Gillian Anderson Reads “On Tinder, Off Sex” by Ali Rachel Pearl
This morning whilst driving, I listened to Gillian Anderson on the Modern Love podcast, which was first aired on September 18.
She discusses her new book, “Want - Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous”, a collection of letters submitted to Gillian Anderson from women all around the world about their deepest fantasies and desires.
She also reads an essay from NYT’s Modern Love column, "On Tinder, Off Sex," by Ali Rachel Pearl from October 2015.
It’s about abstaining from sex, “secondary abstaining” as the writer’s doctor describes it in the essay, but she writes “accidental abstaining” is the more appropriate term for her.
Secondary abstaining “refers to someone who is sexually experienced but has chosen to no longer be sexually active, usually for reasons relating to religious faith, unwanted pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases”.
But for Ali Rachel Pearl,
If I were to update the definition of “secondary abstaining” I discovered through my Google search, I would add the following to the list of reasons someone may stop having sex: failed relationship, broken heart and being cheated on after a near proposal by the man you spent your whole life loving.
Gillian Anderson does a beautiful job reading On Tinder, Off Sex, and after listening to it, I looked it up online because I wanted to read it myself. I found myself very moved as I reached the last part of the essay, which I’ve extracted below, and these lines stayed with me the most:
“We don’t have sex, but we have intimacy.”
”It’s not that I’m choosing to abstain from sex in these situations, but that sex seems to be choosing to abstain from me.”
”We fall into almost love. And then life takes us away from each other.”
There is a woman I sometimes love, a death penalty investigator too fresh out of a breakup from the woman who broke her heart.
There is a man I sometimes love, a writer and lead singer in a hard-core punk band, who constantly declares, “I don’t have sex,” and “I don’t do love,” in the same moment that he sways closer to my face, nearly but not quite giving one of us the opportunity to make a move.
The man I sometimes love tells me, “Love is a leaky boat.” The woman I sometimes love tells me the blooming jasmine in Los Angeles reminds her of walking to school in Egypt as a teenager. And in her head she is somewhere far away from here, from us. We don’t have sex, but we have intimacy. It’s not that I’m choosing to abstain from sex in these situations, but that sex seems to be choosing to abstain from me.
In my imagination, the sex I have with each of them when I’m riding my bike home from work or when I’m stuck in traffic on the freeway or when I’m otherwise far away from myself is epic. It is all dark rooms and brick walls. Aggressive and gentle. It is the kind of sex that makes a person fall in love instantaneously.
Except we never have sex. And we never fall in love. We fall into almost love and then life takes us away from each other. And without that memory of skin against skin to connect us across distance and time, we become, once again, strangers.
You can listen to the audio version of the Modern Love episode with Gillian Anderson on YouTube below, she starts reading the essay at the 13th minute. Or listen to it on the podcast app you subscribe to.