43 year old male here, I have done well in some areas of life and perhaps not so well in others. For much of my life, going back to my teenage years, I was never successful with women. It wasn't that I was particularly ugly or undesireable, I just didn't really try. At the time I thought it was too much work I suppose. I've read books and seen documentaries about other "loner" types, and a lot of them go through a phase and move on from it later. Maybe I was destined to do that, maybe not.

I did, however, develop a porn addiction that I haven't worked hard enough to eliminate from my life. This escalated throughout the 2000s to the point where by the end of the decade I was regularly making visits to escorts along with marathon porn sessions that would last for hours on end. At the time I realised I needed to change, as I wasn't happy living this way. However, there were a couple of things that kept me stuck in that particular groove. Firstly, there were other aspect of my life (career, travel, physical health etc) that were going well or at least not too badly, so there was less incentive to change. For another thing, I started reading TRP content and listening to Tom Leykis.

I started to think that eschewing women in favour of porn and escorts was the better option. After all, why would I waste my time with real women when I could just satisfy my sex drive through synthetic means and avoid what I considered the risks associated with a relationship (i.e heartbreak, financial ruin etc). I even found myself spouting off MGTOW rhetoric to family and friends, despite the fact that my actual experience of relationships was precisely zero. For probably a decade I stagnated in this area, listening to reruns of the same old Tom Leykis shows, reading MGTOW material online.

Eventually my escalating porn use caused problems in my life, things I won't discuss here, but I started to realise I couldn't keep ignoring this problem or deluding myself any longer. Around this time I also discovered TRP. Not a good thing to mix with MGTOW. Now I was really filling my head with a lot of "men are oppressed", "The Left is trying to destroy men" bullshit. To be fair, TRP did have some solid advice that would have helped me a lot (i.e. drop the porn and work on yourself), but this stuff was largely just common sense anyway.

My awakening really started in 2018 when a couple of positive things happened. For one thing, when I was travelling I met a very nice young woman who seemed to find me attractive and wanted to spend more time with me. Unfortunately she lives on the other side of the world and is roughly half my age. We stayed in touch for a while, but contact gradually fell off as one would expect with long distance situations where there is a large age gap. She'll find someone her own age from her own country, and she'll do so with my blessing. It gave me a lot of confidence that I can make that aspect of my life work, however.

The practical upshot of that situation is that I'm starting to wake up to the MGTOW bullshit I've been stuffing my mind with. Someone on this sub put it brilliantly when they said "MGTOW is like a bunch of kids taking their ball home, then looking out the window to see if anyone notices". I even asked the question on a MGTOW sub reddit as to why MGTOW seems to be such a pity party all the time, and why there is so much focus on women if these guys are, in fact, going their own way. The responses I got made me question whether I really want to live like that. I don't hate women, nor do I want to judge an entire gender by the opinion of some guy on youtube who may or may not know what the fuck he is talking about.

So today I have made a decision. For the remainder of this year I'm going to take an extended break from both porn and MGTOW content. This will not be easy, I've tried to quit porn before and failed. However, it's time I experienced living by a different narrative for a while. I figure that the crutches of porn and MGTOW will still be around in, say, two years if I decide that trying to live differently doesn't work out.