Celibacy Made Me?

This has been another depressing week for me. Yet I have been lower than this before. What keeps me going is the possibility that celibacy might actually make me superior as a man, especially in the twenty-first century. Are you wondering how that could be possible?

There are many who do go without sex for long periods of time. But their condition is voluntary. Monks and nuns make a choice to be chaste. A modern, post-feminist writer like Hebhzibah Anderson chose to be celibate for a year. My predicament is something that is considered by some as an illness or a disease. One academic even considers it as a part of Asperger’s Syndrome. I don’t want to go without sex. Throughout most of my adult life, sex was always on the forefront of my consciousness. Come on, I am a 21st century man, a child of late 20th century’s obsession with sex to sell anything from Pepsi to Persil.

Yet today, I wondered if I could settle to be celibate for the rest of my life. Let’s face it, I have already gone without sex for most of my youth. The queen of Chick Lit, Helen Fielding, recently said that sex is really for ‘young people.’ It is when we are in our teens, twenties and thirties that we have the most energy and the libido. Our bodies are at their peak in this golden age of physical performance. I had to endure a form of sexual leprosy and missed out on all the sensual pleasure that makes life exuberant and precious. Now, as I reach my forties, is it really wise to keep longing for women and love?

Voluntary celibacy must be self-empowering. After reading Hebhzibah Anderson’s excellent memoir, Chastened, one thing I learnt was that sexual abstinence can make a person stronger. But can this apply to involuntary abstinence? Can this apply to a man?

From my traumatic toils, I’d say that involuntary celibacy has simply been an invisible disability. I am not on a wheelchair. I am neither blind nor mute. Yet, without regular sex, or without the mental references of a sexual memory bank, I do feel like a freak, a real-life Shrek. The pains of involuntary celibacy are crippling. It affects all aspects of my life to reduce me to a soldier struggling to keep up the fight from the trenches of 21st century life. I put on a performance of normality around those I live and work. It is an illness that dares not show its real face. Inside, behind the mask of extroversion, I am handicapped by this affliction. I am yet to realise my full potential as a man and a novelist. This life without a feminine presence has me feel like a Porsche, struggling on the permanent punctures to all four of my tyres. I do feel special. Yet what can take me from A to Z – the wheels of a man’s confidence- a sex life, is damaged. In Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain, one character refers to sex as men’s essential ‘revitalising’ ingredient. There has to be a lot of truth to this. When I look around the men in my life, the ones who seem the sanest are the ones with a regular sex life. On the other hand, the men who find it difficult to get girlfriends are perpetual failures in life. There is a look of permanent anger and frustration on their faces. I used to be one of these faces. At least now, I do possess the countenance of a cheerful man, brimming with an inner certainly that my life does have a meaning and a purpose. Despite this crushing fact of a life without the love of a loving woman, I have survived. I have lived to tell the tale. I am living to find a way to make the most of my affliction. How many other men, especially in this sex-obsessed century, can go for most of their adult life without sex? Please think about it. How many men do you know can cope without sex for more than six months?

So, shall I live without women and love for the rest of my life? Well, from now on, I am not going to allow myself to yearn for a girlfriend. According to Einstein, the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. All my life, I wanted a girlfriend. After prolific rejections, I have become this disabled man with a disabled life. Involuntary celibacy had hunchbacked me into a social pariah. I am a social an emotional leper sitting on the grandstand of this carnival of sex.

From now, I choose to be celibate. My purpose on earth is to be the twenty-first century heir to Charles Dickens. Lack of single-mindedness, aided by my perpetual and fruitless longing for a loving woman, has meant a fruitless life. All this shall change soon. Celibacy got me into this hell. So, celibacy is going to have to get me out. I’ll use my womanless existence as a blinker and shackle with which to focus and act on making myself a chronicler of our troubled century. If a woman has adequate emotional intelligence and class, then she will simply fall for me. Otherwise, I’m going to stick to writing… and being voluntarily celibate. This makes me a better man.

© Clooney Brown 10/9/2009.

Affinity With Jane Austen.

It seems that I have a wonderful precursor in the maladies of involuntary celibacy. Most biographers of Jane Austen claim that the greatest nineteenth century woman novelist, who wrote so perecptively about relationships of the heart, was in fact a virgin till her death.

As a novelist, I want to learn from Jane Austen’s ways of coping with this affliction. Of course, in her situation, her celibacy would have had completely different reason. Yet, there are some similarities to do with societeal obstacles.

This blog of Austen should give us more insights:
http://thewrittenword.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/sex-and-the-austen-girl-a-big-giveaway/#comment-13466

Women have sex with men out of pity!

This week, I read a lot of media coverage about a new book of research called “Why Women Have Sex?”

Click on this link:

http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Group/BussLAB/pdffiles/why%20humans%20have%20sex%202007.pdf

This research paper suggests that some women have sex with men out of pity. Well, that’s news to me. In the last 21 years, I have never been that lucky to find the kind of women that these researchers seem to know !

How Do I Live Without Love?

How am I going to cope? I’m 37 years old and I have never had a girlfriend. Women in the past three years have said things along the lines of my being “cute and funny” and “charismatic.” Yet, how come I am unable to attract any woman into my life? Apart from a brief fling in my mid-20s, I’m virtually a virgin. And I don’t want to end up as the much mocked 40 year old virgin.

This is why I want to keep this blog. At best, I might attract a few readers who might be able to give me some empathy that could assuage my pain. At worst, I could at least use this blogging facility as therapy. But I do hope that I am not writing this for just one person. That would be the cyberspace equivalent of performing endless monologues in my room.

In three years time, I would be forty. Where did the youth go? I have no idea what it might have felt like to be loved. I’d give away almost anything to experience that feeling.
What is wrong with me? I’m not disabled. Well, certainly not in a physical way. I have suffered from depression all my life. In childhood, I had good reason to drown in sadness. And in my teens and twenties, I longed for a girlfriend. But the absence of any success just made the depression worse. Now, aged 37, I am worn out by too many rejections. This week, I gave up looking for love and girlfriends. If I keep hoping that my life will change, and find each week bearing no sign of love, I would become frustrated. So, I feel that it would be better than suicide to keep up a journal, in the form of this blog, to chronicle my struggles. May be it might help others who may not be able to write honestly about this embarrassing and shaming affliction.

I haven’t completely addicated all hopes of love. I just want to keep on getting better as a man. If a woman has reasonable emotional intelligence, she simply cannot ignore all my positive qualities. I am better looking and healthier than most men of my generation. I don’t drink alcohol. I stay away from meat, pasta, bread and processed sugars. I live mostly on vegetables. I work out at least three times a day. I feel fitter now than I did when I was eighteen. I work hard in elevating my interpersonal skills from one day to the next. What else can I do? May be you could give me some suggestions.

The plan is this: I’ll keep this blog for the next three years. The goal is to end this 37 year old involuntary celibacy and find a loving and loveable girlfriend before my 40th birthday. I’m going to do whatever I can. Life is brief. And I can’t keep living like I had done in the past 24 years. Please, dear reader, as you come with me on this journey, do suggest how I could improve myself. I thank you in advance.

© Clooney Brown 09/9/2009