Love in the Digital Age: Liam & Porn

This is not a story about whether porn is good or bad. This is not a story about whether porn addiction should be a clinical diagnosis. This is a story about Liam (and we’re not using his real name because of the sensitive nature of the topic).

For Liam, porn became a compulsive, damaging habit around the time that high-speed Internet came around -- which is to say, his entire adult life, starting when he was 20. He’s 38 now, and it’s been a little over a year since he decided to quit. We asked him to go back in time for us and describe what his habit was like.

The Bubble

"It's like a bubble," he recalls. "It's like an exciting, adrenaline-filled state of mind where you're not thinking about, 'OK, I have these bills due,' or 'I have to go meet my boss tomorrow and I'm nervous,' or 'She wants to talk about the relationship and I don't want to!' "

At times, Liam would stay in the bubble for five, 10 hours at a time.

The variety of porn today is mind-boggling and unprecedented. Liam spent his hours scanning hundreds of images linking to videos, scrolling until he found just the right one for that moment. "OK, there’s the girl I want to look at." Then he'd scroll some more.

Or perhaps he'd meet or pass a woman during the day that sparked his curiosity. “OK, I want to see what it would look like if that person was having sex." He'd go home and search for a video featuring somebody who looked like that woman.

Liam's level of engagement with porn may have been more compulsive than average but it's hard to know, because many men are uncomfortable going public with their porn use.

"There's an extra-special element of shame to this problem," says Liam, adding that people will "deny it up and down the street, like I used to."

Pornography inspires powerful emotional responses, from those who see it as immoral, to those who feel it is demonized by parents and the media, to those who would simply love a scientific explanation for what they're experiencing. Sex, after all, is universal in a way few things are, other than food and sleep.

In this TED Talk, one of Liam's favorite public discussions about porn, retired science teacher Gary Wilson notes many researchers say they can't find a control group of men who have not been exposed to some pornography at some point in their lives.

Liam, who works in construction and lives in Los Angeles, is no awkward loner using porn as a stand-in for human contact. He's the son of a therapist, raised in a "liberal" home in Santa Cruz. He's articulate and charming, and a veteran of several relationships, one of which almost led to marriage. But from early on, those girlfriends were competing with porn for primacy in Liam's mind.

"Excitement and shame mixed together makes [porn] this erotic thing, whereas just being with someone’s kinda boring," Liam says.

That's not to say Liam wasn't bothered by what he called his emotional numbness. "It’s almost like when I’m looking at pornography, I’m burning off the little receptors that are my feelings and enable me to care for somebody. You know, they get fried."

Over the years, friends suggested to Liam he consider getting help, but he brushed them off. Ironically, he was open -- even proud -- of his involvement with Alcoholics Anonymous. He's been in AA for 16 years now, thriving on the structured approach to recovery and the supportive community.

Then, about a year and a half ago, Liam paid for sex. "The first time I did, I thought 'This is a great solution.' You know what I mean? 'Cause I can pay someone to be nice to me, and have sex with me, and it worked great." But subsequent dates were less enjoyable. "I can’t describe other than, like, wow: This is the loneliest I’ve ever felt." By the fourth time, he says, "I couldn't even have sex."

After that, Liam went to a men’s-only AA meeting and dropped an anonymous note into a basket asking if anybody else had trouble with porn and prostitution.  Despite a lot of laughter and hooting when the question was read aloud, one man rose and invited whomever had written the note to reach out after the meeting. That man became Liam's sponsor in Sex Addicts Anonymous.

Every night now, Liam reports by phone. Has he exercised that day? Has he done something fun like go to a movie? Or something shameful? Is he resentful about anything? What is he grateful for? One thing is for sure: Liam is grateful for his SAA sponsor.

"I have one person who’s willing to spend a lot of time talking to me on the phone," he says. "I’ve been doing that for over a year and he never, ever makes it seem like it’s a burden."

In recent years, there have been a number of movies made about online porn addiction. For Liam, the best Hollywood treatment of the subject that doesn't glamorize it (like "Californication") is "Thanks for Sharing," starring Mark Ruffalo and Gwyneth Paltrow. “I’ve never seen anything that more accurately described how it is to be a sex addict,” Liam says.

The movie drops into the life of the main character, Adam, when he is in recovery and considers whether he's ready to be in a relationship.

“For me," says Liam, "the only problem is when he goes dark. He swings out of it really fast in the movie. Guys that I see do that in real life, it takes them a long time to recover from those relapses. And they lose their job. And she’s gone forever. All these really terrible consequences. Whereas [in the movie], he just, like, brushes his shoulder off. 'I’m back!'”

Liam says he doesn't have stories as terrible as the ones he's heard in SAA meetings. He also doesn't have a core reason or experience he can point to that might explain why pornography became a compulsive habit for him.  He's happy to be dating now without the background presence and pressure that pornography put on his dating life.

"It's a lot more pleasant, and friendly," he says.

This podcast features music by Van-G ("Enter Sandman" remix) and Dave Porter ("Negra Arroyo Lane" from "Breaking Bad").