How Voluntary Celibacy Saved My Sex Life
Choosing to go celibate as an adult is something you think only born-again Christians do. But for me, it’s what saved my relationship to sex.
I was brought up Christian, lost my faith around 17, and dove straight from the arms of the Church into the arms of postmodern feminism. At this time, around 2012, the sex positivity movement was truly gaining traction, and I was enchanted by the idea of sex. When I left home and my small private school where I didn’t want to sleep with anybody anyways, I was sure that I would go off and have my great college love story. My first time would be romantic and I’d be with that person forever, because that’s how life works of course.
As college went on and it got clearer that wasn’t going to happen, I started to care less about the first time and more about a fun time. I rushed headlong into my first relationship with a boy I didn’t actually like that much, dumped him and found my next boyfriend immediately afterwards. I did like him, and I knew I wanted to lose it to him, so I did. And while the sex was good, the rest of the relationship wasn’t. He was about to graduate and would be moving back home and neither of us wanted to do long distance, so we had six months together with a firm expiration date. As you can imagine, it wasn’t very healthy. After I broke up with him, the border had been crossed: I was no longer a virgin. I was free to have all the casual sex I desired because I was just having fun.
But the more casual sex I had, the worse I felt. I experimented with my bisexuality, I hooked up with friends, I got laid at parties, and every single time I regretted it. I didn’t necessarily regret the sex itself, but I regretted who I was having it with. I craved something more than passing fun in the night, and it didn’t feel right to me that I couldn’t use sex to express that, but I didn’t know how to reconcile it with the image I had of casual sex as this wonderful thing that gave me power. I studied abroad and kept pursuing casual sex as a method of fulfillment. I thought if I could fuck enough people, I could somehow become a sexual goddess that everyone would want. Yet I still felt totally empty inside.
Towards the end of my study abroad experience, I was sexually assaulted by a close friend who had come to visit me. But that’s not what made me turn celibate. I had consensual casual sex with my rapist before and after the assault, and twice with another man after him. It was after I had that last sexual encounter that I realized I had serious self-control issues when it came to sex. I wasn’t over my assault — not in the slightest — although the better half of a year had passed, and yet I was still so anxious to be wanted that I jumped into bed with someone I hardly knew. Again, although the sex itself was quite good, I realized why it wasn’t making me feel good:
I was mistaking sex for intimacy.
To a girl who was brought up in the church, sex was a mystical forbidden fruit that was going to make me feel powerful and secure in myself and finally distance me from that needling desire to be known. But the truth is, that’s never going to work for me. I crave intimacy on a deeper level, and passion without intimacy to me is no passion at all. No matter how fun it may be in the moment, I know that when I wake up and have to say goodbye to my conquest of the night, I’ll feel utterly and completely alone.
When I realized I had serious self-control issues with sex, I made the decision to go celibate. Not until marriage, just until I’m in a stable relationship in which some form of intimacy already exists. I want to be known and accepted and desired anyways, not worry that somebody is going to leave me once they discover my demons. That means that dating can be hard, but it’s a sacrifice I had to make to get back to the place I needed to. I wasn’t serving myself by constantly offering up my body knowing that it was going to make me feel bad afterwards, because the sex I was having was never about an expression of power: It was about me seeking acceptance in any way I could find. I realized that to truly have what I crave, I needed to get intimate with myself first, and reclaiming my body to serving me was a part of that.
It’s been almost three years since I last had sex — and it was casual. In that time, I’ve discovered a lot more about my emotional needs, and also my physical needs. For example, I know that I’m never going to be cool with a friends with benefits situation. I know that I don’t want to sleep with people I don’t know, and that I require a lot of foreplay even when I’m on my own. Because I haven’t been distracted by romance, I’ve had the chance to nurture some very intimate friendships, and I don’t feel so alone anymore. Sure, there are times I think it would be nice to have someone around, and my stomach does flutter a bit when I see a good movie kiss, but voluntary celibacy is teaching me patience for the kind of love that will fulfill me. There have been distractions and temptations, but overall, this is important to me.
Don’t get me wrong — I have nothing against casual sex, and I think if it works for you, by all means, you should pursue it. But for the person out there who’s trying to make casual sex work and it just…doesn’t: there are other avenues. You don’t have to have sex if you don’t want to. Having sex didn’t make me a powerful badass, and nobody smote me down from the heavens either. I do think I’ve had it with the wrong people, and funnily enough, I don’t think I would have recognized that were it not for my years of voluntary celibacy. By taking a timeout from sex, I know that I’m ready to have it again when that time rolls around.
For so many years, I thought that the power was in the sex, but the power is in the choice. For some, acting on that choice is the power. For me, it’s abstaining. No matter what you choose, your body is yours, so don’t let anyone else tell you what to do with it.
