How a Year Without Sex Changed Everything (with Melissa Febos)

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Introduction – 0:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: Welcome to Relationscapes—the podcast where we explore gender, sexuality, race, and relationships in order to make the world better for everybody. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and our guide in this episode is the critically acclaimed author, Melissa Febos.

MELISSA FEBOS: I thought, “I have a messed-up relationship to relationships. I don't know how I got it. I really need to change myself.” And it was really quite shocking—so many people were like, “Tell me more!” And I thought, “Oh my God, I am not alone in this.” So I'm going to lay out what I have learned through the experience of celibacy so that other people can find it as a touchstone if they are already having this experience.

BLAIR HODGES: Melissa Febos found herself in back-to-back-to-back relationships, always seeking but never finding the kind of lasting connection and satisfaction she so badly thirsted for. Partners hurt her, and she hurt partners, until drastic times called for drastic measures. Just as she had done earlier with drugs and alcohol, she determined to go love-sober.

A three-month experiment. Complete celibacy. But three months was never going to be enough, as she explains in her latest book, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex. Award-winning author Melissa Febos joins us to talk about it right now.

 

Celibacy Wasn't Just a Fun Experiment – 01:50

 

BLAIR HODGES: Melissa Febos, welcome to Relationscapes.

MELISSA FEBOS: Thanks for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about your book The Dry Season. When I first saw it, I thought maybe a writer had thought up this fun experiment to try. I don't know if you've heard of Rachel Held Evans, who did this book called Year of Biblical Womanhood?

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah, I've heard of that book.

BLAIR HODGES: I was like, are you doing, like, year of celibate womanhood? [laughs] Like, this is gonna be a fun book project. But you say it was actually—like, the words you use are—"a biological imperative" to try celibacy out. 

MELISSA FEBOS: I wish it had just been sort of a fun idea. Yeah, I wish that all of my books had just been fun book ideas instead of crucibles of actual life. But unfortunately, that's not how I live. I tend to sort of, you know, as I describe at pretty great length in this book, I have extremist tendencies. I don't live lightly.

I tend to rocket in a certain direction until I hit a wall, and then I need to make a big decision and overhaul my whole way of thinking or living or being. And this was not an exception. It didn't occur to me to write about it until many years afterward.

At the time that I was living it, I was coming off of, like, 20 years of non-stop romantic relationships, which had culminated in the worst one—a relationship that had kind of ruined my life, or I ruined my life while I was in it. And on the other side of it, I thought, damn, I should be better at this after 20 years of logging my 10,000 hours.

And so I thought, all right, let me step back and take a little break and see what's going on here later on.

BLAIR HODGES: Then you decide to write about it. And looking at the back cover, the pull quote that they chose, it makes the book sound kind of horny. [laughter] It says, “I've been thinking of this time as a dry season, but it had been the most fertile of my life. Since childhood, I had run dry. When I spent that vitality in worship of lovers, in celibacy, I felt more wet than I had in years.”

So I was like, okay, like, is this—

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah—

BLAIR HODGES: And I know, like, publishers are gonna pub—

MELISSA FEBOS: I think they were a little worried about publishing a book about celibacy, especially, I think, with the title The Dry Season. They were going to be like, oh, nobody really wants to read about a dry season. And because the book is pretty sensual—and I think funny and surprising—I think they wanted to add a crude encouragement for readers who might be turned off by the title and the ostensible subject matter. Which is like, yeah.

You know, this is my fifth book. I know what publishers do. So I was like, all right, I get it. I get it.

BLAIR HODGES: I mean, the book has some titillating things in it, but it's more—like you said—it's very sensuous. And it's about expanding other aspects of your personhood beyond sex. Not to say that sex wasn't still important, or that you weren't still reckoning with it.

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: But your original plan actually wasn't a year even, right? You were looking at three months. So you kind of gave us a little bit of the background about where you are, but you didn't mention Best Ex. So let's kind of go to this moment about why you chose to go three months. What had happened with Best Ex—who you call them in the book—and give us that bit of the story.

MELISSA FEBOS: Sure. Happy to. Yeah, it's actually even more pitiful that it was only three months, which for me was a really radical shift. And, you know, I was being realistic with myself.

So what happened was I was in my—I guess it was my very late 20s or early 30s. Oh, it was my late 20s. I got into what was really sort of the healthiest relationship of my life with an older woman who is also an artist, and we had a really lovely relationship.

And then she had a health crisis, and I basically became a caretaker for a couple of years. And it was a pretty excoriating experience. I mean, certainly most of all for her, but also, you know, at the age of, like, 29 or 30, I was not prepared to undergo that kind of experience.

And I rose to it as best I could, which was imperfect.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I mean, caregiving has emotional and physical components. It really does, depending on what the person's going through.

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah. And we moved out of the city. I learned how to conduct medical procedures that only citizens in a country with a totally corrupt insurance system would ever have to learn how to do at home. And at the end of it, I really sort of felt done and didn't know what to do.

My partner was improving, but in small ways.

And then this sort of transition, for lack of a better word, unfolded that I was pretty familiar with—where I sort of wanted out of a relationship. I didn't know how to do it. I felt sort of bound to the person. I didn't want to hurt them. I didn't want to abandon them.

And so I just sort of stayed and kind of emotionally and mentally checked out. And then eventually, after many months, my interest was piqued by another person, and I ended up kissing that person.

And I didn't have it in me to conduct an affair or anything like that, so I told my partner right away, and my relationship exploded. And then I was like, you know, honestly, sadly, my thought was, well, it can't get worse than this. I'm coming off of pretty much the hardest—arguably the hardest—two years of my life.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

MELISSA FEBOS: I feel totally depleted—just mentally, spiritually, financially cashed. And now I've had this really ugly breakup where I was very clearly the villain. And I'm gonna just sort of recuperate.

And instead of recuperating, I jumped headlong into another relationship, which turned out to be the most harrowing ever.

 

It Was Like Getting Sober – 07:56

 

MELISSA FEBOS: A truly devastating relationship where—you know, I had been sober for 10 years at this point, clean and sober from drugs and alcohol, and I basically sort of treated this relationship like I had drugs and alcohol in my 20s.

And—

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. What were the similarities there? What would you say the crossover was?

MELISSA FEBOS: You know, I just chose that relationship and that person, even though the relationship was incredibly tumultuous. We fought all the time. It was very possessive and really a sort of degraded model of relationship from anything I'd ever experienced.

Like, pretty toxic relationship, pretty manipulative.

BLAIR HODGES: Like, a lot of jealousy and control.

MELISSA FEBOS: A lot of jealousy and control—on both sides, you know. It was not a healthy relationship. But I prioritized it over all of my other relationships, over my physical health.

I was constantly flying across the country, driving long distances. My partner didn't live in New York. She lived, like, 3,000 miles away. She was also—

BLAIR HODGES: There's that one story you tell where you drove all the way out there, and it was a complete disaster.

MELISSA FEBOS: Oh, my God.

BLAIR HODGES: I mean, she wanted you. She's basically like, come to me right now. And you're like, it's the middle of the night. Okay, I'm coming.

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah. It was like—and that was so—there were literally more instances like that than I could possibly count. The whole relationship was like that. It was like, prove you love me by doing this crazy thing that hurts you.

It was awful. It was really, really awful.

BLAIR HODGES: It kind of reminded me of that lady, the astronaut, who drove across—

MELISSA FEBOS: The country with the diaper.

BLAIR HODGES: She drove to kill someone. You drove to prove your love?

MELISSA FEBOS: I drove to prove my love and was incrementally killing myself. Yeah.

And so, I mean, it really was like—you know, my mother's a psychotherapist. I've been in recovery for 10 years. I've been in therapy most of my life. Even as it was happening, there was this part of me that was like, what on earth is going on? Like, what is happening?

I literally—I was deranged. I was deranged for two years. I can't even believe it went on for that long.

BLAIR HODGES: So there was a part of you observing it during that time. You were sort of like—I mean, you were obviously neck-deep, and that's where you really were. But at the same time, you did have a little bit of distance, enough to say, like, this is nuts.

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah, I knew. I knew it was absolutely nuts. But there was—I mean, it really was second only to my experience of drug addiction, like the depths of drug addiction.

It was proof to me that it was possible to entertain multiple consciousnesses at a single time. A part of me was absolutely all in on this relationship. It felt like my life depended on making it work.

I was also telling myself—and my partner was also telling me—a story of this kind of scary fairy tale-ish thing. Not Americanized fairy tales, but like scary Grimm's fairy tales [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: The ones where everybody dies and stuff [laughs]—

MELISSA FEBOS: Like in Hans Christian Andersen, where everybody cuts their feet off and gets their eyes pecked out.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, the little mermaid dies by suicide at the end.

MELISSA FEBOS: Exactly. Where it was just like, this is what true love is. It ravages you. It ruins your life. You put it before everything else.

It was contrary to every sort of insight about healthy relationship I'd ever gleaned from all my years in it. And there was a very young, undeveloped part of me that was like, yes, this is the dream.

And then I think—I do identify as an addict, and I think there's a biological component. However you want to explain that, I have—

BLAIR HODGES: I thought you threaded that carefully, too, by the way, to not necessarily full-on equate it, because addiction really kind of its own thing—

MELISSA FEBOS: Thank you.

BLAIR HODGES: But to point out the parallels there really mattered. I liked that you were careful with that.

MELISSA FEBOS: Thank you so much. I worked really hard to try to thread the needle there, because it definitely locked into that addictive part of my brain that can take anything that feels good and turn it into a battering ram that I use on myself.

And I certainly did that with that relationship.

 

EXCERPT: Wile E. Coyote – 11:51

 

BLAIR HODGES: Battering ram. Perfect. That reminds me of this great part of the book where you talk about Wile E. Coyote, speaking of battering rams. So I thought it'd be cool to have you read this section on page 155.

MELISSA FEBOS: Happy to. I love that section, if I'm allowed to say that.

BLAIR HODGES: You are!

MELISSA FEBOS: Okay. I'm gonna hold the book over here so that I can get the microphone.

As a kid, the only time I was allowed to binge on television was Saturday morning cartoons. My favorites were Tex Avery's Droopy Dog and sexy Red Hot Riding Hood. But of the better-known characters, I had a soft spot for Wile E. Coyote.

Coyote was the hapless protagonist of his skits, always trying to trap the smug Road Runner and always failing. Each of his Rube Goldberg contraptions backfired comically, and I found pathos in the grim resignation with which he opened his parasol as a boulder hurtled toward him. He was the rapacious predator and also the underdog, the chump, the loser.

Partly, my sympathies were triggered because I rooted for the loser in every game, regardless of what team I claimed. I also related to Coyote. He looked like an absolute junkie—rangy and ragged, bloodshot eyes and greasy fur—strung out on his desire for Road Runner. He was the hatcher of half-baked plans, a chronic underestimator, a real tweaker.

Why didn't he eat something else? I understood why obsession made us stupid. Once that drive ignited, reason became a stranger. There was only hunger and new ways to chase it. I marveled at Coyote's ingenuity because I understood the relentless imagination of those whose perspective had narrowed—straw-thin. Coyote was a hungry ghost, dying over and over.

Chuck Jones, who created the character for Warner Brothers in 1949, made him a sick and sorry-looking skeleton, based on Mark Twain's description of a coyote in his 1872 book of travel writing, Roughing It. Twain's coyote was a living, breathing allegory of want. He is always hungry.

Once, walking laps around LA's Silver Lake Reservoir, I spotted a coyote jogging along the inside of the chain link that surrounded the water. He must have gotten in through a hole in the fence. Lean and haunted, he stared out at us passing humans like, how did I get into this hungry cage, and how do I get out? I had to turn away.

I describe myself as a gremlin to my therapist, but the figure of a coyote is more accurate. A gremlin was a monster, but Wile E. Coyote, though a kind of villain, was also a slave in bondage to his obsession. We associate villainy with power, but it is more often characterized by desperation.

We are all capable of becoming predators if we get hungry enough. To label the drive solely as one of addiction was reductive, though, and inexact. I believed that some biological cork was its likely origin, be it a serotonin deficit or an inheritance of intergenerational trauma. But ultimately it didn't matter, so long as I understood it wasn't a moral failing or a life sentence.

Addiction could be a consequence of it, and certainly it could lead—and had led—to moral failures. But the drive itself was something else, more capacious in its potential. The conditions that cause a tornado are not a tornado nor its wreckage. They are power inchoate.

The essay I had probably assigned to students most over my years of teaching was Annie Dillard's “Living Like Weasels.” The magic of the essay is that it has almost no narrative. Dillard simply makes eye contact with a weasel one day on her usual walk around a pond. If you and I looked at each other that way, she explains, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders.

The rest of the essay is ostensibly an ode to the weasel—its black hole of eyes—but really a bit of glorious thinking on instinct and how best to live. We can live any way we want, she promises. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, even of silence, by choice.

The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't attack anything. A weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I had read the essay probably 30 times, and I always thought, first, that yielding at every moment to single necessity could be a description of bondage—to addiction, poverty, survival under domination. Coyote yielded at every moment to his single necessity. And so had I as an active addict; so had I as a lover, prioritizing my limerent obsessions, no matter how fleeting, over everything else I loved.

But Dillard wasn't describing the addict. She described the artist. I thought, though it could be anyone, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will. The key was choice. The difference between bondage to a single necessity and the perfect freedom of one was agency.

Once obsession locked in, I lost the power of choice. But before that, I still had it—my perfect freedom.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Melissa Febos reading from the book The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex.

Did you kind of get inspired by Annie Dillard's essay? She talks about vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Was that an ingredient floating around in your mind when you kind of decided to take up the celibacy thing? Or is that something you're like, oh, hey, yeah, she talked about that, too?

MELISSA FEBOS: Not consciously, but I think that the thing that attracts me to that essay and the thing that attracted me to the project of celibacy are the same part, right? That there is a part of me that is, first of all, interested in sort of acknowledging the other side of extremism.

Like, I'm gonna go all in on my indulgences, but I also want to go all in on my asceticism or my deprivations. That sort of going all in on something—or even the simplicity of that perfect freedom of a single necessity—made so much sense to me.

BLAIR HODGES: And a lot of questions are answered just by having that already, totally spend a lot less mental time making decisions.

MELISSA FEBOS: I mean, even the addict stuff aside, I'm a Libra. I see all sides. I could think for a really—I could really get into a kind of agonized spot over a restaurant menu, deciding what to order, you know?

BLAIR HODGES: Right. Have you heard of this book, The Paradox of Choice?

MELISSA FEBOS: No, I haven't.

BLAIR HODGES: Ooh, it is good. Basically—really quick—his argument is, and it's based in research, that the more choices we're presented with, the less satisfaction we report and experience after the fact, because we second-guess ourselves.

So he's like, if people had 20 different pairs of shoes to choose from, and then they chose one, and then they reported how satisfied they were with those shoes, they're much more likely to be less satisfied than if they chose between two pairs.

MELISSA FEBOS: That's so interesting.

BLAIR HODGES: So it sounds like you've experienced that—the paradox of choice.

MELISSA FEBOS: Totally. I think I might have actually heard that guy on Radiolab or something one time.

BLAIR HODGES: I think that's where I originally heard him.

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah, and it makes sense. And Dillard was onto that, right? It's like—that's why it's a freedom. Our minds cognitively just tend toward deliberation. If we're given too many options, we're not meant to have too many options.

Capitalism has, like, totally—it's such a mind f*ck. 

BLAIR HODGES: It is. 

MELISSA FEBOS: I think I love the simplicity of the idea of sort of getting up every day and being like, these are the shoes I wear, this is the shirt I wear. Everything is in service to the one thing that I live for, right? Which is a good description of a nun's life, actually, as well as a devoted artist or devoted anything.

 

The First Real Temptation – 19:59

 

BLAIR HODGES: You're gonna take your own personal vow of celibacy as the maelstrom finally screeches to a halt. It blows up. But even after that, you still have, like, five quick, brief entanglements.

And I love how you describe them as the last handfuls of popcorn when you've already decided to stop. I so related to that feeling of just one more.

MELISSA FEBOS: Just one more! I've already gathered it in my hand. I might as well just—yeah, yeah—one last one.

I was like that with TV as a kid. I'm still kind of like that with candy. There's just an inertia to my appetites for certain things, and it's hard to work around.

BLAIR HODGES: It was nice, though, because it gave you an opportunity to reflect back on what happened in those situations.

Because what you ended up deciding to do was kind of write this personal inventory out. You're like, I'm gonna write my personal relationship history and try to figure out what the patterns are, and what's going wrong here.

And so you had those five quick ones right away that you could just sort of dig into. And then you hit your first big test—your first big temptation—just six weeks in.

And this is—you go to LA. It's probably, like, a conference or something, I assume, right?

MELISSA FEBOS: It was a conference.

BLAIR HODGES: You're at a hotel room, and someone invites you in.

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah, and I went.

BLAIR HODGES: You went in!

MELISSA FEBOS: I went in. Which was—you know, it was one of those moments.

As a memoirist, it's so interesting, because you're basically building this little diorama of the past and then reenacting your own choices. But now you are divested from the stakes of those scenes.

And so it's really obvious. It's like watching a little TV show of your life that you're writing yourself. And, you know, the most agonizing slash entertaining TV shows are the ones where you're like, no, don't go down there. What do you feel like? Of course he's down there.

And this was one of those moments, writing the book, where I was like, oh, man.

I mean, not even writing the book—just writing the inventory—where I was like, oh, God. Clearly it was like, don't do it. Don't get in the elevator. Don't go into the hallway. Definitely don't go into the hotel room.

But it—you know. And so it was with equal parts regret, dread, judgment, shame, but also kind of a new feeling, which was a kind of compassion—or I don't know, a kind of agonized tenderness.

Where it's like, oh, man, you were really powerless. You knew you didn't want to. You knew that you shouldn't. You knew it wasn't the right thing. But the incredible gravity of another person's desire or expectation was so powerful.

It's like, wow. It was a little glimpse into all of the ways that I had been—or at least felt—powerless in my relationships.

Because this wasn't even someone that I was in a committed relationship with. It was someone I had had a kind of mixed dalliance with, who I really respected as a—But I didn't—

BLAIR HODGES: This is the person you were—texted? Had more of a text connection with—

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah. Like, I didn't really want to be in a relationship with them. I really had just wanted to be friends with them.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, you introduce this idea of pity, too, or sympathy. This was really clarifying to me, where you're like, okay, I was there. Because I'm thinking, like, why didn't she just get out of there? Is she just wanting to have sex? Is that what it is?

And it really wasn't. A lot of it had to do with not wanting to—I mean, she was basically begging you, and you didn't want to hurt her feelings.

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: And so there was this sense of obligation and people-pleasing that was a component of your ongoing sexual experiences that was really clarifying to see.

MELISSA FEBOS: It was clarifying for me as well. It really had not been visible to me. I mean, I had sort of thrown that word around, right? Like, I'm on the internet. I've been to therapy. I know what people-pleasing is.

And I had been like, oh yeah, I say yes when I want to say no sometimes, like everybody, sure. But it's different between being like, yeah, I guess I'll do that at work, and then walking into a hotel room with someone who wants to have sex with you and you don't want to have sex with them. That is a very different situation.

The stakes psychologically are a bit higher there. And I just hadn't realized how huge a factor that had been in my decision-making.

Right. And so how much of my relationship history, my sex life, had been governed by this sort of irresistibility of meeting other people's expectations or wants.

You know, even with women, I had thought, oh, that's like a heterosexual thing, right? No, it wasn't a men thing. It was just a me thing. It was something I did in relationships.

And I did also do it at work and sometimes did it in my friendships or my family, but I hadn't really seen it in this area. Which was also really helpful and weirdly empowering when I was making the inventory.

Because I had been like, how do I end up in these relationships? How have I ended up here? And here I had sort of gotten the magnifying glass over a dynamic I hadn't seen before.

And I thought, oh, here's what's happening. This is part of what I'm doing. This is something I can change.

BLAIR HODGES: Right, right. And you got out of that room. You got out of the hotel room and learned a powerful lesson: when push came to shove, here was proof that you could say no. You could do it.

MELISSA FEBOS: It was a real departure, I think. Because in the past, you know, it sort of shed a spotlight on all of these past experiences I'd had where I hadn't left the room—at least not before doing something that I think was probably psychologically harmful to me. Definitely was.

And in that case, I think because I had begun this endeavor into celibacy and really admitted to myself in a very lucid way, I don't want to do this. I want to step away from this. I want to take a break.

Because I had set these parameters for myself and had a deadline, I was like, no, I really—I mean, I am very type A. I'm a good student. I meet a deadline. So I was like, no, I can't. I have a deadline. I have to get out of this room.

And it was so hard. And I did it. And I thought, wow, that is a real departure from what I've done in the past. And it instantly revised my conception of my whole history.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, and we get to see that. I mean, you wrote it down, and now you've edited it and kind of dispersed it throughout the book.

 

Taking a Relationship Inventory – 26:15

 

BLAIR HODGES: And as you're approaching some of your earliest relationships, like back when you're a teenager, you kind of started to relax a bit because you're like, "how bad could it be? I was a kid, and it was probably some funny things that happened."

But your expectations were upended there, and you actually had to work through a lot more with those early relationships than you'd expected to.

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah, I really did. I mean, and this is also, in hindsight, really logical. Of course I didn't start this destructive pattern in my adulthood. It came from somewhere, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And you say you had a pretty good family life, too, right? Like, you didn't have daddy issues and that kind of stuff.

MELISSA FEBOS: Who among us, Blair? Come on—

BLAIR HODGES: The average. Sure, sure, sure. Every kid deserves therapy. [laughter]

MELISSA FEBOS: —"didn't have any" might be a stretch. You know, I had issues. I've written about them in other books. But relative to a lot of people, I had a loving family. I had a secure attachment to my parents.

BLAIR HODGES: You didn't see enough to say, that's why I'm having these issues—

MELISSA FEBOS: Right, exactly. There wasn't a great departure there.

But I could see back as early as my youngest friendships, where with other girls we were enacting these—it was actually sort of the prototype for the maelstrom. Where it was this super heightened, super passionate, making big promises, very dramatic, very possessive, very intense sort of relationships where the stakes felt very, very high and they were very consuming. Before they were even ever physically eroticized, right? They were very romantic. Very passionate relationships.

BLAIR HODGES: Did you know at the time that you were gay? Did you identify at the time as lesbian?

MELISSA FEBOS: I did. I knew that I wasn't straight. And I think part of this is because my mom isn't straight. She's bisexual. And so it was always presented to me as, like, whatever. And to me, I was like, isn't everybody bisexual? Like, that would make sense. Which obviously isn't true. But I presumed that at the time. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: At the time you just did.

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah. I was like, I'm probably not straight. And then, you know, it was very clear—to everyone around me—that I was definitely not straight. [laughter]

But then I had relationships with both men and women as a young person. And there were a few of them where I went back—multiple ones, ones I didn't even include in the book, because you only need one example of some things. It would have been really repetitive, as my inventory was very, very repetitive.

But there were a lot of relationships where I went back, and I thought, oh no, wait. I really did this thing that I'm now seeing I've done for a lot of my adulthood, where I people-pleased and capitulated to what the other person wanted or what I thought they wanted, and was kind of trying to be this perfect partner until I—

BLAIR HODGES: You were yielding to your single obsession, right? 

MELISSA FEBOS: I was yielding to my single necessity, which was keeping my partner happy—being the perfect object of affection. And then I would burn out, because actually I was a person with lots of other interests and obsessions and was very independent. And I would start to sort of hate them.

And I was so afraid of conflict that I would basically bail out of the relationship. Sometimes I would ghost them. Sometimes I would break up with them ceremoniously and never speak to them again. Sometimes I would just vaporize, you know.

And we didn't have a word for that at the time. There was no ghosting, because there was no internet, so nobody knew that anybody else was really doing it. There were no apps. [laughter]

And I realized that I had even gotten the information years later. I had gone back and assumed that it would be okay with those people. And they pretty uniformly said to me, like, oh no, you basically ruined my life for a few years. Like, I was totally devastated. And I was kinda like, "Ahhh."

BLAIR HODGES: And I was thinking, that's part of taking accountability. It reminds me of your addiction stuff. Like, you went through Alcoholics Anonymous, I presume. So the 12 steps are about taking an inventory and also making reparations.

MELISSA FEBOS: Absolutely. That's a big part of how I had the idea to do the inventory. I mean, I'm a big list-maker anyway, but I had really transformed my life through 12-step work for drug and alcohol addiction.

And so I had definitely turned over the log of my own behavior to see all the bugs that were underneath and gone and made amends. So this was sort of based on that model, right?

 

Learning the Art of Courtly Love – 30:32

 

BLAIR HODGES: You had a lot of extra time, now that you're not in these relationships. You could research stuff, you could study stuff about celibacy. And you bring up this famous text from 1184, Andreas Capellanus—I'm gonna just guess that that's how you say it.

MELISSA FEBOS: Your guess is as good as mine!

BLAIR HODGES: This is from The Art of Courtly Love. Speaking of lists, this is some of the stuff that's just floating around in the cultural air that you and I and many people just imbibed about what we think about relationships. So I thought I'd have you read some of those excerpts that you have in the list here.

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah, yeah, happy to. I mean, when I came upon this, I thought, oh, interesting that my first model for romantic relationships was based on this very, very old and crazy list.

Yeah, here we go.

But he who is not jealous cannot love. A true lover does not desire to embrace and love anyone except his beloved. When made public, love rarely endures. The easy attainment of love makes it of little value; difficulty of attainment makes it prized.

If love diminishes, it quickly fails and rarely revives. A true lover considers nothing good except what he thinks will please his beloved. A true lover is constantly and without intermission possessed by the thought of his beloved.

I mean, it's actually still shocking to me. And as I was just reading it, I was like, oh man. I actually can see how a few of these stuck around. And more recently, I've had to actually sort of debunk them.

BLAIR HODGES: To me, I see him treating love like this sort of magical spell out in the world, rather than—I would compare love to gardening. Like, it's something that you do and cultivate. You get your hands in the dirt.

And he's just like, no. Love is this thing out there that then sort of takes over you. So you’ve got to be super jealous. You would never think anyone else is attractive.

Which says, like, if you ever get a crush on somebody, you should start questioning whether you love the person you're with—which is so silly.

MELISSA FEBOS: It's totally crazy.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

MELISSA FEBOS: I now have a relationship where we can talk about our crushes. And it feels so shocking to me, because I really, for years, had this very immature idea that I should be obsessed with my person.

I should never want anyone else. I should constantly be trying to please them. I should be very possessive and apparently secretive.

It's just so toxic. It's like the worst. This just sounds like a list of red flags, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yes. And the list of red flags precedes one of the funniest lines in the book—which I will bleep out for everyone. But I will say it to you, which is where you say, “Be still, my beating cu*t,” which earned a pretty big laugh-out-loud.

MELISSA FEBOS: My wife read that and she was like, you clown. You would never say this in person. And I was like, I know. But it was very true to me in the moment! Because I do understand that there is—like, this was the first model of what's hot and romantic. There is something there.

And I think this is what happened when I was 32 and I met the woman—my lover—in the maelstrom. And she acted exactly like this and was actively like, this is how we should be.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that's love.

MELISSA FEBOS: There was a young part of me that was just like, "Ahh, swoon!" It just seemed like all of my very young, preserved fantasies come true, even as the adult part of me was like, "uh-oh!" [laughter]

 

Spiritual and Therapeutic Connections – 33:54

 

BLAIR HODGES: You took your inventory and you actually ended up sharing it with a spiritual director and also with a therapist. Originally you were writing it for yourself, but later you shared it.

I wondered what different things sharing it with those people did for you. Because a spiritual director has one mode of working with people therapeutically, and a therapist has professional guidelines they follow. What did you get out of both those instances of sharing?

MELISSA FEBOS: Oh, so much. It was such a helpful exercise. You know, I really have just experienced over the course of most of my adult life that so much of the insight I’ve gotten about myself and my experience has come through sharing them with other people.

By nature, I'm such a secretive person, and secrecy, for me, enormously inhibits growth. It's really hard for me to have an accurate self-appraisal without allowing other people to see me.

And these two people were people I trusted that way, too. Yeah. I think most adults sort of figure that out.

BLAIR HODGES: I know people that hide, though. Like, I don't know if most do figure that out.

MELISSA FEBOS: It's comforting, it feels safe to hide.

BLAIR HODGES: Or maybe, I dunno, I feel lazy.

MELISSA FEBOS: Ha!

BLAIR HODGES: I feel like it's because I'm just—I don't have the time and energy to just, you know? [laughs]

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah. But being seen is scary, because other people see things we don't. And for the very reason that it is valuable is the very reason why it's terrifying.

So I think, especially when people have a lot of shame, they're afraid of what other people will see or point out, or that people will see them and then be like, whoa, gross.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that's absolutely true.

MELISSA FEBOS: Right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And your partner who you live with is going to see a lot more—know you a lot—in different ways than you know yourself.

MELISSA FEBOS: My wife and I have a little sort of discourse in our household about, like, oh my God, please stop perceiving me. I can't take it anymore. Like, I just need—no more observations, please. I've met my limit for the day! [laughter] I know so much more about myself than I want to know, because she's here to tell me.

But yeah, so when I shared the inventory with my spiritual director—who is like a mentor and dear friend of mine, who's very honest, very straight shooter—I was really looking to them for more of my part, my complicity. What did I do here that I'm not seeing, that I can change?

And what they said was the absolutely resounding, horrifying phrase that I don't think they came up with, but they were the first person to ever say to me, which is: people-pleasing is people-using.

Because, you know, they had said, you're a user. When I hear this, I hear that you used these people. And I was like, how can I be a user when I was a people-pleaser?

And they said, Melissa, people-pleasing is people-using. You pleased them to soothe yourself, because it made you feel safe. It wasn't about the best thing for either of you. It was just what made you feel safe.

And I was like, oh, crap! I knew it was true. I knew it was true. It was depressing, but also really galvanizing, because I was like, oh, okay, I can stop, I can stop, you know? It's not easy, but that's something I can actually work on. I can practice doing something differently.

And then when I shared it with my therapist—because therapists are much more interested in integration and healing—when I shared it with her, I was really able to step into how it felt to have hurt all those people. Like how it felt to have betrayed my Best Ex—someone I dearly, dearly loved. And I desperately did not want to hurt her. And I had gone about our breakup in the most cowardly way.

And, you know, I've gone through a lot of breakups. When you're going through a breakup, it's so helpful to have a crush on someone else, or some kind of anesthesia, because it is so painful to hurt someone that you love. And I had anesthetized myself so thoroughly that, in many cases, I had never really felt the pain of having hurt those people. And I had never really sat with it. And to sit with it was quite devastating and also purifying. It was really good to finally feel those feelings that I think I had been carrying around in my body ever since.

And so my therapist encouraged me to communicate with those parts of myself. Like, what do you want to say to the part of you that is devastated about this? And to really step into the caring, integrated, adult part of myself that could be more responsible and more loving and more brave in relationships.

 

Toward a More True and Generous Love – 38:24

 

BLAIR HODGES: You were in a really good place to start doing that, because as you write at one point here, you say, “Up until then, I had not gone a day in twenty years without entertaining the ways that I did or should or would or could appeal to other people and conform to their desires.”

Like, you finally were able to step out of that mindset of being completely directed toward others. And the irony, as the spiritual director pointed out, is you were doing that and it was all self-directed.

MELISSA FEBOS: That's right.

BLAIR HODGES: I think that's why it's so hard to see in ourselves, because it's an illusion that we are living toward others, but it really is all about ourselves.

And so many self-help books, I think, encourage that kind of mentality—positive thinking type stuff—where it's all self-directed.

MELISSA FEBOS: It's true. I mean, in many ways, I think that was at the very core of the book—this very nuanced teasing apart of motive and intention and responsibility. To really try to get to a practice of love that is actually generous and loving, that really is about the other, that acknowledges all of our investment in the self, and doesn't try to hide from it in this fantasy of being good.

And it really acknowledges taking responsibility for ourselves so that we can truly be generous and truly see and consider other people. And that means saying no to them sometimes. It means displeasing them sometimes.

And this is not a sexy idea. It's not a marketable idea. It's really like, yeah, you're really gonna get down in there.

BLAIR HODGES: I know. I feel that on my podcast. This is the stuff I'm trying to talk about, and it's like, how do I put that on TikTok? It doesn't fit.

MELISSA FEBOS: Because it is truly radical. It really is radical and so liberating. And I really believe it has the power to transform on a global level. For people to take responsibility for their own emotions and needs allows us to be loving and generous in ways that really could transform our societies.

You see it operating in relationships, in families, in institutions, in governments—really at every level. So much destruction is caused because people don't acknowledge and take responsibility for their own feelings. I see it at work all the time.

BLAIR HODGES: You're trying to uncover this toxic dependence and replace it with, not just independence. Because I think—to me—that's the thing. When people realize there's a problem, a lot of times they go to the independence thing. But you're saying there's an interdependence you're trying to get to.

MELISSA FEBOS: That's right. Because independence—I was great at that, too. My great fantasy, in some ways—I think the fantasy that I had intermittently during my celibacy, and then had had in other relationships—was sort of like, I'm gonna go live in a tower. I'll just never do any of this ever again. That seemed more appealing to me.

But it's this binary, just black-and-white thinking. It's never realistic. It's never generous to the self or other people. There really is no escape from the hard work of interdependence and navigating intimacy. It is really, really hard. And it is, for me, the only way.

BLAIR HODGES: And the trick is, it does still include giving of yourself. You just have to assess why you're doing that and how much you're giving, and differentiating from the partner that you're with.

Because there are still sacrifices that you make. Your book—this is where, again, it's so hard to articulate it all. The book lays it out so well. It's this idea that you're not preaching this isolated, independent thing. You're talking about interconnection, which does require some sacrifice and give-and-take.

Like, the relationship you're in right now with your partner, where you said you can talk to each other about your crushes and not have to necessarily feel threatened by it. Or sometimes you're not going to be able to read when you had that plan because something else comes up.

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: But also sometimes you need to say, hey, I need this time to read. Both of those things can be true.

MELISSA FEBOS: Totally. Yeah. It's really funny—you just made me think about my wife and me. We have had to navigate—this is a really minor thing, but it's totally part of it—where at the end of the day, I'm a morning person, and I like to go to bed and then have 30 to 60 minutes to read before I fall asleep. I don't want anyone to talk to me or really touch me. It's my decompression.

And she's a night owl, so she sort of revs up and always gets a second wind at night. And sometimes she'll come into the bedroom and start a deep conversation with me, and I'll be like, ah, what are you doing? This is my wind-down time.

And it took many years for us to navigate being like, okay, sometimes when I feel open to it, I can choose to put my book down and offer my attention. And we can have a nice interaction before bed.

And then sometimes I need to say, sweetie, I can't do it tonight. And she'll be like, okay. And she'll go direct that energy elsewhere. But it's a choice, right? Where I think in the past, my partners would want to talk and I would put my book down every single time.

And then after about two and a half years of that, I would be like, I think I hate this person. And the only way for me to read at night is to end this relationship!

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah! [laughs]

MELISSA FEBOS: Which is like, whoa, buddy!

BLAIR HODGES: "I'm choosing my books."

MELISSA FEBOS: It's just all or nothing. And that doesn't work when it comes to intimacy. It really doesn't. It's not sustainable.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Melissa Febos talking about her new book, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex. Her other books you might have heard of include Whip Smart, Abandon Me, Girlhood, and Bodywork. And she's won more awards and critical acclaim than I have time to say.

She's been published in places like The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Believer, McSweeney's, and New York Times Magazine. And she earned her MFA degree from Sarah Lawrence College.

Currently, she teaches in the nonfiction writing program as a professor at the University of Iowa.

 

The Work of Writing Memoir – 44:09

 

BLAIR HODGES: Speaking of teaching, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about your work on the art of memoir. Because you haven't just written memoirs—you've written books about writing memoirs.

Bodywork: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. And that book talks about the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately.

And we've kind of addressed some of the emotional things you were going through, and maybe some of the psychological. But I think people might be surprised to hear that there are physical elements of writing intimately about your life.

How did that apply as you wrote this book?

MELISSA FEBOS: That's really interesting. I mean, I think some of this is not explicitly in the book, but I think that this book is the closest in voice and style to me in the world than any previous book that I've written.

And the reason for that is because over the last—let's say—five years, I mean really ten years, but five years, I went through a huge change in my life where I basically redefined my relationship with my body.

And, you know, it's all connected, which is something that I've always known, right? And yet it seemed also pretty separate from the way I ran my life, which was: I lead a life of the mind. I treat my body like a machine that I own. And I basically took terrible care of it.

I did not feel integrated in my relationship with my body. And I would write at all hours, deprive myself of sleep, drive long distances, travel all of the time, exercising only as a means of either controlling the shape of my body or for the endorphins—mostly for the endorphins—without thinking about the way those practices and ways of living affected my body, or how the way I treated my body affected my emotional life.

And as someone who trades in emotional insight into experience, it was a significant area of neglect. Right. I really was—speaking of living in extremes—I had sort of exiled my body as not a major concern. Which was, in many ways, also dependent on the privilege of having a well body, having an able body, which I totally took for granted.

And some years ago, that changed. I had a series of pretty catastrophic back spasms and a spinal injury, mostly from the ways that I had treated my body—running kind of addictively for most of my adult life. And I was pretty severely disabled for a couple of years, intermittently. And, ironically, I was writing my craft book about memoir, Bodywork, at the time.

And so I was convalescing, or in weird positions because I couldn't stand or sit, writing this book about memoir. And at the same time, I was really figuring out how to be a writer—to live my life in a way that made space for a healthy relationship with my body.

And I think it had an indelible effect on my work that I basically overhauled and changed my entire lifestyle—from the amount of time I work, to when I work, to how my desk is arranged. I'm standing on a treadmill desk right now.

And I really got in touch with my body and learned to take care of myself in a different way. And that made me so much more compassionate toward myself and other people. Which, you know, radically affects the way that I write memoir, which is writing stories about myself and other people. Right?

BLAIR HODGES: I love your definition of autobiographical writing as "a form of intellectualization and aestheticization." So there's brainy thinking-about stuff, there's beauty, aesthetics, and together those lead ultimately to a confrontation with emotional truth.

And, you know, I hadn't read a lot of memoirs before I started this podcast project. And I used to have this idea of them as kind of not worth my time. I thought they were like navel-gazing, or people would be like, oh, "so brave!" And I was like, I don't need a “so brave” person right now. These are sort of the common tropes of memoir.

MELISSA FEBOS: A friend and I actually have a refrain—just a running joke—"that's just so brave.” Where we'll be at a reading and we'll look at each other and just be like, so brave. [laughter]

It just feels—I mean, and of course there are writers who are really brave. Like, you have to be really brave. But it just feels like a shorthand for: is it good art? Do you like it? Is it entertaining? Or is it just “so brave” or you know, is it just kind of pitiful?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And there could be some “so brave” stuff that also—well, they're not writers. Like, it's not well written. The craft isn't there. And that's fine. We need stories. People can tell their stories. It doesn't mean people shouldn't tell their stories.

But the way you're teaching people to write and think about writing, and the way you do it yourself, really does combine that intellectualization with the aestheticization, and ultimately this confrontation with emotional truth.

 

Folding Time with the Beguines – 49:33

 

BLAIR HODGES: I appreciated the way that you stack time—folding time, I guess, is the metaphor you use—that you're folding time to see patterns.

And you became kind of—it seemed to me—you were kind of obsessed with these Beguines, these religious women who kind of struck off on their own way, way, way back in the day.

And I didn't expect a religious angle to come up in the book, but they seem to play a really important part.

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah, I didn't expect it either. I mean, that is so fun. It's one of my favorite parts of writing in general, and writing memoir specifically.

You think you know what the story is, right? Because I remember—it’s my story—but living something does not mean that you understand it, or even that you're aware of what the story is or what role you played in it.

Everything can be a surprise.

But because I also include research and a kind of intertextual searching element to mine, there are huge surprises—from Wile E. Coyote to this 1100s text, The Art of Courtly Love, to the Beguines.

Who were, as you said, these religious lay women who were often talked about like nuns, but they were not nuns. They were not under church rule.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, they weren't official.

MELISSA FEBOS: And they basically were like separatists—religious separatists—who abandoned their lives.

They often abandoned unhappy marriages or lives of abuse. You know, there were just not very good life options for women at the time. [laughter]

They cropped up in the Low Countries of Europe in the 13th century, and then there was a resurgence in the 16th century.

In the 13th century, they would buy properties outside of major cities—in kind of gross, unpopulated areas—and they would buy a big set of buildings, build a giant wall around it, and start a community of some kind.

They were financially independent. They would worship and preach—which was illegal at the time—and they would basically work as kind of social workers in their communities.

BLAIR HODGES: They opted out of the patriarchy.

MELISSA FEBOS: They opted out of the patriarchy. They opted out of the economy. Even the cities where they lived.

They opted out of traditional gender roles. They opted out in really radical ways that I found both humbling and heartening.

Because I was like, if these ladies in the Middle Ages, who had zero rights, could live these principles of interdependence and align themselves with their deepest-held beliefs—spiritual, social, interpersonal—I can do a little bit better in the 21st century.

Like, I can do a bit better, I think.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. I can't remember—did they seek converts? Did they go out and evangelize, or did people just gravitate?

MELISSA FEBOS: They did, I think. But it was really sort of—there's a slogan in 12-step that's like, attraction, not promotion.

They didn't evangelize or try to persuade. I think the beginnings were attraction, not promotion. But they didn't have to evangelize—it was very, very appealing for a lot of women.

I mean, they spread like wildfire, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. The church eventually tamped down on them.

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah. They ended up burning a lot of them as heretics and shutting them down, forcing them to either rejoin society or join abbeys of actual nuns.

Because these—when I look at my life, I was reading about the Beguines and thought, oh my God, think about all of the people I am in community with.

All of these women writers and artists and queer community and activists. In the Middle Ages, all of these people would be expected to marry some guy—probably someone else chose—and then just churn out babies and basically work as a domestic servant for the rest of your life.

Like, what would we have done?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

MELISSA FEBOS: And it was really obvious that we would all have run away to the Beguinage. Like, that would definitely have been it.

 

A Spilling Kind of Emotionality for All Relationships – 53:19

 

BLAIR HODGES: Now, I asked you about evangelizing because that's an interesting part of your book—how you went about talking about your experiment while it was going on.

So in the very beginning, you told your mom, as you mentioned—a psychotherapist—and her first thing was like, ooh, be careful how you bring that up. Because, like, three months—not a real hero there, buddy! [laughter]

MELISSA FEBOS: Like, everyone's gonna laugh at you.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And then it would sometimes come up at dinner. You might mention it, and you'd notice all the attention would shift—people would be like, ooh, I want to hear about this.

But you weren't going out and proclaiming the truths of it. And yet your book kind of does that now. Throughout the process, if there wasn't a sense of evangelism, do you feel like the book evangelizes?

MELISSA FEBOS: No, I wouldn't say that the book—that was not my goal at all when writing the book. But, you know, like everything I have ever written about in memoirs and personal essays, this subject matter started out as something I thought was a personal problem.

I thought, I have a messed-up relationship to relationships. I don't know how I got it. I really need to change myself in this way. I have a specific me problem, right?

And then, as it would come up incidentally while I was doing it, so many people—it was really quite shocking—so many people were like, tell me more.

And they would have this look of eagerness and dread, because I could tell they knew it was something that they should probably do, or they had the same problem. And I thought, oh my God, I am not alone in this. So many more people—but we weren't talking about it. Which feels shocking, because we talk about relationships all the time.

But the tenor of those conversations was not the tenor of the conversations I was having during my celibacy. Mostly people were complaining about dating, or they were complaining about not being in relationships, or people who wanted to—

BLAIR HODGES: Or they want the opposite of celibacy and they're not getting it.

MELISSA FEBOS: Exactly. And then when I started to realize that people were really hungry for a different kind of conversation—and they, too, felt alone, whether they were involuntarily in nonstop relationships or involuntarily never in relationships—they were really, really interested in the project of trying to change their relationship to love.

And so when I went through this experience and I did successfully change myself and had all of these insights, I thought, you know, I don't want to recruit people. I don't think that's possible.

First of all, this is not something you're going to recruit people to if they're not already interested. But I don't believe in that anyway. But I know that there are lots of people out there who are just kind of caught in a cycle—feeling baffled by it, feeling alone in it, feeling ashamed of it, not knowing what the first step might be.

And so I thought, you know what? I'm going to lay out what I have learned through writing this book and through the experience of celibacy, so that other people can find it as a touchstone if they are already having this experience.

So it's really for the people who are already in the club but don't know it yet.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, no, it makes sense. And I think the process you went through prepared you well to be that kind of—I would say—a journey partner rather than an instructor.

And, you know, I thought the book was just going to have a chapter about how food was more tasty now that you were celibate, and how movies were more interesting. Just shallow stuff like that.

And you do talk about some increased sensual pleasures, for sure. That's there. But what really stood out was that you call it a spilling kind of emotionality. That's what you say.

And so even in these conversations where you're talking to others about your celibacy, it seemed like you were able to be more emotionally available to those conversations because you were experimenting and going through this process of celibacy.

MELISSA FEBOS: Exactly, exactly. I mean, I was more available to recognize new information about the people I was in community with.

But I was also more available for every single kind of relationship—my friendships, my relationships with my students, my relationship with nature, with my work, with my family. Like, I really became more available to the world.

 

Learning to Be More Present – 57:25

 

BLAIR HODGES: Then the project had to become—if you were going to re-enter into the world of relationships again—how to take that with you and not fall back into those same patterns, right?

And I wondered, now that you're years removed from it, if you feel pressure to keep succeeding—to actualize the lessons from the book—or worries about, like, am I a hypocrite because I wrote this lesson out in the book and I'm not living by it?

Do you know what I mean? Is there pressure from having put it out there so publicly?

MELISSA FEBOS: I would say, actually, no—not from the book.

I mean, would I be embarrassed if I had a relapse and went back to flirting with everybody and being messy? Absolutely.

But there's no danger of that happening. There really is no going back.

The pressure I feel doesn't come from having made it public or from the book itself. The pressure comes from having actually raised my own standard for living.

Like, one of the texts that I quote from in this book—and have quoted from in other books of mine, because it's so important to me—is Audre Lorde's essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic Is Power.”

And in that essay, she defines the erotic not as a sexual element, but as basically what I'm writing about in this book: this way of being in the world and in oneself and in every relationship and activity as fully and spiritually present as possible.

And once you begin to do that in your life, it becomes impossible to go backward, because it feels terrible. Once you know—once you have a frame of reference for how it feels to really be in your relationships, to really consider yourself and consider other people, and to have a higher expectation for the quality of connection and presence and activity in all those areas of your life—you really can't tolerate it being lower.

BLAIR HODGES: It almost sounds like a religious conversion.

MELISSA FEBOS: It does. And in some ways it is. I mean, it's definitely a conversion to a higher standard of living and presence. Right? It's a different definition of love.

And so there were—or in the moments where I have, of course, slipped back into old ways of being. And I think this happens throughout my life to small degrees, but most radically, I think, in my marriage, because I really had to put the rubber to the road in my marriage.

And there have been times where I've slipped into the people-pleasing kind of manipulations of my past. And it has been horrible. It has hurt my relationship. It has made me feel terrible about myself. It has also just kind of stalled me out.

It just doesn't feel right anymore. It used to feel bad in some ways, but also it was just what I did. It was like the air that I breathed. And now it's not.

And so when I do it, it doesn't feel right. And it causes disruptions and pretty immediate consequences in my life.

So it's kind of like—I was a cigarette smoker for a long time when I was younger. Now, once in a while, I'll be like, ooh, I used to love smoking. Give me a drag of your cigarette.

And it's awful. I hate it. It makes me cough. I feel gross. I'm like, ugh. And that's kind of how it feels.

So the book is more separate from that. It's not anyone else's perception that keeps me changed—really, it's my own affect.

 

Celibate No More – 01:00:45

 

BLAIR HODGES: Well, people will find out as they read why the three-month thing didn't work out. It's basically like you weren't ready yet. You kept prolonging the deadline until it ended up becoming a year.

Not that you set out to have it be that long, but that's how it ended up.

At the end, you describe this ritual that you undertook. You ended your celibacy commitment with a ritual at the ocean. I thought it would be nice if you'd take us there.

MELISSA FEBOS: Sure, yeah. At the end, I realized—right around the year mark—that the need for a deadline had gone away.

And I had needed the deadline, as I said before, because I have a real allegiance to deadlines. I want to meet them. Otherwise, there was such a strong pull back toward my own behavior. There was a kind of momentum—a lifelong momentum—that was going to pull me back.

And at the end of the year, I realized—I think it was actually before the end of the year—that I just didn't want to go back anymore. I was so content and so thriving in every area of my life. I didn't miss being in relationships, or I rarely missed it.

And I really felt so happy that the question became, am I ever going to want to? Rather than, how do I avoid running back into my old habits and behaviors?

And I'm a person who loves ceremonies. So when I realized that there was no need for a deadline, I stopped setting one. And I felt like I graduated. Right? And I decided to step into the rest of my life. And if I wanted to be in another relationship, I was free to try to do so in a very different way.

I had been very pragmatic about the ways I wanted to conduct that experience if and when I decided to. But I wasn't going to go looking for it. I was just going to keep living without a specific project of celibacy. I wasn't technically celibate anymore, and I just moved into the rest of my life.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And this ceremony—you took this list with you?

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah. I took my list, and I rode the train to Coney Island. And I dug a little hole in the sand, and I burned the list.

BLAIR HODGES: What was on that list?

MELISSA FEBOS: The list was—it was the list of the—was it the list of the person who I wanted to be? It was the list of—I think it was the list of the ways that I didn't want to be anymore in the world.

Like, I had made a bunch of lists, and this was the one where I was like, I am stepping into the new reality. I really, truly felt changed.

And so it wasn't ceremonial in the sense of, like, in burning this, I now free myself. It was like I had freed myself, and I wanted to mark that occasion.

BLAIR HODGES: It was a celebration rather than some promises.

MELISSA FEBOS: It was, yeah. I'm a very ceremonial person, which comes up a lot in the books.

BLAIR HODGES: And so were there any secret—I'm not going to ask you what they are—but were there any other—this seemed like a sacred moment, and you shared it with us.

Were there other sacred moments throughout the process that you decided not to put in the book? I won't necessarily ask what they are. I just wonder how much you kept to yourself.

MELISSA FEBOS: Yeah. I mean, the great surprise—both to the writer and certainly to the reader of writing memoir—is that you have to leave almost everything out.

Three hundred pages is not as long as it seems. I had a lot to do in the pages of this book, and so, yeah, there was a lot that I left out.

I think it's safe to assume of most memoirs—certainly of my work—that any sort of high-topography moment of insight or drama in the book, there were probably at least five to ten other experiences that were similar to that one.

BLAIR HODGES: But were any of them sacred, though, that you're like, I'm—this one's for me. I'm not putting it in there.

MELISSA FEBOS: Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah. Sure. There were definitely moments. There were definitely moments—especially moments that involved other people.

Because, yeah, you have to navigate—I am willing to share more of my own private, special moments, but with other people, I've learned to be much more protective.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And you're using pseudonyms and stuff.

MELISSA FEBOS: Totally.

BLAIR HODGES: You kind of talk about that. But yeah, that makes sense. Especially that those moments, especially, would be held back.

That's Melissa Febos. We're talking about her terrific book, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex. We'll be right back with "Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises," after this.

 

Break: Check Out “What Your Therapist Thinks” – 01:05:19

 

BLAIR HODGES: Hey, everybody, it's me, Blair, again. I'm just wondering—it's a new year, but how did the holidays go for you? I'll be honest, holidays can be a bit stressful for me. You know the song, “There's no place like home for the holidays.” I mean, to some people that can sound a bit threatening, actually—that there's no place like home—which is why maybe it's hard to be there.

It's not terribly hard for me. I don't want to over-exaggerate or anything, but some people really struggle with the idea of going home for the holidays. I saw Mel Robbins had written a New York Times editorial about this—how we all just kind of need to forget our own traumas and just sidle up next to our racist uncles or whatever. And I'd have to say that the lack of nuance in that piece wasn't particularly helpful to me.

I got a lot better advice from a podcast that you might like. The podcast is called What Your Therapist Thinks, and they had a really good episode about setting healthy boundaries with family. The episode was called “A Guide to Surviving the Holidays.”

And with apologies, I'm sorry this recommendation comes a little bit late. But, you know, there's always next year, right? Or you can listen and see what might have gone better if you had listened to it beforehand. I'll tell you a little bit more about the podcast, though. I think people who listen to Relationscapes might really connect with this show.

What Your Therapist Thinks is a mental health show where actual licensed therapists are opening up about what they're really thinking. And if you haven't ever been in therapy—or you haven't been in therapy in a while, like me—and you want to get back there, the show will give you an inside look at what therapists are really thinking about.

Questions that you might be afraid to ask them. Topics like performance anxiety, why people cheat, infidelity, what people-pleasing is like and how to navigate it, what's up with ketamine therapy, and more.

And two things make this a standout show for me.

The first is that co-host Felicia Keller Boyle is a licensed somatic therapist. And I know that no specialty is perfect, but I do put a lot of stock in the words of people who've put in the work and who maintain their credentials.

They have professional expectations, guidelines, and ethics that they follow. So for that reason, I think it's just on a little bit higher level than a lot of shows that talk about mental health without being grounded in what specialists can bring.

But also, because no specialty is perfect, her co-host, Kristie Plantinga, is sort of a stand-in for people like us. We're not therapists. We're not trained in that way. But we're deeply interested in mental health, and she brings that kind of perspective. So with these co-hosts, the show works well. They're kind of a dynamic duo. I love the conversations they have each episode with other licensed mental health professionals. Their show is sponsored by BetterTherapists.com, which Kristie founded. This is a directory that vets mental health professionals so that if you're seeking therapy, you can focus on best fit.

The second thing I really love about this show is how intersectional it is. It has a lot of queer and non-traditional voices and perspectives in it. And I think cisgender folks like me have a ton to learn from these perspectives.

So those are the two big reasons: you have licensed professionals, and you have a great intersectional lens.

And as always, by the way, Relationscapes is brought to you by me. I don't have any paid sponsorships or anything right now. But Felicia and Kristie reached out because they thought our audiences might enjoy each other's shows, and I agreed. Doing a promo swap like this is a great way to grow our audiences and also introduce our listeners to shows that we believe in.

So again, if it sounds interesting to you, you can check out What Your Therapist Thinks wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks, Felicia and Kristie. Keep up the great work over there.

And now, back to Relationscapes.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:08:54

 

BLAIR HODGES: We're back with Melissa Febos, award-winning and highly acclaimed author of many books, including Girlhood, Bodywork, Whip Smart, and her latest book, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex.

Now it's time for Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises. Melissa, is there anything that you'd change about this book now that it's out? Or what kind of obstacles did you have to overcome to get this one done? Or what kind of things did you learn as you were putting it together?

Any big revelations? What caught you off guard?

MELISSA FEBOS: I'm gonna go with surprises, because it is just—you know, I mean, it's sort of like we started this conversation with you talking about how there are writers who go out there and are like, this is a cool idea for a memoir. This is a project I can undertake in service of a memoir.

But when I tell you that I never plan to write another memoir or another personal thing—I'm like, I'm gonna go write some fantastical fiction. Or, like, I always have another plan.

And even when it occurred to me that I might write about this experience, I thought, cool, I'll write a nonfiction book about celibate ladies across history—all of these amazing figures that I became obsessed with.

And maybe I'll put a little bit of my own experience interstitially between the chapters. But I'm gonna write about the Beguines and Hildegard von Bingen and the Dahomey Amazons and all these amazing people throughout history.

And then I started to try to write that, and my own story was like, "heey, girl!" [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Hi!

MELISSA FEBOS: "I've actually got some things I want to say." And I was like, no, not you!

And I really fought it for a little bit. I was like, I really don't think there's a whole book there. I really wasn't planning on writing a memoir. And on the other side of having written the memoir, it's just amazing to me. I think that's part of my creative process. I have to set a trap for myself and then walk into it, because I'll never just decide to write a memoir.

BLAIR HODGES: You're your own Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote.

MELISSA FEBOS: They hunt me down and they trap me, and then I just have to yield. I have to surrender.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, Melissa, that is a surprise. That's a huge surprise to hear, because it's an absolutely outstanding book. I love this book.

MELISSA FEBOS: Thank you.

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for putting it out, and thanks for joining us to talk about it.

MELISSA FEBOS: This has been so fun. What a fun premise for a podcast. What a fun conversation. And thank you for being such a close and careful and generous reader. I really appreciate it.

BLAIR HODGES: Thank you!

 

Outro – 01:11:26

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to another episode of Relationscapes.

I've got a bit of a favor to ask. If you'll please take a minute to rate and review Relationscapes in Apple Podcasts. Just open the app, search for Relationscapes, scroll down—you'll see the ratings and reviews. Leave a review right there.

Here's a new review I just got from IndigoJaq:

“This is the only podcast I know where you really get to listen to and focus on the experiences of a wide variety of people having a wide variety of experiences in this roller coaster life. It builds very relevant skills for a divided and very binary society. I always learn so much, and I haven't missed an episode since the beginning.”

Well, that's amazing. Hey, IndigoJaq—I think you're my first completist! Let's go! We have a Relationscapes completist. They've heard every episode. Thank you so much.

So, folks, go rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts. I also challenge you to become a completist. Do like IndigoJaq did and listen to all the episodes.

You can also rate the show in Spotify, by the way.

Mates of State provides our theme song. I'm your host, Blair Hodges, a journalist in Salt Lake City, and I'll see you next time.