Alternatives to Sex

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My decision to practice celibacy had nothing to do with prudery or penance, morality or manners, dysfunction, or fear of disease. It had very little to do with sex. It was all about real estate.

What had started out, one year earlier, as a bout of benign computer dating—a euphemism for online chatting followed by brief encounters, less impersonal than old-fashioned anonymous sex because you exchanged fake names with the person—had turned into an almost daily ritual that had replaced previous pastimes such as reading, going to the movies, working, exercising, and eating. I’m exaggerating, of course, but by how much, I’d rather not say. For months, I’d known that my habits were slipping out of control, but I figured that as long as I acknowledged my behavior was a problem, it wasn’t one.

And then, one rainy September morning—coincidentally, the same morning Samuel Thompson and Charlotte O’Malley wandered into my life—I woke up and decided that too much really was enough. I could feel trouble pressing down on me like the low dark sky outside my bedroom window. I lived in a house near the top of a steep, San Francisco–like hill, but rather than a view of the Pacific, I saw from my windows the colorful sprawl of Somerville, Massachusetts—jagged rooftops and the tight grid of streets—and in the near distance, the cozy, unimpressive skyline of Boston, minimized this morning by the clouds. The previous owners of my house had installed a picture window in the master bedroom, an architectural feature I frequently deride but secretly love. As I stood looking out through the streaks of rain, a plane dropped from the clouds in its approach to Logan Airport. The sight of it, popping suddenly into view like that, jolted me.

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