This is the final episode of my series about my Covid induced celibacy.

On one day I received:

– a very sexy and empowering photo from the only female friend I have who is as sexual as I am.

– a message from my former lover
Sex or no sex, active status or not;
At this point I consider him the patron saint of my sexuality.
Speaking of saints;

– an email from The Saint
Today’s message brought out an avalanche of sexual ambitions that made me realize that although I did not have sex yet, I am fully healed of all fears and phobias.
I m not just good to go, I better start moving because I have so much I want to do!

I started this series when I noticed Covid brought out dormant social phobias. Just like with Aids in the 80s, my anxiety appeared to be around catching Covid, and triggered by not being able to handle the risks of sex.
But in reality it were always social phobias.

I was afraid of the social consequences of becoming hiv positive.
And in 2020 I became afraid of the social consequences of testing positive for Covid or of being deemed irresponsible.

What I picked up as a teen, and what I ve picked up in 2020 as well, is that there is a lot of unresolved tension around sex, and around other topics that society is just way too eager to piggyback onto some contagious disease.
The disease, and conversations and regulations on how to prevent it, becomes this HUGE metaphor, that provides an umbrella to take shelter from the real topics that none of us want to address.

Just like when Aids became a way to keep teens from exploring sex;
Covid too is taking the fall for a lot of things that have been falling apart for years.
Like our stripped healthcare system, making The Netherlands dependent on Germany for ICU beds and Covid test capacity.

Although both Aids and Covid are real threats, they are almost impossible to have healthy, transparent conversations about, because of other fears, other judgements; Because of conflicts of interest, reluctance to invest, ruthless budget cuts, and so on. 

So that was largely the starting point for these C diaries;
That I had a social phobia, and not a phobia related to hypochondria.

And I’m sure I ve also mentioned, and if not then now is the time, that the reason I had fallen prey to this Covid induced social phobia, was because I felt people had become shameless in projecting their fears onto other people.
It was basically about a demand from others:
“Give me a safe feeling.”

There’s few things I do so reluctantly, as giving people a safe feeling. 
I never do it without making a mental note to minimize contact, and will remove that person from my life if I can.
Feeling safe is your job, not mine.

So that is what I can remember from how I started this series.

But the main breakthrough came when I started thinking in terms of eroticism. More than sex, I need space where everything and anything can happen.
It’s the reason I resist monogamous relationships.
It’s the reason I will never have “a sex date”.
I need possibilities, options, tension, a field where we can play.

The erotic space, as a space where anything can happen, has explained for me, why my sexuality fell flat on its face when Covid came and I tried to connect with the rest of society over the dangers, and over how to now do life and so on.

My erotic space evaporated, and my libido with it.

Since I know that I have been able to restore and protect my erotic space, I’m healed.
It’s over.
I can now have sex with Covid present, just like I can have sex and manage the risk of hiv.

And the three messages I got today, from my three friends, brought out the first glimpses of all that is yet to come. Of all the things I have not experienced yet, and that I want to.
From being fearful and paralyzed, I feel life has now become this giant erotic space, filled with the three questions my lover once asked me:
“What do you really want?
Or are you afraid to ask?
Afraid you’re too horny?”

I know what I really want.
I am not afraid to ask.
And there is no such thing as too horny.

This is my series about my Covid induced celibacy.
I m close to ending my celibacy at a practical level, but also, and more importantly, to discovering why I was struck by Covid and Aids induced phobias which affected my sex-life.
And how to fix it.

If I had one message, then what would it be? 
I often ask myself that question, because I have so many outlets and art forms.
LS Harteveld is a large part of it, but this is a pen name account.
I ve started calling it my workshop, a place where I shape my thoughts, much rather than sharing one message or outcome.

From writing in my LS Harteveld workshop for 14 years, has one message surfaced?
And I believe it has.

But I have come to understand that this message is first of all not as generic as I thought it was. It is a one size but it doesn’t fit all.

And secondly, that I got the message, not so much wrong or backwards, but that I had been using the wrong vocabulary and therefor it was constantly getting me in trouble because I was communicating something that it wasn’t.

The message that has been mine since I broke up my longterm relationship in 2006, and started writing, is an unaltered one:
Sex is important.
And you cannot mess with it, contain it, restrain it, deny it, or even chain it into what we call monogamy, without doing serious damage to it.
That second sentence was not part of the original thought, but it quickly became the appendix when I found how damaging 14 years of monogamy and 14 years of being part of two-some had been.
I was so unsuccessful when I started allowing new men in my life, that it took a whole year before my first kiss.
And I had never heard anybody speak about how monogamy brings you to sleep, in hibernation, and keeps you from developing yourself.

Just like you are eating on your own capital, when you don’t have an income, you start eating on your own erotic capital when you become monogamous.
You can start off as two healthy adults, and even create mutual erotic capital in the first months or years of being together (which makes it even harder to recognize what’s going on when it goes downhill later on);
And years later you are sexually deprived, erotically poor, and robbed of all confidence that was yours when you started.

No one had ever talked about it like that.
No one had ever warned me what the cost of monogamy, even the accidental you could almost say “natural” monogamy we had, would be once you come out of it and find your sexuality to be in a deplorable state.

So that is when the second sentence, about the costs of monogamy, was added to the first more inquisitive quest I set myself on, on wanting to find out who I was sexually, without my partner.
But because of those costs, discovering what I wanted sexually, and who I was, which originally had been my idea of what I would be doing when I was single, became Step 2.
I could not begin there.
First, I needed to setup the entire operation at ground level, much like when I was an early teen and started to fall in love with boys.
THAT’S why I lost an entire year before I got my first kiss.

If you had asked me then what my number one message was, it would have been that whatever you do, don’t become monogamous, because it eats away and destroys everything you hold dear about yourself.
And basically that’s still what I would tell you today.

So when I bypass the relationship aspect, the bigger theme, my real message is and always has been;
-> make sex the guiding principle of your life <-

Use it to indicate how well you are doing.
Use it to develop yourself.
Use it to heal yourself.
To heal another.
Use it to connect.
To identify yourself.
To comfort yourself and to comfort another.
To excite yourself, to excite another.

Use it for intrigue and mischief.
For betrayal and reconciliation.
For understanding and to make not understanding each other more palpable.

Use it to live with that which cannot be changed.

And when I say use I mean:
Do.
Experience.
Give.
Get.

The formula being:
{ positive verb } + sex = a good thing

And yet I kept NOT getting my message across, and was constantly entangled in movements and lineages that had looked like my thing, but that were not my thing.

I followed teachers and therapists who appeared to have been knowing on this big fallout monogamy causes.
Only to then realize they were coming at it from an entirely different angle, and ended up with conclusions I did not support.

And I have been studying Tantric sex for couples (which is not what I believe is the real Tantric sex at all, but like all couples I looked at what we call Tantra for help) as early as the 90s.
Only to realize that I would probably not want to have Tantric sex even if it was with the movie star man of my dreams with whom I was granted a night of Tantric sex.
That even with new, exciting men I was in love with and everything was new, I would not be able to “get it up” for Tantric sex.

And problems started to arise on the other end as well.
I wrote erotic stories, but didn’t feel a connection to most of the people who read it, and they did feel a connection to me!
They had felt like I had taken them to bed, and all I wanted to scream was:
“I m pretty sure I didn’t!” 

I was asked to write an erotic story for a site that promoted long healthy sexual relationships for couples, only to then have my story banned when I had finally been able to frame having sex with your real partner in a way that was erotic.

I was asked to pose nude or in lingerie multiple times, because I would be portrayed as a writer of erotica.
To this day I don’t understand why a writer of erotica would be more willing to take her clothes off.

The confrontation with the world about my core message became so uncomfortable, not because I got push-back or angry people, but because I could not express myself in a way that reached the right people.
And looking back I think I abandoned my message.
I gave up.

I renamed this account a workshop, and starting January 1st, I m going all in under my real name.
With a message that is packaged in a way that most people will NOT be able to relate to.
And it is the most deliberate choice I ve ever made.

My message is wrapped in three layers of Bon Jovi, and no one but the die-est hardest of fans is going to find it there.

So what happened?
What is the reason, that after 14 years I only feel comfortable sharing my message either anonymously, under a penname and barely showing my face?
Or share it using the cover of a double-neck electric guitar.

The answer came this week when I realized what I had been struggling with, was the difference between erotica and sex.
For instance: Where I had thought the problem with monogamy was that it kept sex between two people, my real problem had been that it kept eroticism between two people.
And because eroticism (I think by default!) DIES between two people, the sex in longterm relationship becomes a shadow of what it once was.
The two people die their erotic deaths.

When I complained about your sex-life needing startup time after a longterm relationship, what I had actually meant was your erotic identity requiring to be brought back to life.

When I wrote the entire list of how to use sex, or the formula
{ positive verb } + sex = a good thing
The word sex should have spelled eroticism.

And even this series, the C. Diaries, about my Covid induced celibacy;
What died from Covid was not sex; it was eroticism.
And without eroticism, I can’t have sex.

That also explains why most other people CAN have sex during Covid;
Either their eroticism has not died, or they do not need, or no longer need, eroticism to have sex.
When your eroticism has died before Covid, Covid will not bring a fundamental change to your sex life.
And when your eroticism can stay alive, or perhaps even thrive, in times of Covid, your sex-life can be absolutely great.

So before I share what I know so far on how to restore my sexuality, in Covid times and all other times to come; 
I want to explain the key to eroticism, and why it dies when you throw Covid regulations at it.

That is because eroticism is a space where an alternate reality is created.
An alternate reality about who you are, who the other is, who you are together. 
Eroticism is something that exists in a plane that is unbothered by facts, and rich in mysticism, the forbidden and the hidden. 

Because the Covid pandemic is battled from the perspective of mechanistic, scientific thinking, a cure A will lead to result B kind of approach, something I will explain in a minute why that is true, but not for the reasons you think – 
the culture around fighting Covid is the opposite of the erotic plane.
And the mysticism, the forbidden and the hidden that is of course omnipresent especially in a culture battling Covid is deemed so threatening, that it is simply denied.
That taking part in the mysticism, the forbidden and the hidden, and even looking for the boundaries to where your individual freedom can be pushed, is demonized and frowned upon.

Why the mechanistic structure of Cure A or Plan B will lead to outcome C, DOES work, but for different reasons than you think:
When in 2008 the banks fell, and people who worked at the banks knew about the financial system being broken, a lot of people argued that the public should be informed earlier when things like this happened.
The public should know there is no solid basis to their financial system, and how fragile it is.
No! 
This awareness would have been fatal.
If in October 2008 the general public had known what the bankers knew who fled to safety buying guns because they thought a civil war was upon us;
A civil war WOULD have come upon us.
The only reason it didn’t is because the population, world wide, BELIEVED in the financial system.

Same with Covid regulations and their cure and the future of how this will unfold: It will go according to the road, the path, that most people BELIEVE to be the best. 
And that the rest of us find acceptable enough not to riot.
And that is exactly how it should be.
Because it is not about what is right or wrong, you must go the path that is supported by the majority of people.
If the majority gets a sense of safety from a certain set of regulations; It’s a Go.

And now we have come full circle.
Now it is clear why my message will never be for the majority, why eroticism will always be under threat, why my sex-life has suffered in the 80s during the aids era and why it is suffering now in the Covid era:
Because the majority needs a sense of safety, a sense that things are under control. Affirmed by practical actions they can do themselves.
We all know that condoms are not a 100% safe.
And we definitely know face masks are not a 100% safe.

The story that a simple behavioral adaptation can contain the threat of Covid,  aids, or the threat for being left by your partner and ending up alone,
is one that gives the majority of the population a sense of reassurance which is the glue that holds society together.

Eroticism is at the entire other end of the spectrum.
Where insecurities are played out, toyed with, teased with.
To create an erotic environment within Covid, you would have to accept our times like war times, when seeing your lover is dangerous.
Something that could get you killed, your loved ones too, something that is an act of rebellion and freedom, when everybody around you is in a state of panic, a constant numbing fear that is only just contained by regulations that provide a veneer of safety as long as we all comply.
You have to feel, and really soak in all that social pressure of cornering you until you behave like the majority of the people want you to.

And then meet your lover instead.
In secret.

That is eroticism.
.