What I Unlearned While Celibate

It wasn't about sex at all. Yellow Brick Road.

Credit: Ethel Moore

I haven’t talked about sex much here, primarily because I am traumatized and secondarily because I wasn’t having any when I started this newsletter. Now seems as good a time as any because I’ve recently come out of a long, dry celibacy with some fodder to munch on.

I had to ask myself why. When you have a history of being victimized by straight, white desirability politics, sexual trauma, and people pleasing, “because I wanted to” is not necessarily a sufficient answer to the question of what motivates you to have sex with someone at any time. At least for me, the desire to have sex was messy and loaded…and like, not in the hot way.

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In my younger years, I was the Samantha of my friend group without the actual sex part. Sex talk was welcomed in my family home — SATC considered a family program by my folks — and I was the first of my girl gang to ever mention masturbation, which I started doing while in elementary school. All that to say, sex was never stigmatized, but it also wasn’t defined beyond anatomy and “Do what you want!” feminist rhetoric. The conversation around sex among friends is often generated in jest and levity, and yet, one single moment of candor with any woman about her sexual history sounds closer to an episode of SVU than any steamy scene in the movies. This disparity between our personal experiences and cultural representation made me feel emotionally isolated from what I thought sexual liberation was.

Fatness (see: society’s aversion to fatness and not my body at all) taunted me into scarcity and a belief that sexual desire was relatively inaccessible from a very young age. Finding myself in predominantly white spaces as a Black woman didn’t help either. Wondering if I would ever have sex at all, let alone regularly and with people who actually thought I was arousing, I jumped at the opportunity to have sex with the first person who offered during my first semester at college. If you were told you may not have access to food for months on end, you would probably collect as much food as you could regardless of passed expiration dates and nutritional value, wouldn’t you?

In HBO’s The Sex Lives of College Girls, Bela Malhotra — aspiring comedy writer and Brown girl at a very white institution — enters her college experience jumping at as many sexual experiences as possible, initiating conversations on Tinder with a simple “Shirtless pics?,” taking invites to nude ragers, and giving hand jobs like party favors.

Later in the season, she becomes a survivor of sexual violation by someone she trusts. She reckons with the fact that, while being harassed had absolutely nothing to do with her sexual appetite, she also seldom considered safety in her idea of liberation. My younger self related to this character a lot as someone who had her first actual kiss and sexual encounter all in one night simply because I was sick of not being able to relate to others. Knowing there’s no systemic shame in having sex whenever you want, doesn’t mean we don’t harbor deeply personal shame that harms us all the same.

For fear of re-packaging purity culture bullshit as self-regard, having sex without considering the trauma I was bringing with me into the bedroom was re-traumatizing me with each date and toxic relationship I trudged through over the years. Sex became anything but casual, quite labored in fact, and left me feeling less satisfied and empty than a pre-coital Kendra. Even after years of working through this, my last serious relationship made me realize I still relied on hyper-sexuality to create a closeness that poorly imitated intimacy, circumvent rejection, and provide a sorry excuse for solutions to problems only a breakup could really solve.

I think many shamefully assume you need to be having a lot of sex with many in order for celibacy to be “necessary.” First, celibacy is valuable because you value it. Second, it’s not about the quantity of your partners, but the quality of your connection to yourself with those partners. I’ve spent the majority of my adulthood either not dating/having sex at all, or in compulsive situationships/relationships with unsavory people. The reasons why I continued to connect this way despite being someone who loves love and has so much of it in my life was a mystery to me. That’s why celibacy was “necessary” — because I didn’t feel connected to myself while romantically connected with others.

Catherine Gray, the author of The Unexpected Joy of Being Single, gave up sex for a year in 2014. “Between the ages of 16 and 34, I hadn’t spent more than a few months single,” she says. “I felt incomplete without a plus-one and constantly hunted approval. I reached rock-bottom after being disproportionately crushed by the failure of a six-month relationship, so I decided to give up sex and dating for an entire year.”

2014 was a very different dating pool to navigate, though I presume just as horny because people will always be horny. Regardless, Gray’s sentiments are consistent with what I hear from cis, white, thin, and “conventionally attractive” women all the time — that they gave up sex because it was too available. Because they found themselves drowning in opportunity. I can’t say I relate in the slightest. Not because sex itself isn’t available for the rest of us, but because it is not available for the same reasons, within the same parameters of emotional or physical safety, and with the same consequences. When you spend a lifetime knowing you’re desirable, it makes sense to eventually have to learn how to find self-esteem in isolation. But when you never really get that external validation flat out and without caveat, the lesson is often the opposite. Relationships, attachments, and reliance on others is a learned behavior for those of us whose view of ourselves never quite matched up with the world’s.

Why do I have sex at all? Why am I having sex with this person? How am I seeking to feel during and after sex? Am I safe here?

The gratification I felt after sex mostly stemmed from how I made my partners feel, the comfort in knowing I was desirable enough in that exact moment for someone to have sex with me, and the chance to share my raunchy sexcapades like a well-written Samantha Jones should. It has occurred to me that many people, like me, have probably compulsively participated in sexual exploits because there’s no apparent reason not to and this was no longer satisfactory for me. In fact, I think most people believe they have a healthy sex life just by having sex regularly due to the pressure to have robust sex lives and the many “shoulds” attached to sex today. I’m not a “should” kind of person and approach my life with intention — why did this part of me not deserve the same consideration?

So anyway, I left a relationship with the most heinous person I’ve ever met in my life and entered my celibacy, self-help book, spiritual awakening, double-my-tattoo-count phase for nearly 2 years.

Around month three of zero dates, apps, sex, or romantic intimacy; I was intoxicated by the choice to center my emotional needs for the first time, possibly ever, by day — and crouched in heaving sobs of loneliness by night. By month six, I became devastatingly aware of how much I wanted to jump out of my own skin and lose myself in somebody else’s. I was sick of solving my own problems, dissecting my own flaws, and having nobody else to blame for my emptiness. I understood then that it was usually right here, at this exact juncture that I would get on dating apps, text an old flame, or implode into other self-sabotaging behaviors. I was watching myself squeal underneath the microscope of my own consciousness, desperate to hide under another.

Was I so bad? How did I spend so many years escaping myself without noticing? By month 9, I had pushed beyond the inclination to escape and had become terrifyingly comfortable without so much as a flirt. In fact, I barely wanted to be around people at all for any reason. That’s the thing about sex. In the words of Oscar Wilde, “Everything else is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” Though, it’s not about the kind of power a white man would suppose in which one person is dominated and the another subjugated.

Sex is about personal power, which is why we might call it a form of intimacy. During sex, all of us shows up in desire’s meeting place, but what if who we are is buried in shame? Locked in trauma? Disconnect from soul, body, mind, or all of the above? Can what we desire be truly good for us? Without it, sex can be empty at best and self-harm at worst. Some of us have to lose ourselves in the power of others a bit before we realize it. In my celibacy, my personal power was no longer being channeled into dates, DMs, and fucking; it was being funneled into other starved parts of my existence. My art. My writing. I started this newsletter. I picked up several hobbies and established connection at a community level, like I never had before. I had a feeling this is what I was seeking all along.

At the 1 year mark, I created more than I have created in my entire life and was entirely touch deprived. I was able to look back at many past lovers and flames with a squeaky clean lens. The majority of my sexual experiences were a lie. When I said yes to sex, what I actually craved was love. I wanted to be seen by someone, lusted after, missed when I was gone, touched in tenderness, but I settled for being devoured for a couple hours by an emotionally unavailable person who probably wouldn’t think twice if I got hit by a truck.

I didn’t have a sex problem really; I had a love problem for which sex became an unpredictable variable. Once I took immediate sexual connection off the table, I also eliminated the trap of thinking someone valued me because they had sex with me. I reduced the likelihood of prematurely attaching to someone I didn’t even necessarily like in virtue of not having to reject or be rejected. I started centering my own desire. The greatest gift celibacy gave me was slowing the pace of courtship and creating bonds with stronger and more sacred material.

At the end of my celibacy a few months ago, I decided it was time to integrate everything I’d learned about my dating patterns recently. Isolation had served its purpose. Now, I’m inching back into the scene consciously. On dates — which have spanned over months and with intention — I feel present and in my body to sense out compatibility, chemistry, and mutual attraction. In presence, I’ve found myself struggling to perform anyone’s sexual fantasy including my own. I don’t want to be seen in fantasy; I want to be seen in the many dimensions of my person.

There is no night and day “before and after" story here. I’m still learning how to care about liking myself more than being liked. I’m still working on not feeling like my body is apology. It took me a couple of decades to inherit harmful narratives; it’ll take me more than 2 sexless years to undo them. I’m still a horny bitch who sometimes just wants some cheeky instant gratification. Inside of me still exists a wounded little girl who believes, ever so slightly, that she has to abandon herself for love. Because I decided she was deserving of space and protection, we’re far closer to understanding our essential worthiness than ever. Together. Celibacy offered me a chance at intention where I treated myself with carelessness. I trust myself to act in my best interest most of the time, for the first time. I’m defining sexual liberation in my healing journey with my comfort and safety as the goalposts, and that’s all that really matters.