Episode 189 -- February 3, 2022

Why We Wait: Navigating Sex in Early Recovery

A great many experts and recovery veterans suggest abstinence from sex and romantic relationships for the first year of sobriety. The "One Year Rule" has become an enduring piece of advice for people in early recovery. When we first give up our substance of choice, change seems to be the only consistent thing. It makes sense to focus on the one thing needs to stay solid: our sobriety. The "One-Year Rule" reinforces the message that everything else in our lives should take the back seat on our road to recovery.

In her book Sex in Recovery: A Meeting Between the Covers, Jennifer Matesa explores the challenges people encounter when navigating sex and romance while living in recovery. She creates a space for a vital, new dialogue about sexuality and intimacy. Many people may believe that sex is not a factor in their recovery. Matesa explains how important it is.

In the following excerpt, Matesa discusses how this year of waiting can support the goal of long-term recovery. Whether or not we decide to follow this rule, our sobriety should always be our number one priority.

This excerpt has been edited for brevity.

The Infamous One-Year Rule
Any of us who've been going to a Twelve Step fellowship to stay away from alcohol or other drugs knows what I'm talking about when I bring up the One-Year Rule.

Practically every newcomer hears a version of the One-Year Rule. It pisses everyone off, and almost nobody follows it.

Because, whaaat???

Why It Might Be a Good Idea
Often, when we're instructed not to make any big changes in the first year—not to start a new relationship, not to end a long-term relationship, and maybe, if you're single, not even to have sex with anyone but yourself in the first year—it's the first time we have to think seriously about surrendering our ideas of what we want.

Because sex is something most of us want. And to give it up for a year?

Oh yeah and by the way: There's nothing at all to that effect in any recovery program's recorded literature, or in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (which is "How It Works" for shrinks). All these "suggestions" are part of a vast lore that has grown up among people in long-term recovery from addiction for the past eighty years or so. For most of that time, we recovering people have had to take care of our own encounters with addiction mostly by ourselves, because the scientists and the medical and psychological practitioners, which is to say the professionals who might help us, haven't yet known enough or achieved enough unity to develop effective strategies against this thing that's out to kill us—be it a spiritual malady, a bio-psycho-social illness, a brain disease, a genetic or epigenetic disorder, a learning disability, a Cyclops- or Grendel-like monster, or whatever you might call it.

As fellows in the project of recovery, we bond and support one another through the age-old means of story—which casts both the newcomer and the old-timer in a web of belonging and safety. Community.

And one story that's been passed down among our many recovering tribes is this: it's just better not to make big relationship changes in the first year. Whether you're single or in a relationship, it's good to think really hard about what sex means to you, how you used to use it, and how you might want to engage with it differently as you start having it sober. All that takes time.

In early recovery we're vulnerable physically and emotionally—we're craving the relief of the head-changing stuff we've just overcome—and the excitement of new sexual relationships can tempt us with instant relief and satisfaction that quite literally activates the same chemicals—dopamine, endorphins, adrenaline—as the drugs we've just quit using. Homer inscribed it this way into The Odyssey, an ancient epic poem of a great journey that for centuries was passed down orally before it was ever inked onto papyrus: our boats have steered clear of the temptations of the Sirens, our bodies have just been cut down from the mainmasts where they'd been tied for safety, and to turn the wheel toward anything that even sounded like the Sirens' song would be a super-bad idea. It could hurt others, and it could hurt us.

But guess what? Being human, most of us do it anyway.

Making Recovery a Top Priority
The One-Year Rule is related to another cardinal recovery suggestion: make your "program" the first priority in your life.

Which sounds well and good. But it can be unnerving to drag one's newly detoxed body to church-basement meetings and drink shitty low-end coffee out of a Styrofoam cup, wishing you could jump out of your skin, listening to people with years of recovery tell you you'll lose anything you put in front of your "program"—including whatever new romance might actually be the only promise of relief from early recovery's soul-crushing grief of never again being able to take another shot, drink, pill, or toke.

So when it comes to sex, most people ignore this cardinal piece of advice. It's like the one legal thing left, right? Not one person I talked to—young, old, male, female, straight or fluid, this-that-or-the-other race—had followed the rule just because they were told to do it by someone who had "more time" than they did.

"Everybody's going to tell you not to get involved in your first year," said Gabriel, who tells a story later in this book about kicking addiction in New York City thirty years ago. "And out of the thousands of people I've known in recovery, I've known of only maybe five who have actually adhered to that. So go ahead and get involved, but understand that you're going into any involvement probably for the wrong motives, because nobody in early sobriety does stuff for the right motives—or maybe only a handful do. Just understand these things: it will likely end, because you are not a formed person, and it will likely expose you to certain risks, especially of intense feeling that you or the other person may not be able to handle. The only way to protect yourself against that risk is by making your program your top priority."

So: do what you feel, maybe, but check your motives with yourself and with other people you trust. If you haven't done your Fourth and Fifth Steps yet, including looking at your "sex relations" while you were drinking or using, you may want to do that before you hop between the covers with somebody new. The Big Book (p. 69) gives some useful guidance here, both in looking at past relationships and in thinking about getting involved with someone new:

Queries for Discussion

• If sex were taking priority over my recovery, how would I recognize it? What would that look like, and how might I respond? What practices might I put in place to safeguard against this risk?


• Have I subjected a new potential sexual relationship to the Big Book's test: "was it selfish or not?" What do "selfish" sexual conduct and motives look like to me?

About the Author:
Jennifer Matesa has written about health for more than twenty years and authors the award-winning blog Guinevere Gets Sober. She is a regular contributor to TheFix.com, and in 2013 she became a fellow of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. She is the author of The Recovering Body.

© 2016 by Jennifer Matesa
All rights reserved