Not long ago I asked my brother, who is 44, what effect the AIDS epidemic was having on his sex life. I suppose it was the slightly smug question of a man who has been married for a long time.
Kenny was still out there on what looked from my safe harbor to be a dangerous playing field in any number of ways. About three years ago, he broke up painfully with the woman who seemed for a while as if she might be the one. Since then, he hadn’t said anything about anyone new.
I was expecting an answer along the lines of what Jack Nicholson recently told an interviewer: “The world has changed. Before you take a girl to bed you have to discuss the plague. I can’t deal with these sorts of negatives as a form of foreplay. So I don’t bother much.”
What Kenny actually said took me by surprise. It had been 3 1/2 years since he’d made love, so he felt AIDS really didn’t affect him at all. He was celibate. By choice.
Then I began to consider a buddy who had not been with a woman for as long as I could remember; presumably he had chosen to be celibate, too. At lunch I mentioned casually to yet another friend that I knew these guys who were quietly abstinent, and he surprised me even more by saying, “I was celibate until I met C—-,” the woman he lives with now.
Sexual reticence apparently had come full circle. When men my age were much younger, if they were lucky enough to do it at all, they kept it quiet out of respect for the girl’s reputation. Now it sounded like you kept it quiet if you weren’t doing it.
A quiet phenomenon
All three celibates had certain apparent things in common. They were white, college-educated and between the ages of 43 and 51, Bill Clinton’s generation. None of them was a Moral Majority type. On the contrary, though their politics differed, they were all tolerant, and no more rigid than men get as time goes on. Yet they had all for some reason chosen to abstain from sex.
To find out whether this choice was a quirk of a few guys I happened to know, or something more commonplace, I went to Bernie Zilbergeld, an Oakland, Calif., psychologist and author of two books on male sexuality.
Male, middle-aged celibacy was a quiet phenomenon, Zilbergeld said. “My impression is, in over 20 years in this work, that there’s a lot more abstinence and celibacy than anybody knows. I’ve worked with male virgins in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. A fairly significant minority out there isn’t playing.”
Marrieds say `no,’ too
He also knew lots of married men who were abstaining.
“There are plenty of guys in marriages, or stable relationships, who become celibate, too. Contrary to the standard testosterone mythology, a lot of men have sex but don’t get a lot out of it. They’re great candidates for celibacy-it’s easy to drop out because the payoff isn’t that great,” Zilbergeld said.
Surveys often missed these people. “They feel bad about what they’re not doing,” the psychologist explained. “They’re not likely to volunteer this information, so they always get under-reported.”
So I asked all three men to talk about how and why they had chosen celibacy, what it was like, and how it was working for them.
What I found was that although the experiences that had caused all of them to become abstinent were pretty much the same, their reasons for thinking it was the right choice differed considerably. It was a respite for one weary spirit. For my brother, it was a chance to redirect his life. And for my friend Terry, it had become his way of life.
Celibate No. 1: Terry
Terry Shouse lived with seven women for a total of 32 years before he finally concluded in 1984 that “it wasn’t worth it. I backed off and I haven’t gotten involved since.”
At 51, Terry (a fictitious name) doesn’t date and fends off a diminishing number of opportunities. “I wouldn’t want to go out with anybody who would be interested in me,” he says, paraphrasing Groucho.
As if to deflect any interest in him, Terry, who was a lean 6-foot-3 when I met him in the mid-’70s, has let himself go, and wears shapeless clothes.
The trouble for him began, he says, when he realized that he would walk into “a room with 100 women in it and get the hots for the woman with the biggest problems in the room.” Almost any problems would do, as long as they were out of control.
Some lovers fell apart emotionally while living with him while others bossed and badgered him, he says. But the consistent fact that the women he liked invariably had problems worse than his own gave him a sense of doom about any relationship he entered into.
“I get along real well with women now,” Terry says. “It works out swell if you’re not involved in sexual things. I won’t deny there is a certain element of misogyny, but by and large I enjoy women’s company.”
The breakup blues
Terry’s abstinence began with the breakup of a long love affair. In fact, all three men’s stories began that same way. Terry was living with a woman who he says was falling apart. Of course, he was no bed of roses himself, having become deeply depressed and staying mostly in bed, where he had plenty of time to think about how he was repeating his pattern with women.
Without ever discussing it, they stopped making love. He didn’t miss it very much and still doesn’t. “The sex drive is not that big an urge,” he says, confirming one of Zilbergeld’s observations.
“If there was some simple way of enjoying occasional sex outside of prostitutes, then I would do it,” Terry says. “But there isn’t.” He laughs and so do I: We’re thinking the same thing. If there was some way to have occasional friendly sex outside of prostitution half the married men in the world would be single.
Although he now lives with a male roommate (“Demographically we’re gay. We get some awfully funny mail.”), what he misses most as a celibate is the involvement that comes from being with a woman.
“The sense of being in life, that’s the thing I miss,” he says. “You can go on, function as an individual, and you can essentially get through days but I think the sense of living life is hard to get if you’re not with a woman.”
He makes up for the lack, in part, by being close to two married couples with children. Some of their kids call him “Uncle Terry.”
For sanity’s sake
But Terry’s inner life is truncated by being alone. “If you’re close to a woman, you’re essentially looking at things from two different points of view, yours and hers. And that enlarges your vision in other ways.”
He doesn’t regret his decision. “I can’t say that I miss a whole lot else.” Celibacy is the price he had to pay for something he felt was unavoidable. “I decided for sanity’s sake. It got dangerous after a while. I could afford only so many failures.”
And his decision is final. “I’ve basically opted for being old. By the time I’m really old, I’m going to be really good at it,” he says with a laugh.
Celibate No. 2: Kenny
For my brother, Kenny, as he explained over a warm hibiscus drink and a vegetarian meal in Santa Cruz, no single event or defining moment took him out of the mating game.
“There wasn’t a day when I decided to be celibate,” he says. “I made little decisions that added up to a bigger result. One decision certainly was I didn’t want to be promiscuous anymore. I used to be able to juggle three or four women. That would be impossible now.
“Something changed, I guess after I hit 40. The desire is still there, there are beautiful women around, but the casual thing just doesn’t appeal to me anymore.”
As with Terry Shouse, Kenny’s path toward abstinence began with the breakup of his last relationship with a woman. And like Terry also, he was unhappy with a pattern in his own mating behavior: He invariably ended up living with women he genuinely liked and with whom he was comfortable, but for whom he felt no passion.
`Trigger-shy’
His drawn-out breakup with his girlfriend about 3 1/2 years ago was draining. “I was in shock for about six months. I wasn’t even in the realm of going out and finding somebody else. I was absorbed in the pain and the memory.”
As the pain receded, he found he had become “trigger-shy. I lost some confidence that I could meet someone and it was going to be good. That I could care for someone really deeply, and they could care for me.”
Unlike Terry Shouse, who took three strikes and declared himself out, Kenny remains in the on-deck circle. But the prospect of ever stepping up to the plate again is daunting.
“When you’re dating someone, you’re both single, and you’ve been through this story for a number of years, everything seems so delicate. Unless there is that underlying connection. One wrong statement, one wrong look-I don’t really mean wrong, just a thing that strikes the other person that way-and they’re out of there. It hangs in such a delicate balance.”
`Why bother?’
What he wants now is clear to him. “Chemistry plus friendship. Love. Real caring. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?”
The longer he is alone with his cat in his nearly monastic apartment, the less inclined he is to make any kind of move without first feeling swept away.
“Unless that’s there, why bother?” Kenny asks. He says he’s always known immediately if that passion and caring was present, but before now he would override what he knew to his own eventual regret.
Now he has begun to ask himself whether his nature is, after all, solitary. He’s lived with women only twice, and never for more than two years. “You know how the mind will spin out. You’re walking down the street, the mind is weighing scenario upon scenario, possibilities, reasons, and that becomes a burden. I have to tell myself to shut up.”
He finds surcease in the teachings of guru Maharaj Ji, and in meditation.
And he’s not getting any younger. Though he is slim, and his hair is still mostly black, it was a shock when a woman in her mid-20s told him casually that someone his age was too old for her.
But if Terry Shouse’s celibacy is a complete withdrawal, Kenny’s is more a case of returning to the beginning and starting again. The advantage of age, perhaps its only advantage, is that he now knows what he is looking for.
“Something inside has to be feeling, `There’s enough here.’ Then I’ll do it.”
Celibate No. 3: Francis
Francis’ celibacy, which ended almost two years ago, got him what he wanted.
It began with his then-wife leaving him. “I felt a self-righteous indignation” at her behavior, he says, and a determination to maintain his own “sense of decorum.”
Raised Catholic in a small town, and now a successful Silicon Valley communications executive, Francis (a fictitious name) could not easily accept the breakup of his long, monogamous marriage. He became depressed.
“I really feared going through it again, getting wired up, falling in love, and then the relationship would run its course and I would be here again. That would be devastating.”
His own moral values prevented him from “taking my pleasure elsewhere.” After a decade as a husband, he was awkward to the point of humiliation as a single man. He was terrified, also, “of going down in flames from AIDS.” Yet the notion of asking a potential partner for her medical bonafides was contrary to his sense of romance.
His feeling about rejoining the dating game was that the world had passed him by.
“It feels too difficult”
Zilbergeld, the sex therapist, says that “everybody has that feeling these days, no matter how long they’ve been out of it, that things have changed. It feels too difficult. They’re just not ready for it.”
“I begged off on a lot of fix-ups,” Francis says. “I mean, good salary, healthy, not a bad catch. But absolutely no inclination to get back into a social scene that would require some kind of tango, some mating dance. . . . And maybe I was incapable of being intimate? What better way to protect yourself? Be by yourself.”
So Francis devoted himself to his young children, and when they were with their mother, to cultivating a part of himself that he still liked.
“I remember taking great solace . . . in quiet self-indulgence. I was quite willing to abide myself, to read, to hike, to walk senior citizens home from church, and call myself a generally good guy.”
Looking back now he realizes that his two-plus years of sexual and social abstinence were “a stop-and-catch-your-breath situation. Maybe I was posing, but I believed in what I was doing. I was conducting myself in accordance with how I wanted the world to perceive me. Literally reconstructing myself in a way that I thought was upright.”
A major makeover
All three of the men who chose celibacy saw their unhappiness as an opportunity to exercise a greater self-control that went with maturity; to make themselves anew in accordance with whom they had belatedly discovered they really were.
Terry wants the easefulness of old age while he is still young enough to feed himself. Kenny hopes he is capable of finding true love because he can settle for nothing less. Francis had to do the right thing, he kept the faith.
“I remember fantasizing about living a celibate, quiet, purposeful, self-sustaining life,” Francis recalls. “I was sitting alone with a glass of wine and a book at sunset, and I realized that what I was going through wasn’t intellectual, it was the way I was. How exquisitely simple.”
No sooner, naturally, had he accepted the joys of his newly discovered nature than he met the woman he would fall in love with, “in the blink of an eye.” That was 2 1/2 years ago, and he says, “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.
“It may be self-righteous to say,” Francis concludes, looking back over his years of celibacy, “but when I walked through that door and into her arms I came through clean.”
