I'm one of those people who doesn't care much for sex, and I do feel disapproved of by society. It's also one of the stereotypes of singles, that we're weirdos who can't get any.

Ironically, it's also the opposite of the other stereotype of singles, that they're hedonistic commitment-phobic sex addicts.

Can't win either way. ;)

Dr. DePaulo,

Thiis is another well written and accurate article in response to a very timely subject, sex and the single person. Our society's obsession with sex is due to a combination of forces -- our media driven culture, and society driven sex fetish having created a juggernaut of unrealistic sexual expectations for all singles. Not all singles are hungry or needy for sex, many are content with their celibacy state especially during these changing times. There is more to a contented and healthy life than having or being obsessed with sex.

There's a lot to admire in this article, including its embrace of countless options for people which aren't applauded or widely discussed—options that our culture seems to close down, because our imaginations are just so fixated on being in couples.

I like how you put the onus and the opportunity back on us, to work out what it is we want, and why. Another really good book on a topic similar to this piece is Stephen Heath's "The Sexual Fix."

I'm happily involved with another man and very much in tune and love with him. But I recognize that the new emphasis on gay marriage also has a way of putting pressure now on single gay men and women who feel a lot of pressure to couple and so ... conform.

We have to fight somehow against these perceptual and social barriers. I'm glad you're doing so.

"When imagination works, everything works." (Bachelard, 1884 - 1962)

Again Bella, you have said it all. Your last statement, "We all must be aware of the marital mythology and the baseless stigmatizing of people who are single." In our society there are examples in the media which can serve as a prophetic warning about the seductive effect of celebrity culture on a vulnerable audience: The dividing life and art can be invisible. After seeing enough hynotizing movies and reading enough magical books, a fantasy life develops which can either be harmless or quite dangerous. Just look about our society. As we have seen, time and time again the media often counters that pure fantasy element of their celebrity coverage with the flattering come-on that celebrities are "just like us".

Let me remind you readers, everyone's life is different. Everyone's body is different. Since I was a child I was always looking for deeper meaning in life. Childhood memories reveal seeds of our future selves and the conditions that helped make us who we are today. I CONFESS MY PRIMARY ALLEGIANCE IS TO POETRY AND TO NATURE, NOT TO MONEY. My hormones seem stimulated more by the vibration of epiphany than by the scent of profit. My long time friend and mentor the late African-American Ma Vynee Betsch "The Beach Lady" of American Beach, Florida led a successful and power, celibate life. (See May 17, 2009 post for background on her life or google her name.) She said sex nor marriage defined her life, and what a life she led! (smiles) She was stunning, bold and powerful, living her truth in our traditional matrimonial, child centered society. The late Ma Vynee rocked! She was quirky alone, spinster, solo, singlutionary single, or whatever before any of these terms became mainstream! She was TV free, car free and childfree with no regrets, living by the sea in Florida in this match-making, sex-obsessed, forever marrying society of ours.

Furthermore, let me remind you readers that Miss Lillian Joelson is 111 years old, living in Chicago, apeared on the TV Smuckers fruits sponsored birthday greetings (October 12, 2007). She said she owed her longevity to the fact that she never married. Also, super centenarian Nell Meadows celebrated her 110th birthday in the state of Georgia during the month of February, 2009. A teacher, Miss Meadows never married nor had children, it was reported. By all accounts she lead a sex free life. I sent her a birthday card at her home, where she still ives with a caretaker.

Also, Miss Hilda LaCroix celebrated her 110th birthday on January 28, 2009. She told in her interview that the reason she has lived so long is because of no men, no drinking and no smoking. Miss LaCroix lives in an assisted living center, where I sent her a card and a charcoal drawing.

Readers, remember Miss Renee Broussard of Paris, whose life appeared in the world news (1990's) that she lived in a shed for 30 years in her employers backyard. She never married and had no children, but the point I am making is at the age of 65, she told the reports that her needs remained modest, she liked peace and quiet and would like to have some friends. She was relocated to a state subsidized apartment, after her plight came to light.

I must add that in 2002, Miss Mary Parr, then declared the U.S.'s oldest person often told the secret of her longevity: Never getting married. "She never had to worry about the headache of men," she said. She further said she enjoyed her work in life. Lets not forget, Butterfly McQueen, the African-American actress, atheist, never married and no children,she said she enjoyed her own life and being an actress.

Readers, let me turn your attention to a very timely book, THE LIVES THEY LEFT BEHIND, SUITCASE FROM A STATE HOSPITAL ATTIC, (2008) by Darby Penney and Peter Stastny, the authors reported that Josephine Smith, who was a lifelong single lived at Willard, and spent the remaining seventy-five years of her life there. Never married and no children she lived to the ripe old age of one hundred and one. (pg.36)

Be Well.

I am pro local, diversity, small and pro-earthworm, and an only child.

dew, 'south paw' (aging woman of color)
Single, living in The Western Hemisphere, clutter free, car free, child free (by choice)

Thank you Bella, you are "4-star status in writing this particular post. It just struck a nerve in me.

Let me remind you readers about few other noted and unknown successful singles of all races, ages and genders,(SEX-FREE BY CHOICE)from my private files. They are as follows:

The longtime laundress, Oseolo McCarty, 88, lifelong single, no children, who came to fame late in life by donating money to colleges for minorities ($150,000), said she never wanted children. Miss McCarty lived to be 96 yrs of age without a spouse or partner. What a life! Lets not leave out the Delaney sisters, authors and wealthy educators, also led a celibate life and contributed to society. They too lived beyond the age of 100.

March 12, 2008, The New York Times reported on the life of Claire Oesch, 93 year old, never mrried, no children as teh city's oldest and most refined barfly.

In March, 2009, the New York Times again reported a timely story about the life of never married Waver Brickhouse, 69 yrs old. She led a largely solitary life, going to work and church, and adopting four foster children. In 1996, she took her life ssvings and purchased her first home.

Readers we must not forget the successful late Octavia E. Butler, Science Fiction writer, who proudly never married or had children. "Im black, I am solitary, and I have always been an outsider," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1998.

Herbert John Lord, lived to be one hundred, and he never married. In his interview (1990s), he said he worked as a printer all his life and never had a close friend. He lived in Victoria, B.C.,Canada.

In the 1990s, never married, child free, African American male Willie Duberry of South Carolina was declared the world's oldest person at 121 years young. (He did marry briefly at age 100 to a 19 yr old, who left him.) But the point is, he was largely single all of his life on this earth. It was reported the spry older-timer rode a bicycle until he was 105.

In the book, The Life of Elizabeth Hawley Story (2005) the author wrote that she never married nor had children. She is a reporter and lives in Nepal, having left America decades ago. I say way to go Miss Hawley! The author wrote she had no sex life either. Her work was her life. Miss Hawley, did not buy into the so-called American dream either.

"Americans are not aging well. Nearly two-thirds are too heavy, underfit and over-medicated. Most are way too dependent on physicians, prescriptions and preachers. People are too little resistant to baloney and superstition but over resistant to science, reason, responsibility and the fine art of living well." AGING BEYOND BELIEF by Don Ardell (2008)

Having sex and being married has little or nothing at all to do with a long, healthy life well-lived on this earth. Life is a mystery. Even the noted author John Robbins, HEALTHY AT 100, in an exchange of emails in 2005 between he and I, agreed with me on this statement -- life is a mystery.

Lastly, I do not have to appear on TV, be it The Today Show or OPRAH, and whoever else to know for myself that life in the 'single lane' can and is very, very rewarding. I know it because I have lived it in spite of what society expects of me, and continue to live life without sex or being partnered. There have been other forerunners in history. There is life beyond the TV, having sex and the Internet. Nature is sufficient. I am a lifelong nonsmoker, no drinking and no drugs, and I do not consume junk foods, either!

All the best. Please be well.

dew, ' south paw' (an aging woman of color)
Ever single, living in the Western Hemisphere

I am celibate. I'm not sure if its by choice or not at this point. I haven't met anyone that I'd feel comfortable having sex with but I am a very sexual person. Not having sex is one of the more difficult parts of being single for me and I have yet to figure out how to have a fulfilling sex life as a single.

Your writing on this topic is timely. Onely (http://onely.org/2009/05/25/the-sex-post/) recently wrote about a positive single sex experience and Brian at Fitzroyalty (http://indolentdandy.net/fitzroyalty/2009/04/09/sex-and-the-single-hetero/) posted about single sex from the other side of the spectrum from where I currently sit (he enjoys many sex partners while I feel paralyzed/lost/confused/frustrated in the absence of monogamy).

There are an infinite number of positions on the sex spectrum. Ideally we'd all live in a world where all of them are equally valued and accepted. If this were a case, I think we would see a much smaller divide between the single and the married lifestyles.

When I talk with people from other parts of the world, they often comment on how much attention we devote to sex and, at the same time, how many cultural taboos we have in that same area. Clearly, the average American is both frustrated and fixated. Read the other comments any you'll see that even those who profess little interest in the topic have an awful lot to say about it.

Steve Mason
PT Blogger

Very well put! Reading this made me wonder about all the hype in the media by certain TV doctors and others about how "research has shown" that having sex, and lots of it will make people healthier and live longer. Have you looked into any of that? I'm wondering if when the actual studies are examined, it would turn out to be much like the claims about how marriage makes people healthier and live longer -- a gross misinterpretation and distortion of the actual research. It would be interesting to find out what that research actually consists of.

I'm always amazed at how health, money, happiness, or sex problems are pinned on being single or married. Why would being married make you immune to sex problems? Why would being single make you a magnate for them?

I like what Bella said in her book: something to the effect of that it drives married people crazy, but often, singles are getting exactly the amount and the kind of sex they want, be it every night or none at all.

There are married people with multiple sex partners. There are married people who never have sex. To say otherwise would be deluding yourself.

Great discussion!

Bootlegger Cove

In reply to: “Submitted by Monica Pignotti on May 26, 2009 - 8:28am.:
“Very well put! Reading this made me wonder about all the hype in the media by certain TV doctors and others about how "research has shown" that having sex, and lots of it will make people healthier and live longer. Have you looked into any of that? I'm wondering if when the actual studies are examined, it would turn out to be much like the claims about how marriage makes people healthier and live longer -- a gross misinterpretation and distortion of the actual research. It would be interesting to find out what that research actually consists of.”

Monica, great response! Good question. In this society, we have to be careful of trusting so-called research, because, as we all know, research is not always accurate.
Also, readers, I was not sexual in college either. When I was young, during the year of 1977, I had (by choice) a tubal sterilization surgery. This is done to block a woman's fallopian tubes. Tubal sterilization is a permanent form of birth control. To date, as I grow older, I have no regrets. I don’t trust much research. Readers, let’s remember reading and absorbing some of what research tells us can be in many ways uplifting in our modern society. However, research does not tell us the full picture. I have learned over my lifetime that to tell the story of our lives and those of our ancestors in a full, truthful, and unbiased manner, we need to not only ask, “What did they do?” and “How did they do it?”, but also “Why did they do it?” and, “What were their thoughts and motivation as they did it? The answers to such questions are necessary to give depth and texture to the dry details of existence and fill in the gaps between the known and the speculative. Though such answers may have their genesis in the past, the insight they offer is crucial to give meaning and direction to our future. RI have found that old newspapers are the diaries of communities past. They report events in the lives of our ancestors. People and/or resourceful researchers not only turn to newspapers for birth announcements, obituaries, marriages and anniversaries, but also for legal announcements of deeds, estates being probated, debtors and insolvents, proof of military service, unclaimed letters at post offices, crimes and accidents.
I read this in an newspaper years ago: Vermont State Climatologist Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, who is collecting historical records as part of a national and international project to make them available online regarding climate change, said that the journals she collected are gold mines. For the past two years, Dupigny-Giroux and her researchers have visited historical societies and libraries around the state and pored over diaries of early Vermonters. The account not only describes the weather 100 or 200 years ago, but reveals details about life in the 1800s. Alongside notes about transactions on the farm, are notes about haying, the snowfall and the grass coming.

The following is an accurate example:
Diary of pioneer returned to N.D.
Area genealogist George Barron said records show Dalley was a bachelor who apparently was unwilling to marry, despite his neighbors' hopes. In the Jamestown Weekly Alert of April 3, 1890, the Mount Pleasant Notes read, "Levi Dalley has returned from New Jersey, but alas, we are doomed to disappointment. We had all looked eagerly forward to the time when we could welcome Mr. and Mrs. Dalley in our midst. Mr. Dalley is here, but Mrs. Dalley, oh where! Oh where! can she be!"
JAMESTOWN (AP) - The diary of an area pioneer from New Jersey has been returned to North Dakota, some 20 years after it was found in a bucket of toys. The diary of Levi Dalley was written in 1886, two years after the New Jersey native began homesteading south of Windsor. Somehow, it ended up in Buffalo, N.Y., where Paul and Sandy Kolacki's daughter found it in the bucket of toys she bought at a garage sale. She gave the diary to her parents, who live in Peapack, N.J., and have never been to North Dakota. "I thought the diary was so interesting," Sandy Kolacki said. "Everything there depended on the weather." She kept the diary for 20 years, until, after reading a book about the Dust Bowl days, she decided it should be returned to Jamestown, the city mentioned in it. "A book I read reminded me of the diary. It originated there, and I thought we should give it back," she said. "First, we checked to see if there still was a town named Jamestown." The couple contacted Daphne Drewello, director of Jamestown's Alfred Dickey Public Library. "The Kolackis could have just thrown it away. I'm so glad that instead they went to the trouble of getting it to us," Drewello said. "Too often, people aren't aware of the importance of old records. We'll be happy to take any of those records at the library."
For me, I love reading old diaries, journals, etc.
One final example: In Oregon, old man Howard spent decades chasing children off his farm, shotgun in hand. Generations considered him the meanest man in Jackson County. To others, Wesley Howard was simply an oddity: a loner who never married, who never left Oregon, who lived his whole life in the place he was born, a century-old farmhouse without phones or toilets. kids saw it as a haunted house; passersby photographed it as an artifact. In March, 2003, at age 87, Howard died of a stroke, enigmatic and inexplicable to the end. He bequeathed his entire estate, worth more than $11 million, to create a youth sports park on his 68-acre farm. Howard, it turned out, was rich. The house sat in the middle of a grove of oaks, many of them dead. It was built in 1890, hadn’t been painted in a half-century and took on the color of the oaks: grayish-brown with tinges of black. Moss climbed up the sides and onto the roof. He was born on the farm in 1916, and as far as anybody knew, never left the Medford area.

Also, readers, remember, Leonie Faroll, class of 1949 at Wellesley College, had other ideas when she left $27 million to her alma mater: to keep the power flowing through campus, the boilers pumping and the nuts and bolts of certain college facilities properly greased and tightened. Nobody knows exactly when Leonie, a longtime resident of Park Avenue in New York, became fascinated with energy and engineering, but it seems she was hooked early. As an undergraduate volunteer at the college radio station in the late 1940s, she could frequently be spotted hanging wires around campus in an attempt to boost the station’s modest signal. She never married, and friends said, made no improvements to her family’s nine-room apartment, where she lived the rest of her life. She died in September 2003, and left Wellesley what is believed to be the largest bequest ever given to a women’s college.

dew, 'south paw' (an aging woman of color)
Single, living in The Western Hemisphere

Bootlegger Cove

In reply to: “Submitted by Monica Pignotti on May 26, 2009 - 8:28am.:
“Very well put! Reading this made me wonder about all the hype in the media by certain TV doctors and others about how "research has shown" that having sex, and lots of it will make people healthier and live longer. Have you looked into any of that? I'm wondering if when the actual studies are examined, it would turn out to be much like the claims about how marriage makes people healthier and live longer -- a gross misinterpretation and distortion of the actual research. It would be interesting to find out what that research actually consists of.”

Monica, great response! Good question. In this society, we have to be careful of trusting so-called research, because, as we all know, research is not always accurate.
Also, readers, I was not sexual in college either. When I was young, during the year of 1977, I had (by choice) a tubal sterilization surgery. This is done to block a woman's fallopian tubes. Tubal sterilization is a permanent form of birth control. To date, as I grow older, I have no regrets. I don’t trust much research. Readers, let’s remember reading and absorbing some of what research tells us can be in many ways uplifting in our modern society. However, research does not tell us the full picture. I have learned over my lifetime that to tell the story of our lives and those of our ancestors in a full, truthful, and unbiased manner, we need to not only ask, “What did they do?” and “How did they do it?”, but also “Why did they do it?” and, “What were their thoughts and motivation as they did it? The answers to such questions are necessary to give depth and texture to the dry details of existence and fill in the gaps between the known and the speculative. Though such answers may have their genesis in the past, the insight they offer is crucial to give meaning and direction to our future. RI have found that old newspapers are the diaries of communities past. They report events in the lives of our ancestors. People and/or resourceful researchers not only turn to newspapers for birth announcements, obituaries, marriages and anniversaries, but also for legal announcements of deeds, estates being probated, debtors and insolvents, proof of military service, unclaimed letters at post offices, crimes and accidents.
I read this in an newspaper years ago: Vermont State Climatologist Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, who is collecting historical records as part of a national and international project to make them available online regarding climate change, said that the journals she collected are gold mines. For the past two years, Dupigny-Giroux and her researchers have visited historical societies and libraries around the state and pored over diaries of early Vermonters. The account not only describes the weather 100 or 200 years ago, but reveals details about life in the 1800s. Alongside notes about transactions on the farm, are notes about haying, the snowfall and the grass coming.

The following is an accurate example:
Diary of pioneer returned to N.D.
Area genealogist George Barron said records show Dalley was a bachelor who apparently was unwilling to marry, despite his neighbors' hopes. In the Jamestown Weekly Alert of April 3, 1890, the Mount Pleasant Notes read, "Levi Dalley has returned from New Jersey, but alas, we are doomed to disappointment. We had all looked eagerly forward to the time when we could welcome Mr. and Mrs. Dalley in our midst. Mr. Dalley is here, but Mrs. Dalley, oh where! Oh where! can she be!"
JAMESTOWN (AP) - The diary of an area pioneer from New Jersey has been returned to North Dakota, some 20 years after it was found in a bucket of toys. The diary of Levi Dalley was written in 1886, two years after the New Jersey native began homesteading south of Windsor. Somehow, it ended up in Buffalo, N.Y., where Paul and Sandy Kolacki's daughter found it in the bucket of toys she bought at a garage sale. She gave the diary to her parents, who live in Peapack, N.J., and have never been to North Dakota. "I thought the diary was so interesting," Sandy Kolacki said. "Everything there depended on the weather." She kept the diary for 20 years, until, after reading a book about the Dust Bowl days, she decided it should be returned to Jamestown, the city mentioned in it. "A book I read reminded me of the diary. It originated there, and I thought we should give it back," she said. "First, we checked to see if there still was a town named Jamestown." The couple contacted Daphne Drewello, director of Jamestown's Alfred Dickey Public Library. "The Kolackis could have just thrown it away. I'm so glad that instead they went to the trouble of getting it to us," Drewello said. "Too often, people aren't aware of the importance of old records. We'll be happy to take any of those records at the library."
For me, I love reading old diaries, journals, etc.
One final example: In Oregon, old man Howard spent decades chasing children off his farm, shotgun in hand. Generations considered him the meanest man in Jackson County. To others, Wesley Howard was simply an oddity: a loner who never married, who never left Oregon, who lived his whole life in the place he was born, a century-old farmhouse without phones or toilets. kids saw it as a haunted house; passersby photographed it as an artifact. In March, 2003, at age 87, Howard died of a stroke, enigmatic and inexplicable to the end. He bequeathed his entire estate, worth more than $11 million, to create a youth sports park on his 68-acre farm. Howard, it turned out, was rich. The house sat in the middle of a grove of oaks, many of them dead. It was built in 1890, hadn’t been painted in a half-century and took on the color of the oaks: grayish-brown with tinges of black. Moss climbed up the sides and onto the roof. He was born on the farm in 1916, and as far as anybody knew, never left the Medford area.

Also, readers, remember, Leonie Faroll, class of 1949 at Wellesley College, had other ideas when she left $27 million to her alma mater: to keep the power flowing through campus, the boilers pumping and the nuts and bolts of certain college facilities properly greased and tightened. Nobody knows exactly when Leonie, a longtime resident of Park Avenue in New York, became fascinated with energy and engineering, but it seems she was hooked early. As an undergraduate volunteer at the college radio station in the late 1940s, she could frequently be spotted hanging wires around campus in an attempt to boost the station’s modest signal. She never married, and friends said, made no improvements to her family’s nine-room apartment, where she lived the rest of her life. She died in September 2003, and left Wellesley what is believed to be the largest bequest ever given to a women’s college.

dew, 'south paw' (an aging woman of color)
Single, living in The Western Hemisphere

and I just have to say I'm happily divorced, having come out in my late 30s as a lesbian to my Very Catholic In-Laws >: ), and I moved on my own to a new town with a very active lesbian population. A few months into the dating scene, I realized I just didn't care about dating. I wanted friends. I was out with a bunch of friends one night when a married friend asked why I didn't date. I countered with "why do you think dating is the default condition?" She blinked and then said, "Well, are you asexual or what?" Another single friend, bless her, piped up with "You don't need a partner to have a great sex life!" I just don't know why people care whether or not I have a sex life. Someone in an earlier discussion on this site said (loosely quoted because I can't find it now) "you can pretty much assume all of them (singles) have some sort of friends with benefits thing going on." I don't, and I resent anyone assuming that about me. I resent anyone assuming anything about me, sex-wise! I'm fine, and my life is full of rich, physically close love from my rescue animals. Orgasms sold separately. >: )

I'm glad this topic came up because I often wondered, "what is wrong with me".

I am interested in sex is spurts but for the most part, I am happy being single and sex-free. I just chalk it up to me being a latebloomer.

For all of you who have forgotten and don’t know:

Of all the people who knew the late Elvis Presley, few have the insight of a 68- year-old nun who has lived in a secluded convent in Bethlehem, Conn., for more than four decades. That's because, in the late 1950s, Mother Dolores Hart was a rising Hollywood starlet who locked lips on screen with Elvis in not one movie, but two. From behind the wooden grid of her convent at the Abbey of Regina Laudis recently, Hart, with her eyes radiant, as if she were still 17, recalled her Hollywood stint with Elvis and the path that took her away. Dolores Hart (born Dolores Hicks on October 20, 1938 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American Roman Catholic nun and former actress. She made 10 films in 5 years, playing opposite Stephen Boyd, Montgomery Clift, George Hamilton and Robert Wagner, having made her movie debut with Elvis Presley in Loving You (1957). Miss Hart is still single.

AND,

Folks, here is another example from my own childhood home, the late Miss White. I remember this lady and her works as a teenager in Florida. The late (never married and childless), Eartha Mary Magdalene White, a prominent African-American resident of Jacksonville, Florida, was widely known for her humanitarian and philanthropic endeavors in northeast Florida. Born on November 8, 1876, and reared by her adoptive, altruistic mother, Clara English White. Miss Eartha White displayed a lifelong commitment to helping others. Her adoptive father, Lafayette, left little influence on her life as he died in 1881, five years after her birth.
Her work with Duval County Stockade inmates was legendary: for more than forty years, she visited them in jail, arranged for religious and social activities, and provided counseling and other personal services for them. During World War I and II, her many patriotic activities included intensive work with the Red Cross to aid both soldiers and their families. Showing her less serious if not downright athletic side, the ubiquitous Miss White organized a baseball team during World War II to entertain troops at Camp Blanding. All these activities left little time for a private life. By her own words, "I never married. I was too busy - What man would put up with me running around the way I do?" According to Charles E. Bennett, author of Twelve On The River St. Johns, she was briefly engaged, at age 20, to James Jordan, a railroad employee from South Carolina. Letters from the collection attest to their love for each other but, unfortunately, he tragically died a month before their impending marriage in June 1896. Miss Eartha White died at age ninety-seven on January 18, 1974. (Miss White was another celibate woman who did good works in her life.)

Dew - 'south paw'
Single, Living in The Western Hemisphere

Like many singles, I struggle with mixed feelings about this issue. Yes, there are stretches of time when my sex drive goes unsatisfied. But there are also things I DON'T like about sex, and none of those seem to be "acceptable." There's plenty of advice available on how to deal with those issues, yes. But the advice is never to stop worrying because it's okay not to like those things; no, it's always to acclimate myself to those things I don't like. Why, I wonder, am I being coerced into liking something that I instinctively recoil from? Why am I being told that if I try something and simply don't like it that I must be uncomfortable with my body or can't enjoy pleasure? If I didn't like some other physical activity like, say, dancing, would I also be told that I wasn't comfortable with my body or couldn't enjoy physical sensation?

I can also provide personal evidence that marriage certainly doesn't equal sex on demand. For most couples I know, it seems like the longer they stay together, the less sex they have, by their own admission. Now, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. Unlike the American media, I don't assume that we all need to go at it like rabbits throughout our lives in order to be happy. But for those people who DO advertise marriage as a guarantee of sexual satisfaction, it's not.

I really like this article, but as I am in the tiny tiny minority, it lacks that punch I am seeking in regards to sex and being single.

I can tell you from my experience, especially in Los Angeles, that being single is one of the hardest things I have had to endure in life, and it is by choice. As I am a very sexual person, my choice, my preference, I cannot find anyone to share my interest in sex, every woman I ever meet is either a drunkard that will sleep with me only after she downed huge amounts of alcohol, preferably if I pay for them, which of course I won't do, or they will only sleep with me if I either wine them and dine them or actually offer them some sort of relationship opportunity.

But for the actual act itself, the interest in it, is completely lacking, I hear people talking, girls saying how much they love sex, but none of them will have a healthy interest in it as per the act itself without any additional strings attached to it. Maybe because the stigma, the fear of being ridiculed as whores or sluts, I do not know.

Honesty is dead, and playing games in order to get whatever sexual pleasure you can are the only ways I see to get it, and I will not do that, I will not cheapen my sexual desire with the feeling that I had to manipulate someone to actually have sex, that I had to pay for it or that I had to be someone I am not in order to have some pleasure, passion and fun.

I remain defiantly single and sadly rarely have sex due to this until society accepts the sex act as an honest pleasurable thing rather than an act of pornography that needs to be shunned or a tool to get what you want from guys.

Call me whatever you like, but that is how I feel.

Cen,

In reference to your statement about society and its need to change, I wanted to bring this information to your attention. You are not the only one who sees the need for society to change its attitudes on many levels concerning the betterment of humanity.
The greatest challenge in the next decade is greed. It arise out of a sense of lacking within the psyche. Obviously raw and living foods, superfoods, herbs and cacao bring us into a state of abundance-of-prosperity consciousness—as long as they are grow in mineralized soils, says David Wolfe, JD, author. (pg. 26) Interview: Thinking Man in Purely Delicious magazine (Spring 2009)

And,

“All humans being possess a tremendous, untapped potential that they will finally be able to explore when they are free of the burden of having to work to earn a living.” The Best That Money Can't Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty, & War by Jacque Fresco

I read an excellent interview by Captain Bradshaw. She says that not being married over the age of thirty-five stems from old values that haven’t kept pace with modern reality. I think there are some things that we hold on to as tradition and expectations, so why it comes to people in this country getting married at a young age, that hasn’t change. It’s about time that people realize that being thirty-five and not married doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with you;” (pg. 109) I Didn’t Work This Hard to Get Married (2009)

“Just as most stand up against child marriage because marriage is an institution meant for adults, and just as most do not let children participate in certain civic duties such as voting until they reach a certain age, the time has come to debate the participation of children in religious institutions. (pg. 14) Forced into Faith – How Religion Abuses Children’s Rights by Innaiah Narisetti (2009)
Sadly, this is the case in 2009, society has a long way to go to shift for the better on many, many important issues facing humanity in our modern times.

Dew, going barefoot (outside in my hammock)
Single living in the Western Hemisphere