the next chapter is all about the last guy she had sex with, an older man named jake. if i was that dude or his fiancee & i stumbled across this book, i would not feel great about it. The books starts with WAY TOO MUCH FUCKING DETAIL about her relationship with college boyfriend. it's never really entirely clear what the author hopes to gain from avoiding sex for a year, or what inspired the decision, but.let's just go with it. this makes her think, somehow, that maybe it has something to do with sex-that maybe she has been divorcing sex from love & is reaping the rewards, in the form of casual sex & no love. in fact, no man since there has told her he loves her. this happened shortly before the author turned 30, & it made her think about how she hasn't really had any real long-term relationships since she & the college boyfriend split up eight years earlier. she learned from a mutual friend later that they had become engaged. her vow was inspired by a chance encounter on the streets on new york city, when she saw her ex-boyfriend from college steering a smiling blonde woman into a jewelry store. it's a memoir kind of deal by a woman who made a personal vow with herself to not have sex (which she defines as 'penile penetration') for a year. i think i read a review of it somewhere that made it sound potentially intriguing. An antidote to the growing genre of another-notch-in-the-bedpost memoirs, 'Chastened' is a refreshing look at what's to be gained by going without. Told with Elizabeth Gilbertesque candor, 'Chastened' reveals much about our contradictory cultural attitudes towards sex and the ways intercourse has been used as a shortcut to deeper intimacies. The results-her feelings about femininity, her body, and romance-are illuminating. In this confessional account, Anderson shares the results of that year, narrating each month as she flirts, dates, and swoons but doesn't have sex. Anderson decided it was time to spend a full year without sex to rediscover its meaning and purpose in her life. As she examined her past, she recognized that most of these relationships went off course at the precise moment sex was involved. This discovery led her to question a decade of emotionally frustrating relationships with commitment phobes.

On the eve of her thirtieth birthday, Hephzibah Anderson glimpsed her college boyfriend going into a jewelry store with a smiling blonde-and in that moment realized it had been years since a man told her he loved her. Seeking love in an age obsessed with sex, a journalist chronicles her year without

Chastened by Hephzibah Anderson