The problem is that, the addiction itself is sustaining involuntary celibacy. By constantly maintaining a sexual ideal, for example, of stunning beautiful, hugely proportioned women doing whatever to whoever, the focus of desire is an unobtainable fantasy. I can promise you it is. I went with a lot of women nowadays, and many of them were up for anything, but I never fulfilled my more outlandish fantasies, and thank god some might say!
Joking apart, this is a problem that, if you have it, you need to address to be well. If your hearts desire is essentially something that doesn’t exist, you can never be happy. I read this all the time of the Forever Alone forums, usually about men who choose the path of sex surrogacy or prostitution, and then having disappointing experiences. Not all of them, for many people, this is a sex positive solution to their issues and they are much better for it, but for many, as I said, it’s disappointing.
What does it mean to be disappointed? Think about it. It means to have an idea of the way you are hoping for something to be, and then for the reality to be very different. So often, the men who are very disappointed say they paid for a prostitute and the sex was OK, but she was just going through the motions, and there was no ‘connection’ there. And so their mental picture, their desire/fantasy was clearly romantic, and some prostitutes can play this out, most can’t – and obviously in that paid situation, it’s only ever a role-play, and these men are disappointed.
So if your fetish is being wedged between two Sweedish schoolgirls on horseback galloping around the nudist park with raindrops of coconut oil dripping from a cloud that follows the three of you around (… where the HELL did I just think that up from?), then you’re in trouble. Either it’s an impossible fantasy (if it’s possible, email me via the contact link), or you need to learn to feel gratified and satisfied and grateful from the fantasy alone. But the research shows that isn’t the case. What actually happens is that a porn addict will desire the fantasy, look for the image, feel gratified finding the image as pornography, then masterbate – but many porn addicts report feeling self-hatred or guilt after the orgasm, and of course, the same brain area lights up again once the hormones replenish and we’re off looking for another new image. The old image is ‘spent’, a new one is needed, and the desire to go and find it is compulsive, it’s an intrusive thought, and so it is an addiction, which generally causes unhappiness.
I don’t know why you’re reading this, who you are or what your specific situation is, but I want to be talking to the Forever Alone community now, whoever you are. Now you might have a full on porn addiction as I described, but the desires can be very different but based around the same desire/reward brain area. Perhaps the desires are fantasies about perfect romance, being loved, which was more the way I was. Perhaps it’s working in a different way and manifesting as a different, seemingly unrelated addiction, like drinking, gambling or whatever.
The key to healing Forever Alone and Involuntary Celibate issues, from the core
The point is, THE MENTAL PICTURES ARE THE PROBLEM. What do you want? Maybe your problem is very simple, involuntary celibacy based on sexual fear, body dysmorphia or something like that, but your fantasies and daydreams are realistic and you need to address the other issues, the fear or the dysmorphia or whatever. But you need to develop a mindfulness of your consciousness, you need to train it to be aware of how it operates throughout the day, what are you yearning for, because if it’s something unobtainable, then if you do manage to get over yourself sexually and find partners, there is always the danger that it is going to switch from one internal, unrecognized addiction (to certain fantasies, thoughts, outcomes) to an external addiction that causes you as much pain as the first.
But you can solve this part now, in a way it’s the easier part of the equasion because you don’t need to find a partner or be actually having sex to straighten out the knots in your mind. You need to firstly, be mindfully aware, then you need to construct a healthy pattern of thinking (healthy reasoning and realistic sexual fantasy), then you need to discipline your thoughts as a permanent practice, then you need to go, get better, and jump into the life you want to live that will make you happy, sex positive and complete.
Porn, limerance, obsession and addiction
I’m going to write a longer piece, and possibly a course, to essentially obtain the ultimate healing I obtained, without making all the mistakes I made. As I said, although these addiction issues are common with involuntary celibacy, they are not always co-morbid, and of course there is normal and ‘abnormal’ behaviour. Generally, addictions related to involuntary celibacy are either going to be porn or limerence based before any kind of healing and/or sex addiction after recovery. I am pretty certain that addressing the mental processes of addiction at any stage will cause recovery, and as I said, you may as well be free right now, wherever you are in this journey.
Concerning limerence, there is general a central, possibly unconscious belief in ‘magical potency’, i.e. that a specific love affair is going to solve everything (Peele and Brodinsky, 1992), other than that specific element to limerence, then addictions have common themes. The researcher Sussman (2010) noted increasing amounts of time spent on the compulsion that cannot be stopped, other activities are reduced at the obsessions’ expense and also decreasing satisfaction and so ‘stronger’ forms of satiation (I’m guessing that in the case of porn it means fetish becoming more specific or extreme over time, limerence could perhaps become stalking).
The research and criteria for ‘problem’ behaviour was similar to Goodman’s (1993) findings, who considered addictive behaviour has the purpose of creating pleasure in the mind from ways that can be controlled internally and not in the world. So if sexual gratification in reality is unobtainable, the mind sets up the behaviour of finding specific sexual images online and a feeling of gratification when found (instead of an actual sexual partner). And she also noted the following characteristics:
- failure to resist urges
- Increase in tension prior to initiating
- Pleasure or relief upon gratification
Five of the following indicate a problem:
- Frequent Preoccupation
- More frequent or longer than intended
- Repeated efforts to stop or control
- Much time spent in preparation or recovery
- Important activities reduced or given up
- Tolerance = diminished effect = increased frequency
The researcher Schwarttz, (1992) had a more simple criteria of ‘a behavior that causes harm in any way’. He also believed addictions were a form of childhood PTSD and advocated the twelve steps as a treatment. Other advice is to manage the environment, avoid triggers, journal and use forums (Hanseder and Dantas 2023) – although I’d add to be careful which forums to use as many of them are fatalistic and tend to reinforce a helpless identity.
Generally, the gold standard for treatment of any addiction is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (cbt), and this was helpful for me (self-administered), although I actually got into this decades ago when the original book by Dr. Burns came out and it became a normal part of my journaling practice. The reason I got so deep into addiction was that, living alone, I didn’t really realise there was a problem.
In a way though, the problem was also the cure. A person who ‘saved’ me, taught me how to heal my mind and use it to create the reality that I want to live. This technique I was given also melded with the way that CBT restructures irrational thought over time. It’s very hard to explain, but something ‘clicked’ in me, a way of using my mind and perceiving reality that created my cure, from isolation, into over-compensating addiction and ultimately into healing.
I’m really trying to get my notes and thoughts together to write this up as either some more pieces of writing or an actual, structured course, so please join the mailing list to stay informed.
References
Agustín-Pavón, C., et al. (2008). Sex versus sweet: Opposite effects of opioid drugs on the reward of sucrose and sexual pheromones. Behavioral Neuroscience, 122(2), 416–[…]. Brand, M., Snagowski, J., Laier, C., & Maderwald, S. (2016). Ventral striatum activity when watching preferred pornographic pictures is correlated with symptoms of Internet pornography addiction. NeuroImage, 129, 224-232. Goodman, A. (1993). Diagnosis and treatment of sexual addiction. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 19(3), 220–224. Hanseder, S., and Dantas, J. A. R. (2023). Males’ Lived Experience with Self-Perceived Pornography Addiction: A Qualitative Study of Problematic Porn Use. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(2), 1497. Peele, S., & Brodsky, A. (1992). The truth about addiction and recovery. New York: Simon & Schuster. Schwartz, M. F. (1992). Sexual compulsivity as post-traumatic stress disorder: Treatment perspectives. Psychiatric Annals, 22(6), 333-338. Sussman, S. (2010). Love addiction: Definition, etiology, treatment. In S. Sussman (Ed.), Sexual addiction and compulsivity (pp. 31-45). Vol. 17.