90 Days of Celibacy

If sex talk makes you queasy, do not open:) I love you

That’s right. I am officially off the market. 

For how long, you ask? 

Three months. Till January 11, 2025. 

What led you to this brazen declaration? 

Well, how much time do you have? 

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Since my freshman year of high school, I’ve been jumping from one relationship to the next. 

I always kept a steady boyfriend. Inevitable boredom would kick in. At which point I could be found maypoling Shakespearean melodramas around the next prospect. Making leaky jam of the transition. Clean cuts hath ne’er been my strong suit. 

In college, I was single my freshman and sophomore years. Ask any witnesses to my starter time at LSU. They will confirm that I took my after-school job very seriously. I drank to get wasted, fall down, pass out, throw up, drunk dial, drive through Arbys, stick two fingers down my throat, and do it all over again. Give or take a few days here and there when I was too hungover to stomach dog hairs. 

This, friends, was my ritual back then. 

‘Twas dim and grim and speaking of plum preserves. In other words, the time I did spend single was not utilized as a means of finding myself, furthering my personal transformation. It was spent trying to forget I’d been tasked with surviving a world that left lesions up and down my esophagus. 

My junior year of college I jumped on a guy mismatched but well-to-do and could at least keep me accustomed to a certain lifestyle (gross, I know. But that’s who I was back then). The assimilation of self I’d conjured through childhood was that I needed to locate a caretaker, someone who could manage me. Me being incapable of managing myself. At some point, I stopped trying. Submitting to my successful acquisition of an M.R.S. DEGREE. 

But senior year I went abroad for my first semester. Cue Dr. Shakes-em-up. I fell in love with a man who became my first lover while we were traveling India. Bid adieu to fraternity, country club upper crust old south. Came to understand why people swore by sex. That someone else was capable of making you feel that good. I was hook line sinkered smitten.

Yes queen. Add it to the fuckin list. 

For reasons that remain largely geographical (Me in Northern California, he in Florida), my lover, alas, was not to be thine own. But I was still not ready to thine own self be true. We hadn’t broken up yet when I left for a stint in New Zealand. Within a month, I’d met my future husband and called it off with loverboy back home. Viscous in the shape of yet another person. Entirely dependent on someone NOT me for emotional regulation, adoration, self-esteem and broken management issues. I knew he could take care of me. And I knew that’s what I needed to do for the sake of everyone I loved. I tried to be happy. But it wasn’t enough. 

I still didn’t know who I was without someone else.

Fast forward 16 years, two kids and one divorce later, to present day America. I work to curate a theater people actually want to go to. I’m sober from one drug crawling into the arms of another. This time: gambling. 

At first, the game is fun. Anything could happen. All I have to do is swipe and match. And success is mine. I start to keep a list in my notebook. I am greedy and hungry and tap my fingerpads together in cobwebbed corners by night, rasping: “mine.” 

But after a year. Of quartered loves and half-truths. Of not hearing backs and not showing ups. Of ghosts and gaunts and nothing-to-show-for-its. Of dreams dashed by no vacancy hearts. I have become so miserable I am finally ready to quit. I have decided to take a sabbatical from sex. But mostly from the modern-day cheapening of love. 

I am hitting pause instead of swiping right. I am taking myself off the market. 

Because that feels like a choice. Because that feels like freedom. Because I don’t want to have to belong to someone to matter. I don’t want to try to feel like I have to beat the clock and find someone to love me before haggitude sets in.

I want to belong to myself. Keep my dreams, hopes, and wishes alive. Not in a simulation but in real fucking life.

Holding vigil for both badass and hopeless romantic. Ophelia dressed like Courtney Love. Smudged lower lid liner. Combat boots. Gooey love notes pressed into ripped back pocket. 

A knight with long, dark wavy hair and green eyes rides through my tended kingdom at dusk. Procures lute, snaps fire into forest clearing. Plays the song his dreams told of me. I sing along. I already know the words…

Cue love scene: full moon, no mosquitoes.

The rest is yet to be written. 

The next 90 days, I get to spend writing. Making space for the right things to arrive. 

Less drug. More medicine. Less Shakespear. More Anais Nin. 

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If you want to do this 90 DAYS OF CELIBACY with me, I’m thinking of starting a group about it. Reply to this email and I’ll see what I can do!