‘I imagine there is a lot of hassle involved and I have always been busy doing other things’.
So said Clara Meadmore last week in a story that made the national press. One hundred and five year old Clara Meadmore was telling a reporter why she has been celibate for her entire life. (That’s another way of saying she has never had sex but it’s the polite way of putting it that we reserve for people who have reached the very grand age of 105). She can’t have been short of suitors either. Check her out, she was a looker. But for one reason or another, she never got around to doing the do.
I love the idea that the concept of someone going through their entire life without ever once having sex once is so completely alien to most people that when it happens, it makes the national papers. I once interviewed a man who had been married for twenty years who had never had sex. Believe me, I’ve heard some odd stories in my time, but it was this, very ordinary one, about a healthy man in his forties who had not lost his virginity that twisted people’s melon more than any other.
We simply cannot get our heads around the fact that some people don’t want to have sex. Is it ‘wrong’? Depends on what you mean by wrong. Does that need – or the lack of it – come from a sad place? I can't help thinking that it might, but that’s just me. I’ll let these people here tell you their own story and you can make your own mind up. If you click through to the Clara Meadmore story, the comments section also makes for fascinating reading.....
Meanwhile, many happy returns to Clara Meadmore!
