Literary Wench: Time-out: Growing-up Poly Part X

In my late teens—the time when, not so coincidentally, I became a mother— society won for a bit and I put my inner sexual/poly child in time-out. I basically decided that I was a slut and that I needed to change, and so I went into a period of celibacy that lasted for about five years. Yes, I know, I can hear the collective gasp—and I can’t believe it myself.

Okay, to be fair, I wasn’t completely celibate—maybe 90%. I went from being a girl who had sex whenever she felt like it, to a woman who successfully fought her natural urges—most of the time. For the first couple of years of this dark, dark period I indulged a few times—usually with a friend who would visit me on occasion and help me find new and interesting places in the Arizona desert to have sex—but for the last couple of years I went cold turkey.

This didn’t stop me from craving sex, of course, or from wanting something other than monogamy—I just came to see non-monogamy as something I would outgrow if I tried hard enough, and I thought I should stop having sex with men who didn’t have “I want to be with you and only you for a long time” potential. Of course I know now that no man, or woman, has that potential, but then I was still more than a little delusional.

I did eventually snap out of it, but not before spending an awful lot of time denying myself and my desires. It would be easy to look at this period as time wasted, but I don’t. I regret a couple of opportunities that I passed on, but I can’t regret the time itself because it was spent on intense self-reflection and exploration as I read, watched, and took the time to really learn about myself and what I needed.

**This series originally appeared at http://lookingthrough.us/