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Ali Rachel Pearl writes for the New York Times:
My friends don’t seem to understand my secondary abstinence. They ask if I’ve had sex yet.
“How can you go so long?” they ask. “I can’t imagine.”
They say: “You have to lower your standards.” “Go to the bar more.” “Join a dating website.” “Make really good eye contact.” “Get rid of your hang-ups.” “Be more open.” “Stop being afraid.”
“It’s just sex,” they say. “You have to stop refusing to sleep with people just because you don’t immediately want to marry them.”
My secondary abstinence is the wallflower type: sitting quietly on the couch at the party making everyone else feel a bit more awkward for having a good time.
Every night that I go to a concert or a party, every day that I walk around the neighborhood, I find my secondary abstinence trailing me like a sad ghost or an unwanted dog.
It’s not as if I haven’t tried to move on from this phase of my life. I joined Tinder. I sat in my friend’s apartment, punctuating our conversation with questions like, “Who is supposed to write to whom on this thing?” and “Why do so many guys have photos with tigers? Do you have a photo with a tiger?”
I asked my friend how to tactfully respond to my most recent Tinder message from a man named Dakota who teaches yoga and doesn’t have a tiger in his photo. I found the profile of a man whose name is probably Matt and told him I’m new to this Tinder thing and asked him how it works.
“You match with a bunch of people, no one ever messages each other, and no one ever has sex,” he responded.
That seemed unlikely to me, but he was all the way down in Long Beach, Calif., anyway, which is too far to drive for sex, so I cut my losses and we unmatched each other.
When a friend recently asked me, “Why do you think you never have sex?” I fell back on all the clichés. I told her: “I just want to focus on myself for a while.” “I’m afraid of getting hurt.” “Strangers are gross.” “I want to be in love first.” “I don’t have time to meet people.” “Los Angeles is impossible.”
But I’m not sure I believe any of these reasons apply to me. I’ve focused on myself my whole life. I’m worried about getting hurt, but no more than most. Some strangers are smoking hot. What is love anyway? I have plenty of time. Los Angeles is full of men and women of all shapes, sizes and backgrounds, and those men and women populate every restaurant and yoga class and dog park in my life.
Comments at the NYTimes.com:
* What a silly article from somebody who, in her own words, has focused on herself her whole life. I can see why this was published in “Fashion & Style”.
* It’s good to be an English PhD candidate who can publish a nice essay about…well, not all that much. But, any NYT article with “sex” in the title is more interesting than a comparable Cosmo article. The author sounds like a nice person, though first person narratives like this make neuroses seem cuter than they probably are in reality.
I hope you find a suitable successor to the guy who cheated on you (maybe you could write another essay about that, if you haven’t already?). But there’s no rush, really. Sex will be there when you get back to it.
* Sad tale and literally pathetic, i.e. inviting pathos.
She’s clearly a neurotic on the issue (can’t have sober sex with a new partner?) but, in true LA fashion, because she talks about it, she thinks she’s dealing with the problem.
Try talking with a therapist, and learn something about your unconscious — the part of you that, for reasons good or bad, is keeping you from the most honest and fulfilling connection with others.
* She’s sober now. Hasn’t ever had sober first sex. It would be a completely new and foreign path to falling into bed with someone – with more thinking and awkward emotions – both of which would be inhibitors. Much harder to do – so she hasn’t.
Sort of struck me like the newly clean rock star who questions their ability to perform sober. Just have to try it to prove you can.
* This false self reflective twenty something ennui is nothing to go on cheering about.
Sex is supposed to mean something (Romping in an animal barn, for example, with idle chit chat afterwards… ) What’s more interesting than hearing a twenty something slowly discover through her gender confusion and act of selfish, recreational, demeaning, immoral sex without a committed relationship is in fact, the comments that try to salvage her disclosure as an act of bravery. (shakes the head and walks away – emoticon) As some have mentioned already, sex is supposed to be the accompaniment of love–the type of love that commits for a lifetime. #millennial self absorption / hookup culture / selfie
* See, I think if she really wanted it that badly, Long Beach wouldn’t be too far to drive. So she is secondary abstaining, for the reason of “just not that interested in sex outside my own imagination.”
