Please Stop Saying I Need to Have Sex

Our societies are so obsessed with sex that it has become a measure of general success in our lives.

Photo by Sylvie Tittel on Unsplash

I went through a bad breakup a couple of years ago. A bad relationship, really, followed by an awkward, extended phase of separation. It left me feeling really bad for a really long time. I’m a very emotional person and it’s easy for me to get absorbed in my feelings, and this breakup, in particular, came at a very difficult moment for me because of other personal issues.

While I think these days I’m still going through some of the emotions this breakup left me with, at some point I decided to not shut down those feelings but instead let them in, allowing myself to be sad, work through my issues and dedicate myself to self-improvement. I know I have an addictive personality, so I decided I wanted to cope with things the right way, using the correct tools and mechanisms instead of things that would make me feel even worse in the end. And slowly, after months and months of work, I started getting out of that dark hole I had dug myself.

During that time I really was focusing on myself. I was working out six times a week, waking up at 5.30 every morning to write, taking singing lessons. I was not only pouring my negative feelings into creativity but really going through them, finding gratitude and strength in myself once again. And sex, well, it just wasn’t a priority.

I was alone for a long time. Weeks turned into months, then to years, without me even noticing. I didn’t feel like sex was something that was missing from my life, however. I have two perfectly well-functioning hands and a vivid writer’s imagination. But I noticed that other people were bothered by the idea of me not needing sex. Especially male friends made a lot of jokes about it, somehow needing to tell me that my not being in a sexual relationship with just about any man I could find was affecting my humor. Some people suggested I was asexual. “I’m just not ready,” I told them, but apparently there is no worse thing than a woman not having sex out of personal choice.

Now, I don’t consider there to be anything wrong with being asexual. The word just doesn’t describe me at all. I’ve always been a very sexual person. I think about sex a lot, fantasize about it, and enjoy it very much, whether I’m alone or with another person. I’m very open and vocal about my needs and wants with my sexual partners and when I talk to my friends. I’ve always known myself very well and because of that, I’ve never had bad sex (except for a couple of drunken encounters). I’ve enjoyed great orgasms starting from the very first time I slept with a man, which for women is not a given.

But what I’ve always been especially good at is being able to detect when I‘m completely comfortable and ready to do it. That was why I lost my virginity many years later than my friends. That’s why I’ve always been able to enjoy sex so wholeheartedly. And even if it meant spending more than two years of my early thirties without sex, I was completely okay with it. Not okay, actually. I was doing great with myself.

But a couple of weeks ago, while going through a tough moment with my feelings about the breakup, a friend told me he thought I needed to get a new guy to think about, to be able to forget about the last one. “That’s what I did,” he said, recalling how six months ago he had jumped from one relationship to another in less than a week (something I would hardly say is a good way to deal with your emotions). “You need to have sex,” he said. And this time, I was weak enough to listen. This time, I let all those other people and their comments get to me.

I knew I wasn’t ready. But I was bored and sad, having a hard time with my writing and with work, as well as still carrying these unresolved issues and feelings about the person who had broken my heart. So I downloaded a couple of dating apps and got to work.

It was pretty easy at first, as it always is. You go down the rabbithole and swipe left,left,left,right,left,left,left,left,left,left, right, until you get dizzy and realize you forgot to prepare dinner. I lost one good evening and a lunch break to dating apps, and I’m glad to say that was pretty much all the time I wasted swiping.

I was left with some observations:

• If you only have one photo on your profile, it feels like you’re a creep.
• If your first photo is not of you but of a landscape or a celebrity (this happens surprisingly often) it’s much less likely people will check out the other pictures.
• It’s pretty easy to get matches, but few people actually take the time to have a conversation or meet somebody. It feels a little like people are only there to boost their egos with the matches they can get, not even intending to go any further with it.
• What people say in their profiles they are looking for is often not true.
• Everybody lists “travel” as their interest. Now, unless you are really traveling several times a month, I’d say this is not really a hobby or a personality trait and doesn’t tell me anything about you, except that you couldn’t come up with anything more imaginative.
• Men over forty that have never been married or in a long relationship are a giant red flag that you should run away from as fast as you can (this is in Buenos Aires and might not apply to every other place in the world).
• Men over forty who recently got divorced from their high school sweetheart might not be great guys either. They could also just be on Tinder trying to recover from their lost youth and get through as many women as they can find, the younger the better.
• Don’t believe everything you see. Women use a lot of filters and Facetune (I learned this while comparing Tinders with a male coworker). Men always think they are two inches taller than they really are.

But among all the swiping I managed to get a few matches, a couple of guys started talking to me and I made plans to meet one of them pretty much the next day. He was what I’d call my target demographic as far as age and physical appearance went, and we had a lot in common when it came to education and work. I met him and, while I didn’t feel like he was the love of my life or that we’d really share any important values, we had a lot of other things in common, so I let myself go (I’m a progressive, anti-populist pro-choice vegan living in Argentina, so I’ve pretty much given up on meeting someone who would share my entire worldview).

I didn’t know if I liked him, or if I just liked something about him, but I went out with him a couple of times and had sex. Yes, I did it, after two years. It was technically good, I could tell he’d spent the past two decades going on a lot of dates with women like me. But it didn’t give me anything more than that. There was no spark, no passion of any kind. I had fun, sure, and it felt good to feel another person’s body close. But it wasn’t what I wanted. There was no real connection.

However, I was putting in a real effort to get to know him. I didn’t want the sex to just be sex. I wanted the fact that I’d gotten to this point to mean something.

And then, after a few more dates, he ghosted. Said: “I’m sick, let’s talk in a couple of days,” only to be never heard of again. I still stuck to the dating apps for a week or so, but felt it harder and harder to be interested in the whole thing. Then I deleted all of them.

The result, I realized, was not positive. Having sex hadn’t left me feeling empowered in any way. The thing that people had been pushing on me like some magical solution to all my problems had only made me feel alone, a feeling I had not experienced at all in my two years of solitude.

And what was worse, I was left feeling emotionally drained. Despite my energy and motivation for dating being spectacularly low due to heartbreak, I had put in a tremendous amount of effort to know this person. And I didn’t even know why I did it. I didn’t really even like him. But he did resemble the person I had had that bad breakup with.

I was still looking for the person who had broken my heart. And after this experience, I missed him more than ever. But if that person had not been good for me for a number of reasons, why would this other person be? Why would I have sex with someone when I clearly wasn’t mentally ready? Just to fill a longing for someone else?

This probably sounds ridiculous. I know a lot of people would think this is something normal in dating, to go on a couple of dates and have the guy ghost you, and that you just need to suck it up and get back in the game. But I don’t want to. Because my experience didn’t give me anything, except for a couple or orgasms I could perfectly have given myself.

And I started thinking. Why would I accept to be pressured by other people into doing something that I had always known was for only me to decide?

Our Instagram-filled societies are so obsessed with sex that it has become a measure of general success in our lives. Are you in a relationship? If not, you better be going out, enjoying that single life. And that by default means dating, having sex, showing that you can get it, that you’re attractive enough. And if you need to get over a breakup, the best way is to show the person who broke your heart what they missed, by sleeping with anyone you can find.

But what if I don’t have an issue with not having sex? Is it really my problem, or are the people who consider it a problem at fault here? Isn’t it a lot more pathetic to measure your life by the number of people you have sex with than by how at peace you are with yourself? Isn’t it better to deal with your actual issues and yourself, instead of getting on Tinder? Why is it that it’s socially not acceptable to take time to heal yourself, even if you know you need it? Why is sex considered a better mechanism to getting over a breakup than actually being alone with yourself?

What I learned from this experience is that I’m not willing to sacrifice my mental stability for something that I’m not that interested in doing, just so that other people would feel that I’m more like them and somehow more acceptable because of that.

I don’t mean just that I wasn’t interested enough in this particular person. I mean that I’m not interested in dating at all. It didn’t give me anything. It didn’t make me feel better about my life or fix all my problems. It didn’t help me get over my breakup. It didn’t give me a real connection with a new person. I didn’t end up with new, interesting people in my life through this. And I don’t need to. I have enough close friends who give me so much more than a random Tinder date ever will. I don’t need to boost my self-esteem through it, I feel a lot better about myself after any good gym session or a good day of writing, or when I manage to belt out that high note in “Shallow” in singing class.

And most importantly, I really don’t think I’m currently in the right place to attract or be attracted by the kind of guy that is actually worth my time. Until I’m there, I don’t want to put myself through that again just to make the people around me happy to see me fill society’s expectations of what healthy sexuality looks like. I can’t look for someone vaguely resembling my ex to fix what was broken in my previous relationship.

What I need to get over my bad breakup is something else: me. I need to keep building myself back up, day by day, until I’m strong enough to know I can take on anything. I need to fix myself, and it takes time.

So please, stop telling me I need to have sex.