This post, a different version of which first appeared in 2006, was initially inspired by this poem by Lady Ki No Washika:
No
It’s not because I’m now too old,
More wizened than you guess..
If I say no, it’s only
Because I fear that yes
Would bring me nothing, in the end,
But a fiercer loneliness.
I found it in the Los Angeles Times Book Review back in the late summer of 1998. This was a time in my life where, after a very turbulent couple of years, I had taken a temporary vow of celibacy. Keeping the commitment to that vow was proving difficult. This poem comforted me instantly, because those last four lines ran so unbelievably true — they summed up in 22 words what had been up to then my entire sexual history.
When writing about my past, I choose my words carefully. So many people I know and love read this blog, as do folks from my spiritual community, my youth group, and my college classes. Much of my private life is thus obscured, and rightly so. Yet I think I can share a little bit that may prove useful, or if nothing else, may explain why this poem means so much to me.
As I’ve talked about before, in late June of 1998, I had hit a kind of emotional, physical, and spiritual bottom. I attempted suicide after a prolonged struggle with drugs, alcohol, and compulsive sexual behavior. My family was frantically worried about me, my friends had largely pulled away from me, I had spent time in handcuffs — and extended time in hospitals. While in the last of these hospitals, someone asked me "Hugo, do you have any idea how to be alone? I don’t mean single — can you really be alone with yourself?" I admitted that no, I really didn’t know how to do that. I had already burned through a couple of marriages, and was, for lack of a better time, compulsively dating. I was a walking, talking, incarnation of toxic neediness! In the year or two leading up to that watershed summer, I had been going out several nights a week with lots of different people, addictively hungry for connection. The whole process had left me alienated, lonely, and miserable; it had also made me a bit of a pariah.
In that long hot summer of 1998 — the summer of Bill and Monica, the summer of the World Cup in France — I came home to God. It’s an easy phrase to write, and it doesn’t come close to capturing the extraordinary turbulence and excitement of that time of conversion and transformation. I can only say that I prayed as I had never prayed before, to a God I wasn’t sure I believed in, and I was given peace beyond any expectation. It was an amazing time, one I hope I will never forget. "Born again" is such a trite, overused expression — and yet truly, that’s what it felt like.
One of my earliest spiritual directors/Twelve Step sponsors told me that in addition to a variety of spiritual activities, I needed to be celibate. He defined celibacy as not only no sexual activity, but also no dating, flirting, masturbating, or what he liked to call "intriguing" (I love that verb) with women. I asked how long this period was supposed to last, and he gave me the typical spiritual director answer: "You’ll know. For now, just do this a day at a time."
(I had spent a brief period of time in my undergraduate years considering whether or not I had a vocation — a story I ought to post. As I prayed and wondered about becoming a Dominican, I also kept hanging up on the issue of celibacy. I felt called by God to his Church — and at the same time, was terrified of giving up what I saw as the sine qua non of a happy life. My fear of celibacy played the decisive role in my abandoning the process of joining the Church.)
Thinking about what my director was asking me to do, I realized that I had spent years and years chasing the next exciting relationship. As much as I liked "going out" with various women, what I really loved was the fantasy that that night’s date might be "the one", the one who was going to make me content and happy. I was always just one woman away from contentment! Just the prospect of someone new filled me with tremendous anticipation. I lived for years and years oscillating between hope and disappointment, idealization and disillusionment, neediness and loneliness. It’s not a happy way to live, and I know plenty of men and women who’ve lived that way — and some who still do.
Before 1998, I had never consciously made a decision not to date or be in relationship. There had been times when I didn’t have anyone in my life, but it wasn’t for lack of trying! In that summer, I found out just how "addicted" I was to novelty, to the illusion of intimacy, to instant chemical connection, to promise. I also found that God’s grace was stronger than all of that. Much to my surprise (but not to my spiritual director’s), I found that I had the power to live differently. My behavior changed, and then my thinking followed. I discovered that in celibacy, I had an extraordinary amount of free time to do many new things!
It was during that summer that I first started running at a high level. I had been running for a few years, but had never hired a coach and done serious track work. With the money I was saving by not going out night after night, I could easily afford to hire a coach to direct my training. (That’s why all of my personal best times came within the next nine months or so.) I started going to church again, of course, and found that I had the time to volunteer for many things. As many people in similar situations have found out, once I got out of my own self-obsession, I became infinitely more useful to others — not to mention happier with myself. If I hadn’t made the conscious choice to be radically celibate,and if God hadn’t given me the strength to live into that commitment, none of this would ever have happened.
As the weeks and months wore on, and the "newness" of my conversion experience began to wear off, the commitment to no dating/flirting/intriguing became more difficult to maintain. Surprisingly, the abstinence from masturbation was less difficult. As my sponsor had predicted, the longing for orgasm and physical release ended up being less intense than the hunger for validation, the longing to know I was wanted. (Let me make it very clear that I’m not anti-masturbation in the slightest. Masturbating can be a wonderful and liberating thing, and ought to be encouraged among the young of all sexes rather than shamed. But masturbation had become for me a way of coping with uncomfortable feelings, and I knew I needed a time away from that habit in order to find a new strategy for dealing with anxiety and longing.)
It’s at this point that I found the Washika "No" poem. It was one of two poems I recited to myself over and over again that summer and fall. I memorized it, and repeated it to myself as I ran. (The other lines I used came in the form of this famous final couplet from Auden’s In Memory of Yeats: In the desert of the heart/ Let the healing fountains start/ In the prison of his days /Teach the free man how to praise.). I knew what it was to trade an hour’s pleasure for a fiercer loneliness; living out that infernal exchange had made me (and many who cared for me) abjectly miserable. Somehow, Washika’s words got through to me on a soul level when nothing else would. Perhaps it was the title of the poem itself: "No." Such a simple word, often a child’s first word, but before 1998, my least favorite word in the whole language and the word I found hardest to say. This poem was an important part of my learning to say it. Folks, I don’t just put up poetry because I like it — poetry has helped save my life, again and again and again.
Of course, my advisor/sponsor was right: the time of celibacy did come to an end after many months, and it came to an end in a positive way. Though I still had much growing and learning ahead of me, in the dozen summers since that conversion time, I have lived very differently. Today, my extraordinary wife and I have the sort of marriage I could never even have imagined having years ago. Though I still have my petty neuroses, and God still is working in my life, I’m no longer the bundle of neediness (beneath a carefully crafted exterior) that I was in my pre-conversion days. Of all the tools I used in those early days and weeks after I chose to live and live well, none save for prayer was more important than the discipline of celibacy. It was only by completely quieting that aspect of my life that I got still enough to listen to God; it was only by learning that I could live without romance and sex that I learned how to have both of them in the same person in a joyous, life-affirming, enduring way.
Frankly, I think all of us need a celibate "time out" at some point in our lives. Yes, I know most folks associate celibacy with refraining from physical sex. But it’s more than that; you can be a virgin and addicted to flirting and intriguing, in love with love, hungry for validation. Whatever your level of sexual experience, making a conscious decision to close down that area of your life — if only for a few months — can provide extraordinary rewards. It did for me.
Poetry helped.
When I first wrote on this topic, I was called out for my sexual privilege. Though I had been by my own estimation and that of others a shy, nerdy, and chubby teen, by the time I reached college I discovered that for whatever reason, finding willing sexual partners wasn’t especially difficult. I didn’t think of myself as having “game”, and I certainly never gave any thought to to the advice of “pick-up artists” (PUA), if such a community even existed in the 1980s. I certainly tasted rejection and disappointment, but I know that others dealt with loneliness and bitterness far more than I did. For some, celibacy was less a choice than a constant and unfortunate circumstance, a prison from which they had difficulty extricating themselves. My musings about celibacy as a decision came across as grating, and I am sorry about that.
Celibacy, of course, is more than just being single (whether by intent or by unhappy accident.) It’s about committing to avoiding relationships, to quieting one’s own sexual impulses, to redirecting that aspect of one’s energy for a season of one’s life. Even someone who is a sexually frustrated virgin might find value in choosing to stop pursuing sex and relationships for a time.
Addendum: My old sponsor, Jack, and my running coach, Art, both told me the same thing in the summer of 1998, as I practiced celibacy and trained for a fast marathon. They told me that if I wanted what I’d never had, I needed to become what I’d never been. And if I wanted to become what I’d never been, I needed to do what I’d never done.
I can’t tell you how often I think of that phrase. "Doing" celibacy — like doing 10×800 intervals on the track — was doing what I had never done to become what I’d never been in order to get what I’d never had.
Great post, as usual.
However, the prohibition on masturbation by your sponsor sounds completely wrong. It’s like trying to overcome overeating by complete starvation. Asking a person to abstain from tending to their physiological necessities is cruel and unhealthy.
Clarissa, I think we can agree that orgasm isn’t quite as immediately physiologically necessary as food. (A lot of genuinely malnourished people would be appalled by the comparison.) It may be emotionally and psychically necessary and physiologically beneficial, but it’s not quite worthy of the comparison to food.
The problem with masturbation, as my sponse explained it, was that it was connected to fantasy. Though some folks can and do masturbate while thinking about balancing their checkbooks, or about simply floating down a nice river, most (including me) tend to fantasize about having sex with other people. For me, as my sponsor knew, my fantasies tended to be carefully edited replays of past sexual experiences. The unhealthy, toxic, dangerous, crazy stuff tended to be the most erotic for me at that stage of my life. Replaying those old tapes kept me stuck.
Again, I’m pro-masturbation. To use your food analogy, many nutritionists advocate the benefits of temporary cleanses, where one abstains from beloved foods in order to clean out the gastrointestinal system completely. (I’ve done a few cleanses in my day with excellent results.) Abstaining from masturbation and orgasm and fantasy is neither realistic or desirable for a lifetime (just as a juice cleanse would be terribly dangerous for more than a week or two). But the short-term benefits of the celibacy/cleanse can be tremendous.
When I did return to masturbation, my fantasies were different as a consequence. What “got me off” in my head and what was “healthy emotionally” were, remarkably, the same thing. I liked that congruence. Your kilometers may vary.
“To use your food analogy, many nutritionists advocate the benefits of temporary cleanses, where one abstains from beloved foods in order to clean out the gastrointestinal system completely.”
-That’s true, but nutritionists are trained medical specialists who can evaluate the risks and keep an eye on the progress. I don’t think that anybody other than a doctor can dispense advice on health-related matters.
Indeed, but telling me to abstain from masturbation was unlikely to have life-threatening consequences. Pleasure is a very great good, but its absence isn’t immediately deadly. I think orgasms are splendid, and people should be having them often with themselves and their chosen partners. But like anything, masturbation can become addictive — particularly when it involved, as it did for me, the ritualized reliving of dark and unhealthy sexual experiences.
I needed to shift my consciousness about sexuality. I wanted a healthier, less compulsive sexual life; remember, I write as a recovering alcoholic and addict who was addicted to everything and anything that felt good. I needed to change how I lived, and giving up masturbation for a short season of my life (like giving up romantic relationships, sex and flirtation) was part of that change.
Hugo,
“My musings about celibacy as a decision came across as grating, and I am sorry about that. … Even someone who is a sexually frustrated virgin might find value in choosing to stop pursuing sex and relationships for a time.”
aah, yeah. You know I was involuntarily celibate for a long time, and I think it’s still a little condescending… plus, the running thing sounds like a page from any turn of the century European conservative, sublimation of male energy by celibacy… well.
That said, I’m glad it worked out for you. But the impression I got from reading this is that this was something that would probably only work for people who need extremes. Your entire redemption narrative, not just the celibacy example – and again, I’m glad you found something for you – seems to be about replacing one set of radical behaviours/beliefs that no longer worked with another set of extreme behaviours/beliefs that did work – and likely worked *because* the other set didn’t work anymore. You appear unbalanced before *and* after, in a way, only in very different ways.
So if being involuntary celibate were to be seen as a similar behavioural extreme, then the equivalent to your approach would not be to stop desiring, it would be to book a flight to Bangkok or Kjev and live the extreme that has been missing so far – something which I most certainly wouldn’t recommend to any involuntarily celibate person.
We all tend to project that what helped us will also help others. For you, fighting one extreme with another was a great thing. For others, it would be a very bad decision. Nietzsche wasn’t right when he said “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”, sometimes shock therapy is just shock, and, I would suggest that that is the case for people who have naturally more balanced personalities.
I dunno, I don’t find musings on celibacy condescending. I’m not sure why anybody would. Voluntary celibacy might be something I’d like to try someday (like most other people, I’ve already, erm, “tried” involuntary celibacy, plenty o’ times), and if I did, I’d eschew masturbation as well, for exactly the reasons Hugo gives–I wouldn’t eschew it if I could do it without very detailed fantasies (and I have done it that way before) but I would eschew very detailed fantasies as well (which is the more common mode for me). I don’t find a temporary period of no masturbation any more “extreme” than a temporary period of no sex with other people, and that’s not because I don’t have a high sex drive–I do, very. Twenty years of no sex, yes, extreme. Six months to a year of no sex, well, no, not extreme. The military frequently does that to folks, for instance–it’s far from being the most extreme part of the experience.
“Condescending” isn’t the word I would choose, but “privileged” certainly fits.
I still think there’s an understanding gap between those whose experience is that of being able to engage in partnered sexuality (not necessarily whenever they want, or with whomever they want), and those whose experience is that of being excluded from that entire sphere of human interaction. Voluntary celibacy might be helpful for those people who are looking for validation, but it’s not going to do any good for people whose problem is loneliness (who are already told that the need they may feel for partnered sex is not a legitimate one). I suppose it could be good for learning to distinguish between the two forms of need, though.
Lisa KS,
“Twenty years of no sex, yes, extreme.”
yeah, well. I wasn’t *that* bad. But more than ten, depending on where you start counting, weren’t fun either. So, well, yeah, don’t know. A lot of what Hugo says about male/female behaviour in my opinion comes from a mindset that is never worried about scare female sexuality. But that’s very, very different from the perspective of most men, certainly that of most involuntary celibates. I can see that now because I’m in the unusual situation of personally understand both sides, and if feminist HQ would ask me about what I think would be the single most important thing to improve gender relations, I would say it is “giving men the feeling that their sexuality is valued on par with that of women, the rest will take care of itself.”
But it occasionally feels like Hugo trying to protect a thirsty person from drinking dirty water. Good intentions, possibly even necessary, but not rarely coupled with a seeming inability to understand – this specific – thirst.
Let me make it clear that I don’t think what I did is right for everyone; many folks of both sexes have had similar (if slightly less dramatic) experiences to my own, and might benefit from similar (if slightly less dramatic) approaches to transformation.
I was very thirsty when I drank a lot of dirty water too, Sam (not a reference to women as the dirty water, natch.) I was very thirsty when I first stopped drinking it. But when I did the work to move upstream, I found a spring that was clearer and brighter than what I had imagined. Privilege, yes, but let’s not have folks sell themselves short by imagining that they too cannot find something better than what they’ve had.
I remember your post from 2006 – I think probably commented on it. I’ve talked about some of the insights in it and I get that they’re valuable.
I’m having a hard time hearing them right now and that’s strange for me. I was the person I wanted to be with forever and it ended really horribly and dating is just more than I can do. I’ve tried to think of it as voluntary celibacy but it’s not working. It feels like a gaping wound that won’t heal.
I didn’t mean to hit submit just yet. I probably shouldn’t do this while at work!
Yet . . there’s also a strange experience of, in some sense, not caring if I’m celibate. I have a very dear friend who went through a very painful divorce and she has chosen to be celibate but also to be open – I’m not the emotionally healhthy yet. But I’m also finding a source of comfort in the power of thinking of sexuality as something over which I have control, in the same way I control what I eat and how much I exercise. Seeing it also as a form of spiritual practice seems to grant a different perspective.
Hugo,
yeah, sloppy metaphor, sorry for that…
“Privilege, yes, but let’s not have folks sell themselves short by imagining that they too cannot find something better than what they’ve had.”
Of course not, but as you say yourself, what you did is not for everyone, and the right depends on the kind of the problem at hand.
I think there is a large difference in attitude with voluntary celibacy and involuntary celibacy…much like my attitude when it comes to voluntary submissiveness and involuntary submissiveness…my attitude just changed the more I got to know the opposite sex.
“giving men the feeling that their sexuality is valued on par with that of women, the rest will take care of itself.â€
Sam, I’m really not sure what you mean here…but to me it translates if women were on the same level as men in expressing their desire for sexual relations that everything would be fine…could you please clarify what you mean here?
Another personal question, but yu know I’m going to ask anyway:
How did you go months without an orgasm? I can go a week or two, but even as a woman, I find it incredibly difficult to go more than that. (Especially right before aunt flo comes.) I’ve never, ever, ever known a man who didn’t come one way or another at least weekly, and most daily. Is this some sort of crazy superhuman thing? Or do other guys have experience with this kind of denial too?
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