My Life Is Not a Porn Film

My life is not a porn film and the sooner I recognize this, the better. I've sensed it for a long time, of course. I've known it despite countless hours consumed over several decades.

How is it different, you may wonder. Well, that's something I'm still slowly working out. Like water from a well, my eyes are still adjusting to the light. Three years since I walked away from it and I've finally taken time to look behind me.

As I do, I put even more distance between me and this thing called porn. I feel at peace about it. There's more to life beyond it and this list is a gentle reminder of the journey.

This is how my life is different. These are the things I hope will never change,

It requires communication with women

My life requires communicating with women, not dismissing them or refusing to engage in what they might express. In porn, it is often the very opposite: the times we see men talking, taking to satisfy their wants along a one-way street.

In the real world, that just doesn't work for me. It doesn't do justice to the divine feminine I've come to know and understand.

The one that requires patience, not obstinacy, a conscious type of manhood. The one who recognizes openness before she allows herself to open.

Porn negates the subtly, range, and emotion I now know as women. I need to communicate with them instead of only hoping their needs match mine.

It involves imperfect sex

My life involves sex as I'm offered it, not a pristine, merry-go-round of encounters where nothing goes wrong or off the rails.

In porn, the sex is near flawless. The skin tones are air-brushed and orgasms impeccably-timed.

I don't want a world where everything is synchronized, however. I'm more than my erection, which is not always instant and sometimes deflates and slips out of a vagina or three.

When porn becomes perfect, I remind myself that sex is not. I thrive on imperfections that fuel the sex life of my dreams, not just my fantasies.

It needs intimacy much more than penetration

My life needs round the clock intimacy and care, not just a few seconds of penetration when it becomes available. With porn, there is a hyper-focus of penis and vagina. I can't strive for this if watching pixels allows me to achieve it for the thousandth time.

I need passion mixed with romance. I need flirting and constant reassurance. I want the female brain to meet me between attraction and shedding clothes, but it's a sequence that porn, like extended foreplay, leaves trampled on the cutting room floor.

Porn doesn't touch me the way I long to be touched in my own life. Without intimacy, it doesn't penetrate my soul.

It requires depth that erotic pleasure can't bring

My life requires a depth that I'm finally learning to acknowledge. A constant search for sex doesn't satisfy it. I'm still more practiced reaching for the stars than someone's naked body.

Along the way, I discovered sex, but quickly put it out of place. I bent it, distorted it, imagined I could hide it away like the x-rated videos on the hard drive of my computer.

Only by aligning sex, not substituting it, have I found freedom from its grip. Only by inviting the erotic into an already magical life have I kept on living with myself.

Porn doesn't speak to the depth and breadth of life I've been given. Like a faithful gardener, I awaken its growth and return to its roots most quickly when not watching a surface level performance of sex.

There's nothing wrong with pornography, but when it's over, I still have to clean up and keep on living.

I have to feel the rejection, experience the tough conversations. I have to find my way in the land of women with a masculine presence that has been owed to them since the very beginning.

What I'm learning from this list-in-progress is that I'm more complex than porn could ever give me credit for. Something all-together boundless. Someone flawed and found waiting for another chance to prove himself.

I've been told before that I'm a deep pool . Why was I swimming in the shallow end all this time?

My life is not a porn film. Thankfully, it's so much more than that could ever hope to be.