Comment: Are people weary of casual sex and ready for a lovemaking approach like Synergy, in which bonding is the primary focus? This item appeared in The Times (UK).

The singer Tulisa used the term to say she wants emotional connection before a physical relationship. I know how she feels, says Charlie Gowans-Eglinton

Are you demisexual? I hadn’t heard the term before it came up in the Australian jungle on I’m a Celebrity. Tulisa Contostavlos, the singer and former X Factor judge, was talking about her dating life with a few of the male contestants. She’d been on the invitation-only dating app Raya but never actually escalated any of her matches to an in-person date. (That’s still better than me — I was invited to join but only got as far as having to choose a theme song to soundtrack my profile.)

“I feel like I’m a bit demisexual, I need to have a really close emotional bond built with someone,” Tulisa said. “I need meaning and I need real depth. I’m a slow, slow burner. I’ve been celibate for over three years. The thought of literally shagging someone … makes me feel physically sick. I don’t know you — this is my temple, you cannot enter.”

The term demisexuality was coined in 2006 and is on the spectrum of asexuality: sexual attraction only comes after an emotional connection has been built. Not fancying anyone at first sight is further along the spectrum than me. But not wanting to have sex without an emotional connection? Surely that’s everyone over the age of 25. I’m a straight woman so my sexuality is about as nuanced as a Venus razor ad but that sums up the dating lives of most single people I know. And not only is my body my temple but so is my flat: I don’t want to wake up to a near-stranger in my safe space (not a euphemism, for once) on a Sunday morning.

A few of my single friends would disagree with me. For some, sex positivity only seems to apply to actually having sex: everything else is met with negativity. During my sort-of-accidental few years of celibacy post-Covid, friends would ask about it in the same gentle, mildly patronising tones that some married couples (usually the unhappily married ones) will always take when talking to single people about relationships: assuming that we all want what they have, obviously.

During my sex drought, a single friend of mine signed up to Feeld, a sex-positive dating app where people list their kinks instead of their hobbies, which she used to meet men for sex, no strings attached. One was a model, while she met another in a bar and had sex with him in the toilets between rounds. Everything was safe, consensual. I think she’s a goddess for doing exactly what she wants, and told her so.

She told me that I must download it, that it would be easy, that guys might even be turned on by my recent abstaining, that “it’s perfect for when you just want sex’’. It never even occurred to her that I might not just want sex, that my break from it might be anything but accidental, even embarrassing. Though I celebrated her choices 100 per cent, it didn’t occur to her to celebrate mine. She didn’t for a second think that I might not want to have sex with a stranger in a loo.

Tulisa and I are the same age: 36. The younger generations might be having open conversations about sexuality but I grew up with all sorts of shame and stigma around sex. When I was a teenager at an all-girls school, the bus ride home each day meant shouted insults from local boys, and the only thing worse than being called a slut was being called frigid: at least being called a slut meant you were deemed shaggable.

It was validation of desirability. The first girls at school to have sex, aged 13 and 14, had bragging rights, talking down to the rest of us and forming a little clique. On the TV throughout my teens Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones was the face of sexual liberation, which meant having lots of sex and wanting lots of sex: sex outdoors, passionate argument sex, sex with strangers. By my twenties, living in an era of sexual liberation and preferring to say “No thanks, not until we’ve really established a deep connection” felt like being a bad feminist. Only the devoutly religious waited longer than a third date, if that.

So I’ve done “bits”, as we used to say, on a golf course (damp, but preferable to the golf buggy where a friend was having full sex nearby) and taken home a man on a first date (truly the least fulfilling sexual experience I’ve ever had).

I once met a man on holiday but by the time we’d walked from the mountainside bar where we’d met to my quiet Airbnb, we felt awkward with each other. We agreed that nothing would happen between us, then relaxed and talked for hours about our very different lives in different countries until we were completely sober and felt like old friends.

And then we had sex — because by then we wanted to. I think fondly of that man, whose name I can’t remember if I ever knew it, unlike men I’ve slept with based only on physical attraction and a first date’s worth of flirting.

The most physically attracted I’d been to a man in person was to a model I was working with on a week-long shoot abroad (I was the junior runner on the job, barely out of my teens). At his casting, taking his Polaroids for my boss, I’d been smitten: in the first 20 minutes I spent talking to him on the shoot — mostly about ponies, his sole interest — I learnt an important life lesson about just how far physical attraction can take you.

I don’t miss sex when I’m not having it, or at least not most sex. I have better orgasms with a vibrator than with 90 per cent of the men I’ve slept with, and that includes the longer-term ones I had years of practice with.

When I’m dating more casually, sex is at best mediocre and at worst traumatic — and I’ve been lucky. Now I just don’t fancy having sex with men who don’t ask follow-up questions on dates, or who spend too much time on their phone. I don’t want to fall asleep next to a man who might secretly have a wife or leave skid marks in my toilet in the morning — at least not before I know how he votes and whether he really makes me laugh.

And in relationships? One of the happiest couples I know regularly approach the year mark without having sex — and they don’t have kids, or affairs, before you jump to either conclusion.

“I don’t know why I’m enjoying watching Rivals so much,” says another, happily married, friend of all the sex on screen in the Jilly Cooper adaptation. “Maybe it’s just vicarious, or a romp’’. But it’s not having the Fifty Shades effect, sending her running for the bedroom. “My husband and I are often more tempted by the extra sleep,” she says. Day to day, she fancies him most when he’s just put on the dishwasher, and absolutely not at all if he doesn’t help with the kids’ bedtime.

Perhaps this is demisexuality for people of a certain age: choosing eight hours of sleep over sex but getting the absolute horn if you don’t find any dirty knives lying in the kitchen sink.

‘I suspect that almost all demisexuals are women’

Isolde Walters: “If I didn’t like someone, why on earth would I want to have sex with them?”

The truest thing I have heard about sex is that for men it is like pizza. Bad pizza is still pretty great. But for women sex is like sushi. Bad sushi can be a horrifying experience. I believe this fundamental truth explains the latest buzzword in the world of sex and dating: the demisexual, referring to people who only feel the spark of sexual attraction for someone when they have an emotional bond to that person.

When Tulisa Contostavlos told her I’m a Celeb camp mates that she was “demisexual” I was ready to roll my eyes until I listened to what she said and felt the spine-tingling chills of relatability. She hardly dates (check), doesn’t consider herself a particularly sexual person (check), requires a close emotional bond with someone to want to go to bed with them (check), hasn’t had sex in three years (not so long for me but long enough — check) and it makes her feel “physically sick” to imagine sleeping with or dating someone she doesn’t have a connection with (check, check, check).

 If these are the criteria for being a demisexual then, yes, I am one. Aren’t most women? There have been times when I’ve adored dating and approached it with the enthusiastic fervour of an adventuress. I loved the thrill of the chase, the swipe through the apps, the dates themselves, first kisses, flirtatious texts and, when I’ve felt that oft-cited “connection”, sex. But I’ve always needed that connection. I’ve never been a casual sex person.

If I liked someone enough to go to bed with them, I almost always wanted something more than no-strings-attached sex, which made any casual dalliance at best pointless and at worst emotionally painful. And if I didn’t like someone, why on earth would I want to have sex with them? I did try it once — sex for sex’s sake — and I found it more akin to an awkward, weirdly intimate workout than anything joyous or, well, sexy.

Has it not always been thus? Men and women have historically had very different approaches to sex. Men respond to visual stimuli far more than women do (hence the popularity of porn) and are far more easily able to divorce sex from feelings. Whereas a woman’s sexuality is a much more complex beast, with most of us needing to know, trust and like someone to take off our clothes and have enjoyable sex with them.

I suspect that almost all demisexuals are women and that the term is gaining popularity because modern dating culture is so frustrating that a lot of us are opting out of it. Many of my friends and I now view dating as an ordeal instead of an adventure, an obstacle course of admin that too often involves endless messaging without meeting in person, alongside disappointment or mismatched expectations.

The dating app Bumble faced a backlash this year after it ran ads apparently aimed at people like Tulisa, with messages such as “A vow of celibacy is not the answer” and “Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun”. I suspect those ads caused such a furore because they hit a nerve.

 I was at a dinner last week with a group of people I had gone to a yoga retreat with. Over dessert our yoga teacher posed the question: “If you had to give up one, yoga or sex, which would it be?” I didn’t hesitate: “Sex, obviously.”

One friend cheerily said to me recently: “The longer you go without sex, the less you miss it.”

I can attest that she’s correct.