Latest news with #MelissaFebos
Yahoo
6 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
6 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
6 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
Daily Mail
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
I committed to celibacy for a year... but the result was NOT what I expected
When author Melissa Febos decided to stop having sex, it wasn't because of a breakup, a religious epiphany, or a viral celibacy challenge. It was because she was tired - of performative intimacy, of chasing connection, of confusing physical closeness with emotional safety. What began as a three-month break turned into a full year of celibacy. But Febos, who identifies as queer and is now married to a woman, didn't do it to swear off pleasure - she did it to find a more authentic version of it. In her new book The Dry Season, she explores how abstaining from sex made her feel more erotic, not less. 'I felt more vital,' she wrote, noting that the absence of sex created space for clarity and creative energy. It wasn't a punishment - it was a reorientation. For Febos, whose past works (Whip Smart, Girlhood, Body Work) have tackled everything from addiction to sexuality to the politics of writing, this latest memoir is less about renunciation and more about reclamation. She stopped having sex not because she feared desire, but because she wanted to feel it fully again - not dulled by obligation or routine. During her celibacy, Febos found inspiration in the Beguines - a group of medieval laywomen who chose to live outside the bounds of marriage, religion, or male control. They were celibate not out of prudishness, but out of independence. 'They quit lives that held men at the center,' Febos writes. Notably, many of the Beguines were in romantic relationships with other women. Her year without sex wasn't without connection. She formed an intimate, nonsexual bond with a younger queer friend named Ray - a relationship that helped her distinguish between wanting someone and acting on that want. The absence of sex didn't kill her libido - it sharpened her awareness of when she was saying yes out of habit, not actual desire. She also points to a moment of erotic clarity many people might relate to: a mother friend describing how aroused she felt just standing alone in a quiet airport line after time away from her toddler. She advised others not to have sex unless they really want to She explained that the quiet, undisturbed space was what celibacy felt like. Even her teaching - she's a professor in a prestigious MFA program - took on new dimensions. Teaching, she says, is 'a kind of seduction': pulling people in with attention, presence, depth. Celibacy gave her a new way to show up in the classroom, fully present, not depleted. By the time Febos fell in love again - with Donika Kelly, a poet she eventually married - she did so from a place of sovereignty, not scarcity. In the end, celibacy wasn't a retreat from desire. It was a radical act of desire - for herself, her art, and the kind of intimacy that doesn't require performance. Her advice? Don't have sex unless you really want to. 'This radical honesty not only benefits you but also your partner,' she says. 'To me, that's love: enthusiastic consent.' And the so-called 'dry season'? It ended up being the most fertile chapter of her life.
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Our fantasy of love has to do with need and dependency': Melissa Febos on her year of celibacy
When Melissa Febos decided to be celibate for a year – after what she describes as a 'ravaging vortex of a relationship' and 'five other brief entanglements' – she felt 'pretty self-conscious and kind of weird'. But other people's reactions surprised her. 'I thought people were going to laugh at me or be like, that sounds boring, but so many people would lean in and either get this eager look on their face or this sort of dreadful look on their face, and they would say, 'Oh, I think I should probably do that too,'' she says. 'I had no idea how many people had been in relationships for their whole adult life.' Febos, a professor at the University of Iowa and author of books about working as a dominatrix, young womanhood and writing, chronicles this celibate era in her new memoir, The Dry Season. 'I had scrutinized my experience and self in many different areas, but in this area, I was fairly unexamined,' she says. 'I didn't have as much insight about that part of myself.' The experience ended up affecting more than her reliance on love and sex. 'All the other areas of my life began to flourish and feel really fulfilling and complete,' she says. 'I had kind of a honeymoon experience with myself, especially at the beginning, because I realized almost immediately that I enjoyed my own company profoundly, perhaps even more than I enjoyed the company of any other person.' What were those first weeks of celibacy like? What was the hardest part? At first, I wasn't quite sure what my goal was, or what the conditions of my celibacy would be. I began with sex, because that seemed like the most obvious common denominator in my relationships. So I thought, I'll take three months off. Within the first few weeks, I had the experience of flirting with someone, and I got a text from someone I'd been on a date with, and I identified very quickly the feeling of excitement and distraction that had been propelling me. I almost immediately began questioning the parameters of my celibacy: I thought, oh, perhaps it's not sex. Perhaps it's this feeling of being taken out of myself and chasing a psychological high that I get out of not just sex, but all of the activity around romance, flirtation and seduction. What made sex and relationships so appealing for you? One factor is a collective derangement that we have around love and sex. We idealize this very temporary, superficial definition of love, which has to do mostly with the early stages of infatuation and is predicated upon not yet knowing the lover, and not yet being secure or safe. That's a traditional sense of eros, of longing and uncertainty; it's a very immature definition of love, and it's not sustainable. But it is the part of love that pop songs and movies and romance novels are obsessed with. I think we have a collectively problematic relationship to love and sex, and also a narrative about it – that it's going to complete us, and it's just about finding the right person and then everything's going to fall into place. In addition, I developed early, physically, and underwent a radical difference in the way I experienced being perceived by other people, particularly by boys or men. And I got this messaging, as lots of young girls do, that my primary power in life was to attract and appear lovable and desirable. That's a very fraught place to be sourcing one's self esteem, and I identified it early, at a time in life when I felt really disempowered. I've learned, partly as a result of being celibate and talking about it, that this is really common. In the book, you talk about distilling these internal beliefs to an idea of 'if I'm not wanted, I will die'. You describe this concept as dramatic, but women constantly receive messages – from companies trying to sell us stuff, pop culture – that partnership is what women should aspire to the most. Those ideas have roots that go back literal centuries, right? Women's individual personal safety and survival did depend on our being appealing to potential partners, both physically and financially. And that was true for a lot longer than it hasn't been literally true. I don't know how we would eschew that idea within just the last few generations. Why did you include historical examples of women who were also celibate, like the Belgian beguines, the 12th-century abbess Hildegard von Bingen and Shulamith Firestone, who called herself a political celibate? A few weeks into celibacy, I started to realize I had a set of role models for love and romance that were quite outdated, whom I had adopted as a younger person who was interested in semiconsciously justifying my own choices in love. These were primarily women who were artistically prolific and fulfilled, but also very passionate and messy in their love lives, like Edna St Vincent Millay and Colette and Sappho. I realized, I've chosen these role models because I'm already like them. And now that I'm trying to change my ideals, I need new role models. So I went about reading about women who were voluntarily celibate across global history, and ended up becoming obsessed with these women who seemed incredibly complete and fulfilled, and lived profoundly creative and spiritually centered lives that were also very political, very community oriented, that were interested in mutual aid and art making and collectivity. About a month into celibacy, you found you had a lot of time for other things. You included a short list in the book that I thought was really funny: you cut your hair, donated a bunch of clothes and ran 45 miles. All the adults I know are always complaining about not having enough time, and I, too, have been like that for most of my adult life. This amazing space opened up as soon as I stopped engaging in activities related to love and sex. Some were kind of superficial, like, I revamped my whole apartment. But also, I had this luxury of time to bring a new focus to my creative practice, to all of my other relationships, my friendships, my family relationships, my job. I had so vastly underestimated the amount of time and energy that I spent devoted to love and sex and flirting or being on apps or spending time with a partner or thinking about a partner or a potential partner. There's no way that I could have measured that while I was engaged with those things. I just hadn't realized that I had been preoccupied by partners and dating and love and sex, almost all of the time. Ultimately you were celibate for a year, but originally had set a goal of three months. Why did you decide to extend that period? I started with three months because that is a familiar unit of measurement. I'm a sober addict, and three months is a typical amount of time to detox, psychologically. I also knew it would be unrealistic for me to try to commit to anything longer. And honestly, even though it might sound ridiculous to other people, three months was kind of a long time for me to abstain. But when I got to the end, there was no question that I had barely begun. I was just starting to get a sense of the deeply entrenched patterns that I had been stuck in for years, and I knew that it would take much longer to undo them. I had gotten a break, but I had not fundamentally or constitutionally changed. In the book, a friend makes fun of you – like, three months is actually not that long. Yeah, there were a number of people who said that. It's relative, right? To someone who has trouble getting into relationships, it's absurd, but I had been incapable of doing that. This book – as with you previous books about addiction and sex work – is honest and revealing. What is it like to write vulnerably about your life, and what do you get out of the process? Well, fortunately, I am alone when I write. So I get to write in total privacy. I think when people read a memoir, it feels as though the writer is speaking directly to them in real time. But actually the writer gets to sit alone for years with those words until I find exactly the way I want to communicate them. I also get to sit with those reflections long enough to make friends with them and to become comfortable with them. I would never publish the first words I wrote about those subjects. For me, writing is a sort of integrating experience, of undoing shame, of becoming friends with experiences that at one time made me very uncomfortable or felt incredibly vulnerable. By the time a book is published, it doesn't feel so vulnerable anymore. I actually feel quite comfortable with that material and excited to share it. Writing about it and publishing it also connects me to a vast community of people, both living and dead, who have had similar experiences and have survived them. And being a part of that larger network and lineage is incredibly meaningful to me. It makes me feel strong and connected in experiences that once felt alienating. There's a great scene where you describe trying to teach a friend to flirt, and you realize you've honed that skill in response to various external pressures. Before I was in graduate school, I worked in food service, and I located this as a training camp in seduction, because it is through social skills and a form of magnetism that I earned my living. The better I was at it, the bigger tips I earned. But I had never thought of that as connected to seduction. Also because I had gotten so much of my self esteem from feeling lovable or appealing or attractive, it was just something that I was constantly practicing from quite a young age. In my early 20s, I worked as a professional dominatrix, and that was probably the realm in which it was most explicit, where my ability to conform to someone else's romantic or sexual ideal was the extent that I earned my living. People told me what they wanted and I became it. My current profession, in addition to writing, is teaching creative writing. I use those same skills in the classroom, but it feels much less manipulative or transactional, because what I'm doing is using my ability to hold someone else's attention so that I can share with them my genuine love for a text or an art form or an artistic practice so that I can imbue them with that same passion for the subject. You mentioned your sobriety earlier. Were there commonalities between sobriety and celibacy for you? When I started the celibacy, one of the questions I brought was whether I could apply the rubric of addiction and recovery to my pattern in love and sex, because there were certainly compulsive elements. I was sort of hoping that I could classify it as a form of addiction, because I had had such success when recovering from other addictions, and I wanted a clear solution. Unfortunately, it wasn't that clear cut. I don't identify as a love and sex addict, at least not exclusively. But there was a lot of overlap. I brought a lot of the wisdom and tools I had learned in recovery to this process, from abstinence to the practice of writing an inventory to gain insight into personal behavior, which I learned to do in recovery from drug addiction. My experience of recovery is that it is not passive. My recovery and abstinence from addiction are contingent on my active participation, and it affects everything about the way that I live. And it is also contingent upon my honesty with myself, about my complicity, my past behaviors, and that also became incredibly relevant to my process of celibacy. Accountability cannot be skipped over at any process of personal change, and I learned that in sobriety. Voluntary celibacy is a hot topic now, as with the 4B movement. What do you think has shifted culturally for that to happen? I think certain groups of people are bringing more scrutiny to conventions that they have taken for granted or passively complied with. And one of the reasons is that the political landscape in the US has taken such a hard shift to the right. We're living under an incredibly oppressive government. Part of this swing to the right is backlash against feminism and civil rights movements. People are responding to that with an equal force, both individually and collectively, and a part of that is scrutinizing how relationship dynamics are reinforcing institutional oppression. You're now married to your wife, whom you describe meeting in this book. Have you brought principles from that celibate year to the present era of your life? I have redefined my ideal for romantic love as one that is not based on dependency. I think our fantasy of love has to do with need and dependency. My definition of love is contingent upon a very conscious choice to support the flourishing of another person. It's based on choosing them, every moment that I maintain that connection. That is the only way I became qualified to have a long-term relationship. I would never have gotten married if I hadn't redefined love in this way, because I think any other definition is not sustainable. The Dry Season is out now through Knopf
