…Andy is in his late thirties now, a well-spoken, suited, high-flyer in the city. His frame is imposing, but the subject makes him vulnerable. He’s embarrassed, talking about his compulsive masturbation and the marked change in his personality, as time went on, from relaxed to angry. But he has found a way of speaking about it, when previously he refused to acknowledge how his life was meandering out of control. It was his girlfriend who confronted him – none of his friends know about his addiction, or the subsequent therapy he’s been undergoing for over two years. “There’s so much online; everyone talks about being anaesthetised – you see an amount of a certain subject and you become completely immune to it,” he says. “You don’t think about the person behind it, the impact, it’s there for your pleasure. That was the most worrying thing. I think it just leads you on to so many different avenues you wouldn’t even think about. The more you look at something, the more you think, ‘That’s boring, now I want to find something else’. You can end up in serious trouble.”
Andy had a routine. Every night, he’d come home from work and go online to look at pornography for a couple of hours before dinner. After dinner, he’d go out for a drink or to do sport, and then he’d log on just before bed – which often lasted until the early hours of the morning. The next day at work, he’d be exhausted – and then repeat the same activities when the working day was over and he’d find himself at home again. He stopped trying to have relationships with any emotional intimacy; he went out with someone for a year and manufactured so much travel and business work that he only saw her about six times before ending it….