[Insecurity][Fetish] Did anyone here succeed in getting rid of a fetish?

I feel your pain, OP.

There's some wonderful advice posted here, but I thought I'd share my story in case it was helpful.

For starters, I wouldn't be too hasty to think that you can "re-program" yourself into enjoying vanilla sex through repeated exposure to it, whether that's in real life or in books and films. It didn't work for me, and it hasn't worked for the many people who tried to stop themselves from being homosexual etc.

I say this because I've got my own weird fetishes. Like yours, some of mine are simply impossible to do with a human partner.

They developed when I was in childhood. Over time, I discovered the internet, and realised I wasn't alone. I started to read, write and research about my fetishes, desperate to find out why I was like this, if anyone would ever love me despite them, and if I could ever change. In fact, I ended up getting an academic career researching them...

I found alternatives to vanilla sex, which allowed me to have a relatively happy and healthy intimate life with a range of partners, none of whom shared my strange fetishes (although some of them had their own!).

For example, we would have normal sex while fantasising or speaking about our fetishes. Maybe you could eventually find a girl with dominant tendencies who loves the idea that you're imagining her as a powerful giant crushing cities? Or maybe there's an asexual girl who would enjoy sharing your minds more than your bodies? Or maybe a girl with her own strange fantasies who you could watch porn with, reading about your weird turn-ons separately while mutually masturbating? I promise you that your local kink scene has someone with a stranger and more taboo fetish than macrophilia...

In a weird way, what worked for me was going "through" my paraphilia, rather than trying to escape it, delete it, or fight against it. I watched so much porn of my fetish, chatted about it to so many people in the kink community, that it kind of lost its magical, obsessive power over me.

Somewhere last year, while researching an essay, I suddenly realised that my fetishes suddenly seemed almost normal, even boring and slightly routine... The work and social group I'd crafted for myself was so accepting of my fetishes that they sometimes didn't even seem taboo...

I noticed little things changing, like the sight of two people just kissing or fondling seemed kinky... I doubt I'll ever look at two genitals bumping together and say "wow that's the hottest thing ever", but I can find ways to connect the act of normal sex to my fantasies that makes it mutually enjoyable. You could say I still have fetishes, but I like normal sex as well. So, I save my most extreme fantasies for solo porn sessions.

I'm not saying the fetishes went away, but I've managed to have many normal(-ish), happy, healthy sexual relationships. Even though yes, there are parts of me which will forever go unfulfilled (I'll never get ass-raped by an alien tentacle, woe is me), and parts of myself I'll never truly be able to share with people... But oh well, at least I'm at peace with the way I am, and have loving relationships.

I'm not saying you shouldn't get therapy, or try to educate yourself about a wide variety of ways of being intimate (including asexuality, BDSM, or anything else that might have some cross-over with your fetishes). But please, don't let anyone tell you that you can't be in a relationship unless you get rid of your fetishes, because that's simply not true.

This was all was a really lengthy way of saying: No, I don't think you can get rid of your fetish, but their might be ways to work with it which you can't see right now. What works for one person doesn't work for another, but just because you're a macrophiliac does NOT mean you're undateable!

/r/sex Thread