Deciding to go off sex for three years was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made and one that I would never make again. At the time I chose abstinence, my relationship with sex was bitter. It was 2016, I was in my mid-30s and having a very bad run in my dating life. The pattern looked something like this: I would meet a guy, become interested in him, have intimacy and the relationship would end soon after. In the story I wove around those events – men chased me for sex, and after securing what they came for, I would be discarded. I reasoned that if I removed sex, then I would remove the tantalising, but distracting bait, and would thereby catch someone who wanted me, for me. At that time, I was also active in the church. Its teachings on abstinence reinforced this belief that sex was bad and a cause of pain and suffering. Initially, I made the decision to be celibate for one year. It was a success – success being defined by the absence of emotional pain in my dating life. This was mostly because my dating life also dried up. I was making less of an effort, and having sex off the table also removed some men’s initial interest. I had also redirected my energy to other pursuits, which I found fulfilling. As a result, my emotional world was more stable. This felt like an improvement from the volatility I had experienced coming in and out of dating stints. I was also buoyed by a sense of valour in my sacrifice of worldly indulgence. Church doctrine told me that happiness had to be earned: by giving up something in the short-term, I would be rewarded with what I really wanted in the long run: a real loving relationship. But into the third year, celibacy didn’t feel so good any more. I was living in a life without pleasure, not just the physicality of sex, but the play of flirting and the delicious uncertainty of sexual tension. I wasn’t fully living. A subtle sadness settled in. It felt like something inside was drying up. I was disconnected from my body and my sensuality. Fissures in my connection with the church were also appearing. I wasn’t getting the sense of community and connection that I needed from that space. Most people in the church were already married and I didn’t quite belong. Planning a trip to Iceland delivered the fatal crack in my resolve to stay out in the cold. I had met an Icelandic man online and decided to travel to Reykjavik to meet him. In the process of deciding what I would be open to on that trip, I had to ask myself a new question. Would I be willing to invest in this trip of a lifetime, but deny myself a part of the experience? I started to carve distance from the voices of my own stories, self-judgment and that of the church. I listened instead to what I was denying – the whispers of my spirit and my body that wanted to be fully engaged in life. In July 2019, I went to Iceland. And although the sex that ended my dry spell was disappointing, I knew that I was better off out of the cocoon of celibacy than in it. I continued to be open and, in the years since, I’ve had a mixture of good, bad, amazing and mediocre sexual encounters. But now I appreciate them all as being interesting experiences, part of the adventure of being alive. I can now see that what I did back in 2016 was create a story around a series of events which cast sex as the villain. I blamed sex, instead of looking at how I was making decisions about who I was getting involved with. I can see now that the quality of my experience is not and was never sex’s fault. What I learned about myself is that pleasure, being connected to my body and engaged with my sexuality are important to me and a joyful part of being alive. I know myself now as a sensual woman, who needs adventure, play and all kinds of connection. I also learned that the stories I create about things are more damaging than the things themselves. That’s why I know I will never choose to be abstinent again. I have rewritten the story. However, taking sex away for a time was one of the things that helped give me that clarity. It was a meditative pause, a chance for reflection to ask, “Who am I? What’s important to me? What do I need and what do I really want?”