Every time Mangala Holland breaks up with someone, she vows to stop having sex for a while. “Normally it lasts for a few months,” the 51-year-old author of Orgasms Made Easy tells me. “It’s a way to come back to myself and work through the emotional pain, and reassess what hadn’t worked in the last relationship. It also allows me to become more emotionally mature, spot unhealthy attachment patterns and to do the inner work without projecting my ‘stuff’ onto someone else.”
If all that sounds very healthy and reasonable, it’s probably because, well, it is. While there might have been a time when pledging a vow of abstinence would have elicited judgemental sniggers and whispers, today it’s viewed by many as an integral part of self-care and personal development – something many of us could benefit from. Hence the brouhaha surrounding a new advertising campaign from Bumble, which saw billboards plastered across the US with the slogan: “You know full well a vow of celibacy is not the answer”.
