Polyamory? Celibacy? Today’s sexual politics reveal a lot about our way of life | Sex

Three years ago, around this time, as summer arrived with its wasps and heat, I wrote about the return of sex. We were just coming out of lockdown – remember those days? The time of hope and fear, when we’d spent many months thinking about things like the meaning and nuances of touch, the secrets that made up other people, the many contradictory facts of a strange, warm body? The adult world was preparing to feverishly step out of their homes and into other people’s arms, beds and cars, soft and devilishly gorgeous in a way that only a pandemic really allows; their minds dirty even though their hands had never been so clean. And then, well, nothing.

As that summer is finally here and we drag our bare legs through the thick yellow air, newspapers around the world are breathlessly reporting on the rise of celibacy. Yesterday I sat on a step in the garden, among the strawberries we planted during lockdown, my phone overheating as I scrolled through the memoirs of women who abstained from sex, the articles about the politics of celibacy, the new descriptive terms like “boysober,” the apologies from dating app Bumble after they mocked it and ran ads that read, “You’re not supposed to give up dating and become a nun.” Lenny Kravitz made an announcement about his own sexual abstinence, declaring, “It’s a spiritual thing,” and Julia Fox said, “After the Roe v. Wade ruling was overturned and our rights were taken away, (celibacy) is a way for me to take back control. I just don’t feel comfortable until things change.”

The general reaction to this reported shift is largely one of panic and confusion. Confusion because these people now choosing to abstain from sex are not unsexy people. They are not angry incels (involuntarily celibate by their definition, and violent and disturbed by my definition), but usually very nice, intelligent women whose decision to opt out for reasons of misogyny, disappointment, or self-care has sent waves of self-doubt and doubt in others. And panic because this decision, despite its mirror image in conservative religion, somehow suggests a terrifying rejection of tradition, marriage, children, and reason.

Perhaps what adds to the confusion is reporting on the rise of celibacy and polyamory, two seemingly contradictory models of relationships. But as different as these two ways of life may seem, one leaning toward others and the other away from them, it is clear to me that they come from the same source. The people making these choices, these choices about how to seek connection and intimacy, are dissatisfied with the relationship patterns or structures they should follow, and so both have turned away: one from monogamy, the other from sex itself.

Yet, despite all the coverage of these trends, such decisions are rare. Not only because so few people are willing to give up sex and all the associated hurts or happiness, or to embrace the spreadsheet-filled, jealousy-filled lifestyle associated with polyamory, but also because of something even murkier and more boring. Namely, hardly any of us make any real decisions at all; decisions about the kind of life we ​​want to lead.

Instead, we feel that most of us blindly float into the kinds of relationships our parents had, or fall into them, or are pushed into them, with the boundaries of our imagination still vaguely drawn by old novels or Disney. And once we’re in the relationship, whether with a long-term partner or a one-night stand, most people accept its compromises, some even accept the suffering it can bring, even the feeling that it requires a polite, bloodless forgetting of who they were or who they might want to be. It’s better, they think wordlessly, than the unknown.

It’s funny to write about dating trends as someone who has never dated; someone who has been with the same boyfriend since college, when phones weren’t for flirting but just for Snake and missed calls and messages because a text costs 10p and a minute costs 50p. It’s funny not because these stories feel so alien and inappropriate to suburban life, as I might have expected, but because the desire in them seems so prescient, relatable and exciting.

The more I hear about these trends, which are largely a collection of similar choices by young women responding to expectations about how they should love in the world, the more I realize how they can speak to all of us, no matter our sexuality, relationship status, or age, and how they can speak to us about things beyond sex too. They’re like flares that go off in the night, they’re like a sweater thread that gets tugged on—these gentle distractions from the expected life, sometimes brave, sometimes irritating, sometimes both, reminding us to try to choose our own adventures rather than sleepwalking along carpeted paths.

Email Eva at [email protected] or follow her on X @EvaWiseman