My best friend hasn't had sex in 5 years

And she feels perfectly sexually fulfilled

Mira and I have been friends since high school and there’s hardly anything we wouldn’t talk to each other about, including the last time we had sex, and how we take care of hair down there — So a few months ago, as we settled into my couch with our nimbu panis and waited for our Chinese food to arrive, the conversation floated to when the last time we’d had sex was.

“Work has been so full-on these last few months and I haven’t made any time for it,” I complained, as I did the mental gymnastics of trying to figure out if I’d have a sliver of time next week to, um, schedule some in.

“Well, um, I haven’t had sex in five years,” Mira answered, raising her eyebrows as she took a sip of her drink.

“Wait, what?”

“I know. It’s been really fucking long, but I’ve had some really good orgasms in the mean time!” she laughed.

I was shocked, but also intrigued. Since I became sexually active, I haven’t gone more than 6 months without having sex. So five years seemed a ridiculously long amount of time.

Five years ago Mira got out of a horrible relationship that left her questioning not just her self-worth, but the intentions of men in general. She’s straight, so her dating pool is all penises. And while many penises are absolutely wonderful, she couldn’t figure out which ones were trustworthy and which would hurt her, so she just avoided them all. And that meant she wasn’t having any sex.

Women are often dealing with a double edged sword when it comes to, well, everything in life, but also sex. We’re taught not to be promiscuous, not to be open about our views on sex, not to be honest about the sex we might be having. “Virginity” remains high on the list of things people look for in traditional marriage settings and when it’s not explicitly on the list, it’s expected that you give off the air of virginity.

Yet the opposite is also true, especially in more open and liberal circles. If you aren’t having sex, there must also be something wrong with you. There is a sort of pressure to have sex, have sex in a new/exciting/novel way and then say you are having said sex.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

But sex is complicated, as you well know. There are countless reasons why a person wouldn’t want to have sex or be intimate with another person. Depression, anxiety, existential angst, but also less complex reasons like just not being in the mood. We aren’t ever owed an explanation as to why, but it was wonderful to dive into why Mira wasn’t having any at the time.

She said that for a while it was about self-preservation and a lack of trust in what life would throw at her next, but then came the pandemic and sleeping with a stranger became an actual physical danger. She lived with her parents and didn’t want to put anyone else at risk.

“But I sexted a lot during that time. Like A LOT. It was both strange and delightful how many boys slid into my DMs.”

At the time, as she was getting out of her messy relationship, she didn’t feel ready to fling herself back into dating and the pandemic offered the perfect in-between of w(h)etting her sexual appetite and drawing boundaries to work through things at her own pace. She loved exploring her sexuality this way, not having to take her clothes off for other people, but still being able to get off.

The specific combination of sexting and the pandemic offered her a space where she was able to survey the landscape, gain an understanding of what she wanted and what got her all hot and bothered, but keep a safe distance from a physical intimacy she wasn’t yet ready for.

Since I started Leezu’s, I haven’t had nearly as much personal time as I normally like. I’m busy creating toys and content to expand people’s approach to sexual health and wellness, but being in start-up mode doesn’t leave a lot of time for dating. At the very most there is sporadic sex, sprinkled through the months when I have a night off from my many commitments.

“You always have your toys, though,” says Mira. “Just because you aren’t having an orgasm with someone else, doesn’t mean you can’t have them at all.”

She’s right. My drawers full of sex toys aren’t just for show! They’re for research purposes and my, how well and how often I undertake that research.

Often, especially in long-term monogamous relationships, sex gets put on the back burner. It might not be intentional, but it often falls to the bottom of the priority list. If you’re going the more traditional route, rent, marriage, monthly expenses, children, their monthly expenses and all the responsibilities that come with sharing a life with other people, that shit tends to take precedence. Even if you don’t have these more conventional responsibilities, say you’re in a long-term relationship but not married and don’t have kids, you still have some version of them: job stress, loneliness, burnout, family pressure.

It’s assumed that a long-term relationship/marriage guarantees lots of sex and lots of sexual satisfaction, but this is far from the truth. Perhaps they offer the potential for those things, but they aren’t assured and always take effort, practice, communication, scheduling. They take work. Staying sexually inspired as a couple for years and years takes work.

It’s also typically assumed that sex within a marriage/long-term relationship always ought to be a two-person job. Many people think of masturbation as a thing you do when you’re single and don’t have any other options. And that when you are in a serious relationship, masturbation is something you would only do if your partner can’t satisfy you. While that may be some people’s reason to masturbate even though they “have a partner”, it certainly isn’t the only one.

Mira would argue that sex need not be a two person job. Is having sex with another person the only thing that makes us sexual beings? For too long we’ve equated this (having sex with another person) to intimacy. But what if we reframed intimacy as also a closeness to ourselves, to our own needs and desires.

Whether single or in a relationship, one person (yourself) is more than enough to feel the sweet toe curling sensation of sexual uninhibitedness, arousal and a great orgasm and cultivating a sense of intimacy with ourselves can give us just that.

Mira’s lack of sex was never a lack of desire.

“I’m a really horny person,” she laughs. “Don’t get me wrong. I really love having an orgasm - something I’m not always able to have with a guy, and I love having sex. All these years that I’ve taken a break from sex in the conventional way we often define it - with another person - doesn’t mean I’ve taken a break from pleasure, desire or orgasms. It just looked different. And honestly, it sometimes looked better.”

Mira says she has truly appreciated this time of self-exploration and sees it more as a gift and over time, reframed it for herself as a, some might say radical, choice to prioritise herself.

We live in a world where the convention, once you reach adulthood (whatever that is), is to find a partner, get married or commit to a relationship, potentially have children and, well, go from there. Both of us have had the privilege to choose outside of that convention and explore what it means to live a life that attempts to skirt the patriarchy.

What this means, though, is that we’re often being asked where our husbands are, whether people are simply being nosey, or pondering whether or not to rent an apartment to us. But it’s not just the older generation who are wondering where the partner is, right? People our own age are sometimes perplexed by our choices to live outside of this convention and, after all, I was also surprised by Mira’s decision to spend over 5 years “sex-free”.

“I often thought that I was sexually liberated,” Mira said, “but I was still in the confines of a relationship.” Mira reflected that she was exploring her sexuality, but was navigating that space with another person, through their gaze, not solely her own. There wasn’t any obvious judgement present, she even explored BDSM with some partners, but still felt she had a lot to learn independent of another person.

“I always wondered whether what I liked would be shared by my partner, or whether they’d judge me or think I was strange. I was definitely exploring my sexuality filtered through a shared experience. How the other person would respond or react, what I could do for the other person, what they could do for me. It was exhausting after a point and took the pleasure out of the act, honestly.”

Through all of that, Mira feels the vision of her desire and pleasure was blurred by the relationality of it to another person.

“Once I’d gone through this loooooong period of only pleasuring myself, I finally had a clear idea of what pleasure meant to me outside of a relationship. How I liked to make myself orgasm, where I liked to be touched, what I wanted done to me, what I wanted to do myself. I can count the number of times a partner has made me orgasm without my help, or a toy’s, on one hand!”

Come to think of it, my introduction to a vibrator had also introduced me to a real orgasm.

As I’ve said before, there are countless women in my DMs who either through my own sex education content on Instagram or through a toy from Leezu’s have arrived at their first orgasm. Many of them didn’t know they could have an orgasm or were confused about what it felt like, questioning whether they’d ever actually had one. While women are loud and proud in some porn, they’re often taught to be demure and reserved in real life, indicating that a full on exploration of our sexual desires is unimaginable.

Betty Dodson, an American sex educator and artist encouraged participants in her workshops (which were at first didactic and eventually experiential), to look at their vulvas in mirrors, to really see what was going on down there and embrace and love them. Honouring our own bodies solo is a way to create confidence and power when we then share our bodies with other people.

Dodson believed that in order for partnered sex to be good, women needed to know what they wanted and be able to show their partners. Like Mira reflected, she found herself moulding her sexual desires to what her partners seemed to want, unconsciously letting them take the lead.

“And that’s why we have a situation where I can count on one hand the number of times a man has made me come without my help!” she laughs.

Armed with an actual intimate knowledge of her own body, Mira not only feels extremely sexually satisfied, but so much more confident and prepared and excited for a time when she returns to partnered sex.

The familiar advice that we enter relationships having “worked on ourselves” could easily include sex and how we interact with and understand our own bodies. Of course you don’t have to go five years without having sex in order to come to this conclusion, but think how wonderful it would be to feel fully confident in the knowledge of what you want sexually. And think how fantastic it would be to then bring that to another person, one who is just as enthusiastic about putting all that knowledge to work.