My recent break-up made me realize that I’m not a good person.
Recently (about a month ago) had to leave my ex-girlfriend of 4 years over my porn addiction. I have been addicted to porn since I was 12 years old and was first exposed to it at 8. Exposure to porn at such a young age did irreparable damage to my perception of women and sex. This girl was my first relationship and the first couple years my sexual relationship with her was very strained because I didn’t understand the difference between lust and love which caused our sex life to be essentially only about sexual pleasure instead of genuine intimacy and connection. I was so ashamed of my addiction that I hid it from her for essentially the whole relationship and then told her a week before I left her because the guilt became too much. She had no idea and she acted ok at first but she revealed to me about a week later that she had been cutting herself because she felt like she had no control over her life anymore because she could no longer trust that I wanted only her and no one else. This broke me. I cried to her and begged her to promise me that she would stop but she told me that she didn’t know if she could because it made her feel good. She told me that she had already told a friend about it and that she could rely on them for support because she didn’t want me to have to worry about it. I went home late that night and the next day I drove to her place and told her that the relationship had to end. She made a promise to me right before I left that she would no longer cut herself after I was gone and said “This was all you. Not me.” while pointing at the scabs on her chest. That image has stayed in my head vividly ever since.
I always told myself that I had chose not to tell her because I could fix it on my own and she didn’t need to know about it. In reality I think I chose not to tell her because I cared more about what would happen to me when she found out than I did about how my lack of self-control would negatively impact her. The breakup revealed to me every flaw that I could possibly recognize in myself and I feel like I have been living so thoughtlessly and wasting my life’s potential. The more I reflect on the relationship and my current situation the more angry I become. For weeks I have been consumed by guilt and anger that I lacked the courage to just do the right thing and tell her what was going on and worst of all I am now realizing that I’m not at all the person that I had convinced myself I was. Hell, my LIFE is not what I thought it was. I have been a complete idiot for not realizing how serious my wrongdoings truly are and it makes me feel worse that I know for a fact that I was completely capable of this realization. I am weak willed, I lack self-control, I am lazy, and I am selfish. I let myself hide behind my false pride and these things do not only apply to my relationship but I now I have essentially nothing to show for what I felt was years of genuine love and effort that I put into the relationship but I’m now even questioning how genuine I was being. My achievements in life now feel worthless to me because I feel that despite my success in some aspects of life I am a failure in the aspects that really matter. I really struggled at first to formulate a plan on how to move forward but I am determined to fix myself because I know that I can be better but I still wrestle with self-loathing and guilt. I reached out to her 2 weeks after the break-up to make one final apology and a promise that I would become a better person and she asked me to meet her in person. She got all of her negative feeling out that she had been holding in, telling me that she was confused and angry but she forgives me because she knows I didn’t intend to hurt her. She told me she had been talking to a new guy (which made me very upset on the inside) but she wanted to stay in contact because she wanted to be friends and I originally obliged but after a few days I came to my senses and cut her off again and told her I needed a while before we could be friends because I don’t think I could ever get over her while being in contact, especially if she’s already seeing someone else. According to my friends, all of my ex’s friends and most of her family now hate me because she tells them I treated her like shit despite thanking me for having treated her well when we talked post break-up. I don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t trust my own perception of myself.
On a more positive note though all of this has pushed me into a determination to improve myself for when I meet the person I really want to spend my life with and I don’t want to meet that person for a long time because I feel like I’m so far from the best version of myself. I think this experience has rendered me nearly incapable of becoming complacent in my virtue, which I hope is a good thing. I don’t really know what my goal was with this post.