Touched, not felt.

A LOVE AFFAIR WITH CELIBACY.

Let’s just start here:
I’ve spent most of the past year practicing celibacy.

Not by accident, not because I couldn’t get laid, not because I’ve lost my libido or gone full nun. But as a radical, devotional act of returning to myself.

Before you imagine me draped in white linen sipping herbal teas under the moonlight each night (though, to be fair, it’s not far off), let me also say: I am a deeply human, sensual woman who adores sex and wholeheartedly endorses pleasure.

I love love.
I love intimacy.
I love a good flirt and the electricity of connection.

But somewhere along the way, the cheap thrills stopped thrilling. What once felt electric began to feel empty, performative, even. It all became a little... soul-tiring.

Swipe Fatigue & Situationship Scars

App culture didn’t just make dating and people lazy, it made connection feel disposable. Endless swiping, bios drafted on the toilet, emotional unavailability wrapped in tattoos and “just seeing where this goes” energy. Somewhere in that sea of options, something sacred got lost.

Then came the rise of the situationship, the slippery in-between that might break you more than an actual breakup. An illusion of intimacy without the security of commitment, just enough to stay hopeful not enough to be secure in the slow ache of ambiguity. The “I’m not ready for a relationship” paired with “but I don’t want you seeing anyone else.” All the closeness, none of the clarity.
It means everything until it means nothing at all.

And hook-up culture? I could send a quick text to an old flame or walk into a bar, down two tequila shots, and have an invitation back to someone’s place by midnight. And yet, I’d leave lonelier than before. I got tired of waking up next to boys I wouldn’t even introduce to my plants.

Being Touched but Not Felt

I didn’t feel I was being met. Not truly, anyway.

I was being desired, but not understood. Met with hands that don’t know how to hold. Looked at with eyes that don’t see.

You know the feeling when you are undressed by someone but your soul remains clothed, when the conversations barely scrape the surface of your essence. When your body becomes a playground for someone else’s desire and not something to be honoured.

It changes you, for sure.

The Choice to Choose Me

I spent most of my early twenties in relationships.
And when I wasn’t in one, I was healing from the last.

For years I didn’t know what my own Sundays felt like without someone else’s plans. I’d forgotten the sound of my own stillness. I just needed to know who I was when I wasn’t orbiting someone else’s needs.

I wanted to be single. Not in a “Hot Girl Summer” kind of way (though, power to you if that’s your season, I’ve been there too and had a lot of fun!).

But alone.
Truly alone. Intentionally.

So I could meet the parts of myself I left behind in the name of love.

Devotion, Not Distraction

I deleted the apps. Stopped responding to texts or keeping the thread of anyone’s interest. I let go of the need to be wanted in order to feel worthy.

I stripped it all back and let my loneliness stretch out its limbs. I let it take over my bed, sit beside me at dinner and hold me at night. I stopped treating it like a problem to be solved and started listening to what it had to say.

At first, it was weird. Habits are hard to break. That hit of dopamine, that subtle validation… it’s addictive. But I began to feel something I hadn’t in years:

Myself.
My desires.
My softness.
My enoughness.

I learned how to worship myself without needing someone else to arrive and call it holy. And that, feels like freedom.

Pleasure is a Practice

I realised how many times I’d said “yes” when my body whispered “no”.
How often I placed myself in situations just to feel desired.

Celibacy isn’t about absence.
It’s not withholding.
It’s not self punishment.

It’s fullness.
It’s discernment.
It’s the refusal to let myself be touched by anything that doesn’t treat me with the same reverence I give to myself.

The Lover I Was Waiting For

I could care less about attention because I crave resonance, intention and true connection. To be met in my energy, my eros, my heart.

And unless I feel that, I am quite pleased with my own company.

I practice celibacy. But I am not deprived.

I just stopped treating love as the sun I orbited around, and began pouring that energy into all the other constellations of my life.

Into my friendships, my work, my family, my art.

I am deeply touched by many things in my life and most especially, by my own fingertips that trace a skin that feels like home again.

Somewhere over the past year,
I became the lover I was waiting for.

Let me tell you -
She knows she is divine.