In his first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul issues one of Christianity’s better-known if lesser-observed dictates: It’s best to remain unmarried, full stop. But, he continues, if people “cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”
The message was clear: Celibacy is best; marriage is a concession. But as the centuries progressed this hierarchy collapsed, first in Christianity and then in the broader secular world. Now some form of committed sexual monogamy is the norm and “celibacy” has become largely associated in the news with unhappy men on Reddit who think they can’t get a girlfriend because they’re too short.
It’s quite a comedown.
Yet celibacy — by which I mean deliberately going without sex — persistently returns to the public conversation. When the dating app Bumble recently ran cheeky ads admonishing women with the line “Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun,” the company might have expected to rile only a handful of traditional Catholics, but instead it angered its user base and was forced to apologize. Lenny Kravitz just announced his own sexual abstinence, and Julia Fox’s recent boast of celibacy as a way to “take back the control” recalled a similar statement from Lady Gaga in 2010, when she announced that periods of celibacy allowed her to be “strong and independent.”
If I search TikTok today for “celibacy,” the videos — mostly, though not exclusively, by heterosexual women — form a resonant chorus: Why have sex if the sex is usually bad? Why have sex with people who don’t respect you? Why not walk away until somebody can make it worth your while? Much of the current vogue for celibacy is not driven by a desire to discipline the flesh but by disgust with the digital-age dating scene.
As a Catholic who generally tries — though not always very hard — to follow the church’s rules about sex, I’ve watched celibacy’s occasional quasi popularity with some amusement. (The Catholic term for not having sex is continence, incidentally; celibacy means remaining unmarried.) But I also get it: Sexual celibacy can have the same superficial allure as other ascetic lifestyles. The Quakers adopted simple, unornamented clothing to resist the world and its vanities; I can now have the modern-day equivalent shipped to my door from Everlane.
Yet I do believe that celibacy, as a discreet spiritual practice, has something to offer. When we abstain from drinking for a month without committing to full-time sobriety, we call it Dry January — a practice that’s become increasingly popular. We might consider embracing a similarly measured approach to sexual abstinence: Call it Dry Spell July.
When the possibility of sex is quietly but firmly taken off the table, we lose certain possibilities and certain ways of knowing one another. But we also gain something. Perhaps the greatest gift celibacy can foster is the ability to love people without wanting anything from them. Sexual love wants everything; it wants to obliterate the distinction between self and other, to uproot reason, to run roughshod over anybody in its way. Celibacy transforms other people from potential lovers to potential friends — friendship being the form of love that asks for nothing except that its beloved exist. It allows for warm, generous but detached and disinterested love; it respects the boundaries that define another person.
Over the years, I’ve built a celibate canon in my mind, made up of scenes in which a character rejects sex. Jimmy Stewart’s Mike Connor gently telling Katharine Hepburn’s Tracy Lord in “The Philadelphia Story” that there are rules about sleeping with drunken women so he didn’t have sex with her the previous evening; Philip Marlowe rejecting a naked Carmen Sternwood in Raymond Chandler’s novel “The Big Sleep.” Perhaps the most shocking book I’ve ever read is “The Princess of Cleves,” by Madame de La Fayette, in which the heroine refuses to marry the man she loves — he’s a cad — and instead enters a convent. What I find moving and memorable about all these scenes is the way these characters can hold desire in the palm of their hand, with all its attractions and its possibilities. Then they let it go.
Many readers might now reasonably object that this rather pie-in-the-sky account of celibacy willfully ignores much of what is so ugly about American “purity culture”: the purity balls, in which fathers and daughters dance together before the girls sign pledges of chastity, or the abstinence advocates who liken women who have premarital sex to chewed-up gum. But a better celibacy can exist without conceding any territory to the creeps, just as the existence of harmful ideas about dieting doesn’t invalidate the notion that we should be thoughtful about what we eat. Periods of celibacy, however temporary, can be a fulfilling act of inwardly directed exploration aimed at bolstering peace and self-worth, not an outwardly focused act of performative purity.
In that same letter to the Corinthians, Paul sets forth the qualities of love: It is patient, kind, without envy or pride. It “always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” This passage is read out loud at many weddings, perhaps because marriage is intended in part to be a kind of erotic friendship, and so sexual attraction must be understood in the context of the whole relationship. Celibacy is not the only way to learn how to more skillfully integrate sexual desire into our lives. But it is one way.
Celibacy, after all, is not asexuality. A celibate person may well want sex. But she can, ideally, recognize that desire, comprehend it and send it on its way. There is much one can learn by feeling a desire without rushing to satisfy it.
