The art of living without sex

After his divorce, Carl Cederström decided to become celibate, focusing instead on his kids, his book, baking bread, and folding plastic bags into tiny triangles. But is there still space for physical intimacy?

Cederstrom's newfound self is one part Japanese monk and one part American housewife (TT News Agency/PA)

I am folding plastic bags into small triangles. I take out all the old stuff from dark wardrobes and forgotten pantries. I fold the clothes into neat bundles and pour food into transparent plastic containers on to which I paste dymo labels. I stop going out and start baking bread and planting flowers.

To “sublimate”, I learn from the dictionary, is a phenomenon that is closely associated with sexual drives and aims to elevate something to a higher plane, especially through spiritual, intellectual, artistic, scientific or altruistic activity. To which of these elevated activities plastic-bag folding belongs I never learn.

It’s Easter and we have not yet moved apart. She’s in a house in the country with her parents and the children. Everyone thinks I’m with friends in the forest, but I’m alone at home in town. The documents are already written and submitted. The sun is flooding in through the kitchen window and I am sitting newly divorced on the floor, gently stroking plastic bags, and I don’t feel as broken as I look.

“So now you’re single,” says a friend a few weeks later, when I’m eating spaghetti with her and her guy. “God, how exciting!”

I don’t understand what’s so exciting about it. I do not long for what has been, but neither for what is to come. I can’t get used to the word “single”. “Divorced and separated” sounds harsher, but still easier to say. The French use the word célibataire (single), even better. Or the English celibate. Why not celibateur?

When we talk about men who live a life without physical intimacy, we almost always think of young men living in involuntary celibacy (Incel). According to the caricature, they are ugly and live alone in front of their computers and hate women. Incels captured the world’s attention on 23 May 2014 when Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured another 14 in California. Then he took his own life, but not before explaining in a video that he was 22 years old and never got to kiss a girl. And how he was taking revenge on all the women who never wanted to have sex with him and on all the men who were more attractive than him and always got to have sex.

But I feel no connection with Rodger and the aggressive incel movement. They are like screaming billboards that obscure the view of the melancholy landscape of significantly more interesting men who throughout history have lived without sex.

Heterosexual men who reject women have always aroused suspicion. In one of the oldest scriptures ever found, Instructions of Shuruppak (dating from around 2600-2500 BC), a father speaks to his son and says that he should marry because the married man is well equipped, while “the unmarried makes his bed in a haystack”. The father warns his son not to have sex with slave girls (”she will chew you up”), prostitutes (”she is a mouth that bites“) or married women (”the slander could be serious”). But the most shameful thing of all is to not sleep with anyone. For a man without a woman is lost: “Losing yourself is bad for a dog, but terrible for a man.”

In the first book of Genesis, we read: “Be fruitful and multiply.” But in Matthew’s gospel, in a more disputed passage, it says, “there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.”

I buy Japanese clothes on the internet with money I don’t really have and get my hair cut at a stylist who is too cool for me, telling myself that this is something I do for myself and not for anyone else

I go out late one night for a drink with an old friend, who is also divorced. She says it’s unfair. That I as a 40-year-old man can have sex with however many young good-looking girls I want, but that the same rules do not apply to her. “I could roll out a red carpet to you with 25-year-old girls all over it,” she says. I say I’m not interested. Mostly because I don’t believe her.

Paris, late 1110s. The charismatic philosophy teacher Abelard was about my age, almost 40, and his love affair with his 22-year old student, Héloïse, had been discovered. Her uncle was furious, so the lovers fled the city and made plans to get married in secret, because she was pregnant. One night the uncle’s men thundered into Abelard’s room with knives and made him sexless.

I buy Japanese clothes on the internet with money I don’t really have and get my hair cut at a stylist who is too cool for me, telling myself that this is something I do for myself and not for anyone else.

Alexandria, sometime back in the second century. The Christian scholar Origenes made himself into a eunuch of his own free will. According to legend, he had a doctor perform the procedure. The man who shot the man who shot Abraham Lincoln performed the procedure on himself. He used scissors.

I renounce all pleasures to work on my new book, which is supposed to be about fatherhood, but which is not really about anything, because whatever I do, I keep coming back to the hermits, the eunuchs, the sexless. I read about the Desert Fathers and Saint Antony who fought against their desires and eventually left everything behind to run out into the desert.

I used to cry regularly as a child. Then I quit, sometime in high school, and didn’t start again until last year. My horizontal life, I realise now, follows exactly the same pattern, except in reverse. A long childhood devoid of sex, followed by a life where physical intimacy is a natural part of it – which only ends a quarter of a century later. The moment one stops the other starts. Almost every night, when the children are asleep and all the things are in their boxes, I sit on the sofa and listen to old songs with tears streaming down my face.

Spring turns into summer and one evening a beautiful woman with long dark hair pops into the corner of my eye. I am flattered when I hear from her afterwards and we decide to see one another a week later. In the days before she comes to my house I feel the first stirrings of desire.

The day she is due to come to my place, I go to the supermarket and buy condoms and a frozen pie for lunch

All his life, Mahatma Gandhi was in constant revolt against himself and his desires. He got married at the age of 13 and three years later he was sitting at his dying father’s side, massaging his feet. When his uncle suggested that they take a break, the horny teenager rushed into a bedroom with his wife. In the middle of the act, a servant interrupted them to tells Gandhi that his father was dead.

A few months later, his wife suffered a miscarriage. Gandhi was certain that these tragedies were caused by his carnal sins. On several occasions during his marriage, Gandhi ran away from his wife, or forced her to live with his parents, because his craving was too strong. Gandhi was as old as I am now when he decided to live in celibacy. Much later, as a 70-year-old widower, he began to share his bed with naked teenage girls. He said it was to test his resilience.

The day she is due to come to my place, I go to the supermarket and buy condoms and a frozen pie for lunch. I put on the oven and before it is hot I have texted her to cancel the date. I say I have too much to do, and won’t be good company. And I continue to work on the book that is growing backwards. A few days later, I write to her again, more truthfully, explaining that as a new singleton I am completely not in the market for anything that sounds like a date. She replies that she understands. Then radio silence.

Everything must be neatly tucked away in drawers (TT News Agency/PA)

During the summer I collect pictures of green colours on Pinterest and start renovating the apartment with money I do not have. I get help from a close friend. One evening, while we are painting, he says: “You should strike now, I think. Before you get too old and ugly. While you can still get someone good-looking.”

Gustave Flaubert was only 23 when he wrote to a friend: “Sex games have nothing more to teach me.” He continued: “It is now two years since I last had coitus; and, in a few days, a year since I performed any lascivious act. I no longer experience in the presence of any skirt even the desire that springs from curiosity, that impels you to strip the veil from the unknown and look for something new. I must have fallen very low, since the sight of a brothel inspires me with no urge to enter it.”

I go to Dalarna in Sweden to write the book that does not want to be written and my friend informs me in the car that I am a “copper monk”. What is that, I wonder? “No sex for three three months. You become a Silver monk after not having had sex for six months.”

“Well then, I’m a silver monk,” I say. She laughs: “If you manage to stay away from sex for a whole year, you can call yourself Gold monk!”

 I cultivate a new identity and tell friends about my newfound self, who is one part Japanese monk and one part American housewife

In the autumn I am on a work trip in Skåne and go to Malmö to meet someone from the past. I bring the condoms I bought at the supermarket even though I know nothing will happen. It’s been 10 years since we last met and she says I look the same as when we first met, almost 20 years ago, and I smile and pretend to believe her. We part with a long hug and we never see one another again.

On the way back to Lund, I ask the taxi driver to stop at the edge of the city so I can walk through the wet autumn air and experience the old places, the scents and memories of what once was.

Contrary to the myth, according to a 2018 survey, 10 per cent of all Swedes never have sex. In another survey, from 2019, it is said that 20 per cent of Sweden's adult population (16-84 years) have not had sex in the past year. One-fifth are solid gold monks. I know friends who have lived in sexless marriages and relationships for a long time, and although they have sometimes expressed sadness about it, it is not a subject they want to speak about for very long.

I start watching YouTube videos about American housewives who are demonstrating how to make perfect beds and arrange cushions on couches. I borrow interior magazines from a neighbour and sew velvet curtains with my mother and sit up late in the evenings, bidding on children’s furniture on online auctions. I get a book entitled The Art of Simple Living, and follow the advice of the Japanese Zen monk: get up early, plan my days, meditate, drink tea, and talk to my flowers and plants. I cultivate a new identity and tell friends about my newfound self, who is one part Japanese monk and one part American housewife.

I explain to my analyst that everything is actually pretty good now. I don’t feel I need anyone. I already have everything I need. The physical proximity I get from the children. I have a caring family. Friends I can talk to about everything. A job that is free and meaningful. Then I tell the therapist about the plastic bags and wardrobes and the breads I bake. She asks if I have difficulty with physical intimacy. I feel she has misunderstood everything.

Gandhi never got any peace. Almost 70 years old and still masturbating, he was so disappointed with himself that he planned to write about it and make his failure public. He was stopped at the last second by a friend. I also experiment with chastity for a short period, but soon realised that it only makes things worse. I am a sexual being and, over time, learn to handle my desires on my own, without shame or disgust. Gandhi learned to keep his hands away but was plagued by nocturnal emissions.

Afraid that an answer will lead to a date that will lead to a relationship that will lead to a new life without freedom and where everything I have built up during the year will collapse

I take a job I don’t want to pay for the bill for all the renovations and start getting up in the middle of the night to catch up with the work. Late November, the children’s rooms are ready and I read for them before we put the lights out. Now they sleep a deep sleep in their well-made beds and almost never come to me during the night. The king-size bed has been replaced with the single bed I bought as a 19-year-old, and now I lie there, in the narrow bed that feels far too wide, and my oxytocin levels drop through the floor.

I have dinner with a friend, and suddenly find myself at a party and talking to a woman who is radiant with vitality. I think of the thought that so rarely occurs to me, and which soon disappears, and I walk home alone in the morning cold. She gets in touch with me the following day and writes something funny, but I soon stop answering her because I am too afraid.

Afraid that my quiet but solid life will fall apart. Afraid that an answer will lead to a date that will lead to a relationship that will lead to a new life without freedom and where everything I have built up during the year will collapse like a house of cards and that I will then be stuck in something I don’t really want and find myself being forced to give up what I do want: a close relationship with my children and my friends and time to write and read and organise wardrobes. My new woman friend sends me a number of new messages - fun and nice - but I still don't respond.

Christmas is approaching and I buy a Christmas tree that goes all the way up to the ceiling and I order big boxes of Christmas decorations with money I got from a scholarship I never thought I’d get. I bake saffron buns for the first time and find that I am allergic to saffron.

My therapist says it’s difficult to live alone without intimacy (TT News Agency/PA)

On New Year’s Eve, I am with a close friend at a party. It’s my first New Year without the kids in 10 years. I don’t really know anyone at the party, and I don’t really feel like being at a party, but I start chatting with someone who seems nice. It is midnight and everyone goes out and watches the fireworks that are going off across the city. When the others start coming in again, I tell my friend I am going home. She understands. Later the same night she texts me that the person I talked to at the party had been offended when I went without saying goodbye.

According to a 2019 report, many more men than women feel that they rarely or never can refuse sex.

I stay up that night baking bread and folding plastic bags and listening to old songs and crying and feeling free and alive. One late night when I’m in front of the TV, I realise I’m in love. She has short blonde hair and is not a real person. I stay up all night and watch intently the last episodes of the last season and I cry continuously for hours because I know we will not see one another again.

1 in 5

Adult Brits aren’t having sex

At a dinner, a friend shows me a picture of her friend who looks nice and wonders if I want to date her. I tell her about my celibacy and that I want to spend all my time and energy on my children and my friends and the book that I am trying to write. Three out of four protest wildly. The fourth interrupts: “Hang on now, no one ever reacts like that if a divorced woman says she doesn’t want to date.”

I tell my therapist that I don’t feel that well anymore. I am a gold monk, but the monastic existence does not put any golden edge on my everyday life, and the therapist emphatically says that it can be extremely difficult to live alone, without any close intimate relationship.

Flaubert’s celibacy lasted only two years. One day the poet Louise Colet showed up: “Then you came along, and with the touch of a fingertip stirred everything up again.”

I finally download the dating app that everyone is talking about, but when I start looking for photos of myself I realise that there aren’t any on my phone. Only pictures of my children and my neatly folded clothes. I ask some friends. They have no pictures either. I start googling myself and find an article about myself that I’ve never seen before. The heading reads: “A Beta Male Speaks…”

Beta male, I read, denotes a weak and depleted man. He is constantly in the shadow of the alpha male, who is strong and good-looking and can sleep with whoever he wants.

“You must have a profile text too,” explains a friend with more insight into the dating world than I do. I write that I am tall and enjoy books and become calm by folding plastic bags – a description that should suffice to scare most people away. Later that night, I lay aside the book I am reading and start swiping. I am hesitant at first. Then I notice a growing generosity on my part, but that does not seem reciprocal. After an hour, just as I’m about to give up, it pings and I start chatting with someone who looks promising and we decide we will meet on the following day.

That day I clean the house even more furiously than usual, wipe all surfaces, put on my Japanese clothes, and give myself a close shave. We meet in a wine bar and talk and when we part, she says I smell good. When I wake up the next morning, I feel unusually light and everything looks a little different, like a lens has been changed or my perspective has shifted a bit.

We decide to meet again on the Friday of the same week. I feel a weak expectation growing within me in the coming days. Then come the thoughts of impending disaster. One date turns into more dates that turn into…

Gandhi believed that the unrest between Muslims and Hindus raging in India was directly linked to his inability to quench his desires. A close encounter that turns into a one-night stand that turns into a long breakfast…

Disaster scenarios are playing out in my head and I see in front of me how my world is collapsing. I see that I must continue to be myself, alone, single, a celibateur, maybe just for a little while longer, maybe so long that I will later regret it, but then so be it.

I say I am coming down with a cold and use it as a sweeping reason to cancel the date.

Later that night, I sit alone in the kitchen. Everything is neatly tucked away in the right drawers and the table has been wiped down.The light from the candles throws shadows across the walls. I gently stroke the plastic bags and I don’t feel as broken as I look.