Moments of Glad Grace: Celibacy, Running, and Nostalgia

In 1999, I ran a marathon in a time of three hours, thirteen minutes, and fifty-one seconds. I averaged a 7:24 per mile pace. It was the fastest of the eighteen marathons I’ve ever run.

I do not normally wander around bragging about my running times. Marathoning was a relatively brief season of my life, followed by an even briefer season of ultra-running. (The goal was a 100-miler. I never made it. My longest completed race was half that distance, and that was more than enough to damage my body.) My knees eventually gave out, as they often do. A cardiologist told me I had an enlarged left ventricle, the danger made worse by endurance exercise.

All these years later, no one ever asks me if I intend to take up running again. No one, certainly, expects me to run as I did when I was decades younger and whippet thin. My marathoning days are over, I say. My role now is to share whatever wisdom I gleaned from my years of marathoning with anyone who happens to be interested. I’m not a coach but can provide advice and encouragement to friends.

To most people, sex and romance are not the same as distance running. (A very famous poem by a famous Berkeley poet does make the comparison in an evocative final sentence.) When I tell people that my goal is to stay celibate indefinitely, they tend to see it less as an evolution and more of a concession to trauma. Athletes should retire, and our culture is littered with sad examples of those who lingered too long on the field or court. We consider it wise when someone acknowledges their body can no longer do what it once did. We do not consider it equally admirable when someone says their heart can no longer do as it once thought it could.

In other words, no one doubts what I say about my knee -- or my left ventricle -- and the permanent limitations those weaknesses impose. Lots of people, though, doubt I really mean what I say about my capacity to be romantically and sexually intimate. Some of that doubt is rooted in what they know of me personally: this is a man who has rarely been alone. If the best predictor of future actions is past behavior, then they suspect that sooner or later, I’ll try to date again. More of that doubt, though, is rooted in the presumption that prolonged celibacy is somehow psychologically unhealthy and evidence of a trauma that deserves to be addressed and healed.

I have a good friend who is a devout Roman Catholic. We have known each other for many years. She is faithful to her church’s teachings on divorce and remarriage and pre-marital sex. This friend has pointed out that unless I intend to reconcile with my first wife – the only spouse with whom I had a Catholic wedding, and someone I haven’t seen in well over thirty years – permanent celibacy is the best possible spiritual state in which I can dwell for the rest of my life. This friend and I talk more and more, not because I have any serious intention of returning to the church, but because it’s nice to have one person (who loves me) affirm that this life I’ve chosen can and should be permanent rather than temporary.

Of course, even this friend frets a little. “It might be better, Hugo, if you could see your celibacy as faithfulness to God and less as a retirement due to total incapacity.” Well, sure. It’s always better to do things out of honor, faith, or love than out of self-loathing, but at the end of the day, the best I can offer is the right action. I can’t promise to always have the right thinking too. That’s an overask.

A compulsive oversharer, I have sometimes boasted that I do not remember how many women I’ve slept with. There’s no way to write that, I don’t think, without having it sound like a brag, though I have tried. The reality is that I am fairly sure of the exact number, give or take three or four. I sometimes think about what I believe to be the correct count, repeating it in my head the same way I repeat 3:13:51 – my finishing time at that 1999 Pittsburgh Marathon. Can you believe, old boy, that that many women wanted to go to bed with you? Can you believe, you bumbly, stumbly aging fool, that you once could run that far, that fast?

For sale: baby shoes, never worn. Often attributed to Hemingway, the sentence serves as the classic example of how to break a heart with six words. Shakespeare scholars point out that what the apocryphal Hemingway could do with six, the Bard could do in five: “I was adored once, too,” says old Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night.

When I was a younger man, that line haunted me. Very recently, I’ve changed my mind about it. Sir Andrew’s words are not a lament, nor a vain boast. They’re an acknowledgement that even the best and happiest of things are with us only for a season. I cannot run as I once did, just as I do not look as I once did. I was adored once! I was fast once! I was loved well and often, and I am as sustained by the memory of what it was like to take someone new to bed as I am by the feeling of what it was like to thunder down a mountain trail. It is not tragic to have one’s now be sustained by the memory of one’s then. Nostalgia is not pathology. I am not a Miss Havisham, enslaved and embittered by memories of what was and could have been.

It's always possible that things could change. I could meet my sixth wife in line at the grocery store this afternoon, though it is very unlikely. Having broken many promises of fidelity, I have no intention of making an actual vow of perpetual celibacy. In the meantime, though, I am sustained by happy memory. That is no tragedy, nor even a problem to be solved. I am loved by friends and family and children! I am needed! Those are good things. And if, when I’m alone, I sometimes reflect happily on how well I was loved in my “moments of glad grace,” I accept some will regard that as slightly… pathetic.

That’s fine. Just know it’s not your problem to solve.

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