Month: April 2013

Why Celibacy is Awesome

I’ve already written at length in the past about what my personal celibacy means to me, but the following list is something a little bit different. Objective reasons why celibacy–the choice to NOT have sex, no matter what your sexual orientation–is awesome.

No chance of unwanted pregnancy.
No need to get an abortion.
No need to take birth control (or spend money on it).
No need to spend money on condoms or worry about them in any way.
No chance of contracting an STD or an STI.
No need to go through the potential physical trouble and expense of treating an STD or an STI.
No chance of having unsatisfying sex.
No chance of having sex that negatively affects your self-esteem, your body image, or your sense of being worthy of love.
Virtually no need to worry about sexual partners, ex sexual partners, or anybody else talking smack about you for your sexual behavior. (Note: nobody has a right to talk smack about a person’s sexual behavior unless that behavior directly harms someone else, but the fact of the matter is, people are assholes about sex all the time. Celibacy as a way to avoid being insulted or gossiped about doesn’t excuse the insulting/gossiping, but the wrongness of the insulting/gossiping doesn’t make celibacy any less of an effective way to avoid it.)
No opportunity to mistakenly base your own self-worth, self-love, or self-image on your sexual performance or anybody else’s sexual interest in you.
No chance of being used sexually by someone else.
If you are a heterosexual woman: celibacy is a way out of the ever-present sexist and potentially misogynistic dynamic of heterosexual relations, a relief from men exerting power over you–sexual and otherwise, a relief from the potential disrespect and cruelty of straight men directed at their female partners (whether to their faces or behind their backs) related to sex.
Celibacy can be deeply healthy on a psychological level, precisely because sex in a cultural context is fraught with problematic and pathological issues that cannot be single-handedly dismantled even in a personal relationship between two people. Celibacy can also be deeply healthy based on an individual’s past experiences with sex and romance or their relationship with themselves.
Celibacy for a man can serve as a powerful opportunity to disentangle his sense of manhood and his performance of masculinity from his sexuality. (Men are conditioned to entwine their masculinity with their sexuality, to their own and their sexual partners’ detriment.)
Celibacy can provide extra energy or a clear mind to focus on creativity, on self, on friendships and family relationships, on one’s own physical health and mental health, etc.
Celibacy removes you from the volatile and dramatic landscape of sexual activity: sexual competition, sexual infidelity, unrequited sexual desire, sexual incompatibility with partners,
No chance of coercive sex or sex under dubious consent with a romantic partner, in the context of a relationship that is normally sexually active.
Celibacy is the kind of decision that requires conscious, in-depth reasoning, in a way that choosing to become sexually active (or staying sexually active) usually doesn’t. Choosing to be celibate because you know exactly what benefits you’re after, as opposed to having sex simply because that’s what you’re supposed to do and because everybody you know does it, is a way to become intensely conscious of your own sexual lifestyle and your relationship to sex.
Celibacy can be a beneficial time-out in which you clean up any problematic attitudes or ideas you have about sex. (Or romance.)
If you’re an asexual, celibacy is awesome because 9 times out of 10, it’s your default setting. Living according to your nature feels great!
Celibacy can be a powerful political statement in a culture of compulsory sexuality, in a society that assigns social market value to people based on their sexual availability, performance, and history. Celibacy is the only way to completely withdraw from that system, whether temporarily or permanently.
Celibacy is an expression of freedom, autonomy, and ownership of your body. The world tells you, for a myriad of reasons that are pretty much all self-interested on their part, to have sex as soon and as much as you can. Choosing to be celibate is a way of saying, “Fuck you. I think for myself, and I do what I want with my body.”
Celibacy can be a pathway to real intimacy with other people, whether romantic partners or friends/family. Too many people erroneously believe that all sex is intimate–English-speaking people fucking use “intimacy” as a ridiculous euphemism for sex, for God’s sake–and thus end up having plenty of sex but no intimacy. Intimacy is not innately or exclusively sexual. Sex is not automatically intimate. Sometimes, taking sex out of your life is the perfect way to get at real intimacy.
Celibacy can be a catalyst for exploring alternative relationships and relationship systems.
Celibacy can actually be the only way to disengage from a lot of false beliefs and expectations you have of sex, particularly the ones about sex resulting in romantic love or meaning romantic love.

It bears saying that the fact of celibacy’s beneficial status does not automatically designate sexual activity as a purely bad or wrong choice. That kind of illogical reasoning is a smoke screen that some sexually active people, certainly the Genital Myth Makers of our culture (as Sally Cline calls them), use to derail any conversation about celibacy as a positive lifestyle because they are staunch supporters of compulsory sexuality. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion, in our society where sex moralism is very much alive and well, that saying “Celibacy is great for so many reasons” unavoidably translates into “Sex is bad, wrong, evil, and sinful!” But that’s lazy thinking, no different than interpreting the statement “Not having children is awesome” with “Having children sucks.” This may shatter your world, but most things in life are not conducive to an either/or attitude.

Religions teach that circumstantial, temporary celibacy is good because having sex outside of marriage is bad. Mainstream society has never, to my knowledge, framed celibacy in any other terms or conducted a conversation about celibacy in any other way. Celibacy, thus far, has not been considered objectively outside of a sex moralist framework. Sexual people either claim that celibacy is good in the short-term because having the wrong kind of sex is a sin or makes you a slut, or that celibacy is “uncool” and synonymous with “repression.” Sexual society doesn’t want to acknowledge celibacy as positive on its own steam, as a lifestyle choice that moves toward positives instead of away from the negatives of immoral sex. Talking about why celibacy is good is not the same conversation as talking about why sex is bad. The difference may be subtle, but it’s there.

I’m not telling you to be celibate because having sex is categorically sinful, wrong, bad, etc. That would make me a douche bag akin to all the douche bags who tell you to have sex because it’ll make you cool, mature, grown up, progressive, free, etc. I’m simply pointing out that regardless of who you are or what you think of having sex, not having sex actually does come with a whole lot of benefits. I can vouch for those benefits because I enjoy them on a daily basis.

I’m also saying that there are a lot of shitty consequences or potential consequences to being sexually active. I know, several ranks of the “sex-positive” crowd just gasped in horror, but seriously. Being sexually active does have its cons, like pretty much everything else. When you have sex, you’re taking a risk in more ways than one. That doesn’t necessarily mean you ought to be celibate, but it does mean that a sexually active life is not some glorious, problem-free deal. And if you ask me, denying that there’s anything fucked up about the sexually active world doesn’t do anyone any favors. If your real mission is to create a world where people have healthy attitudes about sex and healthy sexual behaviors, then you have to be real about sex. Sex starts out neutral and becomes either positive or negative depending upon how you use it.

Bottom line: celibacy can be awesome and I would like to see the broader social dialogue acknowledge that fact.

Open Heart, Closed Heart?

Last night, I read a few of Lissa Rankin’s articles on heartbreak and keeping your heart open after it’s been broken, and it’s making me think about something that I’ve considered before only in passing. I wonder how open my heart really is–to love, to the relationships I desire, to intimacy. I wonder if the major shifts I’ve experienced in the last couple years, regarding what I feel for whom and moves I’ve made in my relationships, came from a process of closing my heart or if those shifts are simply the result of becoming uncompromisingly loyal to myself and my own desires. I have to ask myself about this and be honest because I want to live my life with an open heart. I pretty sure I mean it when I say it. I’ll do whatever I can to minimize pain and protect myself from more disappointment in love, but I believe those interests do not have to automatically conflict with having an open heart. Having an open heart doesn’t mean being stupid or indiscriminate about who you let in, right?

It’s not easy for me to answer the question, “Is my heart open or closed?” because of my unique circumstances: I’ve closed my heart to sexual people, not to asexuals, but because sexual people are 99% of the human population, it can look and feel like I’ve closed my heart completely. That’s what I’m unsure about: am I truly leaving my heart open to that 1%, to my own people, or have I effectively shut myself off from love no matter the source simply because I spend more time surrounded by sexual people than by fellow asexuals?

I feel like I’m open to love from asexuals. That’s the love I want, anyway. I know with total clarity that I want love from them. If I could spend time in an environment where everybody was a celibate ace, I feel like it would change everything for me: the way I carry myself, the way I relate, the way I feel about connecting and the possibility of love, etc. When I meet a new asexual or even hear from one, I’m very receptive to them. I know a small handful so far, in person and online, yet these connections haven’t yet evolved into love or deep emotional attachment. That’s not because I’m opposed but simply because we’d have to spend more time together and simply feel that emotional attraction to each other that’s somewhat unexplainable. Yet I’m open! I want more asexual friends, I want to spend all my social time with other celibate aces (and aromantics), and whether it’s casual/common friendship or passionate friendship, I feel like I’m open to seeing where my connections with those asexuals go.

I feel like my heart is closed to sexual people for a thousand reasons and every single one of them is valid, rational, real. No matter how I look at it, I always come up with the same conclusion: staying away from sexual people emotionally is unequivocally smart and wise and in my best interests. I’m almost 23 years old, and almost every single person I’ve ever loved or wanted to love has been a sexual person (because, unfortunately, they vastly outnumber asexuals) and left me with a long history of disappointment, pain, rejection, and betrayal. To date, I’ve never had a 100% satisfying (major) relationship with a sexual person, other than maybe my sister. I haven’t had a relationship with a sexual person that satisfied even 50% of my core needs and desires. Their race, their gender, their age, their sexual orientation, the environment in which I met them, how long I knew them–none of that matters. They’re all the same when it comes this issue of relationships. They think, act, pursue, and organize relationships the same way. The way they’ve been taught, by their families and their religions and the government and the media. Leaving room for the requisite exceptions to every rule, I think they’re incapable of passionate friendship. I think they’re incapable of nonsexual love that reaches the level of significance that I have in mind. I think they’re incapable of deviating from the conventional lifestyle that they pretty much all follow without question. And it’s not entirely their individual fault. We are all products of powerful social conditioning, to one degree or another, and the only way that a person can buck a Big Social Norm–like making romantic-sexual love the center of your life, subordinating all other relationships to your primary romantic-sexual partnership, etc–is if there’s something about you that makes it impossible for you to adhere to that Norm. Like being an asexual who doesn’t want to fuck anyone ever.

I’m not asking any sexual person to change for me. I’m way past that. I wouldn’t believe them even if they told me they were going to be different. I don’t think they can be, barring extraordinary circumstances that pose some huge obstacle to their defaulting onto the traditional relationship system. I guess I’m not looking for a reason to open myself to them again. They have nothing to offer me, beyond common, casual friendship. I don’t expect anything from them, other than shallow friendly attention. I’m not going to waste any more love on people who don’t get it, who actually believe that sex makes a relationship superior or that romance separated out from friendship is innately more valuable or compelling than nonsexual, nonromantic friendship. I’m not going to make myself completely and utterly vulnerable to someone, offer my sensitive heart full of passionate, tender love, only to have the other person reject me, betray me for sex and romance, judge my innermost relationship desires, blow off my identity, never once try to really understand what I’m saying when I talk about passionate friendship, etc. Fuck that. That’s not happening again.

I feel justified in protecting my heart from sexual people, yet I’m also aware that this is exactly the kind of thing that leads to a closed heart: a desperate need to prevent more pain after you’ve been burned one too many times. I have to be real with myself about the fact that I grew up in a near perpetual state of disappointed love that wounded me profoundly, and if I’m not careful, I might allow myself to close my heart to the love I want so intensely because I fear pain and suffering at the hands of anyone I love. I might become someone who wants safety so much that I’m willing to sacrifice love and intimacy for that safety. I don’t want that. I want to grow out of my pain and my disappointed love, not bow to it. I want to be able to trust someone again.

I know what I want in relationships, I know why and how I want it, and I am unwilling to accept anything less. I am determined to live my adult life with complete self-love, honoring my desires, honoring my needs, pursuing relationships that are healthy for me, being true to myself, etc. I want two life partners who live with me, and I want a group of passionate friends that become my long-term family. I want to love people who love me back AND who engage with me in all the ways that satisfy and delight me. I want to love people who respond to my needs and desires with loving, caring, enthusiastic support. I want to love people who want the love and friendship I want. I want to love people who think the way I do about relationships. I want to love people I can trust completely, with my body, my heart, my mind, and my soul. I want to love people who respect me, who respect my asexuality and my celibacy and my relationship anarchy and my gender identity. I want to love people who make me feel safe and secure. I want to be wanted, I want to be cared for, I want to be loved for real. I want to be absolutely wide open again, to bring people all the way into the depths of my heart, to be passionate in love again.

And I deserve to have the love I want. I think that’s the one of the most radical statements someone like me could make to the world. I deserve to have the love and the relationships I desire, exactly as I desire. It doesn’t matter how unique my desires are, it doesn’t matter how few people in the world can give me what I want, it doesn’t matter if my desires are in direct opposition to what the majority vote believes is “normal.” I deserve to have the love I want. I deserve to be loved. I deserve to have the relationships I want exactly the way I want them. And I believe those relationships are possible. I believe that there are people on earth (other celibate asexuals and aromantics) who can give me the love and relationships I desire, because they want the same thing. All that matters is that we find each other and create love the way we really want it.

I don’t know if my heart is open or closed to love from others right now, but I do know that I want to open it as much as possible to other asexuals. I want to open myself so that the Universe can deliver the right people to be my passionate friends and my partners. I’m not entirely sure how I do this, but I’m going to try a combination of meditation, prayer, journaling, feeling love for these people before I meet them, being happy as often as possible, visualizing my ideal relationships more, staying on the look-out for more ace/ace couples and pairs, going deeper into myself, into my own heart….. All the stuff I’ve been doing.

And when I’m ready and I meet my passionate friends and life partners, I can give them permission to break my heart….. because I can trust that they won’t.

Passionate Friendship

I want to define passionate friendship as I conceive of it in a separate post, for easy reference. It’s something I do talk about enough that a thorough definition will be useful.

“Passionate friendship” is a term I have chosen to describe a relationship akin, if not identical, to the “romantic friendships” which existed throughout history all over the world, up until the 19th century. My reasons for renaming the relationship type “passionate friendship” are twofold: I find the term “romantic friendship” potentially problematic because of its implications that certain behaviors are definitively “romantic” and because it could alienate aromantic people from naming and claiming this type of friendship on the basis that “romantic friendship” could easily imply the presence of romantic attraction; there are differences between my relationship ideal and historical romantic friendship to a degree that I think it makes sense to construct “passionate friendship” as a new concept, however rooted in romantic friendship it might be.

Passionate friendship is:

a nonsexual relationship, meaning sexual activity does not occur and sexual attraction is not present
a relationship that usually does not include romantic attraction but does include intense emotional attraction equal to or greater than standard romantic attraction; it can also be a relationship where it is unclear whether the feelings are “romantic” or “nonromantic” for either person to label them
a relationship based on love; passionate friends love each other to the core, beyond mere liking or caring
the emotional intensity of passionate friendship love is equivalent or greater to that of the standard romantic-sexual couple relationship, during phases or moments of (emotional) passion
in the every day lives of two passionate friends, especially those who have been together a long time, the feeling of passion comes and goes (the way it does in any long-term, stable, successful romantic-sexual relationship) but the feeling of strong warmth and profound affection is constant
a relationship in which emotional, mental, and spiritual intimacy are at their peaks
a physically intimate relationship which may include any or all of the following, theoretically at any frequency but usually, the frequency is quite high (distinguishing the passionate friendship from a common friendship): full hugs, holding hands, chaste kisses on the face/body/lips, cuddling, sharing a bed, caressing, massages, dancing, linking arms, leaning against each other, looking into each other’s eyes deliberately, heartbeat listening, touching each other’s bare skin, etc.
verbal or written expression of love and emotions to each other, for no reason, on a regular basis [EX: “I love you,” “You’re the most important person in my life,” “I’m so happy when I’m with you,” etc.]. This covers text messages, phone conversations, handwritten letters and notes, and face to face talk.
If the two passionate friends individually create a hierarchy of relationships in their lives, the passionate friendship is either their most important relationship or one of their most important relationships, entirely equal to the other most important. Whether the passionate friendship happens within a relationship hierarchy or not, both friends prioritize each other and each other’s needs.
The passionate friendship often doubles as the primary partnership of the two friends, and consequently, they either choose to live together permanently or live separately and alone. Being primary partners, the passionate friends carve out protected time to be together on a regular basis, take care of each other’s core needs, may choose to become financially interdependent, may choose to rear children together or combine their families that include other adults, are each other’s caregiver (or one of them) in case of illness or injury, travel together, etc.
The feeling quality of a passionate friendship is a blend of love, caring, warmth, joy, attraction (emotional/intellectual/sensual), fondness, affection, trust, loyalty, appreciation, and intimacy.
Ideally–and usually, on account of such a connection being rare in the first place–the passionate friendship is one that lasts until one or both of the friends die. It is a relationship that compels loyalty and commitment because the friends are so strongly attracted to each other, their love intense and their harmony natural, that they simply never find a good enough reason to terminate the friendship. Likewise, because the passionate friendship is the most important relationship in the friends’ lives, no matter what, they do whatever they can to preserve it.
This is a connection that often begins with an instantaneous and unexplainable affinity: two passionate friends meet for the first time and immediately like each other without reason, wanting to be close to each other and important to each other. The more they become acquainted, the faster and harder they fall for each other. Their love comes naturally and effortlessly, like the friendship itself. This resonance they have speaks to the spiritual nature of their connection and their love. There’s something about the relationship that can’t be seen with the eye or expressed adequately with words. The passionate friends themselves may not understand why they feel so strongly for each other, why they’re so drawn to each other, no matter how long they’ve been together.
Passionate friendship is characterized by deep vulnerability and intimacy. Moments of emotional openness are frequent, whether one friend tells the other how they feel about them and the relationship, or one friend comforts the other because of emotional distress that the upset friend shares honestly. Passionate friends can be physically vulnerable, emotionally vulnerable, and intellectually vulnerable with each other. They respond to each other’s vulnerability with great respect, caring, compassion, and love.
Passionate friendship is a one-on-one relationship. While passionate friends may spend time with other people in a group, most of the time they spend together is spent without anyone else around.
Passionate friendship is an organic type of relationship. It is not made. It cannot be forced or orchestrated with just anyone. The most definitive quality of passionate friendship is a powerful emotional attraction and love that surpasses that of ordinary or common friendship. There’s a reason that most thinkers who wrote about romantic friendship throughout history characterized it as extremely rare, the rarest of all of human connections. A person doesn’t choose to have a passionate friendship with someone, so much as passionate friendship happens to two people without warning. For this reason, passionate friendship usually only visits a person once in life, although it’s entirely possible to have more than one passionate friend at a time.

What are the differences between passionate friendship and romantic friendship?

Romantic friendship was primarily a youth relationship that ended upon one or both friends getting married. (This is particularly true of romantic friendships during the 18th and 19th centuries, in America and Europe.) Romantic friendship was also a predominantly same-sex relationship, because throughout history, cross-sex friendship was considered impossible or inappropriate (unless the male and female were related). Romantic friendship, if it survived the weddings of the friends, would still become subordinate to the romantic-sexual relationships the friends had with others. Romantic friendship was usually a relationship that formed between members of the same generation, which ties into it being a youth-oriented relationship preceding marriage.

Passionate friendship can happen between any gender combination, can be inter-generational, is never subordinated to a romantic-sexual relationship or any other relationship, can happen at any stage of life, and lasts forever or as close to it as possible.

I have to assume that most romantic friendships in history happened between allosexual people, simply because allosexuals make up most of the human race. That said, I believe passionate friendship in the 21st century is far more likely to happen between two asexuals or at the very least involve an asexual. Passionate friendship is rare in the first place, no matter what someone’s gender or sexual orientation, and I don’t think it can happen to someone who doesn’t believe in it, who isn’t aware of it, or whose heart isn’t open to it. Most allosexuals, at least in Western civilization, fall into one or more of those categories. The present, post-Freudian, post-sexual revolution American cultural atmosphere is not conducive to passionate friendship and may never be again, on a grand scale. Passionate friendship depends on principles that directly contradict that of mainstream sexual society: the premise that powerful, passionate love and friendship can exist without sex, sexual attraction, romance, or romantic attraction and can be superior to romantic-sexual relationships in quality and importance; the premise that great sensual, physical intimacy can happen without sex or sexual attraction; the premise that the person you love most and with the greatest intensity of love is someone you do not want to fuck or need to fuck, someone you do not need to “date” or marry.

I personally view passionate friendship as distinct from asexual romantic relationships, although if two asexuals had a passionate friendship and one or both described feeling romantic attraction to the other, I certainly wouldn’t debate their naming of the relationship. I like to think that the love of passionate friendship, characterized by great intensity and intimacy, combined with the lack of sex, make the presence of “romantic” attraction irrelevant. But that could just be the relationship anarchist in me.