From Madonna to Whore: My Journey of Celibacy and Sexual Liberation

WARNING: I talk about sex and related topics in this essay, so if you’re my family member or someone I know irl who doesn’t want to confront the thought that everyone (well, almost everyone) gets naked at some point with other people, go read something of mine that’s more wholesome.

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Every week from April to June I went on one or two first dates. This is not a brag, just a fact. But, if I were bragging, it would be more so to highlight my progress. You see, up until a couple of months ago, I had been celibate for three years. The goal of my celibacy was to take a break from the hamster wheel of dating avoidant people. They wanted to be mostly single while keeping me on the hook; I wanted romantic love so badly that I accepted it in the form of crumbs. So, I took the time to reflect on why I was drawn to this dynamic. Without the distraction of “when will s/he text me back??” I felt freer. Eventually. At first, I spent many days and nights wondering why I was single and when it would happen for me. But being off dating apps and staying present with my friends while at bars or clubs forced me to confront how I based so much of my worth on what men thought of me. It was time to answer new questions. What did I think of myself? What did I want for my life? How could I develop a healthy attachment to people I loved? 

Besides emerging from a toxic dating cycle, I was also fresh from a horrible job that robbed me of a chunk of my selfhood. Finding myself working in an office and suddenly surrounded by stability, I got to know myself again. I traveled, I cooked, I had fun, I started taking an SSRI and going to a gym regularly. I didn’t just have a job but a career. I had love in so many other forms. Yet, I knew I would always operate from a place of fear if I never confronted dating again. How could I truly learn about myself in a vacuum? I needed to address why I chose people who refused to choose me over and over again. I needed to resume dating. Besides, I was getting bored. Self-discovery was a wide open ocean, and dating as a mentally healthy person was now the most uncharted of all territories. Every night, I reflected on what I was “loving, leaving, and longing for.” In the latter category, I kept drifting back to how the romantic part of my life was dormant. And then I would fall asleep. 

The paradox of my old ways was as such: I set unrealistically high standards, pigeonholed myself into only looking for a particular type, but then put up with trash behavior. I would date someone shitty for a couple of months, deplete myself entirely, rest for weeks or even months, and then repeat. To get away from this, I locked myself away in a tower that protected me from all the bad and the good. Reemerging into the world of dating, I knew my ultimate goal was to meet my life partner. Finding this partner would first involve finding more of myself, as saccharine and cliché as it sounds. I definitely needed to learn how to lower the proverbial walls of my heart slowly rather than all or nothing. Plus, I wanted to challenge myself to be more open-minded about the people I was meeting. They didn’t need to be husband (or wife) material but they did need to be (a) interesting and (b) treat me with respect. 

I’m getting ahead of myself. Months before I decided on these guidelines, I drunkenly hooked up with a girl in the bathroom of a gay bar, following my company’s holiday party. I’m so back, I thought the next day, despite suffering through a hangover cocktail of nausea and shame, sitting at the nail salon hating myself while a tech reattached one of my festive gems into its rightful place. That experience walked so the Vacation Boyfriend of Mardi Gras weekend could run. I asked the universe for romance and it certainly delivered. When I got home, I slowly came down from the high of a fling, and realized I was once again allowing myself to be depleted entirely by a man. It took me some time to recover, to cope with the idea that I could have so much fun and feel connected to someone I would probably never see again. I turned 29 two weeks later, surrounded by beloved friends and family. And then the next day, I woke up to the best birthday gift: I was accepted into an MFA creative writing program in Paris. In every way, this news invigorated me, but for our purposes, it gave me the final push toward sexual freedom I didn’t know I needed. Since I knew I had only five months before moving to another country, it would be silly to be dating for a soul connection, marriage, whatever. And when I did meet that person, in Paris or elsewhere in this great big world, I wanted to have all my wild oats sown and ready for harvest.

Keeping with the wild oats metaphor, my primary platform has been using Feeld, with Hinge and (formerly) Raya as supplements. Feeld was very intimidating to me when I first downloaded it maybe a year and a half ago. And admittedly, it is a chaotic online space, but I needed to embrace the chaos of dating rather than trying to control it. On Feeld, there are thousands of eccentric people with very specific fantasies that they outline in essay-long bios. And then there are “regular” people looking for something outside the norm of fish pics and quick-to-fizzle conversations about the weather. It’s a spectrum contained in an endless stack of shuffled cards. I blitzed through them, “liking” anyone interesting or remotely attractive. I did the same on Hinge and Raya until I hit the swipe/like limit. This intuition-reliant process led me outside my borders. 

One of the first was a date with a guy in an ENM relationship who I wasn’t romantically attracted to, but oddly held a long-standing record for giving me the most orgasms in a single session. We connected over medieval history and Mickey 17. He was the very rare type of shy, nerdy guy who isn’t condescending and doesn’t hate women. He told me he was in an exploratory phase and was learning how to love himself within and outside his primary partnership. I was the first person he had been intimate with since he met said partner, which made him very nervous and subsequently unable to stay erect, but his kink was pleasing the other person as much as possible, so I think both of us met our goals that night. While he did invite me to meet his partner, I knew it was a one and done situation for me. Even the coolest girl in the world (which she very well may be!) probably wouldn’t want to meet someone her boyfriend commuted into the city to see and went down on for 2 hours. Thanks for the memories, though!

That same week, I accidentally went out for drinks with a 52-year-old! You’re probably wondering, accidentally? Yes! I met this salt-and-pepper-haired tall man with seemingly good fashion sense on Feeld. He listed his age as 42, which is on the older side for me, admittedly, but just outside the very comfort zone I was trying to expand. I arrived to find an old man with bifocals resting on the edge of his nose as he tried to read something on his phone. I nearly turned on my heel and dashed before he saw me. Then I thought, what the hell? Do it for the story. I had come right from the movie theater and had a bag of Trader Joe’s Sour Scandinavian Swimmers in my purse. This became a topic of conversation, leading to him eating half the bag. Annoying. We had no chemistry; the only thing we found to talk about was Disney World. He didn’t crack a smile or laugh once. Upon returning from the bathroom, he pulled his stool from across the table next to me. “I want to show you something.” Oh god, I thought, not a dick pic. He placed his foot on the stool and pulled up his pant leg to reveal…a tattoo of the Monorail wrapped around his calf. For those non-Disney adults in the chat, the Monorail is Disney’s aboveground transit system built around the Magic Kingdom’s circuit of original hotels. I was speechless, and not in a good way. This date was otherwise very boring, but I have to share that he told me his favorite Disney character is Goofy. Just when I thought I had managed to escape, he insisted on walking me home, despite me nicely saying things like “that’s okay” and “you don’t have to” several times. We weren’t speaking, a rare state for me, and maybe halfway through the 20-minute walk, I started to wonder if I was going to meet my end at the hands of a Goofy-lover. 

Dating at such a furious pace is bound to bring a variety of experiences, and I consider myself lucky that I encountered a balance between fun and mediocre, rather than bad and worse. I did have to lie about not feeling well on two different dates, but I felt karmically aligned, as they had both lied to me about their height. After about two months, I checked in on myself. Was I burnt out or just getting started? Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been my own frog in the pot, slowly turning up the heat on my need for romantic fulfillment until I came to a full boil seemingly out of nowhere. How did I develop into this version of myself? I found myself bubbling over with my own sexuality, like a malnourished person set loose at a buffet. The more I had, the more I wanted. After telling my friend Catie of my recent escapades, she prophesied that I was going to fall for someone before I left for Paris. I told her, no, that’s not happening. But the universe loves to send me a challenge. And didn’t I ask for challenges? 

Ten days after Catie put that hex on me, I was looking through my usually-disappointing Hinge likes, ready to quickly “X” them all. In the pile was a promising candidate named Mateo. His first picture showed a tall, muscular man with a man bun and a surfboard. He had the kind of profile where he looks different in every picture, but since he claimed to be 6’3” and French-Moroccan, I thought pourquoi pas? I’ll spoil something for you right here and now. Mateo was the final boss of this adventure. This is the part of the Candyland board where you get stuck in the fudge mud and skip a turn. But I didn’t know I was stuck right away; you usually never do. We had good chemistry over text, and our first date was a masterclass in flirting. He was charming, smart, worldly, just handsome and tall and French enough to hypnotize me. But he was also moody and, for someone who thought so highly of himself, only ever wore jeans with a drawstring waistband and Etnies. He had a dry, sarcastic sense of humor I was first delighted by, but as I got to know him, his light ribbing turned to borderline cruelty. 

In actuality, we only went on one date and never had sex. Most of our interactions happened over text, nearly three months of it. I realized upon reflection that this was a manipulation technique in itself. Besides our first date, the only other time I saw him was an hour-long catch-up between a singles event he invited me to (I did not go but instead had drinks with friends after French class) and meeting his friends at a club. I don’t know why I ever accepted his crumbs. He was like all the people I dated in my early twenties: cynical, captivating until I realized he wasn’t, and sort of hated me. Or at least, he seemed to find joy in having control over me, a power that didn’t need to exist in any healthy relationship.  I never fell in love with Mateo, or anyone I met before I moved abroad as Catie predicted, but his brief presence in my life marked a crucial turning point. By rejecting him, I proved to myself that I had grown, that my time of celibacy and self-discovery released me from a certain pattern. 

Throughout this metamorphosis, I also found myself confronting some big fat truths of internalized shame around sex and my body, the exact things I was hiding from for so many years. In order to have any healthy love in my life, internal or external, I had to deal with these anxieties head-on. I used to be extremely agreeable, admittedly just happy someone wanted to date me. I felt so unpretty and unwanted during the early years of dating and crushes—even through college. We all should get a free pass for how we looked and acted in middle school, an era when every single person is battling with extreme awkwardness and confusion. This is when boys and girls start to like each other, but instead of a secret admirer, I got anonymous messages on FormSpring about my chubby body and frizzy hair. Still, when I look back on photos from high school, I can’t help but feel so sad. All I see is a very conventionally pretty, tall blonde girl who still thought of herself as unattractive because she didn’t get asked to prom.

We all deserve to feel deserving of love, but it’s not the end-all, be-all of human existence, just a piece of it. As I embarked on the rest of my pre-Paris summer, unemployed and living with my parents, I allowed myself to have some semi-reckless fun and managed to not unravel as my life did. What’s the worst that could happen: someone doesn’t like me? It took twenty-nine years of life, three of them spent in non-religious celibacy, for me to realize there are actually thousands of men who want to see me naked, which is simultaneously sort of gross and sort of empowering. I didn’t have to prove my worth to a single one of them. And when I do eventually meet “the one,” I know it will be in a state of pure freedom from the need to be liked.