My Accidental Celibacy

The Unexpected Joys of Six Sexless Months

P.C. Malvestida

Introduction

I have something to confess. Currently, I am dry as the desert: I haven’t had sex in almost six months. Of course, as the writer of this newsletter, I feel embarrassed to share that. I wish I were having more sex, not just so that I’d have more content but also because sex is healthy and fun!

Still, an accidental bout of celibacy is surprisingly common. While I may be alone in my bed (lol), statistically, I am in good company. According to the LA Times, in 2021, 38% of California adults aged 18 to 30 reported having no sexual partners in the prior year, up from 22% in 2011. The 2021 General Social Survey found that about 50% of all adults polled had sex once a month or less. The reality is that as many of us delay having kids and prioritize our careers, we’re bound to enter the desert of celibacy for a short time, whether we want to be there or not.

While I am, of course, a very reluctant celibate, I recently began to realize that things are going pretty well. There have been plenty of bright spots in the last six months. I haven’t been sitting on my ass. I haven’t entered a convent, either. In fact, some pretty cool shit has happened. Some unexpected joys, if you will. Here, I’d like to celebrate them. So, in no particular order (drum roll please…):

The Unexpected Joys of Six Sexless Months

1. I’ve made bank.

Since the last time I had sex, I landed two major contracts with my dream client, a woman’s health app. I have more savings right now than when I quit my fancy data analytics job at the giant media conglomerate in New York City two years ago. Sure, my peers from college probably have 10x my savings at this point. I don’t have New York or San Francisco money. But I also haven’t had a full-time job in almost two years, and I spend my days, for the most part doing whatever the fuck I want to. I have enough to stay in Mexico and take the second half of the year off to keep writing. That’s more than I could ask for.

While obviously I would love to be having sex, right now I don’t have to worry about keeping a man happy in the evening, and that’s kind of a blessing. The barista who used to eat me out (bless him) used to finish work at 5 pm and then he wanted to hang out with me all afternoon. It’s a miracle I got anything done while we were dating. Now I don’t have to answer to anyone, so I’m able to do my client work whenever it suits me. This usually ends up being 9 pm to midnight, which isn’t ideal, but then I have more time during the day to work on my writing.

If the last six months have taught me anything, it’s that not having a man hanging around to pay for my shit is a surprisingly good forcing function for me to invest in myself. My self-esteem, my independence, and my career will probably be better for it. Right now, I’m the only one I can rely on to make the money I need. Whereas in the past, I often got distracted when I was in a relationship and took my foot off the gas, especially when my partner was making a lot more money than me. Since I don’t have that problem anymore, this is slowly confirming something I suspected all along: I do well on my own.

2. I’ve worked on myself and my childhood trauma, for real this time.

So far this year, I’ve been to about 35 ACA meetings. ACA, or Adult Children of Alcoholic and Dysfunctional Families, is a 12-step fellowship for exactly that. I find the group sharing and therapy helpful because I feel safe there talking through some of my most deeply buried childhood trauma. Basically, the goal of the program is to learn how to become your own loving parent. For the record I love my parents, and I am on good terms with them. I also understand that no one is perfect.

I have learned so much in ACA, but one of the best activities is non-dominant handwriting. By journaling with my non-dominant hand (in my case, it’s my right hand), I can connect with my inner child and have a dialogue with her on the page. My inner child is about seven, although she’s aware of what happened to her when she was slightly younger, around five, and slightly older, around nine. I’ve gotten to know her pretty well. Essentially, she loves junk food, and one of our happiest memories was when my dad accidentally bought two giant Victoria sponge cakes for my birthday party of about 12 little girls. At least for a few days, there was an abundance of Victoria Sponge cake to eat. What an amazing time that was to be alive.

If I hadn’t been accidentally celibate, I wouldn’t have been spending my evenings unpacking my deep-seated emotional issues in ACA meetings. In fact, yesterday, I finished the first notebook of my ACA learnings. It’s been challenging but awesome. Let me share some of the things I’ve written in it here

Behold, the secrets to my most painful childhood memories.

I have also been trying all kinds of therapy. In addition to ACA, I’m in talk therapy, I’m micro-dosing and I’ve been doing EMDR. So yes, I’m in my era of trying every therapy under the sun to try to work on my issues and see what happens. I’ve also accidentally been doing really adulty things, like going to the dentist and doing physical therapy.

3. I’m doing exciting shit in my career.

Last week, I hosted my first-ever Sex Writing Workshop. This seems like a small task, but as I’ve mentioned, it took me literally months to work up the courage to do it. Hosting that workshop was perhaps the most powerful and beautiful thing I have ever done–so much so that I am hosting them monthly from now on! Paid subscribers get a 50% discount on workshop tickets.

Of course, I love it when someone reaches out to me to tell me they liked my writing. But with the workshop especially, I felt I got to connect with people closely in a special way. I feel like I may have finally found my calling.

In addition to the workshop, when I went on a shrooms hike with my friends last week, they came up with the idea of creating an anthology of published stories from what people write in the workshop. So, everyone who takes part in the workshop will have the opportunity to publish their story on a section of this Substack, which is such a powerful and cool idea; I can’t even tell you how excited I am to do it.

There’s something about being celibate that has helped my ideas to germinate and the next step of my creative projects to come to life. On this topic, a long quote from one of my favorite podcast episodes of all time comes to mind. It’s from the episode of 99% Invisible called “The Pool and The Stream,” where Avery Trufelman and Roman Mars discuss the Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto:

“Trufelman: Aalto didn’t like to talk about his inspiration. He didn’t write much about it either. Aalto only talked about the birth of his ideas in an extended metaphor about a fish in a stream.”

“Mars (quoting Aalto): Architecture is its details are in some way all part of biology. Perhaps they are, for instance, like some big salmon or trout. They’re not born fully grown. They’re not even born in the sea or water where they normally live. They are born hundreds of miles away from their home grounds, where the rivers narrow two tiny streams. Just as it takes time for a speck of fish spawn to mature into a fully-grown fish, so we need time for everything that develops and crystallizes in our world of ideas.”

4. I’m still writing.

Finishing and publishing my first novel at the end of last year was a lot for me emotionally. It was a huge birth but also a huge death, all at the same time. I had worked on that book for literally years of my life. I was no longer an aspiring author but a published one. At some point past the whirlwind of everything, figuring out what to do next became terrifying for me. I started writing a second book, but put that aside for now. Committing to writing another book is hard right now, and I want to respect that process and do it properly. For now, I’m keeping up with this newsletter and workshops and writing articles despite my late nights of client work.

All in all, I had a good chat with myself when I was on my shrooms hike last week. I said to myself simply: I don’t know what I want to work on right now. And that’s okay. And then I remembered Julia Cameron’s words,

“Keep writing.”

So, that’s the promise I made to myself. Whether or not I am having sex, I plan to keep it.  

5. I’ve learned to accept that I am alone.

Despite months of thoughts, feelings, and fantasies about the men on the fringes of my life, I have finally had a reckoning. Technically, I have been single this entire time, but in reality, I have been far from emotionally sober. I have fantasized about men who lived abroad, who promised me they would visit me on trips. I fantasized about musicians who would slide into my DMs, but in reality, they were too busy to see me.

Everything again came together for me on that shrooms hike last week. I realized that I kept reviving these characters in my head. I had left the mental door open to Luís after I left him a voice note saying that if he got his shit together and went to see a therapist, we could hang out again. But as I climbed the hills of the Desierto de Los Leones with my friends, I really began to realize just how averse I have been to accepting the truth: I am alone. I don’t have anyone romantic in my life right now. It is something I have been both dreading and ignoring all along. I don’t have an active partner, and I’m not sure when I will have one again. And while there is a bit of loss in accepting that, there is more pride, excitement, serenity, and peace. Amen.

6. I’ve learned a lot from dating the wrong people.

I know that Logan Ury and other dating coaches say that the “spark” is bullshit. But if there’s one thing I have learned from digging through the trenches of Bumble over the last few months, it’s that I’m a sparky kind of girl.

As I sat there on dates where I tried to do mental gymnastics in my head, figuring out how I could get myself to like the people in front of me, I looked back over all of my partners. I realized that I have always had a spark for each of my previous partners. The spark is not whether I feel a super intense, drastic, and immediate attachment and connection to them when we first meet. For me, the spark means when I look at them for the first time, I sub-consciously think:

Well, there’s a good-enough-looking human.

Of course, I usually don’t act on it and end up dating them right away. But it happened with all my ex-boyfriends. It’s happened with my old coworkers on the odd occasion (I once dated a coworker, but maybe that is a story for another time). The reality is that I know within the first half second of meeting someone, without the need for words, whether I want my biology to mesh with their biology. It’s a baseline level of physical attraction. And the only way I learned this for sure this time was by going on a bunch of Bumble dates over the last six months with people who I am definitely not attracted to while being incredibly horny.

7. I’ve made big life decisions that I’m happy about.

This last month, I have decided I want to keep living in Mexico and finally apply for Mexican residency. I was procrastinating on this partly because I didn’t want to do the paperwork but partly because I didn’t want to accept that it’s not worth it for me to try to date people who live in other places. I love living in Mexico. I’ve been really working on my Spanish. I love my apartment. I love my friends. Of course, I have bad days. But overall, I am 1000% excited and grateful to wake up and live this life that I truly want every day.

This bout of celibacy has offered me a good chunk of time where I can make life decisions that work for me and align with the real lifestyle factors that I am looking for in my future partner.

8. I’m learning to be choosier about men.

It started as a joke, but in December, when I first became celibate, I was trying to become more discerning about the partners I was bringing into my life. I was looking for something more serious: a life partner, i.e., the father of my currently imaginary offspring. But after things blew up with Andrezj, and I left Luís a four-minute voicemail suggesting we weren’t right for each other, I never imagined there would be, well, no one waiting for me on the other side.

Setting boundaries with certain people felt weird to me at first. It made me painfully aware of just how much I had let people that depressed me or people that sucked the energy out of me walk all over me in the past. It has felt weird to set boundaries, and yet that was when I realized my therapy is probably working. I may be dry as a desert, but I was slowly starting to make healthier decisions for myself and break the patterns of my past.  

9. I love my life and am truly happy.

I could have summarized the whole article with this one simple phrase. But recently, the weather has been turning in Mexico City, and the rainy season is about to start. I cannot think of anything that I would rather do than cozy up in my apartment and write over the next few months here.

For these six months, sure, masturbation has not been the most fulfilling thing ever. I have been celibate long enough to know that my horny feelings rise and fall with time. But right now, when I’m cozy in my house, and it’s very rainy outside, I feel like I could sit here in my girl cave forever. Just getting really into being cozy and looking after myself and writing away in my own little apartment. I feel so grateful and lucky and happy and inspired to be able to be alive right here, right now.  

Conclusion

There will be times in our lives when we have less sex. There will be times in our lives when we have more sex. There will be times when we want to have more sex than we are having or less sex than we are having, indeed. But aside from being a bit horny, accidental celibacy has been kind of great for me. This is the true alone time that I’ve been trying to avoid all my 20s. And now I’m sitting in it. I’m here.

Sometimes, we need other people to help us grow. But more often than not, I am learning that we need ourselves.