Drew Barrymore is speaking candidly about celibacy, revealing that she hasn’t had sex since she split from husband Will Kopelman in 2016.
The 47-year-old actress made the claim in an essay published on her official blog on Sunday — just weeks after she made headlines for proclaiming she could “go years” without getting freaky.
“Since entering life as a single mom, I have not been able to have an intimate relationship,” the “Never Been Kissed” actress wrote in the essay, entitled “Rebels Who Love.”
“I have had the honor and a pleasure to actually work on myself and learn what parenting is, something I was not exactly clear on growing up,” she further declared.
Barrymore married Kopelman in 2012, before they welcomed daughters, Olive, 10, and Frankie, 8. They split four years later, with the actress admitting the separation “rocked her to her core.”
She claimed that her views about intimacy and sex have transformed in the wake of the split, particularly as she raises two young daughters.
The former wild child implied that she was sexually adventurous in her younger years, stating: “I did not have role model parents and I engaged with people in grown up ways since a tender age. I was looking for companionship, validation, excitement, pleasure, hedonism, fun!”
But in the wake of her divorce, Barrymore met with a therapist who revolutionized her thinking about sex after he told her: “Sex is not love! It is the expression of love.”
“I have searched my whole life to have words like that,” the actress explained, saying she has needed “to stay very celibate . . . and in some sort of state of mourning of the loss of a nuclear family that I swore I would have for my daughters.”
While the “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” actress insisted that she did not judge others for their sexual practices, she wrote that she wished that she once “had the chastity and the thoughtfulness that I do about intimacy now as a 47-year-old woman.”
“I wish I had been taught by my mother or my father or my friends that there is age appropriateness business and that there is a way to become a classy young woman,” she declared.
“There are things that are fun but also boundaries that can lead to tremendous self-respect. When you are selective and you look at sex as an expression of love and not love itself… well, I’m so glad to be here now in my life,” she further added.
“I am just in a completely different place in my life and maybe in the near future I will get into a relationship . . . but it simply hasn’t been my priority,” Barrymore candidly continued. “So I’m not a person who needs sex and has to go out there and engage with people on that level.”
Last month, the actress first addressed her celibacy on “The Drew Barrymore Show” after it was revealed that actor Andrew Garfield abstained from sex for six months while shooting a movie.
“What’s wrong with me that six months doesn’t seem like a very long time?” the actress stated on the program.