Latest news with #Febos
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
She was a 'serial monogamist,' then she gave up sex: What she learned surprised her
Talking about sex is still taboo. Talking about not having sex? Maybe even more so. Melissa Febos didn't go into her year of celibacy planning to write about it. The memoirist, known for 'Girlhood,' is a self-described 'person of extremes.' She's written candidly about her recovery from drug addiction, but in 'The Dry Season' (out now from Penguin Random House), she embarks on intentional abstinence to solve a different kind of addiction – one to romance and partnership. Febos was a 'serial monogamist,' having been in relationships on and off for 20 years since. After one particularly fraught breakup, she knew she needed to change. The result was wholly transformative and, despite the sexual 'dry season,' the most sensual year of her life. 'The tools that I learned during that year are the ones that I will keep with me for the rest of my life in terms of how to be awake to all of my passions, not just my romantic ones (and) what true intimacy and partnership with other people consists of,' Febos says. Febos determined early on in her journey that her problem couldn't be boiled down to a sex addiction. But she did compulsively jump into romantic relationships, which needed to change. In her addiction recovery, Febos learned how to create a personal inventory to analyze past behavior. She applied the same to her love life – a log of past lovers, crushes and partners. 'I had a story about myself in love that maybe wasn't exactly true because it wasn't quite adding up, … I was having a repetitive experience and that I had hit a kind of bottom,' Febos says. 'If I was just a passionate person who fell in love a lot and was basically a great partner to everyone, why was my life ruined?' When she was ready – and only when she was ready – to hear it, she had a close friend look at the list and deliver her the hard truths. 'You're a user,' they told her. 'You use people.' Hearing that was devastating, but then came the relief, Febos says. 'I had written a story about myself in love that was more complacent than I actually was,' Febos says. 'This reflects a kind of national story that we have in mainstream culture where the task in love is to find the right person and when we find the right person, love will work out. … Something I realized during that year was that I needed to also become the right person.' Febos met her wife shortly after ending her abstinence. They've been together for eight years now. 'The Dry Season' isn't a book about finding a spouse at the other end of celibacy – Febos instead clarifies that this period made her the independent, autonomous person who was capable of having a long-term relationship. When you think about celibacy, which words come to mind? Lack? Absence? Dry? Febos feared that, too, but says she found nothing but abundance. Her instinct was no longer to 'run straight into the beautiful anesthesia of another' but to enjoy the satisfaction of her own company. When she says 'erotic,' she doesn't mean in a traditionally sexual sense, but in a fullness-of-life manner of speaking. Her platonic relationships thrived. She had more time for herself. She talks of the 'vivid sense of engagement' she felt – dancing with friends, sleeping in, reading a whole book in the afternoon, eating a perfectly ripe raspberry. 'Overwhelmingly, I did not feel that I was missing anything,' Febos says. 'I had a sense of what I had been missing for years by being obsessed with love and sex." At first, Febos felt embarrassed to tell people she was voluntarily celibate. But as her year continued, she found more and more people who related. 'Almost everything I have ever written about started by feeling unspeakable to me,' Febos says. 'I was afraid that I was alone in those experiences, but I have had those expectations upended time and time again. Every single time I've written about an experience that I felt really alone in and estranged from other people, I have found myself part of a vast community of people who suffer from the exact same burden.' It's a growing cultural conversation. In recent years, celebrities like Julia Fox, Mýa and Lenny Kravitz have opened up about their celibacy. Some young women are going "boysober." Americans aged 22-34 are having less sex, according to a recent study by the Institute of Family Studies. That data showed sexlessness doubled for young men and increased by 50% for young women between the late 2010s and early 2020s. Febos finds common ground with both voluntarily and involuntarily celibate individuals. 'We live in extremes and we ... have a fraught relationship to aloneness,' she says. 'We have not made friends with solitude, and I think that looking for partnership with oneself is actually the first step to having a more comfortable relationship with aloneness.' Febos sought comfort in a long history of intentionally celibate women, like Virginia Woolf and the ancient Greek poet Sappho. She 'nerded out' over nuns (surprising for Febos, given she's not religious) like German Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen. Especially for the spiritual, celibacy was not about sacrifice but power. 'It requires incredible consciousness and mindfulness and consistent work to live against the grain of the ways that we're socialized to accommodate other people, both in our intimate relationships, but also in the world at large,' Febos says. 'Women are really taught that they're selfish if they put themselves at the center of their story and their decision making.' Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@ This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What is celibacy for a former 'serial monogamist'?
USA Today
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
She was a 'serial monogamist,' then she gave up sex: What she learned surprised her
She was a 'serial monogamist,' then she gave up sex: What she learned surprised her Talking about sex is still taboo. Talking about not having sex? Maybe even more so. Melissa Febos didn't go into her year of celibacy planning to write about it. The memoirist, known for 'Girlhood,' is a self-described 'person of extremes.' She's written candidly about her recovery from drug addiction, but in 'The Dry Season' (out now from Penguin Random House), she embarks on intentional abstinence to solve a different kind of addiction – one to romance and partnership. Febos was a 'serial monogamist,' having been in relationships on and off for 20 years since. After one particularly fraught breakup, she knew she needed to change. The result was wholly transformative and, despite the sexual 'dry season,' the most sensual year of her life. 'The tools that I learned during that year are the ones that I will keep with me for the rest of my life in terms of how to be awake to all of my passions, not just my romantic ones (and) what true intimacy and partnership with other people consists of,' Febos says. How a year of celibacy helped Melissa Febos find herself Febos determined early on in her journey that her problem couldn't be boiled down to a sex addiction. But she did compulsively jump into romantic relationships, which needed to change. In her addiction recovery, Febos learned how to create a personal inventory to analyze past behavior. She applied the same to her love life – a log of past lovers, crushes and partners. 'I had a story about myself in love that maybe wasn't exactly true because it wasn't quite adding up, … I was having a repetitive experience and that I had hit a kind of bottom,' Febos says. 'If I was just a passionate person who fell in love a lot and was basically a great partner to everyone, why was my life ruined?' When she was ready – and only when she was ready – to hear it, she had a close friend look at the list and deliver her the hard truths. 'You're a user,' they told her. 'You use people.' Hearing that was devastating, but then came the relief, Febos says. 'I had written a story about myself in love that was more complacent than I actually was,' Febos says. 'This reflects a kind of national story that we have in mainstream culture where the task in love is to find the right person and when we find the right person, love will work out. … Something I realized during that year was that I needed to also become the right person.' Febos met her wife shortly after ending her abstinence. They've been together for eight years now. 'The Dry Season' isn't a book about finding a spouse at the other end of celibacy – Febos instead clarifies that this period made her the independent, autonomous person who was capable of having a long-term relationship. Melissa Febos says celibacy is not about absence of sex but the abundance of self When you think about celibacy, which words come to mind? Lack? Absence? Dry? Febos feared that, too, but says she found nothing but abundance. Her instinct was no longer to 'run straight into the beautiful anesthesia of another' but to enjoy the satisfaction of her own company. When she says 'erotic,' she doesn't mean in a traditionally sexual sense, but in a fullness-of-life manner of speaking. Her platonic relationships thrived. She had more time for herself. She talks of the 'vivid sense of engagement' she felt – dancing with friends, sleeping in, reading a whole book in the afternoon, eating a perfectly ripe raspberry. 'Overwhelmingly, I did not feel that I was missing anything,' Febos says. 'I had a sense of what I had been missing for years by being obsessed with love and sex." Not having sex? You're not alone. At first, Febos felt embarrassed to tell people she was voluntarily celibate. But as her year continued, she found more and more people who related. 'Almost everything I have ever written about started by feeling unspeakable to me,' Febos says. 'I was afraid that I was alone in those experiences, but I have had those expectations upended time and time again. Every single time I've written about an experience that I felt really alone in and estranged from other people, I have found myself part of a vast community of people who suffer from the exact same burden.' It's a growing cultural conversation. In recent years, celebrities like Julia Fox, Mýa and Lenny Kravitz have opened up about their celibacy. Some young women are going "boysober." Americans aged 22-34 are having less sex, according to a recent study by the Institute of Family Studies. That data showed sexlessness doubled for young men and increased by 50% for young women between the late 2010s and early 2020s. Febos finds common ground with both voluntarily and involuntarily celibate individuals. 'We live in extremes and we ... have a fraught relationship to aloneness,' she says. 'We have not made friends with solitude, and I think that looking for partnership with oneself is actually the first step to having a more comfortable relationship with aloneness.' Febos sought comfort in a long history of intentionally celibate women, like Virginia Woolf and the ancient Greek poet Sappho. She 'nerded out' over nuns (surprising for Febos, given she's not religious) like German Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen. Especially for the spiritual, celibacy was not about sacrifice but power. 'It requires incredible consciousness and mindfulness and consistent work to live against the grain of the ways that we're socialized to accommodate other people, both in our intimate relationships, but also in the world at large,' Febos says. 'Women are really taught that they're selfish if they put themselves at the center of their story and their decision making.' Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Can Celibacy Unlock Heightened Levels of Pleasure?
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." What if abstaining from sex and romance wasn't a retreat from intimacy but a pathway to deeper self-knowledge, creative clarity, and radical autonomy? In The Dry Season, writer Melissa Febos chronicles a year of intentional celibacy—an experiment that began in the wreckage of a devastating breakup and transformed into a radical reclamation of self. What started as a 90-day pause from sex and dating in 2016 extended into a full year of disentanglement from romantic attachment. But rather than deprivation, Febos discovered joy, clarity, and sensual fulfillment on her own terms. Her celibacy was not an escape but a deep inquiry into desire, intimacy, and autonomy—a way to interrogate how socialized narratives of love and devotion had shaped her identity as a queer woman. Abstaining from romance didn't mean denying pleasure—it meant redefining it. Through solitude, Febos reconnected with neglected friendships, deepened her creative life, and uncovered new modes of intimacy outside the bounds of romance or sex. Using what she describes as a '12-step-style inventory' of her romantic past, she traced how her relationships had often been marked by performance, self-erasure, and dependence. Far from isolating, her celibate year became rich with connection. Seeking models beyond the cultural obsession with coupledom, Febos turned to a lineage of women who embraced solitude as a source of power, from 11th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen and the beguines of medieval Europe to 20th-century icons like Virginia Woolf and Octavia Butler. These figures served as both companions and intellectual ancestors, helping her situate her experience within a feminist tradition of resistance to conformity and the marriage-industrial complex. A memoirist by trade, Febos has previously written about sex, gender, and power through the lens of her own life. In 2010, she published Whip Smart, about her three and a half years working as a dominatrix, while 2021's Girlhood, a collection of essays about the pressures and societal conditioning females face, which remains a best-seller. Ahead of The Dry Season's release, Bazaar spoke with Febos about how celibacy reshaped her relationship to self-expression, attention, pleasure, and artistic purpose. Ultimately, the memoir asks readers to consider what our lives might look like if we stopped orienting them around the desire to be desired. From the age of 15 into my early 30s, I'd been in nonstop committed monogamous partnerships. I had a story about myself that I was a romantic, that I was a very passionate person; I just fell in love a lot. But in my early 30s, I got into a relationship that I think is safe to characterize as addicting. At that point, I had been sober for 10 years, but I experienced depths of addiction in that relationship that were worse than anything I'd ever experienced when I was a heroin addict. It was very obsessive. I was crying all the time. I lost friends. I crashed my car. My health suffered, and when the relationship finally ended, I looked around and I thought, Damn, I feel like I should be better at this, having been doing it for so long. How did I get here? So I thought, okay, let me take stock and see what's actually going on here, because this was the most painful experience of my life, and I would not like to repeat it. So, I started with 90 days celibate. That was laughable to some of my friends, but it was a familiar unit of time; 90 days is seen as a good metric for how long it takes to let go of a habit and see your situation more clearly. But it was also as long as I could imagine going. My [version of] abstinence included no sex, no dating, no flirting, no sexually charged friendships. And three months was a pretty radical length of time in the context of my life up until that point. It took a minute for me to figure out what celibacy was. In the first few weeks, I definitely had some flirtations and got some texts and was like, Wait a minute, this feeling inside me that's releasing these delicious brain chemicals and making me want to keep doing whatever it is I'm doing is actually the thing I need to stay away from. I had to redraw the contours of what my definition of celibacy was, but once I did that, it was not very hard; almost immediately, I was so much happier. My life got better instantly. All my other relationships started to flourish. I had vastly underestimated the amount of time and energy I had been devoting to these romantic pursuits for my entire adult life, and when I recouped that time and energy for myself, I got to spend it on every other passion that I had. I was having long, fun, languorous conversations on the phone with my friends. I was visiting family. I was writing more. I was exercising more. I donated a bunch of clothes, got a haircut, hit all my deadlines, taught better classes than I had been before. It really felt like I got infused attention and energy into every other area of my life, and I started having a great time. at I had much more emotional capacity. I had this joke when I was spending that time celibate where I started saying to my friends, 'Yeah, I'm making celibacy hot again,' which is really corny and kind of embarrassing but also was very true. I think our culture suffers from an obsession with categories. We consider our sex life and our home life and our work life as separate, but they're not; we're the same person in all of those parts of our lives, and they're deeply intertwined. I had designated sex and love as the area where I experienced some sensual pleasures of being human and living in a body, and it's where I had also located emotional intimacy. And when I sort of shut down that category, those experiences started to surface in so many other areas of my life. I had erotic experiences eating watermelon that summer that I was celibate; I had incredibly romantic experiences with dear friends of mine that were not sexual but that had a similar quality. I realized that I had been dramatically limiting myself and narrowing the aperture of my own experiences by only looking for the erotic or the sublime in lovers, when actually there were opportunities for it everywhere I looked. I also went dancing more that year than any other year of my life. I started an email list of all my friends, and every weekend, I was like, 'Who's coming dancing with me?' We would go dancing until, like, two in the morning. I also had a really fun time exploring and redefining my relationship to food and clothes. I had identified as a high femme for most of my adult life, and I had almost every day since my late teens. And during my celibacy, I started wearing sneakers all the time, and the clothes I was wearing suddenly started to change and get more comfortable and weirder. I had no idea how much my personal style was actually defined based on the imagined gaze of strangers or potential lovers or how I might appeal to the other instead of myself. And in the absence of that, I was actually trying to repel the gaze of others. After the first few weeks [of celibacy], I started to understand how deeply entrenched and embedded in my consciousness the issues in my relationship to love and sex were, and if I really wanted long-term change, I had to take a more active role in it. For me, because I had a lot of experience [with the] 12-step [program] and because I love making lists, I thought, okay, let me start by really taking stock and seeing what I've actually been up to. It was becoming clear to me that the story I had about myself and relationships was probably not true, because there was a common denominator among them all, and it was me. If I was the romantic, devoted partner that I had always thought myself to be, why was I bottoming out in such an ugly way? And why were all my relationships ending on similar grounds? So I started making a list of everyone I had ever been in a relationship with: major crushes, entanglements, one-night stands, everybody. I was looking for patterns, and they very quickly emerged. I found when I really committed to an honest accounting of my own behavior and relationships, it started to become really clear to me that I hadn't been honest with my partners and that, in fact, the behavior that I've characterized as devoted and self-sacrificing and accommodating of other people had actually been a form of manipulation. My project of celibacy had almost everything to do with the emotional part of it. The sexual symptoms that I wanted to change were consequences of the emotional dynamics more than anything else. Not having sex with other people for a year was not very hard. There were only a couple of times where I felt tempted and I clicked back into my old operating system, but for the most part, I was incredibly relieved to set down those preoccupations and all of the energy and the inner conflicts that I experienced around them. The emotional part of it was a lot harder. Making a conscious decision to change your own orientation to a part of life for which we have really, really strong cultural stories is challenging. If I'm honest, a huge part of that work has happened since my celibacy. It wasn't until I engaged in relationships with other people that the rubber really hit the road, and I got to learn how to actually practice those things. My marriage has been the greatest education of putting ideals into practice, and I got really lucky to have a good collaborator in that. The emotional rewards of doing that work has made it entirely worth it, and nothing has brought me closer to other people. I started doing research during my celibate year because once I was celibate for a while and I started to change my ideal for who I wanted to be in relationships, I realized that I needed some new role models. Before that, I had looked to women who had been artistically fulfilled but had also been really messy and chaotic in their love lives, like me. I wanted to find some people whose behavior, not just in their romantic lives but in their lives, was really aligned with what they believed. I wanted my actions and my beliefs to be more congruent. I started by reading about women who were voluntarily celibate, and almost immediately I got deeply obsessed with a lot of nuns and spiritual ladies, especially those living in medieval times, like Hildegard von Bingen, who was a naturalist and a politician and an artist and wrote a language for her nuns to speak. This lady was tied to the Catholic Church, and she lived in a stone room for 35 years and managed to do all of that after she got out. I also became super obsessed with the set of religious laywomen called the Belgian beguines, who flourished in Europe in the 13th century. They lived in separatist communes and were financially independent and made art, wrote poetry, preached; they did a lot of service in their communities. They worked as nurses and teachers and performed last rites for the dying. It was unheard of at the time for women to be living that independently. It was actually illegal in multiple ways. And eventually, a lot of the beguines were burned as heretics. At a time when it's so easy to feel discouraged by the erosion of civil rights in our country and other countries, I am so grateful to have the touch of these women who were living against the grain and leading these incredibly brave, self-actualized, joyful, fulfilled lives at a time when their lives were in danger because of it. If they could do it in the Middle Ages, I can muster the gumption today to enjoy so many of the freedoms that they didn't. After the first three months, I extended it, and then I extended it again, and when I got past the nine month mark, I was so happy and so disinclined to re enter that world that I stopped counting. I just thought, I am deeply uninterested in being in a relationship with another person. But shortly after the year mark, I started corresponding with a woman who would become my wife. Our communication didn't start as flirtation. We had read each other's work and became friends out of a sense of mutual artistic admiration. When we met, it was instant chemistry. I thought, Okay, I want to pursue this, but I want to do it really differently. I communicated that to her right off the bat, and she was like, that sounds really cool. We've been together ever since. You Might Also Like 4 Investment-Worthy Skincare Finds From Sephora The 17 Best Retinol Creams Worth Adding to Your Skin Care Routine
Los Angeles Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
She gave up sex for a year and gained control of her life
After jumping from one relationship to the next, Melissa Febos found herself in bed with a woman she scarcely knew. 'Though I stubbornly tried to prove otherwise, for me, sex without chemistry or love was a horror,' Febos writes in her new book, 'The Dry Season.' 'A few weeks later, I decided to spend three months celibate.' On an unseasonably warm and sunny day in Seattle, I met Febos to talk about the surprising pleasure when those three months turned into a full year of celibacy. 'I had been thinking of this time as a dry season, but it had been the most fertile of my life since childhood,' Febos writes. 'I had run dry when I spent that vitality in worship of lovers. In celibacy, I felt more vital, fecund, wet, than I had in years.' While giving up physical intimacy might sound like the opposite of titillating, those familiar with the demands of monogamy and motherhood could recognize the erotic potential of solitude. 'A friend of mine took a trip without her toddler and said that the time she spent waiting in line to board was borderline erotic because it was a quiet time and space that she hadn't had in years,' Febos said. At 44, Febos has already established herself as a prolific, critically acclaimed and bestselling writer of memoirs and creative nonfiction. 'The Dry Season' is her fifth book. Her first, 'Whip Smart,' chronicles her time as a professional dominatrix. 'Abandon Me' tells of losing herself in a toxic relationship, struggling with addiction and discovering her biological father, and 'Girlhood' is a collection of essays about being in a body that no longer belongs to her. Her most recent, 'Body Work,' is a craft book on embodied writing. The physical body is clearly central to her writing — how it affects our work, our personal relationships and, most importantly, our relationship with ourselves. In a 2022 essay for the New York Times Magazine, Febos described her decision to undergo a breast reduction as a means to reclaim herself. In a society where bodily autonomy is under active and devastating attack, Febos' work is not only provocative, it's absolutely necessary. In the flesh, it's difficult to imagine Febos as anything but perfectly in control. She is warm, compassionate and easy to laugh. She's proud of the work she's done in recovery from addiction. Much of 'The Dry Season' takes inspiration from programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, where the desire for a substance is in reality a desire to be closer to God. It's unsurprising then that Febos discovered that nuns were some of the first women to find freedom in celibacy. She was particularly interested in one medieval sect called the Beguines, who 'took no vows, did not give up their property, and could leave the order anytime. They traveled, preached, and lived more independently than most women in the western world.' But it wasn't necessarily that they rejected sex, as Febos writes, but rather a life focused on men. 'The Beguines did not just quit sex, and it is likely many did not give up sex at all. They quit lives that held men at the center.' When Febos told a friend that she was going to take a break from sex, she rolled her eyes. It's assumed that sex and love addicts are usually straight people, that it's heterosexual men who are sex addicts and heterosexual women who are love addicts. 'There was part of me that hoped I might be SLA [sex and love addict], because it could've been an easy answer,' Febos said. Febos works to dismantle heteronormative stereotypes about love and sex in this book, quoting writer Sara Ahmed: 'When you leave heterosexuality, you still live in a heterosexual world.' Later in the book, she discusses the uniquely queer and effective partnership of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. 'I didn't want to simply relocate within compulsory heterosexual gender roles,' she writes. 'I wanted to divest from them.' Febos said playfully, 'I thank God every day that I am not straight. But we're still socialized to behave a certain way. We all live under patriarchy. But I never had fantasies of marriage or of being a wife,' Febos said. 'My dream was always to be a writer, an artist.' In 'The Dry Season,' Febos processes some of the experience of being celibate through her friendship with a younger queer woman named Ray. Though there is sexual tension between them, the reconfiguring of desire helped Febos realize that some impulses aren't worth acting on. Febos has taught creative writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Iowa for the past five years and considers herself lucky that she's never felt attracted to her students. 'Teaching helps me to be a better writer,' she said. 'But it is partly about seduction, about being able to hold someone's attention, to get them to feel something you feel passionately about or to help them see something they haven't recognized before.' For Febos, the decision to take a step away from sexual intimacy is similar to the experience of understanding a text. 'There is a difference between how you react to a text and how you analyze a text,' she writes. 'You can be attracted or repelled by the content and still think critically about the response, about your own relationship to the text. As in love among humans, we cannot appreciate a text until we really see it, and in order to see it we have to get out of the way.' In other words, to truly understand your desire, you have to spend some time apart from it. 'The Dry Season' is no marriage plot. Even though Febos' wife, poet Donika Kelly, who Febos met after her period of celibacy concluded, appears briefly at the end of the book, Febos resisted having her there at all. 'That was truly not the point,' she said laughing, 'to say, 'Look, it all turned out great in the end!' ' I told Febos that many women had confided in me (in response to reading Miranda July's novel 'All Fours') that they felt obligated to participate in sex in their marriages with men. 'That's really the point of this book,' she responded. 'Why are you having sex if you don't want to be having sex? This radical honesty not only benefits you but it also benefits your partner. To me, that's love: enthusiastic consent.' Febos has reached the point in her career where she is in control. She told her agent that she would write a brief proposal for this book and nothing more, and it sold quickly. This is a freedom many writers will never achieve. Perhaps it's due to the fact that Febos works not only on her craft but on herself. 'My subject is myself, so this kind of work, in my relationships and with myself, is germane to my writing,' she said. Her inner work has been a wise investment, leading Febos to feel more freedom in her authorial vision, perhaps even moving toward fiction. 'Writing is a process of integration for me,' she said. 'I am so comforted by all of life's surprises.'
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
When Romance Stands Between You and the World
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. [Read: How a recession might tank American romance] 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. [Read: Don't let love take over your life] 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. [Read: The new singlehood stigma] 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. Article originally published at The Atlantic
