Nicolette Sampson remembers a time when abstinence wasn’t a big deal, simply the right thing to do
BODY LANGUAGE
It’s time for some 50-something wisdom. High time. Too late maybe. I suddenly know I’m a woman with a past and that I’m proud of it. So listen up and learn because you don’t see much of this old fogey stuff these days.
In a free market that sells us back our own bodies every day that trades in mythical beings that are just one or two products short of perfection we are encouraged, nay obliged, to pander to our senses at every turn. Sometimes at terrible cost to ourselves and others. And boy do we copulate. Endlessly mate, screw, fornicate and stuff around. And talk about it and write about it and analyse it ad tedium. Now it’s my turn and I thank my sponsors.
It’s killing us. Loving each other to death. Spellbound by the promise of an instant roll in the hay, the allure of the perfectly synchronised orgasm. Going along with the whims of who knows who, who knows where they’ve been, God knows he/she couldn’t care less about me or God or our parents or starving babies or abortions or school fees or now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t HIV/Aids.
The 1960s. Women’s lib breakthrough. The Pill. Yes, I remember it well. The magic, the heat of those years, glorying in the power and passion of my own lithe, transparently blonde and exquisite little bod. Elvis, the Beatles, pot, make love not war. The Joy of Sex (borrowed, well-thumbed at The Clinging Vine).
At 17, at school, I fell for a worldly wise and made-in-heaven 19-year-old. A first kiss left a deep impression (believing pressure was all, I nearly pushed my 1,9m lock forward over backwards). Surges of unknown, undreamed of, inexpressible desire for the most amazing male in the world. The delight of this other body with attributes that took me by joyful surprise.
Total, eternal commitment. The belief that to kiss someone signified a lifetime pledge. Anything less would have betrayed the ideal. How we loved one another: the perfect, the infallible Thou. Sounding the depths of metaphysical and interpsychic exploration, and devising strategies against anyone or anything that threatened to separate us. The name of our first daughter shared one evening as my suitor sat primly by my sickbed: how had we each known, always, what it would be?
Sacrificial, forsaking all others, for richer for poorer, friend for life, non-negotiable love between a man and a maid. And abstinence, far from decrying our sexuality, added value to it.
Wait a minute. What did you say? Abstinence? No fucking? You got to be kidding! I’m not. Sorry, no bonking. Who says? Come on! You some kind of religious nut?
For five years, more than 1700 days and nights, we waited for The Moment, the awesome hour of our becoming one flesh. When we were qualified, when we had jobs, when the folks agreed. When we were ready.
We studied in separate countries for two years no cellphones, no money for public phones. We looked our parents in the eye, we looked each other in the eye, we looked society in the eye, we looked in the mirror and what we saw was good and honest and true. And pure. I grasped my proud, unbent reed resolutely.
How was it possible? What super adolescent strength and resolve did it take? What religious, familial and civic duty was able to mitigate against the demands of testosterone and oestrogen? What overrode the consummation of such a oneness of spirit and soul that we two gloried in?
In the meantime, we honoured our strong, healthy bodies, respected the aching beauty of conception and birth, the awesome, incomprehensible privilege of rearing a beloved child. “Lord, help us to wait for your time, for our time together.” (For the past 10 years students have laughed patronisingly silly old thing when I’ve told them this in an annual lecture on HIV/Aids.)
We studied, danced and sang and painted and sculpted and played musical instruments, wrote joyful and terrible poems and spoke and wrote a zillion words of love. Anguished over politics and law, philosophy, sex, and religion with beloved friends of all colours, nationalities and beliefs whom we still admire.
No to the full bonky. Yes to Chopin and Sibelius, Kierkegaard and Chinua Achebe. Ah, the Impressionists, TS Eliot and Irma Stern, Herman Charles Bosman, sketching trees in a forest, my first bikini (one of the first) and a bottle of wine on the beach. Five bunches of red roses on a train. And there was always and forever our loving God who in His plan and purpose had brought us together, one day in His time to be free to indulge in the sacred act of marriage and nurture longed-for babies. That, of course, is another story.
Thus we travelled towards our time and place. Fuelled by sublimated Eros, powered by broken-in hormones, the journey was tough but beautiful.
In retrospect, abstinence wasn’t such a big deal: millions chose it and still do. It wasn’t even a matter of life or death then.
It was, simply, the right thing to do.