It happened again. I was cooking the family meal and suddenly an attractive woman I know came to mind. I started thinking about her personality qualities and wondering if maybe God would want me to ask her out. It wasn’t lust, I thought — I was only thinking about her personality!

However, soon I was “wondering what meeting her parents would be like.” Eventually I realized I was falling into my old fantasy patterns and said to myself, “OK, time to move on from this.” But I couldn’t.

I tried to push the thoughts and feelings down but they fought to stay alive. I started experiencing the old cravings again. The thoughts and feelings were fighting to possess me.

This tells me something about myself. I believe that my “sex powers are God given and therefore good” (AA 69). I believe my sexuality is a gift, imbued with profound spiritual and religious meaning. I know I have these instincts for a purpose. God made me a sexual being, and my sexuality is ordered towards marriage and creating new life. However, this instinct, as with my others, “often far exceed their proper functions” (12&12 42).

I am an addict and a lustaholic. Long before I engaged in explicit sexual lust, I was craving the opposite sex. I spent grades 3-6 obsessed with the same girl. She lived inside of my head. I was too scared to talk to her but “we” were best friends. “She” was my constant comforter and source of “connection.” Only thing is that “she” was me. I was addicted to the unreal. It was my greatest source of pleasure, and my greatest source of pain.

Recovery Continues tells me that “nonsexual dependency is where we experience the addiction in its essential form and see the awesome power it has over us” (RC 78). In recovery, I don’t need to live in the unreal. I can recognize my programming gone astray, surrender it to God and to the fellowship, and live in the real.

I like living in the real now where I find the true connection. The real doesn’t try to possess me, control me and enslave me. God is in the real. Maybe one day God will call me to date but it will be in his time and according to his purposes. One day at a time, I can live without my relationship drug and become what he would have me be.

Lust, fundamentally, is wanting what God doesn’t want for me. For the same reason, I crave the forbidden fruit. But when I surrender, I can live and eat from the tree of life and walk as a free man at last.