Cutting my 1-Year Celibacy Short

It's now been 10 months since I had the worst one night stand... Ever!!

The kind where you wake up in the morning with the stench of regret making you want to scrub yourself with a hard bristle brush.

In the aftermath, I had made the decision that my open-ness to having casual sex was just not doing me any favours. It definitely wasn't getting me any closer to my ultimate destination, "Ring-on-my-finger-ville".

Sharing myself with men who were not my God-intended mate, was scarring my heart and loading me up with emotional baggage. I was far from a "Samantha/Sex and the City" type lifestyle but I had a relaxed policy that was obviously causing some damage.

I was weak at waiting and exercising strong boundaries. At the beginning of a new relationship, I would say to myself, "This time I'll make him wait three months," only to give in after a week. The compulsion of my own flesh and the fear of losing his interest were often the primary driving factors for going back on my own word. However, those failed attempts at waiting were a warm-up to my big decision.

I decided to go cold-turkey on October 10th, 2016.

Just as how you can't quit smoking by scheduling when you're going to have a cigarette. If you want to be healthy, you really have to cut it out completely. That allows you to shift energy into creating new habits that fill the void that you think smoking does.

Celibate for one year was the mission: a set period of abstinence while concurrently working on deepening my relationship with God.

When I mention celibacy, other single women often joke that they "are celibate without even trying." But just to clarify, that it's the intentionality and the God-bit that separates celibacy from a mere dry spell.

In my mind, I envisioned a year of praying a little more and dating about the same but stopping short at the sex part. I thought that it would allow me to get to know the men I was dating better and without distraction, making it easier for me to assess who was really husband material.

But it turns out that God had something else in mind. HE wanted me all to himself and the God-bit soon became the whole thing.

As the months went by I started to change - the dating apps that interested me before lost their hook. Four months in, I started going to Church Every. Single. Sunday! Six months in, I'm reading the Bible every morning. Seven months in, I stopped dating completely and the thought of Tinder makes me a little nauseous.

I don't know myself from the person who decided to take a random boy to her bed less than a year ago. My spirit and my energy are different but I'm not sure it's all in a good way.

I'm undergoing a process of transfiguration - one that's both challenging and rewarding. Here is the hard bit.

I feel like I have far less fun than I did before and I feel less connected to the outside world. Because I'm not dating - I often don't have anything to anticipate on a Friday or Saturday night. I go out a lot less and I do feel more lonely. My life has gotten very, very quiet and that's a hard adjustment for a social bee. Dating for all its woe, added elements of excitement and an opportunity to experience butterflies and affection.

You might be thinking that I surely could just choose to jump back into the dating pool. But that choice is not viable for me anymore. My chemistry is so changed that getting on a dating app, would feel out of resonance with my spirit. It's hard to describe .... it's almost like I'm on a different wavelength from the energy of those platforms.

A new belief has also been ingrained in me. Whereas before I felt like I needed to actively pursue the sourcing of my mate. I now believe that he will be presented to me. It no longer feels like going out and finding him is my job.

But have I now flung too far the other way? With the added element of it being winter here in Australia, it feels like there is a dryness, coldness and sense of isolation to my life that I have never experienced before. Which is why I have been tempted to cut this whole celibacy thing short.

But there is something on the other side of the sense of challenge that I'm curious about it.

Yes, I feel isolated. But in that space, there has also been a cleansing. Before starting this, I was dragging around the energy of boys that I had been with and had been hurt by. I had been trying to wrench myself free from residual feelings of rejection, resentment and infatuation. But nothing worked.

But in the past few months, that stuff has been swiped.

God has been cleaning me out and I feel like I've been reset.

My spirit is lighter. I am more grounded in my relationship with God. We now spend a lot more time together than ever before, so I've gotten to know what his voice sounds like. I hear his counsel and feel his peace more. It feels good to be closer to HIM.

In addition, I've also been blessed in the past year. The previous ten years of my life have been turbulent in the areas of work and finances. It's only this year that those parts of life have started to calm down a bit and I've begun to experience some degree of ease.

I don't think it's a coincidence that they happened when I made that decision to be celibate. I want that kind of grace to continue in my life.

I want it to multiply into my relationship with my husband.

I see sex differently now too. I understand how much it clasps you to a person and I hold more reverence for it as an act that does belong to the covenant of marriage. That's now how I want to experience it. To not be physically intimate until I have been spiritually and emotionally intimate.

So although there are some places of challenge in this, I have decided to cut my one year commitment of celibacy short and instead remain celibate until I am married.

I want God to continue doing the work he has started in me.

Some more fun definitely needs to be injected into the whole experience, but that can be fixed in other ways.

So, I'm smashing the clock on this thing.

Jesus, you can take as long as you need.

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If you are considering celibacy or are already on the journey, connect with me on email or Facebook. I would love to open up conversations of encouragement.

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