Introduction: The Hunger

I am over fifty years old. By my count, I have been with around one hundred women.

If you look at me now—a successful software engineer living abroad, confident, experienced—you might think this came naturally. You might think I was the guy who always got the girl.

You would be wrong.

I grew up as an only child in a home that had no secrets. My parents were liberal. We had a younger female cousin living with us, and our summers were spent at the beach. In those days, nudity wasn't a taboo. My mother’s friends would sunbathe topless, comfortable in their skin. I remember them teasing me, playing with me, provoking me in that innocent but confusing way adults do with children.

I saw women as something amazing, accessible, and natural. I was obsessed with them from a young age.

But the mirror told a different story.

I wasn't the handsome hero. I was small. I wore thick glasses. I had big teeth. In high school, I wasn't the popular kid; I was the "ugly duckling." I was bullied. While my friends were content playing video games or soccer, I was the only one desperately searching for a girlfriend.

I wanted what I saw at the beach, but I was too shy and too insecure to get it. I couldn't walk up to a girl in a club. I was invisible.

So, I filled the void with pornography. I watched other people do what I desperately wanted to do. I built up a hunger—a deep, frustrating need to be validated, to be wanted, to be "that guy."

I didn't get my first real girlfriend, Clara, until I was nineteen. By modern standards, that is late. But that delay created a pressure cooker inside me.

I didn't go to university, but I knew I was intelligent. I poured that energy into my career. I worked my way up from a helpdesk support role to a high-level engineering career. As I succeeded in work, I began to reconstruct myself. I lost the shyness. I gained status.

And then, I let the hunger out.

This story didn't happen all at once. It came in waves. It started slow in Portugal, fuelled by curiosity and infidelity. It accelerated when I moved abroad and tasted true independence. It took a strange turn when I got married and we opened the doors to the swinging lifestyle. And finally, after my divorce, it exploded into a frantic search for connection.

I wasn't chasing magazine covers or supermodels. I didn't care about "perfect" bodies. I wanted heat. I wanted reality. I wanted women who loved pleasure as much as I did.

This blog is the record of that journey. It is a log of names (altered to protect identities), faces, and bodies. Some were relationships, some were affairs, and some were mistakes. There is cheating in these pages. There is selfishness. I am not always the hero of this story.

But this is the truth. It is the log of a man who spent his youth watching from the sidelines, and his adulthood making up for lost time.