My Year of No Sex

When you decide to give up sex and begin a year of chastity, it's not something you rush to tell people.

In a super-sexualized society that uses orgasms to flog shampoo, with even online avatars having affairs, opting out feels like the last conceivable taboo.

In my own case, I'd assumed I was retreating into a more private sphere. It never occurred to me to blog about my quest, and the book I have written was an idea that arrived late in the journey.

For a while, I didn't tell my friends, either. When I did step out of my chaste closet, I found others didn't quite see it the same way. In fact, they felt licensed to ask all sorts of questions they'd ordinarily have kept to themselves.

"What do you do?" wondered one girl, squinting at me in disbelief."Is it because of me?" asked a guy who'd once invited me home with him. And then there was the question which came up most often -- what did I have planned for my year's end? As an ex put it, "There has to be some kind of payoff, right?"

If there was going to be a party, nobody wanted to miss it.

The question I heard least frequently was the only one I had really been anticipating: "Why?"

Plenty of people have thought about hopping off the sexual merry- go-round.

Sex and its pursuit seem to have become such blood sports, their rules so confusing, and their standards so exacting, it is hard not to wonder occasionally whether it's worth it. At the same time, sexiness is so ubiquitous it has become a bit of a turn-off.

In the past decade, everything from political dossiers to ballroom dancing has been sexed-up.

It's easy to become jaded, and that's perhaps part of the problem: it's not so much sex that's everywhere, but a toned, tanned, airbrushed pastiche that verges on neutering and has less and less to do with the real thing.

I'd thought those thoughts once or twice, but it would never have occurred to me that I'd actually go ahead and voluntarily eject sex from my life.

It took a bizarre serendipity, a torrid affair and a chance anecdote to make me realize the kind of sex I was supposed to be cool with as a post-feminist, 21st century Western woman -- a casual sort of intimacy without intimacy -- was not working for me.

One of my motivations for embracing chastity was a sense that sex had grown impersonal -- that it was nothing more than a game of tennis -- as a 30-something marketing whiz insisted to me while I was researching a magazine article on casual sex.

I've never been any good at tennis, yet I felt like I was the one at fault, so I kept trying.