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A new approach …
Today is the day.
I’ve realized that pledging myself to four months of celibacy freaks me the Hell out—it’s just too absolute. But I don’t want to only pledge to two months or something lame like that—two months is nothing. So, I have a new vow: I can’t have sex until I figure out what role sex and relationships play in my life. Okay, that’s kind of heavy. I may never figure that out completely. I guess my pledge will be like that. My pledge will be centered on the idea of figuring out the role of sex and relationships in my life. Regardless, I want to make a pledge that is based more on progress toward a goal than just committing myself to timed deprivation. Merely thinking about not allowing myself to have sex and caused me to look at things differently. I find myself asking questions like, “Can hermits be happy? Is human happiness completely based on human interaction? What role does selfishness play in different relationships? How to romantic relationships change our social lives and how?” I want to commit myself to celibacy long enough to get a better sense of what it is like to not pursue sex, which may very well take four months, more or less.
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Doubts
Doubts doubts doubts. I haven’t even started this vow of celibacy and I’m already feeling miserable about it. Doubts doubts doubts. Dread.
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Counting down: T minus 4
Some things I won’t need come Friday, May 21 …
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this isn't a question but i just had to say...
more power to you! i hope you succeed in your goal and good luck with it. sex isn't the most important thing in life and as long as you have positive people around you, you wont need it. plus i have a lot of friends from the bay and they aren't always the nicest to these girls over here. they will tell you everything you want to hear and then leave you when the next one comes along. i hope you keep up what your doing and don't give in to any temptations.:-) Thanks!
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Counting down: T minus 5
When I was 12 and I’d never even kissed anyone, I would go on long walks through the woods by my house. I felt that ecstatic non-possessive ownership of the woods I’d later feel of secret lovers. When I was 15, I snuck off one afternoon to met a boy in the woods. I remember how he smelled—he wore this cool, cinnamon musk aftershave. We fooled around and I lost my scarf in a clearing. He later told me he had gone back to the woods in the middle of the night to look for it. I would eventually lose my virginity to that boy.
I stopped taking walks in the woods after that meeting. They weren’t mine anymore. I stopped keeping secrets after I slept with that boy. I had nothing left to keep to myself.
A picture I found of woods in Vermont in the fall. I went to middle school and high school in Vermont and spent a lot of time in woods like these. This picture is not mine and is subject to copyright.
I used to have a constant and strong sense of singularity. Rather than look to connect with other people, I let my sense of self shoot out silently wherever I was. When I was alone, my sense of self would bounce right back to me like a boomerang. The circular bouncing was pure ecstasy. Everything was ecstasy when I was old enough to understand how it feels to be alone and young enough not to worry about always being alone.
That ecstasy was my internality. When I started letting other people in, I punctured a hole in myself and all that internality started to leak out. I became dependent on the pressure from new punctures to keep my balloon-self inflated as bits and pieces of me hissed out of the old punctures.
I think a secret can put a stop in such a puncture.
Today I came home after five in the morning, like I often did the summer when I was 16 and would sneak out to meet a boy whose mother didn’t like me. What kept me out until such an odd time this morning? I’m going to keep that to myself. All I can tell you is that I can’t argue I’m not crazy.
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Counting down: T minus 6
My vow of celibacy officially begins Friday, May 21. Let’s hope that’s when this whole thing really starts, because I haven’t gotten laid in about two weeks. The guy I was seeing suddenly became flakey as fuck and well … I just want to know when the last time I’m having sex until the leaves start falling off the trees is. “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” as Neil Young would say. I want a firm cut-off date. I want to be able to tell myself, “I am having sex right now and after this I will not have sex for at least four months,” rather than, “Um, I might have had sex two weeks ago … I can’t remember … oh, God, and now I’ll never know exactly how long I’m spending celibate …”
This sense of urgency to get my last taste of sugar drove me nuts last night when I went out partying. I aggressively hit on anyone I saw who I recognized from class and solicited a gay male friend for sex. I also kept saying, “My pussy wants bang bang” over and over. This is not how I want to go out; at the same time, this behavior is the very reason I have to exit the realm of sex. All the insecurities I had in high school started bubbling up when I noticed something was up with this guy I was seeing. Normally, when I notice something is up with a guy, I just drop it. I get up. I walk away. I’m not sure why, but I’ve reverted back to giving a shit.
The last time I gave a shit, I responded by sleeping around. I was sixteen and I’d been screwing some boy in a punk band who’d told me he really liked me and he’d date me and I was the girl for him bla bla bla … Well, one night while my mom was on a trip to Florida to bar hop with her girl friends, I had a party in her house. The boy and his band came, as did my close friends. Then this guy got with my best friend right in front of me. I was devastated. So I slept with the rest of his band, including his brother, who was the drummer. Then I slept with some guys at work, and so on. I made it my pet project to fuck like a rabbit and soon discovered I had developed a reputation as the town slut.
Now I’m 20 and I’ve slept with about 20 men— more than some people, less than others. I’ve been seeing a boy who looks like that boy I knew in high school. The latest boy started referring to our sex as “making love” a few weeks ago, commenting on how intimate he felt with me. Then he just stopped responding to my calls and texts (unless, of course, I texted “I wanna fuck”). I haven’t seen him for the better part of a month and I’m used to spending up to four nights at his place in a given week. My response this time? Nope, not gonna sleep around—I’m gonna stop having sex altogether.
When I was in high school and I started sleeping around, it was in an effort to devalue sex and shake-off the Catholic guilt my mother had instilled in me. My goal was to hurt myself so much that I wouldn’t be able to feel pain from the actions of others. I saw my sex life as a pie and each sexual partner as a slice of that pie. The more sexual partners I had, the smaller each slice would be. The size of each slice would reflect my level of investment in the corresponding sexual partner. The smaller my investment, the smaller the amount of my pie I risked losing—the smaller the amount of myself I risked losing.
The problem with this way of thinking is that it emphasizes the negative in that its goal is to devalue something, or remove value from it. Through celibacy, I can acknowledge the value of sex, rather than deny it, as well as increase the value or meaning I find in platonic relationships and solitude through prioritizing those things over sex. Through celibacy, I hope to actually gain value and meaning in my life. I hope to not only not lose parts of myself, but strengthen my sense of self and increase my value as a person— not just decrease my risk of losing that value.
