The writer Melissa Febos had been in relationships for 20 straight years by her mid-30s. 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 like great luck to many people. “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, as reported by The Atlantic.
However, 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, as The Atlantic reported.
Febos 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. 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, according to The Atlantic.
The particular abundance of which Febos speaks is not something many people can relate to. 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. 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, as reported by The Atlantic.
As Febos settles into her solitude, her observations begin to resonate. She details parts of singlehood that many people have treasured—and which they’ve heard extolled again and again in 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, as noted in The Atlantic.
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, according to The Atlantic.
As romantic distractions fall away, the quiet also makes way for freedom. 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.
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. Febos’s greatest challenge, really, begins as the book ends. Being single is easier, in a sense, than being partnered and still preserving your other relationships, your interests, and yourself. She’s been preparing for this test. Febos makes clear, throughout The Dry Season, that what she wants isn’t just to stop defaulting to romance. She also aims to divest from a relationship culture that is rooted in patriarchy; one that so often leads women, even those who aren’t dating men, to make themselves so small that they disappear, as reported by The Atlantic.
Febos studies 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 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, as noted in The Atlantic.
The book The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex by Melissa Febos is available now. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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