Why I've Been Celibate For More Than Twenty Years
I never set out to be celibate. Like so many of us, I was simply damaged early by the patriarchy. In a world overwhelmingly obsessed with sex and gender, however, I chose a different path to healing.
When I was 20 years old, my mother’s live-in boyfriend would get drunk and stoned and make me sit on the couch while he told me over and over that I was a fat bitch who no one was ever going to want to have sex with. In my memory, I feel like this happened multiple times for hours at a time. In reality, I think it only happened once or twice and probably only for about 15 to 20 minutes each time. The damage it caused would take me close to 30 years to undo.
In retrospect, however, I realize that his words didn’t cause the initial damage but rather simply nailed a coffin closed that had been years in the making. It wasn’t that I wanted to believe him; I fought hard not to. It was simply that he was confirming over and over every single one of my deepest fears. The question is, where did I get those fears in the first place?
Recently, I took - and passed - the Mensa test. It confirmed something for me I have both known and been in denial about my whole life. I am a very, very smart woman. Before that, I was a very, very smart girl. It turns out, however, that what our mothers told us was actually true. Boys don’t like smart girls. They also don’t like strong, powerful women. Many like to believe that they do, but they don’t.
They like the idea of strong, powerful women but research clearly shows men just aren’t happy when women outperform them. And when they are not happy, they have a tendency to get violent. In fact, women who outearn their husbands are 33% more likely to divorce. According to the National Network to End Domestic Violence, women whose male partners experienced two or more periods of unemployment in a five-year time span are almost three times as likely to be victims of DV.
While there are many reasons that the divorce rate among celebrities is extremely high, one of the big ones might be that women in entertainment have much more clout that most women. This makes it significantly more difficult for men to establish the “normal” dynamics found in most marriages. When women do not need either financial support or protection from men, they don’t have the same impetus to make themselves smaller so men can feel bigger. While many still try, knowing that it is all-too-often the cost of a relationship with men, the fact that they are not actually dependent on men makes it far more difficult to maintain that image for long.
Long before I was a strong, powerful woman, I was a strong, powerful little girl.
My biological dad died when I was 18 months old. Within a few months of that, my mother was no longer in the picture either. My sister and I were sent to foster homes together, but she was older and began to develop emotional problems that foster parents didn’t want to deal with. So we were split up, and I was on my own. I lost my entire family within the first 3 years of my life. My maternal grandparents became our legal guardians but they did not want to take us in. Years later, I figured out they just wanted the Social Security checks they got for being our legal guardians. They cashed them, skimmed some off the top and then sent the rest to our foster parents.
I strongly believe I was most likely sexually molested early on. I only remember the last name of one foster family from my early years but when I think of that name, it fills me with dread. I suspect, if I was sexually molested, it was there that it happened. When I was around five or six, one of the two best foster moms I ever had walked in on me naked in the bathroom. I started screaming and would not stop until she finally put me under a cold shower. She didn’t know what to do.
From an adult perspective, knowing what I know now about sexual trauma and abuse, I know that was not in any way a normal reaction. Most children of that age that still live in an environment of trust do not have that kind of reaction to being seen naked. Generally, the only reason for a reaction like that at that age is that trust has somehow been violated. I also know that sexual abuse does not need to involve penetration, like so many men want to believe. Being touched inappropriately is still a violation of our very being, which our bodies remember long after our brains have buried the memories.
I remember very little of my childhood since I haven’t had anyone to reinforce those stories to create what we call “memories,”but I do remember that. I also remember her making me go swimming naked at a rental house we used to vacation at in Palm Springs. She made me go out at night and turned off all the lights so no one would see. That was long before Jaws came out and I spent years being terrified of dark water. It may be the best gift anyone has ever given me. It is also odd, because her father was a Nazarene minister and incredibly religiously strict. I think she was always a rebel and I am so grateful for her early influence in my life.
When I was in third grade, my foster parents and grandparents got in a fight. My foster parents wanted to adopt me, my grandparents wouldn’t let them. My grandparents showed up at the school bus stop one morning and took me from California, where I lived with my parents, back to Nevada, where they lived. They didn’t call my parents until 2:00 am to tell them they had me. At first, my foster parents just wanted me back, so back I went. Eventually, they realized they could not live with the knowledge my grandparents could just show up any time and take me, so they sent me back to my grandparents.
That was the beginning of my belief that I was unworthy of love and that if I could just be more perfect, people would want me.
It was also around that time that I began to struggle with weight. Food was my comfort, the only thing that was always there for me. Today, we understand that this is a very common trauma response among children, but we know a lot more about a lot of things now than we did back then. What I also know now is that sugar is absolutely addicting and it is, in fact, a drug I used to self-medicate. What I also know now is that milk and dairy are very high in Serotonin, so it makes sense now that I used to sneak into the kitchen at night and sometimes drink nearly half a gallon of milk.
I finished third grade living with my grandparents, then that summer we took a tour of the relatives to find me a home. I landed with some distant relatives who were Mormon. While my foster mom in particular was an amazing, kind, loving woman, it was there - in the Mormon church - that I first began to develop the beliefs that would keep me from being able to develop an intimate connection for more than 30 years.
There, I was taught that Jesus and Satan went to war and all of the angels who followed Jesus needed to be born into human bodies so that they could one day be reunited with Jesus. They also teach, therefore, that it is the duty of women to bear children so they can give as many angels human bodies as possible. Unfortunately, it was at that same time that I also began to get an image of what would be expected of me as a wife as well.
I remember every spring, my dad and brothers would spend months planning a two-week summer backpacking trip. A trip I desperately wanted to go on. Instead, while they were gone, I was sent to do “girl” things. Most of which I hated. I have always been out of step with what “girls liked.” Instead, in my first long-term foster family I worshipped my uncle who was only a few years older than me and taught me to ride a skateboard.
I used to come home with my clothes all torn up because I liked to “bomb hills.” Particularly the ones my parent’s deemed not safe and therefore off limits. My mom bought me Sears Toughskins and Converse to wear. Toughskins were never cool and Converse sneakers were not nearly as cool at the time as they are now. I hated the rubber toes. While I wanted to do what I wanted to do, I also wanted to dress in my idea of cute clothes. While my idea of cute clothes wasn’t dresses, it also wasn’t Toughskins and rubber-toed sneakers.
In my second long-term foster home, I had four brothers and one sister. My sister was the perfect “girl.” She was pretty, a cheerleader, on student council and first chair in band. She also seemed to enjoy all of the activities the church deemed to be appropriate for girls. She had boys lining up to date her and one of only two fights she got in with my parents was when she wanted to go on a date before she was 16. The other was when she wanted to get pierced ears. I don’t remember about the date but she won on the pierced ears.
She was my dad’s biological daughter and the apple of his eye. I was an embarrassment to him.
I remember walking into my parent’s room on the night of my first daddy-daughter dinner. I was so excited. Their room had a small entrance hall, so before they knew I was there, I heard my dad talking. He was asking my mom if he had to take me because he knew I would embarrass him. He was a good man, he just could not get past his own expectations of what a girl “should” be - and I just could not meet them.
I used to spend a few weeks each summer at my grandparent’s house. My mom would pack one nice dress for church, even though my grandparents never went to church. My grandmother wanted me to wear that one dress every time we went somewhere and would have a meltdown when I refused. My grandmother was also relentless about my weight. Those two weeks were almost always hell and I would usually spend several weeks after I got home sneaking into the kitchen at night to binge eat. With 6 kids in the house, food was rarely missed.
One summer, while at my grandparent’s house, I stole a pack of scratch ‘n sniff stickers from a store. When I got back to California, I hid my stash until I went back to school. At the time, scratch ‘n sniff stickers were a very big deal and when I pulled them out and started handing them out, it got me a lot of attention. It was the first time in my life I had “friends.” Obviously, those friendships weren’t real and as soon as the novelty wore off, I went right back to being invisible. But I had learned the secret to at least fleeting popularity. I was hooked. And thus, my shoplifting addiction was born.
Unfortunately, my parents were pillars in a very small community and being the very present parents they were, it didn’t take them long to figure it out. Eventually, it became less and less of a secret. My three younger brothers were all adopted or in the process of being adopted. When one of my younger brothers stole something, my parents felt they had to make a choice between them or me. The final straw, was when I stole some kid’s cupcakes on the last day of 6th grade on a trip to the zoo. I was sent home and technically suspended; although that didn’t mean much because it was the last day of school.
My father completely stripped my room of everything but the bed and he and my mom traveled to the Mormon temple to pray. While they were gone, I wrote several hate-filled letters (my scathing letter-writing skills were strong, even back then) and ran away. It only took a few hours for my relatives who were watching us to find me, but I had sealed my fate. I got sent back to my grandparents.
This time, they called my real mother.
Apparently they had known where she was all along, so they shipped me out to her. She didn’t want me but they didn't give her a choice. I tried to remain active in the Mormon church because it was all I knew. Mormons are nothing if not family oriented, however, so it’s pretty hard to stay active when you are a kid without a family that is also active in the church.
I got a newspaper route and delivered newspapers to what later turned out to be a number of members of an Evangelical church, although they weren’t yet calling it that. I became very active in the church largely because it was the only place I felt accepted. Most of the other kids thought I was very “holy” because I had no interest in drinking or smoking weed or any of the other “bad” activities they secretly engaged in. Little did they know I had a huge, out-of-control shoplifting problem.
I developed a huge crush on my youth pastor who was in his 30’s and single. He lived in an apartment building a block from my house, so he used to give me rides everywhere. When I was 15 or 16, he started pulling over on the way home and “tickling” me, which was the little subterfuge we mutually engaged in protecting. It really meant a lot of touching, groping and dry-humping sessions. Although I craved and loved the attention, I was also filled with a deep sense of shame for desperately wanting these “sessions” and even worse, for wanting more.
Although we never had sex, he at least had the decency to understand what he was doing was wrong. He said he was going to go confess to the Senior Pastor. I think he did and it was handled the way things of this nature are always handled in churches. He was sent off to an out-of-state Bible College and no mention was ever made of his indiscretions. Years later I came to believe I was not the only one he was having these “sessions” with and I don’t know that it stopped where it did with me.
After he left, my best friend’s brother started cornering me in dark corners and continued what the youth pastor had started. Only he went a lot further. Like the youth pastor, I had a huge crush on him as well and thought, like most girls do, that letting him do what he wanted would make him like me. Like all the other girls that thought that, I was wrong. It still filled me with more shame.
This is the problem with men deciding what is and it not a “sin.” Although I didn’t have sex with either of them, they both scarred me for life. What they taught me was what my mom’s boyfriend drove home years later.
I wasn't even good enough to have sex with.
People say that you always remember your first time, but I don’t. What I do know is that I went to Canada when I was 19, still a virgin but determined to change that. I got really close when the guy I was trying to have sex with figured out I was a virgin and stopped. That was also when I first discovered the blissful protection that booze creates, so I started getting wasted before trying to have sex. At some point, I succeeded in ridding myself of my virginity, but I honestly don’t remember anything about it. In fact, I don’t remember anything about any of my sexual encounters except for two. The second-to-last and last time I had it.
Soon after my mom’s boyfriend spoke his little prophecies over me, I embarked on what I like to call my “whore year.” It was probably more than a year but I’m pretty sure I slept with more men in that time than most sex workers. I don’t remember any of it or any of the men I slept with. I made sure I was properly sedated every time. What finally snapped me out of it was being at work one day, when a man walked in and started talking to me like he knew me. Finally he said “you don’t remember me, do you?” I said no, and he informed me that we had slept together two nights prior.
That woke me up and helped me get my shit together.
Soon after that, I started going to community college and fell madly in love with the man who would turn out to be the love of my life - thus far. He had my complete attention the first second I saw him, when he stood up in class to give a presentation. A few weeks later, we got out of class early for some reason and I gave him a ride home. By the time we got to his house, I was gone. Head-over-heels in love. When I was 17, a guy I had a crush on had a 700 Interceptor motorcycle, which I eventually bought. How I got the money for that, I will never know, but I loved it. I’m 5’-2” and couldn’t even hold it up with both feet on the ground, but it didn’t matter. It made me feel alive. It’s an absolute fucking miracle I didn’t die on that thing.
The new love of my life and I somehow got to talking about that on the way home. He also had a crotch rocket and asked me if I wanted to ride it. I responded with an enthusiastic yes, thinking that of course he meant taking me on a ride. He looked deep into my eyes and said “no, do you want to ride it?” That was the moment I fell hopelessly in love. He got it, he understood me. He knew I didn’t want to ride his bike with him, he knew I wanted to ride it by myself. And I did.
The next night I went to his house and spent almost two hours sharing every deep, dark, personal secret I had ever hidden away from the world. And there were a lot. What I didn’t know at the time, but I think he somehow did, was that I was damaged. Completely incapable of the very relationship I wanted most with him. It wasn’t just my mom’s boyfriend that had fucked me up, it was The Church.
What it would take me years to understand was that no matter how badly I wanted a relationship, I was raised to believe you couldn’t have sex outside of marriage but I could not live INSIDE of a marriage either. To be married was to have to completely subjugate everything I was to the wishes and whims of a man. It is something that consciously I would have gladly done but what I didn’t understand was that there was something deep in the core of me that just could not do it. No matter how badly I wanted to be “in a relationship” - which to me was marriage - I was incapable of paying the price.
Somehow he instinctively sensed this. About a week after I exposed my soul to him, he crawled into bed with me and informed me that we were just going to be friends and we weren’t going to have sex. While I laughed at this, something deep within me felt an enormous sense of relief. He then encouraged me to give him a blow job. He said “what’s a blow job between friends” - which became our running joke.
To many on the outside looking in, it might seem like he was taking advantage of me. Like so many things sexually related and particularly in relationship to sex and religion, it was much more complicated than that. I desperately wanted to have sex with him, but I knew I could not - although I didn’t yet know why. It’s this evil conundrum that religion creates. It took me years to understand that I thought I was evil and wicked for even wanting to have sex.
Since I was in love with him, I wanted to be “pure” for him, but the very fact of desperately wanting to have sex with him made me “impure.”
Many years later I would go to a tantric healer - even though I don’t believe in that sort of thing - who would use crystals to connect my heart and my genitals. I bawled for hours afterwards. I never told her about my past, but somehow she knew what was broken. I have never been able to have sex with a man that I love because I was taught that love was pure and sex was dirty and wrong and it created a schism. A disconnection between my heart and my genitals, an inability to connect love and sex. When she had fixed what was broken - even if it was only identifying the truth of the problem - I felt a strength and a power I have never felt since. I felt 6-feet tall and bulletproof.
Over the course of three years, I maybe only gave him 3-4 blow jobs, but those blow jobs were the closest I could come to having sex with him. It also took me years to understand how important they actually were to me. I struggled with this desire for two years while I watched him date other women. I actually became his roommate for a time, along with his cousin. One December night, I decided to get drunk and have sex with him. That same night a woman came over who would eventually become his wife. I was so angry. Things got really tense and I had to move out. I moved a whole block away. I probably spent more time at his house after I moved out than I had when I lived there. I was not only in love with him, he was my best friend.
In June, I finally worked up the courage to call him and actually tell him I wanted to have sex with him. He painfully told me he had just proposed. Two weeks before his wedding, we went out to his cabin. He offered to let me give him one last blow job. I know that seems a strange thing to say, but I was still broken. He may not have fully understood why or how it happened, but he definitely knew it. Somehow, for the first time, mid-blow job he said “do what you want.” Without thinking I pulled down my pants and climbed on. It lasted about 10 seconds. I was devastated.
In 10 seconds I had gone from being his best friend, someone worthy of his respect to “just one more whore he had slept with” - my words in my own head, not his. I was inconsolable, but I also wanted more. I texted him pretty relentlessly for the next few weeks, offering him all the things I had read on the internet that men wanted. It was pretty awful. He actually came over the day before he got married and we tried - but I was too broken. I think it’s possible that if we could have had sex that day, he might actually have called off the wedding. I think he might have even been in love with me too, but I was just too broken in the most important way. Many women are broken, but they can at least go through the motions. I couldn’t even do that.
That was the last time I had sex.
Soon after, I joined a traveling Christian theater company and traveled the country for 10 years. He was divorced nine months later. For thirteen years, I pined for him but I also never wanted to go through that pain again. What my mom’s boyfriend told me about myself was getting buried even deeper. I blew up to 350 lbs, I think mostly because I wanted to be invisible. I wanted to make sure I had a good reason no man would look at me, other than that I was unloveable and unworthy of sex. It took me 13 years to even look at another man. When I did, I finally began to understand the full depths of my brokenness. It was then that I began to seek healing.
I understand what it means to feel like you were born in the wrong body. Everything I have been told my entire life about what it means to be a woman is foreign to me. Everything that feels natural to me is what I have always been told a man’s role is. This is why I could never fit. It took me more than 20 years, but I have come to understand there is nothing wrong with my body!
My body is not wrong, culture is wrong, society is wrong, MAN is wrong! It is not God that created men and women to fit in the boxes men create, it is man that created those boxes! I actually found a man that could love and accept me exactly as I was, but I couldn’t let go of the boxes I was raised to believe I had to live in to be acceptable to God!
Not a single man I have ever loved has wanted me to fit in the boxes that religion has told me I had to fit in, yet I have vicously sabotaged any possibility of a relationship with every one of them.
15 years ago, I fell head-over-heels in love with a man and became so angry at him for what that meant I would have to become. He didn’t have anything to do with those misconceptions but he bore the brunt of them. Needless to say, he cut me off and didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I decided it was because my mom’s boyfriend was right all along, and I just needed to face it. No man could ever love me and no man would ever want to have sex with me. (In spite of the fact that I had literally had sex with dozens of men.)
I became suicidal. I gave up. I had it all planned out how I was going to end it and had almost everything I needed. I just needed one last thing. I remember sitting in the Safeway parking lot, crying out to God and begging him to just give me one reason to live. I expected my phone to ring and the man I was in love with to talk me out of it. Instead, I heard a voice deep inside of me speak six simple words.
“If you do it, he wins.”
I knew exactly what it meant. It set me on fire. I am, without question, one of the absolutely most fiercely competitive women you will ever meet; although I have spent decades learning to bury that part of myself. But it is there. I would rather live a long and brutal life than let my mom’s asshole boyfriend win. I got rid of my “suicide supplies” and never looked back. It was brutal for a good two years after that, but I was determined not to let him win. I did the work, I faced the demons and found the help I needed.
It took one more preemptive utter destruction of any hope of a relationship with a man I again fell in love with, but I finally found my way all the way out. I am finally at peace with who I am. I can finally accept myself as a sexual being who deserves both love and great sex. It was a long journey, that maybe I will write about more one day, but today, I am whole. I am also fiercely angry about the system that broke me. The system that is destroying lives even to this day. I am happy to participate in its dismantling.
The ultimate conclusion I came to, the message that had caused me to spend decades living in loneliness and shame, was based on a premise that my mom’s boyfriend had never stated but was there all along. What he said was that no man would ever want to have sex with me. What he implied - and the message I heard, as so many women do - is that my only worth, my only value was in a man wanting to have sex with me. When I finally stumbled across that truth, after years of unraveling and unwinding, I almost cried. It was so simple and so very, very false.
The best news, however, is that I have had a good life. It has been filled with people I love and who have loved me deeply. It turns out, in spite of what they want us to believe, one does not need a man to be happy, nor does one even need a romantic relationship at all. Based on what I have read on the internet and what I see around me, I would actually go so far as to say I am far happier than many people who have spent their lives in or in and out of romantic/ sexual relationships.
In the meantime, I’m still celibate. I’m not in a hurry. I’m happy with who I am. I enjoy my own company and that of my Best Fur Friend. I love men, and believe that one day another will come along that I will again fall madly in love with.
This time, I will be ready.
From your 29 th May comment: "- and possibly even men." Yes I agree with Annie.
I have never even called myself celibate as it was not my policy, merely chronically single (but you had been married). Since the official normalising of sex outside marriage (instead of leaving it a private matter) no woman is able to show me how to relate to her and no-one else takes any interest in friendships in this fragmented society: everything is assumed to be left to casual instinct, and religion became without application.
That was powerful stuff. Inspiring. All I can think is, 1- what a journey! And, 2- what a great writer. To be able to bring us readers along, allowing us to feel and experience with you and not lose us in the mess. Just, wow.