Written by T.O.
When I decided to become celibate, it was simply because my PCOS had been driving me crazy in my relationship at the time. I had just been diagnosed, and I would have crazy symptoms accompanied by intermittent bleeding episodes that showed up like bad weather with no warning. And when my period finally came, she would take her precious time and could sometimes last as long as three months.
Imagine trying to be intimate or sexual with a never-ending blood flow. I had bigger problems, like visiting the pharmacy and trying to find supplements or a drug that could make it stop!
As if the mental whiplash from the hormonal chaos and other symptoms I was juggling weren’t enough, amenorrhoea decided to hit me like a freight train.
In all honesty, maybe I fall on the asexual spectrum; I enjoy physical intimacy if and when I like said person—don’t touch me if I don’t! I think basic foreplay is great as well, but I’ve never been a huge fan of penetrative sex. So you can imagine the confusion when having it now came with a huge question mark. Because if I couldn’t exactly calculate my periods and said periods now felt comfortable going ghost for up to three months, how do I know when it’s just PCOS? What if I had something else now? What if a mini-me had started growing in there? A friend of mine had just confided in me about getting pregnant after a six-month straight amenorrhoea stretch. So I knew it was possible, and my head kept spinning every time I missed my period.
For my sanity, I knew I had to stop having sex. And when I eventually did, it became one of the best decisions I had made in my adult life.
Celibacy brought me a deep sense of clarity and a type of peace that I truly cannot explain; I watched myself grow into a woman who now knew what she truly wanted from intimacy, love, and partnership. I also watched myself slowly reconnect to my religious beliefs and grow a deeper relationship with God, and I was the happiest I had been in years. Now, this is where it gets juicy.
A number of men, especially our Nigerian brothers, do not respect boundaries, and from my experience going on several dates, when most of them hear ‘I want to abstain’ or ‘I’m celibate’, they immediately think it’s a joke. They sometimes think it means you just haven’t found the right person to rock your world into giving up your decision. Then they assume it’s them and that you’d change your mind after a few dates and a little lip gymnastics with their tongue down your throat. But when you include the God factor or, for any reason, mention ‘till marriage’, watch them disappear faster than airtime on a bad network.
Though I embraced the idea of celibacy in 2021, it wasn’t until early 2022, after one last slip, that I fully committed to it and decided not to date at all for a year.
By 2023, I was back on the dating streets, and I don’t think I was prepared for how sexually forward our generation had become. Because boy was it tough! It felt like sex had become an imposed transaction or an expectation, and abstinence for any reason was taboo.
When I went on the date that had me write this essay, this fine young man kept redirecting every conversation back to a sexual anecdote, and I was sick of it, so I began firing away. I asked him questions resembling:
What’s your personality outside of sex? When you’re not bragging about the 200 positions you’d like to put me in and the 50 ways you can make me cum, what else do you bring to the table? Are you even able to have intellectual conversations? Can you stimulate me without having to touch me or ‘talk dirty’ all the time? Do you have midnight chats outside of ‘what are you wearing’?
There was a long pause. I could tell he was immediately annoyed. Good, that made two of us.
I realised a lot of times, people were just pushing through the talking stage to get to the banging stage. And when there’s suddenly no banging stage in view, some people have absolutely nothing to offer.
He finally responded with, ‘Wait, you’re actually serious about not wanting to have sex at all?’’
And followed it up with an “In that case, be prepared, because you will remain single forever o.”
He laughed it off obnoxiously and brushed it off as a joke, and though I was stunned by his audacity to say that to me, I was honestly not surprised that he believed none of his gender would be able to hold out on coitus till marriage.
It was obvious we were never meeting up again after that, so that wasn’t a date that hurt to walk away from; it was the one after that, where I actually liked the guy but my celibacy was still a ‘huge problem’ for him. Sad as it was, we’re all entitled to our choices.
There was once a time when I would pretend to agree vaguely or avoid mentioning celibacy at all costs so I wouldn’t get ditched along the line, and I hated that about myself. But not anymore. Now, I will bring it up o, so I can hear where they stand on time.
And if being ‘single forever’ means I get to skip ‘the extra horny’, ‘the emotionally unavailable’, and ‘the aimless’ until I meet someone who respects my boundaries and shares the same values, then, baby, sign me up. I’m good company, that’s for sure.
