Covid Celibacy

You are me.

It's march 2020.

The guy you have been hooking up with tells you he has a girlfriend.

It’s your last straw. You give up on men.

Now, instead of convincing yourself you are overreacting and going on another date two weeks later, you actually give up. You stop talking to the guy you met at the coffee shop. You delete your Tinder. You delete your instagram because just making it private isnt drastic enough. You mine as well throw your phone in the river because you don't intend on answering it any time soon. 

Now we all know what happened next. The pandemic hit, everything closed, and i couldn't see anyone, even if i wanted to. At first it was great; I could stick to being alone without any external pressures to distract me. It was like a couples retreat, but with myself, and not as many sweat lodges. 

Being alone made me realize how much I was using relationships and hookups to distract myself from learning who i truly was, or what i even wanted. I didn't want to focus on anything that was happening in my life, and it was easier to spend the night with someone instead.

Facing yourself is hard. No one wants to do it. Sometimes we don't even know that there's anything to face. Its uncomfortable. It sucks. I didn't want to do it. But here we are. Here is what i’ve learned from practicing abstinence, that i never expected to learn:

I'm bad at standing up for myself

I really wanted to take a break. I knew that i needed to be alone, but if it were not for the lockdowns, for being forced to stay home, i never would have stuck to it. Having that realization made me feel like a total piece of shit. How much of a weak spine do I have that I cannot keep a commitment to myself? People reached out, and if i could have legally left the house i would have. I would have returned to my old ways with no hesitation

Being tested over and over finally gave me the callous I needed to stick to my guns, but it really highlighted how long i didn't have it. I have agreed to a lot that I didn't actually want to do, with boyfriends and just my friends in general. I was so afraid of people not liking me that I did what they wanted. In hindsight it was clear to see it in my sex life, but where did it actually come from. I went over all of my relationships and discovered how few boundaries I had. I was letting people walk all over me all the time. That was even deeper in my romantic relationships, because not only did I want them to like me, i also wanted them to think i was hot. 

So what do I even like? Have I ever had an orgasm? How do I not know this? 

But if i wasn't focused on myself, what was i focusing on? I was thinking about literally everything BUT how I was feeling. I was more concerned with looking hot, sucking in my stomach, arching my back the right way. I was thinking about what super hot creative thing i could come up with to make sure he remembers me as a super hot fuck. I remember hooking up with a guy once and he didn't end up cumming, and i felt like shit for weeks after. Whenever I was feeling shitty my brain was like “ya and you couldn't even make him cum”. My priorities were so messed up. 

As much as i still need to figure out what i DO like, I have been able to figure out what i DO NOT like from my past experiences. I will no longer do something that i don't want to, even if it's what he really wants or he thinks it would be super hot. I need to focus on my pleasure going forward, and that no longer includes reverse cowgirl (that's marriage shit).

Cut out the distractions. Get back to the basics. Learn what you like. 

How long i can go without sex

Look, im going to be honest: im a pretty horny person. I have a more than healthy sex drive, and i used to like that because it was fun, but finally it made me make dumb choices (even dangerous ones). There have been people that i hooked up with that i should not have, for so many reasons.

There is a very formative memory of mine that as much as i pray to forget, i sadly cannot. It was a brisk october evening, and after seeing the early viewing of Rocky Horror i decided that i wanted to end my evening hooking up with a stranger. I opened my Tinder, and literally messaged the first match i saw. He was free, and invited me over immediately. I googled his address, and saw it was downtown in this super boogie building, and immediately questioned what i had gotten myself into. But unfortunately that didnt stop me, and i kept truckin. Now for those that have never seen Rocky Horror in person, we are all dressed like whores. I was wearing a leather skirt, lingerie top, ripped tights, heels, and the smokiest black eyeshadow look ive ever done in my life. I walk up to this building, and the sweetest old man opens the door. Of course they have a whole ass doorman. He walks me to the elevator, asks me what floor im going to, presses the button for me, and thankfully lets me go up on my own. The absolute mortification i was feeling made me want to throw up, but the guy i was going to see was hot so i was like whatever.

I really wish i left because it was by far the worst sex of my life. Nothing has even come close, and i really wanted to leave god forbid he tries to initiate sex again if i stay the night; i needed to leave immediately. But i am hit with the realization i have to face the sweet old man again, and he for sure thinks im a hooker. I look like one, was only here for a very short period of time, and i will be coming out of the elevator flush faced with sex hair. I wanted to die. 

As much as i wanted to abandon sex right then and there, there was no way i was going to start a dry spell with this being my last hookup, so i continued for some more. I was also horny, and saw no reason with not having casual sex if thats what i wanted to do. This inevitably led to more bad choices and more bad experiences, further continuing the cycle.

Being able to take this break has showed me how long i can really go without having sex. Sure i get horny, but there are other solutions to that then hooking up with someone, and pretty healthy ones at that. I have officially gone almost 2 years with nothing. No sex, no kissing, no nothing, and i feel great. Just wanting sex is no longer a valid reason for me to have it. If being with someone forces me to compromise on things that are important to me, I just wont. There's no need for me to look over red flags; i can just wait for the green ones. 

There were so many times that night that i ignored myself in order to fulfil my physical desires, and in the end i didn't even achieve it. It's so embarrassing, not because a sweet old man thought i was a hooker, but because i kept making bad choices even when i was completely aware that they were wrong. Of course it was a bad time, and there were so many opportunities for me to avoid it.

 Im super hot

I used to genuinely believe i wasnt hot, to the point that i found it embarrassing to talk to my friends about crushes and sex because if it was in reference to me, then its obviously a joke. There was no point in discussing MY sex life because no one even sees me that way; lets not waste out time. I adopted this attitude so deeply that when not-so-close friends found out that i was NOT a virgin they were in disbelief since i “looked too fed up to even let a guy touch me”. 

Unfortunately that comment really sent me into a spiral. My casual sex was no longer just sex, but needed as an affirmation that i was actually desired and looked like someone who was. I was no longer choosing guys that I thought were attractive, but ones my friends thought were hot just to be validated. I don't know if you have tried it, but its hard to have good sex when you arent even attracted to them. At least everyone else thinks they're hot, right?

It's fair to say my confidence was absolutely shot. Dead. in the gutter. Went to live on a farm. 

Non existent. 

However, the pandemic gave me a lot of downtime. I used to wear a lot of clothes around the house because it was always freezing when i was home, but now i was home during the day, and during the summer, and pretty much all the time. It got fucking hot. So the clothes slowly started coming off and I was eventually just living in a tank and underwear. Constantly walking by full length mirrors every time i went to a new room forced me to look at my body for the first time. Instead of living with this idea of what i looked like, avoid mirrors, assuming i was just a fat torso with legs, i was seeing what i was actually working with. I spent a lot of time standing and staring and I finally figured it out: I'm super hot. 

It was like a scientific discovery, “Eureka! I'm HOT!”. I wanted to hit the town and show everyone how hot I was. I wanted to take a thousand photos of myself and publish a coffee table book. I couldn't believe i spent so much time letting people treat me like shit in comparison to my hot friends like “hello are you blind? I am also a catch and I deserve some respect”. As much as i wanted to share, i am so thankful that i was forced to spend some more time alone to really solidify those feelings. Like any human with emotions I would probably have experienced a sliver of rejection and gone back to my ugly antics. But now my routine, friends, life as a whole, don't have space for that kind of thinking. The confidence I gained is now deeply rooted in how I live my life, and it would take a heck of a storm to topple it over. 

Now that I know that I'm hot, I feel a lot more comfortable dating. I no longer need the validation. It's much easier to be yourself when you couldn't care less about what the other person's opinion of you is. Of course we care about what our friends think about us, but we shouldn't give that power to people who don't care about our wellbeing. 

TLDR; take a tolerance break, you would be surprised how much you can learn about yourself.