Celibate! Celibate! Dance to the Music!

To say my life worked out a little differently than what I had planned would be an understatement of cosmic proportions. A decent student in school, I come from a family of highly educated folks, and figured at some point the need to get a few degrees would take hold and propel me towards some sort of academic pursuit. I actually took Latin in high school with the vague notion that one needed it in med school. Hah.

It’s now 40 years later. Medical school became law, then just a bachelors degree in something and even that didn’t happen. What did happen was music. And alcohol. I spent the better part of 20 years lost to both. Then, through a circuitous chain of events, computers entered my life, and I was suddenly calling myself things like “Technical writer” and “web developer”. I’d married once, divorced some 11 years later, then again (newly sober).

Then the year 2001 happened. Annis terribilis. Remember what the headlines were before 9-11? I do. Very clearly. “Tech Bubble Bursts. Job Losses in the Thousands”. My dad, a commercial artist and later teacher, had exactly three jobs in his adult life. My mom had one. One. I’ve had three jobs in 6 months. My last “permanent” job lasted 4 months. Gaps in my resume led me back to music, and I wound up single again, broke and, for the first time in my adult life, alone. To say that I never saw myself being alone, self employed as a music performer/teacher at the age of 55 falls short. This is all just to say that I became pretty accustomed to radical, unforeseen change in my life. So much so that change sneaked up on me frequently.

I guess somewhere in through all of this mess I just assumed that sex was necessary. I had, as mentioned before, been in a relationship with a woman for most of my adult life. Suddenly, (after a couple of nightmarish Match.com experiences), I found myself alone and, while I can’t say I liked it, I certainly didn’t seem to be doing anything to change it. Looking back, I see that I had put myself in a sort of “time-out” from women. At first, probably just to show myself that I didn’t need a woman, but then later, more like a sort of cleansing process. I’d been at this about 3 years before the “C” word popped into my head as anything other than a passing notion: Celibacy. People go through periods of their lives where sex is not available to them, and perhaps even not that desirable, but celibacy is something more than that. It’s saying that you are willfully avoiding sex.

A friend of mine decided that the answer to all my problems was simply for me to “get laid”. From the long perspective of a few years without, this statement sounds more agricultural than it does erotic. Like I had to have a gland expressed or something. A friend of his girl friend’s was lined up for me, a date was set, and I found myself completely relieved when she backed out. This gave me pause. Why was I relieved? I did a fearless and searching moral inventory and discovered a few things:
1) It gives me a feeling of control. Control over my body, my relationships, my life
2) It feels cleansing, purifying
3) I realized that I had unconsciously related many of the problems of my adult life to decisions or actions revolving sex.
4) It is not physically “necessary”. At least not in the ways I had been led to believe. My body has adapted quite well to it.

I’ve been celibate for nearly 5 years now. Is this how I want to spend the rest of my life? No. Right now I’m too busy trying to reinvent myself to throw a complex relationship into the mix. So, for now, anyway, I celebrate my celibacy. It’s not a life style (at least I don’t think so), but it does feel right, at least right now.

Later.

Jim