Latest news with #MelissaFebos
Daily Mirror
16-06-2025
- General
- Daily Mirror
I cried every day before giving up sex and the result was life-changing'
After a string of failed relationships, Melissa Febos took a vow of abstinence to understand why she jumped from one romance to the next, with unexpected results… When serial monogamist Melissa Febos was pushed to breaking point by a toxic relationship, she took drastic action - she pledged to boycott sex and all romantic entanglements for 90 days. Yet once that time passed, Melissa, an English professor at the University of Iowa in the US, felt so energised and refreshed by stepping back from the merry-go-round of romance that she decided to keep on going. In the end, she enjoyed an entire year of abstinence, an experience that transformed her life and is the subject of her new book, The Dry Season. 'At the end of the three months, it was clear to me that I had barely begun,' she says. 'My whole relationship to love and sex needed an overhaul if I wanted to change the pattern I was mired in. 'From adolescence until my early 30s, I was in non-stop relationships and very preoccupied with infatuation and flirtation and seduction. I definitely enjoyed myself. I fell in love many times and it was thrilling and quite wonderful.' But as soon as each relationship began to feel secure, Melissa's interest would start to wane. 'I never had a relationship that lasted longer than three years and most of them were shorter. I was always falling in love and breaking up. Those are exhausting pastimes.' Friends and family suggested she might benefit from spending some time on her own. As a former heroin addict, Melissa sometimes feared she had swapped one addiction for another – love addiction. But then someone new would catch her eye and the cycle would begin again. Then she fell into a 'super addictive, toxic, destructive relationship… I abandoned everything else I cared about, I lost touch with friends, I cried every day. It was obsessive and unhealthy. I neglected my writing and my health and my family, and I had friends who broke up with me because I was quite out of my mind'. The relationship ended after two tumultuous years but it served as a wake-up call. 'It was time for me to take a hiatus and reflect on what I've been doing all this time… I couldn't go through that again. It was so painful.' During her 2016 experiment, she appreciated having far more free time and mental space. 'When people consider abstinence or celibacy, they think of it as a kind of deprivation,' she says. 'I didn't feel deprived of anything. I mean, it was really fun when I got to have sex with another person again. But I never felt deprived. 'From the very beginning, I felt like I had more time and more energy. Almost all of my other relationships started to really flourish. My life just felt bigger.' She also noticed how romance-obsessed Western culture is. 'One of the first things I saw during my celibacy was how much everyone talked about love and sex and dating constantly. Watching TV shows, I thought, 'I can't believe how immature our fantasy of love is'. It's all about that very early period where we're feverishly obsessed with someone we don't even know yet. That is what we're calling love. It felt like I really woke up from a kind of collective derangement.' During her 'dry season', Melissa did have the occasional frisson with a stranger but she was never seriously tempted to start a new relationship because she was so determined to break her old habits. She also began to understand why she kept jumping from one relationship to the next and had the realisation that that she was a people-pleaser. 'When I'm around other people, I feel the focus needs to be on them and I need to perform in a certain way. And that was what I needed a break from,' she says. 'It's the instinctive urge to meet another person's wants, desires, expectations, whether it's what I want to do or not, feeling almost as if I don't have a choice – I think that's completely learned, it goes back centuries.' She attributes it to the days when a woman's value was entirely based on her marriageability. 'Your life literally depended upon your appeal to men. There's still a lot of messaging that the power to sexually attract is your greatest power. It had really got into my head that I should cultivate it, that that's where I should be getting my self esteem from. It really did a number on me. 'So I lost myself again and again. It was not an authentic life. That life was not worth living.' Melissa reached a point where she couldn't imagine ever being in another relationship. 'I did not want to compromise what I'd found in being alone,' she says. Then, right at the end of her year of abstinence, she met the poet Donika Kelly. The attraction was immediate. 'But what was different was that as soon as I felt that, I thought, 'OK, I need to stay inside myself, I need to hold on to myself'.' They agreed to take it slowly and, for 18 months, they had a long-distance relationship. Melissa also took a gamble on complete honesty, telling Donika, ''I've just had this transformative experience… My romantic relationship will not always be the most important thing in my life'. The honesty was unlike the beginning of any relationship I'd ever had before. And she said, 'Yes, that sounds good to me'. The gamble paid off. 'I am happily married now, I've been married for four years and with my wife for going on nine,' says Melissa. 'It is very clear to me that spending that year alone with myself, and understanding how complete I was without another person, is the very thing that made it possible for me to sustain a long-term relationship. 'But my marriage wouldn't last if I put my partner first all of the time. We have to put ourselves first a lot of the time so that when we show up for each other, we can do so in the spirit of true generosity and love. But it's scary because it goes against the grain of what society tells us.' She thinks all of us can benefit from a romantic rethink, to make sure we're not putting our partners' needs ahead of our own. 'Everyone could really do with a redefinition of what connection and love are. I think this is where people get trapped in a cycle of 'I can't find the right person'. Because there's a misunderstanding about the nature of a long-term relationship, which takes a lot of energy and a lot of work. It's not just something you feed off. Being alone is much easier. 'We've all seen all the movies where finding the person is the end of the story. But anyone who's been married a long time knows it's the beginning.' The Dry Season: Finding Pleasure In A Year Without Sex by Melissa Febos (Canongate), £16.99, is out now
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Benefits of Refusing
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. In the U.K., when people stop smoking, they say they 'gave it up,' Melissa Febos notes in her new book, The Dry Season. In the U.S., by contrast, it's more common to hear that they 'quit.' She observes that giving something up has a different connotation; to do so is 'to hand it over to some other, better keeper. To free one's hands for other holdings.' The phrasing matters: Giving up feels gentler, and also perhaps more generative. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic's books section: Fast times and mean girls The real message behind Les Misérables How one animal divided Europe Seven books for people figuring out their next move The Dry Season is a memoir about the year Febos spent voluntarily celibate, and this week, she wrote for The Atlantic about six books that celebrate refusal and abstinence. The titles she chose opened her eyes to 'all the other kinds of reneging I've experienced, and how many of them led to unforeseen delights,' she writes. In her own book, Febos uses a striking metaphor to explain why she took a break from sex, dating, and even flirtation. Whenever she had a partner, 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.' Febos realized that she wanted, instead, to widen her aperture, and found that removing something from her life opened her up to all the other things that had escaped her notice. In essence, her book argues, saying no to one thing allows you to say yes to something else. At a talk with the essayist and fellow memoirist Leslie Jamison earlier this week in New York, Febos said that her book is really about finding God, but she told the world that it was about sex because, she joked, it made for better marketing. Her description of discovering the sublime in daily things—such as the 'tang of fresh raspberries and the crispness of clean bedsheets,' as she writes in her recommendation list—moved me. It reminded me that spirituality can be less restrictive and more dynamic than I usually imagine it to be; that it can be found in smaller phenomena and stiller moments. My colleague Faith Hill, in her review of The Dry Season, came to much the same conclusion about the benefits of marshaling one's attention: '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.' Febos's book made me wonder what narrow portals I'm looking through in my life, and what I might see if I turn away from them. What to Read When You're Ready to Say No By Melissa Febos Purposeful refusal, far from depriving us, can make way for unexpected bounty. Read the full article. , by Bae Suah The page-turning plot twists and thrills of a detective novel are often a very effective bulwark against boredom. The Korean writer Bae's novel offers those genre pleasures and more: It is, as Bae's longtime translator Deborah Smith explains in her note, a detective novel by way of a 'poetic fever dream.' Set over the course of one very hot summer night in Seoul, the book follows a woman named Ayami as she attempts to find a missing friend. As she searches, she bumps into Wolfi, a detective novelist visiting from Germany, and enlists him in her quest. Events take on a surreal quality, heightened by both an intense heat wave and the possibility that Ayami and Wolfi may have stumbled into another dimension. Summer's release from our usual timetables can quickly lead to seasonal doldrums. Untold Night and Day, set during the stretched hours of a sweaty, unceasing evening, shimmers at its edges, like midnight in July. — Rhian Sasseen From our list: Five books that will redirect your attention 📚 UnWorld, by Jayson Greene 📚 The Möbius Book, by Catherine Lacey 📚 The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri What Trump Missed at the Kennedy Center By Megan Garber Little wonder that 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' [from Les Misérables] has become a protest song the world over, its words invoked as pleas for freedom. Crowds in Hong Kong, fighting for democracy, have sung it. So have crowds in the United States, fighting for the rights of unions. The story's tensions are the core tensions of politics too: the rights of the individual, colliding with the needs of the collective; the possibilities, and tragedies, that can come when human dignity is systematized. Les Mis, as a story, is pointedly specific—one country, one rebellion, one meaning of freedom. But Les Mis, as a broader phenomenon, is elastic. It is not one story but many, the product of endless interpretation and reiteration. With the novel, Hugo turned acts of history into a work of fiction. The musical turned the fiction into a show. And American politics, now, have turned the show into a piece of fan fic. Read the full article. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Benefits of Refusing
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. In the U.K., when people stop smoking, they say they 'gave it up,' Melissa Febos notes in her new book, The Dry Season. In the U.S., by contrast, it's more common to hear that they 'quit.' She observes that giving something up has a different connotation; to do so is 'to hand it over to some other, better keeper. To free one's hands for other holdings.' The phrasing matters: Giving up feels gentler, and also perhaps more generative. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic 's books section: The Dry Season is a memoir about the year Febos spent voluntarily celibate, and this week, she wrote for The Atlantic about six books that celebrate refusal and abstinence. The titles she chose opened her eyes to 'all the other kinds of reneging I've experienced, and how many of them led to unforeseen delights,' she writes. In her own book, Febos uses a striking metaphor to explain why she took a break from sex, dating, and even flirtation. Whenever she had a partner, 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.' Febos realized that she wanted, instead, to widen her aperture, and found that removing something from her life opened her up to all the other things that had escaped her notice. In essence, her book argues, saying no to one thing allows you to say yes to something else. At a talk with the essayist and fellow memoirist Leslie Jamison earlier this week in New York, Febos said that her book is really about finding God, but she told the world that it was about sex because, she joked, it made for better marketing. Her description of discovering the sublime in daily things—such as the 'tang of fresh raspberries and the crispness of clean bedsheets,' as she writes in her recommendation list—moved me. It reminded me that spirituality can be less restrictive and more dynamic than I usually imagine it to be; that it can be found in smaller phenomena and stiller moments. My colleague Faith Hill, in her review of The Dry Season, came to much the same conclusion about the benefits of marshaling one's attention: '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.' Febos's book made me wonder what narrow portals I'm looking through in my life, and what I might see if I turn away from them. By Melissa Febos Purposeful refusal, far from depriving us, can make way for unexpected bounty. What to Read Untold Night and Day, by Bae Suah The page-turning plot twists and thrills of a detective novel are often a very effective bulwark against boredom. The Korean writer Bae's novel offers those genre pleasures and more: It is, as Bae's longtime translator Deborah Smith explains in her note, a detective novel by way of a 'poetic fever dream.' Set over the course of one very hot summer night in Seoul, the book follows a woman named Ayami as she attempts to find a missing friend. As she searches, she bumps into Wolfi, a detective novelist visiting from Germany, and enlists him in her quest. Events take on a surreal quality, heightened by both an intense heat wave and the possibility that Ayami and Wolfi may have stumbled into another dimension. Summer's release from our usual timetables can quickly lead to seasonal doldrums. Untold Night and Day, set during the stretched hours of a sweaty, unceasing evening, shimmers at its edges, like midnight in July. — Rhian Sasseen Out Next Week 📚 UnWorld, by Jayson Greene 📚 The Möbius Book, by Catherine Lacey 📚 The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri Your Weekend Read What Trump Missed at the Kennedy Center By Megan Garber Little wonder that 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' [from Les Misérables ] has become a protest song the world over, its words invoked as pleas for freedom. Crowds in Hong Kong, fighting for democracy, have sung it. So have crowds in the United States, fighting for the rights of unions. The story's tensions are the core tensions of politics too: the rights of the individual, colliding with the needs of the collective; the possibilities, and tragedies, that can come when human dignity is systematized. Les Mis, as a story, is pointedly specific—one country, one rebellion, one meaning of freedom. But Les Mis, as a broader phenomenon, is elastic. It is not one story but many, the product of endless interpretation and reiteration. With the novel, Hugo turned acts of history into a work of fiction. The musical turned the fiction into a show. And American politics, now, have turned the show into a piece of fan fic.
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- 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
04-06-2025
- 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@
