Vernacular Lebanese culture and the Internet abound with anecdotes about “single women.” Al-Jazeera English recently commissioned and aired the documentary “Single by Choice” whilst asking “why are so many Lebanese women single?” and the late Lebanese popular social commentator, Amal Hamadeh infamously and perhaps unintentionally popularized the expression “there are no men left.” Equally, during my PhD-related fieldwork, I came across innumerable instances of “aversion to marriage” and resolutions to remain “single by choice.” This paper views such narratives as vernacular theories of sexual anxieties that are specific to the “slow death” (Berlant 2007) that largely characterizes the rapidly deteriorating state of affairs in contemporary Lebanon. Marriage age in Lebanon, as is the case with the Levant and elsewhere around the world, is on the increase, with financial reasons and the privileging of professional development oftentimes cited as the main factors behind this shift. However, such quantitative indicators leave unattended the intricate and highly likely, yet easily effaced, negotiations between individual agency and heterosexist societal values that shape singledom by choice. This paper conceptualizes the concept of hetero-pessimism as decolonial knowledge to rethink cis/hetero singledom as a space of futurity and disruptive desire, and to challenge Eurocentric reductions of asexuality to that of identity. Celibacy and abstinence are often evoked to differentiate them from asexuality in western asexuality rhetoric. This paper challenges this differentiation by pointing out the continuity of hetero-pessimism in each. Hetero-pessimism is understood as radical desire that challenges conventional bio-political (read cis/hetero/reproductive) normalization of women’s desire. The paper is highly interdisciplinary. Theoretically, it draws on affect studies, queer feminist approaches, and decolonial praxis – notably discarding, in its conceptualization of hetero-pessimism. Empirically, it draws on vernacular knowledge and popular culture from contemporary Lebanon in order to tie intrapersonal agency to larger economic and socio-political dynamics. By showing how vernacular constructions, experiences, and stories of “refusal to sex” (Fahs 2010) have the potential to disrupt quantitative accounts of bodily autonomy, the paper seriously attempts to engage feminist theorizing from the MENA beyond the trope of MENA-as-area-studies. Keywords: hetero-pessimism; asexuality; asexual agency; singledom; Arab women