A friend confided to me recently that she was burned out on dating. Cruising the apps in midlife felt humiliating, and she repeatedly confronted the same obstacles in her relationships.
I told her I had faced similar challenges, until I spent a year intentionally celibate. She pointed out that a year was a long time to live without intimacy. I assured her that abstaining from sex for a year was not only the best thing I ever did for my future romantic prospects, it was also the most erotic year of my life.
Let me explain. Mostly, I mean erotic in the capacious sense: the sensual, embodied, vital, empowered aspects of beingness, what the writer Audre Lorde referred to as “an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered.” Hildegard of Bingen, the sainted German nun and mystic polymath born in 1098, called it viriditas: the fecund, wet, greening power of life. But, I also do mean the explicitly physical and the sexual.
When I was in my mid-30s, a relationship in which I had completely lost myself came to a terrible end. In the merciful quiet that followed, I realized that I had been in nonstop romantic partnerships since my midteens. Over the years, friends had suggested I take some time alone, but even when I tried, my sights always locked onto someone new.
This time, I decided to take the endeavor more seriously. I would spend three months abstinent. Did my friends laugh at me? Yes, of course. I knew 90 days without sex was ridiculous to some but also that for me it was a radical decision. Quickly, I realized that my problem — that is, my preoccupation — was less sexual in nature than romantic. Even with sex and dating off the table, I had plenty left to occupy me in the realm of flirting and fantasizing.
I decided to extend my celibacy for another three months and draw some strict boundaries: no romantic activity at all. No charged friendships, no scanning the party or the street or the waiting room for the people I found attractive.
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