Maybe... It's Not The Sex

After almost three years of championing celibacy, I might have realised that I was running all along running in the wrong lane.

It's a bizarre experience when one of your heroes recants on what's been their main ethos. That's why I did a double take when I listened to Elizabeth Gilbert's "Supersoul Conversations" podcast with Oprah Winfrey. Gilbert's book, "Big Magic" has had a huge impact on me and I hang on every word she she says about life and creativity. So when she recanted one of her long-time preaching points during on this talk, I was shooketh.

For years Gilbert that your passion needs to be your everything: you need to find it and follow it until you bleed. (Which is what she had done to, of course, great success). But now, she taking it all back.

"I really believed it and I believed I was doing a public service by telling people they had to live exactly the same way I had always lived mine. I preached that because that was my fundamental truth.

And then something happened...and this is the good part... because if you wait long enough something will happen in life that will undo your certainty, which is where the interesting things begin."

"Thank God," I heard myself say. Thanks for showing me that's it's ok to backpedal because I too was standing in that moment of life undoing my certainty.

In 2016, I said good-bye to being sexual active and have been preaching about its benefits since. I've been blogging, done talks and even wrote a book encouraging women to "lock up shop". I was certain of the value of saving sex until marriage: that it strengthened romantic relationships and made you happier generally. That was my truth. I truly believed that this was the best way to live as a single woman. In my mind saving yourself would guarantee that the man would love you for who you are, which is what I wanted more than anything.

You see my sexuality had caused me both physical and emotional pain. So I was thrilled with getting a means to lock her away. I placed her in a cell and went merrily along with all life, telling everyone they should do the same.

But that "something happening to undo your certainty" that Elizabeth mentioned happened to me. I met someone but in a most unusual way: a romantic interest in a way that forced us into a long distance relationship where sex was not even an option. We have been falling in love via texting, phone calls and face times. We live so ridiculously far from each other that a plan for meeting has to done far in advance.

He is also the polar opposite of me in regards to ideas of sex and sexuality. He believes sex and its consequences are a matter of being human: that is a bodily function that can be had with or without emotion. His sexuality is front and centre and he lacks the shame, guilt and need for control that I have carry around it.

Not that a 180 degree turn is the antidote either. There is room there for him to better appreciate the emotional and spiritual dynamics of sex and its consequences. We are on completely different sides of the spectrum and need to meet somewhere in the middle.

And why didn't I run for the hills when he unveiled all this... Because he didn't. I told him about my plan to wait until marriage to have sex again. He responded by saying he could never marry someone he had never had sex with and we somehow just continued the relationship. Neither one asking the other to bend or change, we simply kept talking.

And I started thinking about sex again, for the first time in a long time .... differently this time. For if did I get the opportunity to be with this man, who sees me in the way I've craved to be seen and I spend all that time in resistance to further intimacy, I know I would regret it.

I wondered if I would really suffer for doing something that would make me happy.

I also started to think of a dear friend I knew who was an active Christian and happily married to man she had been sleeping with right up until their wedding day. Her life bursts with abundance in family, love, travel, finances, work and lifestyle.

It all made me think that ... Maybe that it's not about the sex.

As a Christian, sex for me is tied to ideas of punishment. But would my God punish me for being happy? He certainly has not done so for my friend, so why would you change the rules for me? My work in spirituality and personal development had taught me that like attracts like. That the way to attract abundance is to raise your vibration and be happy, exactly what my friend exemplified. That being said, I am so happy that I did choose abstinence for almost three years. It changed me, renewed my spirit and allowed me to raise my vibration so I could be in a place where I would attract my mate.

So perhaps, for everything there is a season and a reason.

I haven't yet made any hard decisions but maybe that's what I needed to do from the beginning... Be open to what is needed in that moment, relinquishing the rules and stop telling other people how to live their lives. Because as Elizabeth Gilbert found out, when you start to preach you can make people feel great while others feel like shit, when how someone else's internal compass works is really none of your business.