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.
Sometimes my decision to have sex seemed to be based more on what was appropriate to the moment than on what was right for me. At a certain point in certain scenarios, a part of me abdicated and gave in to the inevitable. Tipsily noticing that it was after midnight and I was far from home, say, in a dwindling group that happened to include a man, I found myself in bed with him. He said afterwards: "That was intense," as if intensity were something unexpected in sex. But it was intense, and whichever bit of me had abdicated, it was never my heart. My only other rule was that my year would start not from the time I last had sex, but from the day I made my decision. After all, I'm certain I've had dry spells that lasted longer than 12 months. It was the choosing that was crucial, even if it meant adding another three weeks to my challenge. Rather than continuing to go along with what others seemed to want from sex, I had to rediscover what it meant to me. Most urgently, I had to find my way back to the place where love and sex intersected for real. Making that initial decision seemed like a step in the right direction. I'd turned 30 a few months before taking my vow, and among other things, was looking for a fresh way of pursuing love -- a way that was a little less ungainly, permitted a little more self respect, and might even yield a little more success. In that regard, adopting an unrealistically nunnish definition would not have helped. There is also this: after almost a decade of ricocheting from one short-lived romantic fiasco to another, I'd forgotten that the chase could be fun. On August 12 last year, my self-imposed drought came to an end and I caught up with friends. By the time I arrived, they had already reached the bit of the evening where the talk is about men. It had a tart edge, and reminded me of all that I'd been hoping to avoid when I began this year. I don't blame them -- their male counterparts seem just as judgemental, just as demanding -- but nor do I want to become them. This stopped me from telling them about my vow, and though I wish I could have toasted its close with people who've been on this journey with me, I realize that I've mostly travelled solo. In truth, the vow has been isolating. True, I haven't felt as lonely as I've previously felt within relationships, but in some ways it has kept me locked in with my own thoughts like a nun in her cell. I worry that her wimple, too, might have blinkered me. Suffice to say that when it came, that moment I'd been denying myself of for a full year, it was intensely, profoundly, unutterably anti-climactic. I beat myself up about the way my year ended, but since then things have been different and credit those chaste I did get together someone. It didn't but it lasted longer than any had in a while. Since then, there has been one more relationship, which lasted six months. I've heard the words 'I love you' and said them back -- to another. While it hasn't got me there just yet, my year of chastity has shown me the way. Extracted from Chastened by Hepzibah Anderson, published by Chatto & Windus on July 2 at pounds 12.99. Readers can buy Chastened (RRP:pounds 12.99) for the special price of pounds 10.99 incl. free UK p&p. To order please call 01206 255 800 and quote theref The Daily Record. Copyright Hepzibah Anderson 2009.
