Between romcoms, breakup ballads and our own craving for connection, it’s easy to treat romance as life’s ultimate prize. We’re taught to chase it, long for it, even define ourselves by it. But in The Dry Season: Finding Pleasure In A Year Without Sex, which was published this week, Melissa Febos – known for her fearless explorations of intimacy, identity, and the body – offers a bold alternative. Her latest memoir begins in the aftermath of a brutal heartbreak, when she makes what she thinks is a temporary decision: no dating, no sex, no romantic entanglements – for three months. Just her, on her own, figuring out what it really means to want something that isn’t another person.
But what starts as a short-term detox soon turns into a full year. As Melissa leans into solitude, she discovers that stepping away from romance doesn’t mean shutting down or missing out – it means tuning in. To herself. To her body. To the kind of clarity and power that’s hard to access when you’re constantly entangled in someone else’s orbit.
During this self-imposed dry season, she looks to women across history who chose celibacy – not out of shame or repression, but as a way to reclaim their lives. She finds inspiration in queer writers, feminist thinkers, even Medieval saints, all of whom used solitude as a kind of sanctuary. What might sound, at first, like a retreat from pleasure actually becomes a radical act of self-possession.
And while the word “celibacy” might conjure images of moral panic or finger-wagging judgment, Melissa approaches it from a totally different angle. For her, it’s not about denying desire – it’s about redefining it. Her journey is messy, brave and full of unexpected growth, as she peels back the layers of social conditioning and faces her own deeper needs. In the process, she builds stronger friendships, reconnects with her body and begins to love herself in a way that feels real.
We sat down with the acclaimed American memoirist, essayist and writing professor to talk about what she learned in her year without romance – and why stepping back from love can bring you closer to yourself than any relationship ever could. Whether you’re coupled up, happily single, or somewhere in the murky in-between, her story offers a refreshingly honest take on intimacy, desire and what it means to truly come home to yourself.
Celibacy is a hot topic currently. Women are increasingly taking time to abstain from relationships and hookups to centre their personal growth, as you did in your memoir. At the same time, there has also been a rightward, puritanical shift in culture. You underwent your period of celibacy nine years ago – have you sensed a difference in the way people talk about celibacy at the time of your experiment versus now?
When I first decided to go celibate, I felt isolated in my reasons for doing so. But when I started talking to people, I found that I was far from alone in my experiences. In fact, there were tonnes of people who were either in relationships non-stop or were never in relationships. All those people had a lot in common with me, in that we all had a vexed relationship to aloneness. We were having personal conversations about these topics, but there wasn’t much public discourse about them at the time.
In the last couple of years, I’ve seen celebrities like Julia Fox and Justin Bieber talking about spending time celibate. I have also seen a resurgence of the politically motivated celibacy that I spent a lot of time thinking about as I was writing the book, since I was looking at the radical feminists of the ’70s and ’80s. I think it makes a lot of sense at this particular juncture in American political and cultural activity.
People are fed up with the failure of the models for love and sex that we are offered, which are largely driven by capitalism. We’re being sold an idea of partnership that isn’t sustainable. We’re all scrolling to find the right person so that we can be permanently happy when actually the door to happiness is becoming the right person for yourself. Ironically, I think that’s what qualified me to have a happier relationship with another person.
The right-wing approach to celibacy has always been yet another form of control, particularly control of women’s bodies. I don’t see that as new at all, and I don’t see it as liberating, either.
In The Dry Season, you draw parallels between the performance aspect of being in a relationship and the performance aspect of putting your writing before an audience. You reveal that during your time of celibacy, you composed a personal inventory of past romantic and sexual relationships; distinct from your memoir, this inventory functioned as a tool for self-reflection. When completing this exercise, how did you ensure that you were being your most honest self on the page?
Concealing a profound truth about oneself accumulates a kind of pressure over time, because we instinctively seek truth. And I think we want to be living in the truth about ourselves, however painful that is. For me, the pressure had gotten to a breaking point – I was ready to put to bed the false story I had been telling myself and confront my true relationship to love and sex. I felt irresistibly drawn towards being honest about that with myself. So I told myself, I am not going to imagine anyone else’s gaze while I am writing this. I am simply going to be as honest as I possibly can because I want to change. That’s also the spirit in which I wrote the first draft of this book. Early drafts are often the first place where I tell the truth to myself about myself, after I’ve promised myself that I never have to show the writing to anyone if I don’t want to.
“We’re all scrolling to find the right person so that we can be permanently happy when actually the door to happiness is becoming the right person for yourself”
You write beautifully about growing apart from the role models who shaped you when you were younger – and then building a whole new lineup of figures to help guide your thinking around celibacy, feminism, and standing firm in your convictions. Everyone from Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen to Holocaust memoirist Etty Hillesum makes an appearance. For readers who are in that same place – re-evaluating who they look up to – do you have any words of advice or insight on how to find new role models that really resonate?
One of my biggest takeaways from this experience was that I, and all of us, belong to rich lineages of people who have tried to live in all the ways that we could ever dream of living. It’s up to us to find out who those people were. Personally, I found it fruitful to look in some unlikely places. I was trying to love in a more ethical and joy-inducing way, and I ended up reading about a bunch of voluntarily celibate women – I found these incredible role models who had worked hard to live in a way that aligned with their deepest values. That was something I had struggled to do and was really seeking to change in myself. It’s a valuable exercise to think about the kind of life that you are truly meant for and to look for people who are leading that kind of life – and to look trans-nationally, trans-temporally. When I get discouraged about the state of civil rights in America, it’s so comforting for me to think about these radical, badass, mystic nuns and saints who were leading remarkably political, creative, activist lives in a time when women had zero rights.
There were also so many role models who didn’t make their way into the book: The Dahomey Amazons, the Albanian sworn virgins, Joan of Arc... I was absolutely flabbergasted by all of these amazing women and queer people and probably, though they didn’t have a name for it, Trans folks across history who were finding inventive and brave ways to lead self-actualised lives.
Throughout the book, you also include the responses of friends who have found themselves single, despite their best efforts, and examine the similarities and differences between involuntary celibacy and your conscious decision to abstain. What did you learn from your year of celibacy that might be helpful to those who consider themselves involuntarily celibate or single?
This was something I thought about a lot, both while I was celibate and while I was writing the book. It was important to me to make clear that the similarities between people who had chosen celibacy and people who hadn’t chosen celibacy were so much greater than between either group and those who have a more balanced understanding of relationships. It’s a problem of extremes, with both groups trying to claw their way back to the middle. I’m a person who’s recovered from disordered eating, and anorexics and bulimics have the same problem – it just manifests in different ways. And I think there’s a loose analogy there regarding folks who can’t stop being in relationships and people who can’t start being in relationships. My observational insight into both groups is that it’s actually their own relationship with aloneness that needs the tending, rather than their relationship status.
Toward the end of The Dry Season, you write about meeting your now-wife, poet Donika Kelly – a moment that feels all the more meaningful after your year of intentional celibacy and deep self-reflection. It’s a powerful turn: after spending so much time alone, resisting the pull of romantic entanglement, you eventually step into a relationship that feels grounded and deeply mutual. How has that period of solitude shaped the way you show up in your marriage? And what lessons or insights do you hope partnered people take away from your exploration of celibacy and self-reliance?
I could write a whole other book about the ways in which that time shaped the conditions of my marriage. I think the key to it really is maintaining a relationship with myself. My wife and I are incredibly close, but we are not enmeshed. It’s important for both of us to understand that our intimacy is based on choice and not dependence. There are many areas of our relationship where we have different needs and we need to make different choices, and sometimes that’s challenging.
The story we tell ourselves about long-term relationships is that either you’re totally syncopated with another person, or you’re constantly compromising and sacrificing for their needs. Of course, there is a lot of compromise involved in a long-term relationshi – —but my wife and I have made a commitment to make space for the people that we actually are. Part of the reason I needed that year of celibacy is because in the past, I was constantly contorting my true self in such a way that it caused distance with my partners. My wife and I practice radical honesty about what we want and need, and for both of us, that includes a lot of alone time. We sleep separately sometimes; we travel separately a lot; we’ve even taken periods of celibacy within our marriage as a reset for our sex life. We just need to do what’s right for us.
Finally, in a year marked by growing cultural backlash against queer expression, and with The Dry Season rich in reminders that queer communities have always forged their own paths – what does Pride mean to you right now?
This year, Pride feels especially important – because our civil rights are under attack, and, especially for Trans folks, being revoked. But also because that encroachment on our rights is a good prompt to remember queer history. I try to remember around Pride that Stonewall was an uprising; that Pride is an occasion to celebrate not corporate sponsorship but the radical spirit that has always characterised our community. I wake up grateful every single day that I’m queer, that I live in queer community and queer praxis, that I don’t need the state to ratify my existence. One of the outstanding characteristics of queer folks as a group is that we take care of each other – we always have.
