I'm really horny and angry that she said no to a chance to make love. I think about masturbating. Worth remembering the times I did that and didn't feel any better afterward. I felt worse and ashamed and a bigger gap between us, but no improvement or benefit. It's just watching porn and the excitement and buzz and build-up of finding the stuff that is a strange kind of twisted enjoyment. When I think about it, the orgasm doesn't offer much during masturbation. I think the physical release of pressure of the orgasm is outweighed by the guilt and distance that I feel immediately. In real sex sometimes the orgasm isn't 100 times better than any other aspect of making love, but it's often the crowning glory, the climactic pinnacle (helped by there being no guilt and multiplied when you can enjoy giving your partner an orgasm too!).
With real sex, it's all great. The build up, the journey, getting there, as well as the pay-off and destination. I get to enjoy my great feelings, but even better is enjoying her enjoyment. But with masturbation it's solitary guilt conflicted physical pleasure mixed and diluted in the stream of negative stuff. Starting out mediocre and bad with a little enjoyment scattered along the way, building toward a pay off of disappointment and self loathing. Stopping to think about it: would I choose those bad feelings over the pain that they're replacing?
What did the singer songwriter Samantha Murphy say in an interview about giving up smoking, "I had to accept being ready to just sit and feel pain before I could every give up cigarettes." It's like that. I need to just feel the anger, disappointment, pain. It's more than just not getting sex, it's changing the automatic patterns (manually, one experience after another) and resetting the cycle so anger doesn't have to lead to temptation and expectation of sexual gratification.
If I masturbated about twice a day from 12 until 32 (sometimes more, sometimes less), then I've dug deep furrows of this action/response/reinforcement, well over 7 thousand times. I wonder how many times I've chose to do the right thing and respond to pain (sadness, boredom, etc.) smarter? I've masturbated a few times a year for the last few years. Maybe I've chosen to go against the grain and fought against the tide a thousand times. Who knows.
