Terry Crews and wife Rebecca.
“My wife and I, we did a 90 day sex fast. Ninety days. No sex,” says Terry Crews in a video posted on the Huffington Post Facebook page recently. Until then, I had never heard of Terry Crews, an American black actor. The short video showed up on my own Facebook feed and I couldn’t help but take the 60 seconds to watch it, like 4 million other people (guys?). No sex for 90 days! Nada. Call it abstinence, fasting, chastity, masochism … what is this about?
I can imagine at least two reactions to Crews’ introductory statement: “Dude, are you crazy?” or “Join the club of frustrated people (men and women) who are struggling to make this part of their life work.” After all, in a recent large scale study of married adults ages 18-60, one in five (20 percent) said they had not had sex in the last month and 6 percent had not had sex in over a year.
But why would Crews purposely “go off” sex when he didn’t have to, and then brag about it on TV? He goes on:
“At the end of that 90 days, I was more in love, more turned on. I knew who she was and it wasn’t about ‘Let’s go out so I know I’m gonna get some sex later.’ It was ‘Let’s go out because I want to talk to you, I want to know you.’”
According to Crews, those 90 days were life changing. He figured out the true person in the woman he loved, and the love he really wanted from her. This tells me that, until he and his wife paused all sexual activities, they were likely committed but were not well connected.
His experiences can cause us all to question how connected we are in our sex lives, regardless of the frequency of intercourse we can boast. Sex can be rewarding individually since, physically, men don’t need an intense emotional connection to get the “high”. Can that actually blind us to the other person like it did Crews? When we really seek to get closer to the other person, to know her, to be vulnerable and transparent with her, he implies, the previous high was nothing, like smoking without inhaling, or eating without tasting.
“Every man has a desire for intimacy. Intimacy is what you’re looking for. You’re not looking for porn, you’re looking for someone to know you and love you at the same time; that’s all you want,” he explains.
Based on Crews’ experiment, there is something to learn from waiting for sex with a purpose. Sex is more. More than a personal high, more than the satisfaction of an appetite or the release of a tension. Crews is telling the world that guys are made for more and are longing for more.
Yet, some readers are thinking: I wait often, yet it’s not making a difference. So what’s the secret?
Regular fasting: fertility awareness
For most couples who use natural family planning (NFP) or a form of fertility awareness (FAM), “fasting from sex” is not news. Abstinence during the fertility window is what you do to avoid getting pregnant. It’s not 90 days long though. Depending on the cycle of the woman, her ability to chart more accurately, and how ready the two of them are to take chances with pregnancy, it varies from 8 to 12 days every cycle. Fertility awareness methods teach women to know the signs of their fertility so that they can achieve pregnancy or avoid pregnancy with 95-99 percent effectiveness.
The time of abstinence is not a time when the partners avoid each other, on the contrary: it’s time to show love and longing for each other in different ways. It’s dating time all over again. It’s a preparation for the time when you can. “Then when you can,” says a man I interviewed for Natural Womanhood’s upcoming documentary, “it’s more special, it’s full of emotion…it’s like a bunch of honeymoons.”
In my somewhat brief experience with the world of NFP (seven years), I have met a good number of closely connected and happy couples whose experience syncs with that of Crews and his wife. These people are more in love, more connected and enjoying sex more than the average couple. You watch and listen to them and you can sense the profound peace and happiness that is going on, even when they have been together for 20 to 30 years. If you ask, many of them will tell you about the “life before and after”, life on contraceptives and then the life with fertility awareness based methods.
There is a reason. These methods have a rhythm of a monthly time of “sex fasting”. Every month a couple using NFP/FAM gets a chance to do what Crews did once in his life and will never regret.
The dance of intimacy
Not all people who are using an NFP method by the book are having a great time of it. In fact, in a 2004 study done by Marquette University, about 5 percent of the individual responses from the 678 respondents expressed that the time of abstinence was difficult. But the large majority of the responses claimed that these methods improved their relationships.
So how can Crews, in his 90 day experiment come out a happy man, and how can others emulate it?
It will be easier for some people than others to get that kind of intimacy. Everyone has a unique history in this area, because sex and intimacy involve a complex range of physical and emotional faculties, and your life experience and that of your partner will play a role. Yet, the Anna Karenina principle — that there are many ways to do things wrong and one way to do things right — applies. Here is my theory:
It starts with getting rid of stuff that makes sex a consumer experience (condoms, pills, et al) and removing barriers to communication about sex between the partners. Fertility awareness based methods help with that.
The need to create intimate experiences come next. Put aside for a moment any worry about the ability for sex, the lack of it, and the challenges you physically experience when going without it. The greater need is intimacy, and that can be the focus during the fast. Focusing on the physical need is like dropping the prey for its shadow (“Lacher la proie pour l’ombre”).
We must learn to redirect our sexual energy to activities that make us feel whole while we’re waiting. In order to accomplish that, one needs to find outlets for the sex drive in other forms, and for a man it is caring for others and themselves for completely gratuitous reasons. Not washing dishes so that you can “get it later”. Work at making your wife fall in love again.
Finally, there is possibly a need to heal. The challenge a man experiences in becoming intimate with a woman is the possibility of being judged. Too many men feel guilty and responsible for the quality of the experience, or just give up. We all have different predispositions, different experiences. Someone who was abused or grew up in a family where sex was demonized will have a harder time trusting and experiencing unity in sex. It is to be understood and healed. It is a wound, a sign, and an opportunity, as the challenge to get closer can be the key for a greater freedom.
The beauty of fertility awareness based methods is that they can help break down these walls. It’s time to talk about it. I believe men do stupid or selfish things because they are deeply lonely. Fertility awareness based methods can help break the loneliness and rebuild a partnership like it was intended to be in the beginning.
Gerard Migeon is the founder and editor of Natural Womanhood, a MercatorNet partner site. This article is an abridged version of one that appeared on Natural Womanhood. Read the full article here.
Editor’s note: Crews’ video on the Huffington Post Facebook page has had nearly 4,800,000 views, 39,400 “likes” and nearly 59,000 “shares”.
