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

What happens when you stop chasing romantic love entirely?

After ending a catastrophic relationship, acclaimed author Melissa Febos took an unexpected step: despite being a serial relationshipper, she decided to take a personal vow of celibacy.

What began as a three-month break became a full year that transformed how she understood desire, boundaries, people-pleasing, and love itself. In her latest book The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex, Febos reflects on addiction-like romance, the freedom of solitude, feminist role models across history, and how abstaining from sex helped her reclaim agency to build healthier, more generous relationships. She joins us to talk about it in this episode. 

Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. 

Show Notes

• Annie Dillard, “Living Like Weasels”
• Audre Lorde, "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power"
• Radiolab, "Choice," November 17, 2008; Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
• Top ten Roadrunner cartoons as curated by some guy on YouTube for his nieces
• What Your Therapist Thinks podcast 

About the Guest

Melissa Febos is the author of five books, including the national bestselling essay collection, Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her craft book, Body Work (2022), was also a national bestseller Her new memoir, The Dry Season, was published by Alfred. A. Knopf in June 2025.

The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Library, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Black Mountain Institute, LAMBDA Literary, the American Library in Paris, and others, Melissa's work has appeared in publications like The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Elle, and Vogue.

She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the Roy J. Carver Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program. She lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly. From melissafebos.com.