Young Mormons created an app that helps men stay out of trouble
Jamie was doing it carefully Plan your days by finding time alone to watch porn and masturbate – often up to five times a day.
The 32-year-old Michigan engineer, who did not want to use his real name due to privacy concerns, first started watching porn when he was 12, but didn’t realize he had a problem until three years ago when he was at his father’s funeral.
“I didn’t shed a single tear,” he says. “I didn’t know how to react to something, happy or sad.” That’s when his porn use escalated — along with stress, anxiety and depression — and he locked himself in his room “all day.” The only thing that seemed noticeable, he recalls, was “that dopamine rush” provided by an intense session of hardcore porn viewing. But for Jamie, who is a Christian, those fleeting moments of porn-induced paranormality were accompanied by much deeper lows, including suicidal thoughts.
Last March, Jamie says her partner angrily confronted her about her compulsive porn use and accused her of lying and committing adultery.
“The whole world fell apart” Jimmy. He admitted that he felt like an addict, asked for her forgiveness, temporarily moved back in with his mother and gave up pornography. That’s when he found Relay, a program created by a pair of Mormon students that claimed it could help people “take back control of porn one day at a time.” Jamie promised his partner that he would stop watching porn and he gave her a chance.
It offers a comprehensive program to stop watching porn, with therapist videos, daily journal prompts, live group sharing sessions, and a function to meet serious needs. Users even track each other’s porn-free streaks with a “Live Milestone” sign. It’s all an effort to help customers, who pay $149 a year for full access, unlock underlying issues like loneliness and trauma to prevent relapse. The app has been downloaded more than 110,000 times, and company data shows that 89 percent of its users are men.
This month, Relay has partnered with a new drug-fighting nonprofit, with 28,000 signups so far — a new initiative to encourage people to abstain from porn.
Chandler Rogers, CEO of Relay, claims that the scale of pornography use represents “a modern epidemic”. The 27-year-old, who is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, was inspired to create the app in August 2021 to offer his Gen Z peers a way to stop watching porn. This followed his own years-long addiction to explicit content. Rogers, who attended Brigham Young University in Utah, where he met his co-founder and co-chair, says he “tried to quit at least 100 times and could never go more than a week without going back to porn.”
