People have long tried to give up various vices, habits and proclivities in their attempts toward self-improvement. Coffee? Sure. Television? O.K. But sex? Hold on there. Cambridge-educated journalist Hephzibah Anderson, in an effort to try to untangle and distinguish her desire for love from her desire for sex, chose to go a year without the latter. The author of Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year Without Sex talks to TIME about how celibacy can be a good thing.
In your dedication you write that your mother should read no further. Has she followed your advice?
She's skimmed it. I know that as soon as she got a hint that a bedroom scene might be approaching, she skipped a few pages. But my favorite response from a family member came from my beloved great aunt, who is now in her 80s. She assures me that she'll read it when she's old enough.
This sexless year was over two years ago, and your book has already been published in the U.K., right?
It was. And also in France as of a month ago, which was fascinating.
Why's that?
Because what would a British woman have to teach French women about femininity and sexuality? But it was interesting because one of the responses that it got in Britain was that it was a little bit unpolitically correct to suggest that men and women want slightly different things from physical intimacy and need slightly different things, whereas the French have never really lost that understanding. So a lot of what I was saying, they weren't surprised by.
Looking back, what was the most surprising part of the year?
I was certainly surprised by how sensual the world seemed. We tend to stigmatize the dry spell. But it was so far from being arid. I learned so much. One of the things I learned was that we've become quite reductive in our idea of sexuality, and sensuality doesn't really feature much. You don't have to be having sex to still feel like you're a sexual being and still feel like a woman. I felt much more confident in that respect by the end of the year. And much more happy. There was a lovely tranquillity in my life that let me put the quest for love into perspective.
You mentioned toward the end of the book that taking this vow also felt isolating. How so?
It did cast me as an outsider, although there are far more people than we imagine who do lead their private lives along similar lines, and they don't behave the way we are led to believe that everybody is behaving just by watching TV and movies. It made me realize we're under such pressure to be sexual beings all the time and constantly up for it. It gets exhausting.
After the year was over you did the deed somewhat hastily with Mr. Date, and you describe it as a bit of a disappointment.
[Laughs.] Yeah. By that point I was sort of toying with the idea [of writing a book] and I thought, Oh, God, this is going to be embarrassing.
You write, "Men want women and women want to be wanted." How do you think that has changed for you?
I'm much more confident now. It taught me what I wanted and what I needed. Women of my generation grew up in a world in which feminism seemed to think its job was done. We had all these wonderful gains, and we didn't educate ourselves at all as to what this freedom meant. We didn't think too carefully about how we were using it. What we acquired from women's magazines and sitcoms is the sense that sexual liberation meant being able to go out and behave in the way that we imagine men behave. Over the course of that year, I really became aware of the extent to which I was repressing some of my more feminine responses to sex.
Is there still a place for meaningless, casual sex?
For me, there isn't. Not anymore. What you need is changes. It's something different in your 30s than it is in your 20s. You need to reprioritize and it needs to occupy a slightly different role in your life. That was one of the things I was looking for when I set out that year. It would have been great if I had met my soul mate during the course of the year, but that doesn't often happen outside of books.
Would you ever give up sex again?
Well, no. Though I will say that the year chronicled in the book was followed by a year of writing the book, and the year of writing the book was infinitely harder and far less fun.