Beth announced she’d had sex and we all whooped and cheered. As a general rule, my friends and I don’t keep one another informed about every act of coitus, but this was a special exception. You see, Beth hadn’t had sex in a while — a long while, a two-year while — so celebrations were certainly in order.

How does a smart, beautiful, interesting, fun, sexy 25-year-old woman end up celibate for two years? You’d think that given the existence of OKCupid, Tinder, Craigslist, and dear Lord, Coppers, a young woman in possession of a sane mind and all her own teeth, living in the capital city, would have plenty of opportunities — or at least a few if she wasn’t too fussy. You’d be right, but you’d also be wrong, because it happens more frequently than perhaps you’d think. I call it the slump.
The slump can hit anyone, male or female, at any time. It’s indiscriminate — like the flu. Your first experience of it will probably be sometime between the ages of 22 and 26, after you finish college and have had your first experience of heartbreak. One day, your life is a rose-coloured romantic porn movie; the next, you realise that your soul mate is actually a bit of an arse. Love is dead!
You may have bounced back from the thunder and tears of other romantic disentanglements with barely a scratch, but this time you’re left emotionally bruised and utterly bereft. You decide that you need time out. When your libido returns, and you resurface, things have changed. Your friends have paired off, and even those that haven’t, are either working long hours, unemployed or have gone overseas. You are no longer surrounded by single, irresponsible students – and your once wide social circle seems to have dwindled.
Weeks turn into months, and you start getting sexually antsy. But, for better or worse, the experience of having been in love has changed you. You tell yourself that you can’t have sex with just anybody: it has to be the right kind of person. They have to like you — but, in a new twist you think: “not too much.” You want something friendlier than a one-night stand, but not a relationship. You fear hurting or disappointing someone else; and perhaps even more so, you fear getting hurt again. You’re looking for the perfect but not too perfect compromise person, but he or she is elusive. Months turn into a year, and one year into another.
By this stage, you are practically a reborn virgin. This brings about a fresh set of considerations: do you even remember how to have sex? Will you feel awkward or uncomfortable? Since you’ve been so fussy, should you continue waiting, this time for someone who you know will be patient and understanding if you are less than your sexy best? But then, you never really know, do you? Eventually you realise that all this thinking is getting you nowhere. This is a breakthrough, so you decide: “fuck it.” And you sleep with the next available person, which disrupts the slump and gets you back in the game.
Almost everyone I know has had long periods of involuntary celibacy in their twenties. A year here, two years there, even three years in one case. But not one of them considered joining the involuntary celibate or “incel” community. These folk define involuntary celibacy as a period of six months without a date or sex. Pah! Six months is nothing! That’s not celibacy — that’s a dry spell.
Edward was celibate for over a year after he turned 26. “It was awful!” he laughed. “I didn’t meet anyone who liked me, and after a while I sort of gave up. It didn’t help that my previous girlfriend had cheated on me with at least five guys that I know of, and it took me a while to accept that was because of who she was, not because of something I’d done. I’m not the smoothest or most confident guy anyway and at the time I wasn’t in the right frame of mind.”
I was around 24 when I hit a slump. Before my first serious relationship, I had been a flirtatious butterfly flitting from fling to fling. I assumed that I would revert to this kind of behavior easily again, but I no longer had the heart for it and all the men that approached me were either freaks or unavailable. I don’t know about you, but celibacy seemed preferable to shagging a man who spent a first date vacillating between crying and bitching about his ex-girlfriend and definitely less risky than going home with the taxidermist who wanted written permission to stuff me after I had died.
I could blame it all on the dudes, but in all honesty, the biggest problem was me. I was waiting, like Rapunzel in my tower, for Prince Charming to come along and rescue me, instead of fashioning my own ladder. This was partly my own fault, and partly because heterosexual dating is a minefield of gendered expectations.
Even with new ways of meeting people such as online dating and Tinder, men are generally expected to make the approach. As a woman, this seems to me to be grossly unfair: men get to choose; women wait to be chosen. Any woman who is too eager for sex or a relationship is seen as pathetic, psychotic or easy. Think of the Bridget Jones franchise; Abby Richter in The Ugly Truth; Gigi in He’s Just Not That Into You; Jane Nichols in 27 Dresses; and to of course, Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction. No woman wants to be seen as desperate, and anything other than subtle encouragement can have you pegged as a slutty, yet sex-starved, spinster.
But I am sure if I was a guy I’d find the social conventions around heterosexual dating unfairly weighted too: men get to choose, but they face the possibility of rejection, mockery and accusations of being creepy. Unless you have the charm of a Casanova, you’re going to be shot down every now and again, maybe even most times, and repeated rejection, even if done politely, is bound to wear you out.
There are plenty of people who will argue that a woman merely has to snap her fingers and willing and eager sexual partners will line up, but that’s not true — at least not for everybody. Women face rejection all the time, particularly if they are not conventionally attractive, slim or young. There are also plenty of people who will argue that young men are only interested in sex. Again that’s not true — at least not for everybody.
Reading the tabloids you would think that modern sex lives were a free-for-all that would make a Roman bacchanalia look like a tea party and that young people barely pause between one acrobatic hook-up and the next. For some people that’s true — and good for them — but for most it is not.
Pathologising sexlessness, particularly for a period as short as six months, seems somewhat ridiculous. Some involuntary celibates are merely socially awkward and shy, which makes dating difficult, but not impossible. Others externalise their problems and conclude that all women are bitches or that all men are shallow, which only serves to exacerbate the problem. Most, however, are just regular people who are experiencing the slump.
The slump, like acne, is merely a fact of life. And like acne, you’ll get over it.