What I Learned from a Year and a Half of Celibacy or How to Have Sex

We are sexually stunting ourselves.

Given how loudly (*ahem*) sex is flaunted in our faces, you’d think we’d be less shy about talking about it quietly.  From a young age we are inundated with obtuse and false examples of sexuality, and now more than ever -- given the readily available porn industry -- we should be talking softly about the nuances of it.  We take its presence for granted given the likelihood that on our drive to work we’ll see it somehow selling us bank loans and dish soap, and as a result any and all subtlety has been forgotten.   What remains is a harsh, brash idea of sexuality, brandished about for young people to interpret without guides or mentorship.

I stumbled my way through lessons that could have easily been passed down to me by the women who’d gone before me.  I got rules governing my sexuality from society when what I needed was the wisdom of mentors and elders.  I could be so much further along by now if the women just one generation before me had shared what they knew to be true about sex and the emotional lives of women:

We are failing the younger generation.

I didn’t need to know the two strains of thought -- you’ll be less if you have too much too soon AND women can have sex just like men can -- I needed to know the knowledge behind the two.  Because the truth is, of course women can have sex casually, just as well as too much of the wrong kind of sex can be incredibly damaging.  Duh.  But what’s taken me a decade to figure out (and what I wish had been communicated to me sooner), is that physical intimacy with another person without emotional intimacy with one’s self, will always cause damage.  Fullstop.  Regardless of whether or not it’s committed or casual.

I used alcohol as a sexual lubricant for a very long time.  The buzz of booze blunted any emotional presence and made sex purely a physical act--like exercise.  The effects of alcohol allowed me to ignore the fact that if I looked hard enough and deep enough (which, of course, I never did) I would have seen how great (awesome!) sex can possibly be, and how great (significant!) its effects can possibly be.  There is so much potential to hurt and screw yourself over (pun intended) if you don’t know what it is you are really looking for, engaging in, or trying to experience when you are physical with another person.

Nothing feels as good as sex and nothing has caused me more confusion than sex.

My adolescence was really getting underway during the Sex & the City years.  And that incredible, ground-breaking, empowering show kind of fucked me up.  I was trying to talk about sex and engage in sex like Carrie, et al.  And as I fumbled around feeling empty and an unidentifiable longing for years and years, all I really needed was someone to pull me aside and say, “You know?  It’s ok for sex to really mean something to you.”  That is the part that was missing from my sexual education.  Not the bullshit about saving yourself, nor the world seeing you as less if you don’t, but that it’s possible that for some, being intimate with someone will reveal a sensitivity, vulnerability and desire for respect, trust and understanding that, though terrifying, is potentially profound and worth being sober and present for.

I had no idea.  At the time I had no investigative tools like writing, meditation or therapy to uncover that there was an underlying need not being met, and no language to communicate what I uncovered even if I did:

It is ok for sex to mean something.

I didn’t know that I needed emotional connection and a deep feeling of security before and after sex in order for it to not create a dissonance within me.  And not knowing this, that explains why so often I felt an aching, longing, and desperation for something unnameable post coitus.  I was so angry with myself for being needy (because that is what it is called when a woman wants something from a man after sex), but really my needs were just undiagnosed gaps in my own awareness.  Like a baby cries when something is wrong but can’t name it, that was me for the past 15 years--crying, and not too sure why.  Embarrassed and ashamed for feeling so much All.  The.  Time.  Feeling annoyed and frustrated that the sexual ways and appetites of others didn’t feel authentic to me but neither did the alternatives (saving myself for marriage/only having sex if he’s committed to you).  If this way worked for everyone else including the badass women I am friends with, why wasn’t it working for me?

It was being in a long-term, committed and long-distance relationship where all of my emotional needs were finally met that I saw for the first time that even though I’d had lovely and loving sexual partners, because I didn’t know what I needed (trust, emotional connection and accountability), it was impossible for my needs to be met.  Long distance is really hard, and I desperately wanted to get laid and to be with my person in the flesh (*wink*), but even when we ended, I still didn’t seek out the ‘purely physical’ deed with ‘just some random’ or a really loyal friend (also: *wink*) like I thought I would -- like I thought I was needing.  This really confused me until I realized: I had been able to go without sex all that time because the sex I’d been having up until that point had been the wrong kind of sex.

It breaks my heart a little bit that no one sat me down at 14 and said, “Listen, sex may really, really mean a lot to you.  And that is the only thing you need to know about it.  Everything else?  Just noise.”  My sexuality was only ever presented to me as how it mattered to other people.  And when Sex & the City came along, it was all about the cultural ‘fuck you’ attitude of ‘anything he can do, I can do better’ that we all got swept up in.

In North America we place the utmost emphasis on sex (see our marketing, media, movies and television for proof) but zero value on it at the same time (read: cheap, exploitative and obvious).  We’re throwing this make-upped, bravado-filled brand of sexuality at ourselves and not giving anyone the langage to talk about an alternative that takes into account our feelings and emotional lives around it.  Sex has become an aesthetic and a purely physical entity in the public sphere and we’ve given ourselves no language or space to discuss the realities of its importance in our personal and emotional lives.  Many of us will be lucky enough to have partners and experiences that disprove this as the sole model of sex, but why not start the conversation earlier?  Why not introduce this as a possibility to the younger generation?  Why ensure we all continue to emotionally fumble around like idiots with each other, searching for the proverbial clitoris, instead of passing on the wisdom we have learned intergenerationally?

If a younger generation doesn’t want to hear it from me, so be it, but what I want to make abundantly clear is that there is no point in being physically intimate with someone if you have not gotten emotionally intimate with yourself.  Clearly, I am a late bloomer.  Because yes, I was fumbling around like an idiot for a very long time.  Making the same mistakes over and over again because I didn’t even realize there was a problem in need of identifying, I just knew I felt a lacking a lot of the time I engaged in sex.  Alcohol, and not knowing myself, allowed me to have sex in a solely physical way, but the hangover following was always as a result of not having nourished myself. 

I know that sex can absolutely be casual and, what I have reluctantly learned, is that it can just as absolutely mean a whole hell of a lot.  And for the longest time, I had only been living one of these truths.