On New Year’s Day, Jill deleted all of the dating apps from her phone. “I realised how fed up I was,” the 27-year-old says. It wasn’t just that she had tired of dating, though, or that she’d grown bored of endless swiping. The problem was sex. “I’m not looking for a relationship, but sex has somehow become my only romantic correspondence with a person. It just became so meaningless; I started to question why I was doing it at all.”
The solution might sound unconventional, particularly for someone Jill’s age. Aren’t your twenties supposed to be your sexual prime? A period of reckless, venereal abandon? And yet, Jill is just one of many millennials choosing to start 2023 with a vow of celibacy. No sex. None at all. Or for a little while at least. Technically, this is abstinence rather than celibacy, which is associated more with religion. Online, they’ve become interchangeable.
