No sex please, we’re millennials ...

On New Year’s Day, Jill deleted all of the dating apps from her phone. “I realized 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.
Search “celibacy 2023” on Twitter and you’ll see thousands, like Jill, vowing to start the year sex-free. It was even one of the dating trends suggested to The Independent earlier this year by Jessica Alderson, a relationship expert and co-founder of dating app So Syncd. “We are seeing increasing numbers of people choose to be intentional about their celibacy in order to further develop self-love, respect and autonomy,” she said. “As well as to gain a better understanding of the type of relationships they want.”
In recent years, “self-love” has been parodied as much as embraced. But the shift towards celibacy seems to have come from it. It at least seems to sit somewhere in it. That is certainly the case for Jill, who thinks a period of celibacy could allow her to shift focus. “We’re all so quick to fall into a routine, doing what everyone else does without thinking about it,” she says. “I’m hoping this will teach me more resilience and self-respect.”
No sex please, we’re millennials: Celibacy has become all the rage among young people