Melissa Febos decided she needed to take a break from dating, relationships and sex after being in one relationship after another since she was a teenager. What started with a three-month hiatus turned into a year of celibacy that unexpectedly became the most liberating of her life. In “The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex,” five-time author Febos reflects on her experience in conversation with those of women throughout history, from Sappho to Virginia Woolf to Octavia Butler. The book came out Tuesday, and Febos speaks Wednesday at Harvard Book Store. We interviewed her Thursday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
What prompted the idea of a year without sex, and what was that year like?
At the age of 34, I had a horrible breakup after what had been a really painful, somewhat catastrophic two-year relationship. My life was kind of in shambles, and I thought, you know what? I’ve been in nonstop, committed, monogamous relationships since I was about 14 or 15, and after 20 years of practice, I should be better at this. Something was clearly going wrong, so let me take a break while I take stock of what I’ve been up to and think about how my relationship to relationships is functioning. I decided to start with three months, but within days I had two realizations. The first was that I was so happy; I was immediately having the time of my life. I had so much more time for everything else I loved and everyone else I loved, I was cleaning out my apartment, I was exercising like crazy, I was writing more and reading more. I felt amazing. The second realization was that if I stopped this after three months, I was just going to go back to what I had been doing before, which was organizing my life around my love life and being either fixated on romantic pursuit and attraction or working to maintain and accommodate whatever partner I had. I started making a list of everyone I had ever been involved with or even had a crush on, and I decided to really be honest with myself about who I’d been in my past relationships – so I could change that. At the end of the three months, I had barely scratched the surface of that list, so I went another three months and then another three months. By the time I reached the one-year mark, I really thought I might be single forever, because I was so fulfilled. That’s not what happened, because that’s how life goes, but it did forever change my outlook on love and romance and my ideals in that area. I’ve now been married for five years and with my wife for almost nine years, and that never would have been possible. It was not the goal, but it was a consequence of that time.
How has your understanding of this transformative year developed in the time between when it happened 10 years ago and now? At what point did you realize you wanted to write this memoir?
I knew I had had a transformative experience, because my life was so different after it, but I didn’t plan on writing about it. About five years later, I was writing my third book, “Girlhood,” and I realized that this experience fit within the scope of that book. “Girlhood” is about female adolescence and all of the lessons and prescriptions that we absorb as girls, and how they go on to determine, sometimes in quite harmful ways, our choices and experience of ourselves and relationships as we get older. So I first started writing about the year thinking it would be an essay for that book, but it just sort of exploded out of me, and suddenly I had 50 pages and realized I had too much to say for an essay. I put it aside while I finished that book and published it, and it took me another three years to really come back to it. When I did, I found it was waiting and it still had a pulse. I guess the rest is sort of history, but I will add that during that year of abstinence I had done a lot of research, because I realized that if I was going to completely revamp my outlook on love and sex, I needed new role models. I had started by looking for women who had been voluntarily celibate throughout history, and I read a lot about mystic nuns like Hildegard von Bingen, radical feminists, even some cult leaders. When I decided to write the book, I revisited that research and went on to do more research, and the project of the book ended up also becoming about locating my experience inside of this larger lineage.
Tell me more about the role these women played in your year of celibacy and how you went about incorporating their stories into the book.
Changing your own beliefs is a hard thing to take on or even to conceive of, but I knew I couldn’t be the only person who had ever tried to do this, so I started by looking at feminist history, and that led me to a kind of spiritual history. I learned about all these people who had been voluntarily celibate, such as the Belgian Beguines, who were a sect of religious laywomen who lived communally and were financially independent. They worked as artists and activists and they were very active in their communities. They were people who, like many others, lead lives in which their behavior matched closely with their beliefs. That hadn’t been true for me, and so I sort of claimed them as my new heroes. They gave me a new model for living that I kept beyond that year, because even though it seemed unlikely, I found a lot of myself in their experience.
When I was writing the book, at first I thought it might be a global history of voluntary female celibacy mixed into a memoir, but as I was writing, the people who rose to the surface weren’t just celibate folks – they were also artists and activists who had similarly aligned their behavior with their beliefs and who seemed to have been really fulfilled and happy in their relationships, in their creative practices and in their lives. So I broadened the scope of the role models I was looking to, because ultimately, I didn’t feel like I was writing a book that was actually about celibacy, but rather about how to live within your own principles and to be truly content and feel complete, whether you were partnered or not.
What do you hope readers take from it, especially those who might be interested in trying a year of abstinence themselves?
I hope that it offers some really detailed encouragement, not just to people who want to spend some time celibate but to anyone who wants to change themselves and to transform the way they relate to an aspect of their lives. I also hope it encourages people who feel dependent on something, whether it’s other people, or food, or sex or work. I think the lie that’s buried within most dependent relationships is that we can’t live without the thing that we’re dependent on, and in reality, my experience has been that the thing I think I need is actually the obstacle that is keeping me from fulfillment. It seems very scary at first, but I had the best year of my life. I thought I was going to be feeling deprived during that time, but I truly had the most vivid, sensual, fun year of my life.
Now being married, how do you see the perspective you gained from your year as part of that?
There is no part of my relationship that it didn’t affect. First of all, I needed to become capable of being attracted to someone who would be an enthusiastic collaborator with me in this project. I was able to choose and build a relationship with someone who wanted to practice active autonomy in our relationship. We do not have a relationship that’s based on need; it’s one in which we have promised to make sure that we are choosing each other and choosing all of the kinds of intimacy that we practice in our relationship on a day-by-day basis. When we need to redraw the shape of our relationship to highlight the people we are and the people we’ve become, we talk about it, and we do that work together. It’s not always easy, but we have a great time, and I have grown so much in this relationship. It’s the first romantic relationship in my life in which I feel like there is as much space as I need to be who I am, regardless of whether that matches up with my wife at all times. We’re really different people, we both need a lot of alone time, we both treasure our work and our friendships, and we don’t try to constrain or control each other at all. And that is so different from my past relationships. That’s not to say I always had controlling partners, but there was always a pressure inside of me that was constantly urging me to try to conform or contort myself to accommodate the other person, whether they were asking for it or not.
Melissa Febos reads from “The Dry Season” at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free.
The feature image for this post (but not the image seen above) was added to in a digital retouching process. The red table at the far right and left of the frame is not real. The food at the center was photographed and is real.
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)3 nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.