When Romance Stands Between You and the World

The Atlantic

7 days ago

By the time she was in her mid-30s, the writer Melissa Febos had been in relationships for 20 straight years. One romance would end and another would begin immediately, if it hadn't already started: a long relay race of partners. In the rare stretch of singlehood, she would always have a crush ready to grab the baton soon enough.
This might sound, to a lot of people, like great luck. 'Our culture tells us that such abundance is a privilege,' Febos acknowledges in her new book, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex. But abundance, in her experience, felt more like constraint. In one terrible two-year relationship, she writes, she cried so often that the skin near her eyes began peeling off; texts from her girlfriend made her so anxious that she had to keep changing the alert sound. Other times, she details quieter torments: always thinking about her latest flame, always expected to tell them her whereabouts, never really able to work or read or daydream in peace. Her body didn't feel like her own anymore—but rather like 'a work animal who slept in a barn behind the house of my mind.' She recalls feeling like 'a hungry ghost': always starved for affection, but never sated. 'You can't get enough of a thing you don't need,' her therapist tells her.
Finally, she resolves to take a break. Or rather, she has another five flings—'like the last handful of popcorn you cram into your mouth after you decide to stop eating it'—and then resolves to actually take a break: She will be celibate for three months.
Yes, three months. Febos appreciates the laughable modesty of her goal. But she argues that, for her, it was ambitious: an attempt not only to take a breath, but also to find the bottom of her 'bottomless need.' The Dry Season is an account of this period, which turns into a year, during which she abstains from sex, dates, and flirting. It doesn't call for an end to romance, but it is an indictment of a dependence, individually and societally, on partnership. Febos doesn't want to lose passion, but she needs to find balance.
The particular abundance of which Febos speaks—I can't say I'm personally familiar with it. I don't think too many people are, or not to this degree. In her handful of celibate months, she must resist suitor after suitor popping up like road obstacles in a racing game. There's the writer who, at a conference, literally begs her to have sex; the friend who confesses her attraction; the acquaintance who thinks their dinner is a date; the playwright who keeps texting. There's a hot stranger on a plane.
But Febos never claims her journey is anything near universal. She unpacks how she learned early on to catch and hold people's attention, to make them want something from her. When she left home at 16 and supported herself with restaurant work, her tips, and thus her survival, depended on it. She also recounts her history of addiction—how she's no longer using heroin, but still, to some extent, chasing the next reward. And anyway, I'd guess that most readers, whether or not they're serial monogamists, have struggled at some point to shut off whatever autopilot setting cuts against their own best interests. As I read, Febos's celibacy challenge went from feeling like a humblebrag to a deeply relatable effort. And as she settled into her solitude, her observations began to resonate. She details parts of singlehood that I, too, have treasured—and which I've heard extolled again and again in my reporting on romance, even from people whose celibate season resulted from a dearth, not an excess, of options.
One of the qualities that Febos discovers is absolute tranquility. She luxuriates in her quiet mornings, with no one hogging the bed or waiting to hear back from her; she spends whole weekends reading paperback mysteries, carrying them with her to the bathroom, getting lost in them as she hadn't since she was young. The calm is not just physical but, more importantly, mental. When I spoke with people who quit dating out of frustration, several told me they'd discovered immense peace. With Febos's attention freed up, she notices the smells of a New York summer; the flowers she passes along the streets; the 'tart explosion' of each raspberry she eats, one by one, from a whole carton.
As romantic distractions fall away, the quiet also makes way for freedom. When researchers ask people what they most appreciate about singlehood, many mention a sense of autonomy. Febos expresses delight in running her own schedule, forgoing meal times and eating when she's hungry—grazing on green apples and cheese, olives and nuts, pickles right out of the jar. Her liberation isn't just related to action; it has to do with possibility, open-endedness. Every partnership she'd been in had, inevitably, structured her life according to a certain narrative. 'Identity is a story other people tell us, that we learn to tell ourselves, that is housed inside relationships,' she writes. It can be comforting, but also suffocating. When she wakes in her bed alone, or returns to the world after immersing herself in a book, she's not hit with the recollection that she's Melissa, someone's girlfriend. She just exists.
That's not to say that Febos spends her dry season in oblivious solitude; quite the opposite. She describes gabbing on the phone with her mom and her friends about a million things other than her crushes. While staying overnight with an old pal, she writes, she's startled to find that she has 'nothing else to do, no one to call and wish good night, no higher priority than to be with my friend.' This might be the greatest benefit of singlehood: the deepening of other connections. Surveys have found that single people, on average, have more friends than married people, and feel closer to them; they are more likely to spend time with parents and siblings, and to know their neighbors; they volunteer more for certain organizations. Many couples, meanwhile, have a tendency to look inward; to remain in a cozy bubble, thinking mostly of each other. For a variety of reasons, not all of them bad, partners today spend more time together than those in the 1960s did.
Febos recognizes the appeal of a more circumscribed life. The outside world seems to be growing only more dissonant and chaotic. Focusing on a partner can be a way to protect oneself from fully processing a barrage of bad news and angry discourse. 'It seemed impossible to keep an open heart in this world,' she writes. 'It made sense to keep the channel of one's heart narrowed the width of a single person, to peer through the keyhole at a single room rather than turn to face the world.'
But when Febos stops looking through the keyhole and turns around, she finds that being single feels like anything but a dry season; it's the most emotionally and spiritually fertile time of her life. The ties she strengthens aren't only social: She also starts connecting with nature, with art, with her surroundings. 'Instead of narrowing the aperture of my feeling,' she writes, 'I expanded it. A light that shone not on specific objects, but illuminated everything in proximity.' She isn't in love with a partner; she's in love, full stop.
Febos is clear that, as much as she enjoys singlehood, she never intended to linger there forever. And she doesn't. Pretty much as soon as her year of celibacy comes to a close, she falls for the woman who becomes her wife. I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a small stab of disappointment, as if she'd abandoned the whole venture she claimed to champion, only confirming that the luckless are indeed losing out. But Febos's greatest challenge, really, begins as the book ends. Being single is easier, in a sense, than being partnered and still preserving your other relationships, your interests, and yourself.
She's been preparing for this test. Febos makes clear, throughout The Dry Season, that what she wants isn't just to stop defaulting to romance. She also aims to divest from a relationship culture that is rooted in patriarchy; one that so often leads women, even those who aren't dating men, to make themselves so small that they disappear. She finds historical role models in women who chose celibacy or solitude over a partnered domestic life and thus were allowed to retain an unusual amount of agency. Hildegard von Bingen, a Benedictine abbess and eventual saint, lived in the Middle Ages, when women's lives were severely restricted. By claiming a direct line to God, though, she was able to become a composer, lyricist, and the author of numerous scientific texts. The Beguines, a group of medieval laywomen, traveled and lived independently, teaching and working in service to the poor, instead of becoming the property of husbands.
Febos studies these models and also makes a list of all of her past entanglements, analyzing each in hopes that she can discover—and break—her own patterns. She comes to believe that she's been conditioned to identify what someone wants from her and measure her value through her power to grant it. My worth is contingent on my lovability, she writes down on a slip of paper. Then she goes to Coney Island, digs a hole in the sand, and burns it to ash. She promises herself 'to remain faithful to what I had found.'
Can she be, though, now that she's no longer single? Febos seems to have come a long way from where she started. When she first has lunch with her wife-to-be, at the writing conference they're both attending, she knows they have chemistry—but doesn't let that knowledge consume her. She pulls her attention to the world around her: the trees just beginning to bud, the crowds of people, the pinch in her left shoe.
I want to believe this is enough: that if you're intentional, you can be someone's partner without losing any of yourself. I'm not sure I do. Maybe Febos still eats pickles straight out of the jar, and sleeps alone, splayed across the whole bed. But when she wakes up, she will know that she can no longer 'be anyone or no one.' She will be shaped by the story of her relationship. She will, in some way or another, be bending herself into half of the whole. You can't turn toward someone without turning away from something else.
That doesn't mean she should have stayed celibate, or that she's failed to accomplish what she set out to do. On the contrary, she seems well aware of what gets sacrificed for love—she wrote a whole thoughtfully argued book on it. She's simply chosen, I think, to risk some of her own losses for gains she considers worth it. These are the trade-offs we make. Even a conscientious objector cannot disentangle themselves completely from a society that worships partnership. Better to notice where your attention goes. Better to keep drawing it back, again and again, to the world around you: to the pinch in your shoe, to the buds in the trees, to the people—all the many, many people—who are right there beside you.