IMVU Addiction.

Thank you for sharing your story.

Glad you are here!

Thanks for sharing your story !! Imvu is worst than drugs could ruin your life and bad for your health also i been playing imvu for years i finally.gave up and uninstalled that game. A lot of cyber bullying occur and its.bad

Ok, I stumbled on to IMVU and only 1 week later, I am in serious trouble. Something happened to me I was not ready for.

I bought a game controller that I wanted to play games with in linux. I was looking at a list of games that seemed to work in linux under Wine and IMVU was one of them.  So I installed it and the adventure begins. Before long, I was starring into the abyss and I knew my my family was in jeopardy(I am day one away from IMVU and her, and I am still worried).

The IMVU adventure started off poorly for me since many of the people seemed rude and obnoxious. That alone made me want to just uninstall it and chalk it off as a worthless endeavour. It is free to play starting out, I figured whats the harm in looking through the rooms in search of people to hang out with. I did find a small group of people that seemed pretty fun to talk to. We would crack jokes and all get a good laugh. I enjoyed popping in there once in a while to say hi. Things were looking up at this point. I managed to find a of couple cool rooms and I discovered the plethora of creative things to get involved in like creating 3d models and modifying patterns and skins etc. I just wasn't convinced this game was worth paying money for at this point and was going to uninstall it on the 3rd day of wasting too many hours in search of people to talk to.  If I wanted good theme based conversation, I was much better off just finding a technical based room in Freenode on irc.

I was getting close to signing off and I went into just one more room and I materialize next to a avatar that looks like satan with spikes sticking out of it all over. Note to self. When you see satan, don't start a conversation with it.

So I made some stupid joke about poking your eye out on one of the spikes, and asked the girl why she would want to walk around looking like that.  She told me she enjoyed making avitars like that and super heros and stuff. OK.  Then she said she had some nice ones she usually uses; She loaded up one of her normal avatars, and I was completely blown away. This thing was stunningly beautiful because of the time and effort she put into creating the well balanced seductive look of her avatars. I was truly complimentary and honestly curious about how she picked out certain things and whether or not she created any of the skins or tattoos that were on them.  She showed me maybe 10 or 15 different ones, and this one samurai girl she made with swords and a kung foo program were so realistic and stunningly professional. She really is an artist the way she puts together her avatars, and her rooms, which I was soon to discover.

We talked for a long time about a lot of things and we really hit it off well. I thought that I finally met someone cool in IMVU that seems to know a bit about the modeling and other fun creative aspects of IMVU. Plus her avis are extremely hot right ;)  She told me that I am different than most guys who are usually jerks, and she wanted to show me some more cool stuff. She wanted to show me some of her rooms that she put together. So I said sure lets check them out. I cant remember the exact order she showed me the rooms, but I do remember them getting increasingly more sexual in nature.  I don't want to make this an advertisement for IMVU so ill try to spare the details, and those who have played it know that its all in the furniture programs. She was excited to show me everything she put together. Before you know it, im sitting in a chair and her Avi is on my Avi kissing. I must say, it looked and felt nice. Its only a game. No harm right?

Mind you, at this point, I never had any intentions  of trying to smooth talk her and try to manipulate her or anything like that. I was just appreciative of her Avis, and I really liked her personality. She was really cool and we talked for many hours. She revealed to me later that the fact that I was not trying to peruse her made her want to peruse me even more and I just went along with way more than I should have.  She made me feel really good and alive like I haven't felt in a really long time. She also made me feel things ive never felt ever. It was a little confusing. She revealed that she normally only hangs with girls on IMVU and I am not like the other guys and she did something with me she never did with a guy on IMVU before. Im not sure I believe that, but the circumstantial evidence that followed did seem to support that she was being honest about that. Im leaving out some details, but needless to say, she made me feel special, in ways I never felt before. 

The next day,  we were chatting and I pointed out to her that my profile status says that I am married, and I feel that I should not have done what I did yesterday. She said she didn't notice and we agreed to not do that again and just be friends. I made sure she knew right away because the way she was starting to talk, I was getting the impression that she had " big plans" for me. Things that any guy in IMVU would dream of. Things were just getting started according to her. So I wanted to point that out before things went too far and she got hurt.

I felt good the next day in real life. I felt alive. I had a girl show serious interest in me and I thought, I was flattered that she liked me,  and if it made her feel better, I assured her I am not here to try to do anything with other girls and make her jealous. I know this sounds weird  to someone reading, that people would be talking like this only 3 days in to knowing each other, but somehow relationships seem to evolve fast in IMVU. I am not sure why.  I just didn't want to lead her on. 

At this point I have really enjoyed our conversations, and how similar our interests were.  It seemed like two rare earth magnets just slammed together.  every time we started talking,  it just kept getting deeper and more personal. I was really starting to get to know her so I think. She explained to me how she doesn't really think I didn anything wrong to my wife since it is just a game. And there is no worry that it can become real. She would never let that happen and it is only for fantasy.  After seeing how I ended it and how she reacted I sort of believe her that she is able to maintain this distinction. 

I started to realize that I was heading for trouble. Im not sure when it happened, but I started wanting her. She would pay really strong attention to me and make me feel like the most important thing to her, but then sort of push me a way a little and make me feel the urge to persue her.  Somehow again while talking and her showing me things she really seduced me and we started to go at it again. This time it was pretty bad and felt very guilty. i feel like I cheated on my wife badly.

I really dont know how things can get so serious so fast, or how people can connect with others and not be affected. I no longer was interested in just playing the game for fantasy purposes and I wasnt just attracted to her for her avitars, though the visual appeal does help to calcify the connection you feel to the person on the other end. I realized that during our time together I could ignore the avitar and just be concentrating on our text conversation, and the image of her that I had built up in my head from the nearly 15 or so hours we spent together talking about ourselves.

I found that I was thinking about her constantly. I had to be careful when driving that I didnt rear end a car because I couldn't stop thinking about her. I dont know what the heck she did to me. When I wasn't around her, I felt heavy on my chest and a burning inside me. When I would go on IMVU, when her invite box would pop up, my eyes would get wide, and my heart would practically stop for a beat. I was falling for this girl really really hard. It was scaring me really bad. I started to think that Im not going to stop until I get her for real. I didnt care about the game or the Avitar. I was getting attracted to the person I was talking to, who I just had sex with twice. Maybe three times, Im not even sure. If it was just that and nothing more it might not have been a big deal, but we talked so much on top of it.  I just cant handle something like that. Even though she says she can, I don't believe it. 

So now I am looking at a situation where I am almost having a panic attack because I can see where this is going and the end result will be me losing my family.  So I told her I cant handle this and I have to uninstall the game and cant talk to her anymore.  I told her I am crushing on her really bad and explained how i felt off the game and away from her.  She said then maybe I shouldn't do this. I said some more to her and at some point she said I was worrying too much and she would never get in the way of a marriage. Then she said she is not in the right frame of mind right now to talk about it right now and was in the middle of building a room with another friend lol, and that she would talk to me about it tomorrow.  She said come back on tomorrow and she will be here she promises Ok. She made it sound like and order. I asked, are you ordering me? She said yes.  I basically said yes maam lol. 

Then I uninstalled that crap.  Just before I uninstalled it I inboxed her saying Im sorry i cant come back tomorrow. I cant handle it. I told her that if she would have even shown more interest in my problem she would have had a better chance of  keeping me there. Sounds crazy doesn't it? here I am, I want to get away from her, but I feel sad that she didnt show more empathy for what I was just going through. 

Today in the morning I still had the mobile app on my phone and i was curious if she would respond to my last inbox. She didnt respond to it. I then went online and deleted my account too. Right now I am 1 day from not talking to her. I still think about her and IMVU often. I feel like a relative has died.  I miss her a lot. I know people reading this are going to think Im crazy, but something involuntary and subconscious happens when you click with someone really well, and have relations with the like 3 times. Pretty heated relations. And add on top of that  the way this girl was talking to me, it got inside my head way too bad.

Im still curious why she didnt respond, and I keep thinking about going on to talk to her. She is not allowing me to get closure. Am I just really freaking stupid, or is she a master at manipulating? lol   Anyone wanting to play this, just stay away and live in the real world. This game is designed to addict you by shear availability of sensory overload. I feel like I am coming out of a fog and im not sure what the heck just hit me.

Welcome she_got_me

If I told you that this girl was a 58 year old guy fooling a string of people like yourself for kicks would that bring you to your senses? Have you seen the TV show Catfish ? Nothing is what it seems on the internet.

You have experienced a dopamine rush and your brain wants more. Your brain is easily fooled. This is pure fantasy in your brain.

Quit now while you can and your sensible part of your brain still has some control. Or the rest of your life could go down the tubes. You are not alone with this. Don't allow yourself to be exploited.

Reading your post I can say my exp has some similarity. 

My addiction is clash of clan for close to a year.

my addition to the game has more to do with a guy I met in the clan. Nothing so sexual as yours but nonetheless he made me feel special, and I find myself staying in the game just so I can catch him and chat. I became so bad that I stated to make up conversations with him in my head while I'm not even playing. 

I had tried leaving 2 times. First time he followed me to a new clan, 2nd time I left because I was jealous he was flirting with another girl, but I rejoined after being miserable for 12hr. But as my emotions went on constant roller coaster rides I decide enough is enough. I planned to leave a few days ago. I m out for 1.5 day so far. I have reinstalled the game 12 times but I didn't talk to him or anyone. I made it so that I can ever go back. So I will have to stay out. 

IMVU should be where you could be able to talk to people, enjoy yourself, have fun, meet new people, and just be yourself. But in reality it promotes addiction to online games, gives you the ability to customize your avatar in the world it lives in, an enabling spending so much money and time out of the actual real world. This game could take you away from everything in the real life to your own little world of your own!

This game has the effect on a person for them to quit in the real world to be their avatar, in their own gateway world. It could even stop you from being able to have a regular day without this game. It could stop you from being away from the person you love the most to just being addicted to this game and forgetting everything, even your loved one. Lots of people will eventually get so addicted that they won’t be able to stop. Soon they won’t be able to delete the game; that they will chose the game over their loved ones.

That loved one was me. I had a boyfriend that can’t even delete the game for me, even if I beg. We had many arguments over this game. We even had a break in our relationship because I couldn’t accept him playing this game, which I couldn’t understand. I asked him to delete it he said no, you don’t understand. I tried to understand for a couple of days I couldn’t handle it. He was talking to people then ended up liking them and I know this because I have seen what he had been saying to them and that hurt me;  even though it was online. I found him talking to his ex who he dated on IMVU and it was very uncomfortable. He had so many memories in this game of the past since he used to play it all the time before being with me. I understood that he been playing a lot but I feel like it’s enough of this game, crazy that this game has more control over him than I did. This stupid game messed what we got.

When people hear about  addiction they might think about a substance, such as drugs or alcohol. But actually people could get addict to anything and I’m 100% sure that my boyfriend was addicted to this game. It’s so easy to dress up your character to pretend to be them; it must be a bit easy to impress others. So easy to run away from your problems in real life and go into IMVU for escape, where you could be able to flirt so easily, that they would automatically fall for you. I wish someone had warned ME before I ever made an account. However, until it has actually happened to you, you would not believe it was possible. I wish he could realize it one day. I hope that one day he comes to the conclusions that he had wasted half of his life on this game, and one day he could finally say it’s finally Game Over

I personally hate IMVU, just because it spoiled my relationship. I loved my boyfriend very much and wanted to take this game away from him for good but I couldn’t manage it. I just wanted my boyfriend back… how he was before he started playing it.

I have been on imvu since 2010. its not been a good experience and has caused issues in past with my husband and I.. I am at home all day due to health and its my social addiction. I have cheated and lied and my husband was sick and eventually died.. i lost my son few years after. Im still there. I have disabled my account  at least 6 times and came back.. I wish I had never started. I cant seem to break the habit..  its not interesting to me and ive been hurt by male and female there.. its fake love for most part and its every kind of filthe u can imagine.. i dont indulge in that anymore.. but i have done things that I would of never thought of doing.. its costly but financialy and mentally and physically.. I want to stop.. 

Welcome Lundy

It sounds like it is very hard to break away. What other things could you do with your time ?

Attending one of the meetings may help you