Young Mormons Created an App to Assist Men in Overcoming Gooning

Jamie carefully organized his days around moments of solitude to watch porn and engage in masturbation—often as many as five times daily.

The 32-year-old engineer from Michigan, who requested anonymity for privacy reasons, first encountered porn at the impressionable age of 12. However, he only recognized he had a problem after his father’s funeral three years ago.

“I didn’t cry at all,” he recalls. “I didn’t know how to respond emotionally to anything.” That’s when his porn consumption intensified—exacerbated by stress, anxiety, and depression—as he isolated himself in his room “all day.” The only sensation that felt real, he says, was “that rush of dopamine” from intense hardcore porn sessions. For Jamie, a Christian, those brief moments of porn-induced ecstasy were often followed by deeper despair, including thoughts of suicide.

In March of this year, Jamie was confronted by his partner, who was upset about his compulsive porn use, accusing him of deceit and infidelity.

Jamie’s “entire world came crashing down.” He acknowledged his addiction, pleaded for her forgiveness, temporarily returned to live with his mother, and gave up porn. That marked the beginning of his journey with Relay, an app developed by two college students from the Mormon community that aims to help individuals “reclaim control from porn, one day at a time.” Jamie pledged to his partner that he would never view porn again—and she granted him one opportunity.

The app offers a robust plan to cease porn consumption, featuring videos from therapists, daily journaling prompts, live group sharing sessions, and tools to manage serious urges. Users can also track each other’s porn-free milestones with a “Live Milestone” ticker. This initiative aims to assist members, who pay $149 annually for full access, in exploring underlying issues like loneliness and trauma to reduce the risk of relapse. The app has been downloaded over 110,000 times, with data indicating that 89 percent of its users are male.

This month, Relay partnered with the anti-porn organization Fight the New Drug for “the November Project”—an initiative designed to inspire individuals to abstain from porn, attracting 28,000 sign-ups to date.

Relay’s CEO, Chandler Rogers, claims the scope of porn consumption represents “a modern epidemic.” The 27-year-old was motivated to co-found the app in August 2021 to offer his Gen Z peers a way to stop viewing porn, stemming from his own years-long addiction to explicit material. Rogers, a Brigham Young University alumnus from Utah where he met both his co-founder and chief of staff, shares that he attempted to quit “at least 100 times and could never go more than a week without reverting back to pornography.”