A year of celibacy, and grief around the masculine

These past 12 months I committed to a year of celibacy both unintentionally, and with intent. It became clear to me after my last few relationships, that I could not stop myself from having sex that I did not want to have, and often was using sex as a proxy to meet my masked needs.

Around this time, I also began formulating a commitment to myself around honesty. That I would practice being honest with myself and, when possible, with others. It was a recognition that surfaced when I began to see that trust and intimacy are born from a capacity to seek, speak, and process kindly the truth.

In this time, I got to slow down enough to recognize a pattern of fawning to men and performing pleasure as a gateway towards closeness. And in doing so I was trapping myself in dynamics that I was growing weary of. It reflected in me the lack of true partnership in my relationships and rather, a consistent brew of antagonism, mistrust and expectation.

When I would self-betray because I felt that sex was the only way I could feel intimacy from my sexual partners, I would leave feeling tired, empty and longing for connection. I felt myself reenacting generations of trauma, a listless attempt to soothe the masculine into speaking to the heart.

I am learning that the intimacy of the body can create an illusion of intimacy of the heart. In the chaos of the hormones, the inherited beliefs, and excitement, we can divulge our greatest wounds before they’re ready to be held with tender care. We feel that the depth we cultivated can begin with the shedding of our clothes.

This has been the inherited belief system that I have received from years of being conditioned within a patriarchal world view. I have been told that sex isn’t sex unless there’s penetration, and variations of the phrase, “what are we even doing together if we aren’t having sex,” when I have reached towards connection with men.

My lesbian and queer friends are so perplexed by these retellings, which have helped me deepen my inner knowing that I do not have to accept these stories as the truth.

This past year I began an experiment where I started to devalue the physical act of sex itself as a form of value or intimacy and instead, began to value more the intimacy of knowing.

So often, my sexual experiences relied on my ability to disconnect with my body. To use my body sacrificially to ensure my safety, my place of rest, my protection, and my care. Instead, the intimacy of knowing is a commitment to slowing down enough so I may keep the connection between my spirit and my body intact.

It has meant a validation of my deep longings for connection and partnership whilst not feeling open or ready for physical intimacy. It has meant exploring sexually whilst holding strong boundaries around non-platonic touch.

It has led me towards a life of abundant partnership and intimacy outside of the field of sexual touch. It has taught me that community can take on shared risk with me, and that coupledom is not the only place in which family can be created.

In this opening towards love outside of classical romantic love, I have been grieving the masculine. Recently, I have felt the strength to listen to my feelings of attraction and allowing for her to have voice.

When someone who I felt a mutual feeling of attraction with asked to be sexually intimate, I said no, and offered an alternative form of sexual intimacy. To explore the energy that was coming up, and to ask the energy what was there.

In that container, he shared many stories that came up for him around what he perceived in me as a rejection. What he was asking of me physically was not actually a rooted request from his true desires of connection, acceptance, and closeness but were regurgitated lines from a patriarchal norm that tells men that certain “sexual favors” reflect a man’s worthiness.

In hearing those stories, I felt the stark distance between us. I heard in my mind my teacher, who tells me that the work of this time is to slowly close the divides that exist in all of us. Between me and him, a looming wall stood, the patriarchal colonial white supremacist system that lives, alive and well in our most intimate spheres.

Though we both shared the values and vision of a liberated world, we were caught in the expectations of the roles we were born in.

At the end of our container together, when I was about ready to close, he expressed his strong desire to be sexually intimate again. I asked him to sit with that energy and ask what message that energy had for him. At first, he responded with many words trying to explain what he wanted to do with this energy. I requested for him to take a pause with explaining, and simply just sit and keep asking the energy, “what are you here to show me.”

I told him to just ask and see if he could get a response. No need to construct a response, just wait and see if it appears.

After about five minutes, he was still and sitting there. And he finally said, it is telling me that I am accepted and loved. I told him, I felt the same message from the energy as well. It for him, was in his words, one of the greatest orgasms of his life.

This, I have some contradictory feelings on because, the term orgasm, still references a highly capitalist/patriarchal way of orienting to sexual intimacy in which the outcome or result is revered above the process. And it has been part of our ongoing dynamic in which that “result” or “aspect” of our connection has led him to seeing me as a conduit for that release, feeling, or in his words, orgasm.

When we are seen as functions to creating a feeling or release for another, we are in other terms being objectified into a role of responsibility. His non-judgmental, clear connection with his sexual energy was in my perception his connection and awareness of spirit, the divine, god’s love. His projection of me as the conduit to this connection was placing the responsibility on me, to reconnect him with that essence.

Often, women are placed in roles of mother rather than partner. In partnership, we recognize that we can do our best to support one another in meeting our needs, in mothering, we are responsible for ensuring that the acute needs are met for a baby/child’s development.

Part of my year of celibacy is releasing myself from the role of mothering. In different relationships in my life, I have taken on the role of mother. I have two partnerships in which we are actively engaging with this archetype. Part of this dynamic is the fact that I hold access to resources that recreate dynamics in which I have the agency to support one’s physical safety and sense of home.

What is my healing journey is recognizing that I have choice in saying no to responding to moments of crisis and pain that my beloveds are moving through. That my longing for partnership is showing me a way forward in which I show love by giving people the opportunity to cultivate their own connection to source by having boundaries around what I can offer them during times of need.

There is something empowering about asking to be met when there is the capacity to hold oneself in clarity and intentionality. It brings me deeper into my own clarity, and my own fortification around what it means to love through a patriarchal conditioning that tries to wear me down into a disembodied form of servitude.

As I heal this wound that has led me to believe that disassociating myself to make room for the needs of others is love, I step into a masculinity that I am being asked to evoke within myself. It is a masculinity of structure, of integral wholeness, of clarity and resolve. It isn’t domination or control, but instead is the foundation of a house, the arch of a bridge, the steadfastness of the mountains.

I grieve the scared masculine that has shamed me into this shape of servitude. So afraid of the feminine and her deep well of receptivity, the scared masculine manipulates through shaming the desires for connection and care by making belonging and worthiness about ones ability to control and dominate another’s sexual agency.

When I reconnected with this man and had a connective time opening up the container to explore sexual energy, at the end of the call he resorted to telling me what he wanted to do to me. Without curiosity around what sexual intimacy meant for me, he continued to monologue about his desire to do what I had offered to him, focusing on the “orgasm” part and not mentioning the entire process of attunement I had offered him by deeply listening and accepting his experience.

I have been continuing to grieve this experience, feeling exhausted and tired by the continual efforts I have made to desexualize intimacy in hopes of finding forms of partnership that can make sacred the physical action of sex by recognizing first, the inherited actions that disconnect us from our true intent.

As always, I return to prayer.

I pray for the masculine that knows rigidity as the form that lays the foundation for the movements and flows of water. I pray for the masculine that does not dismiss itself or hide its presence but instead integrates and makes clear its desires without manipulation or deception. I pray for the masculine to find itself again, to recognize that there is enough love present within itself, to be shared with others rather than extracted from others.

And I know that I have my part to play within this puzzle. I cannot blame men for this inheritance, as I know I am interdependent to their struggles. What I know is mine to do, is to stay as within the confines of my limitations. To trust that speaking out my boundaries is in part, the only way through.

Boundaries, as I’ll write in my next piece, is a complex reality within the realms of relationship ecology. Stay tuned for the next relationship ecology post: The boundaries and limits of the cliffs and the tides.

for me, this image represents the lineages of blood that women inherit. it is referencing the menstruation blood that ties us to cycles that cannot conform to the rigidity of patriarchal productivity.