Porn doesn’t fill a void, it creates the void

Think of this analogy. Imagine having a cold sore on your face, so you go to the pharmacist and he gives you a free ointment to try. You put the ointment on and it disappears immediately. A week later it reappears, so you go back to the pharmacist and ask if they have any more ointment. The pharmacist says "Sure; keep the tube, you might need it later." You apply the ointment and hey presto, the sore disappears once again. But every time the sore returns, it gets larger and more painful, with the interval getting shorter and shorter. Eventually, the sore covers yourwhole face and is excruciatingly painful, and it's returning every half hour. You know the ointment will remove it temporarily, but you're very worried. Will the sore eventually spread over your whole body? Will the interval disappear completely? You go to your doctor and they can't cure it, so you try other things but nothing helps apart from the ointment. By now you're completely dependent on the ointment, never going out without ensuring that you have a tube with you. If you go abroad, you make sure you take several tubes with you. In addition to your worries about your health, the pharmacist is charging you a hundred dollars a tube. You have no choice but to pay up. You stumble across an article discussing this and find out it isn't just happening to you, many people are suffering from the same problem. In fact, the medical community has discovered that the ointment doesn't actually cure the sore, and instead only takes it beneath the surface of the skin. It's the ointment that caused the sore to grow, so all you have to do to get rid of the sore is to stop using the ointment and it'll disappear in due course. Would you continue to use the ointment? Would it take willpower to not use the ointment? If you didn't believe the article there might be a few days of apprehension, but once you realised the sore was beginning to get better, the need or desire to use the ointment would go. Would you be miserable? Of course you wouldn't! You had an awful problem which you thought was incurable but now you've found the solution. Even if it took a year for the sore to go away, each day as it improved you'd think about how marvellous you felt. This is the magic of quitting porn.