Latest news with #Febos
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@
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Can Celibacy Unlock Heightened Levels of Pleasure?
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." What if abstaining from sex and romance wasn't a retreat from intimacy but a pathway to deeper self-knowledge, creative clarity, and radical autonomy? In The Dry Season, writer Melissa Febos chronicles a year of intentional celibacy—an experiment that began in the wreckage of a devastating breakup and transformed into a radical reclamation of self. What started as a 90-day pause from sex and dating in 2016 extended into a full year of disentanglement from romantic attachment. But rather than deprivation, Febos discovered joy, clarity, and sensual fulfillment on her own terms. Her celibacy was not an escape but a deep inquiry into desire, intimacy, and autonomy—a way to interrogate how socialized narratives of love and devotion had shaped her identity as a queer woman. Abstaining from romance didn't mean denying pleasure—it meant redefining it. Through solitude, Febos reconnected with neglected friendships, deepened her creative life, and uncovered new modes of intimacy outside the bounds of romance or sex. Using what she describes as a '12-step-style inventory' of her romantic past, she traced how her relationships had often been marked by performance, self-erasure, and dependence. Far from isolating, her celibate year became rich with connection. Seeking models beyond the cultural obsession with coupledom, Febos turned to a lineage of women who embraced solitude as a source of power, from 11th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen and the beguines of medieval Europe to 20th-century icons like Virginia Woolf and Octavia Butler. These figures served as both companions and intellectual ancestors, helping her situate her experience within a feminist tradition of resistance to conformity and the marriage-industrial complex. A memoirist by trade, Febos has previously written about sex, gender, and power through the lens of her own life. In 2010, she published Whip Smart, about her three and a half years working as a dominatrix, while 2021's Girlhood, a collection of essays about the pressures and societal conditioning females face, which remains a best-seller. Ahead of The Dry Season's release, Bazaar spoke with Febos about how celibacy reshaped her relationship to self-expression, attention, pleasure, and artistic purpose. Ultimately, the memoir asks readers to consider what our lives might look like if we stopped orienting them around the desire to be desired. From the age of 15 into my early 30s, I'd been in nonstop committed monogamous partnerships. I had a story about myself that I was a romantic, that I was a very passionate person; I just fell in love a lot. But in my early 30s, I got into a relationship that I think is safe to characterize as addicting. At that point, I had been sober for 10 years, but I experienced depths of addiction in that relationship that were worse than anything I'd ever experienced when I was a heroin addict. It was very obsessive. I was crying all the time. I lost friends. I crashed my car. My health suffered, and when the relationship finally ended, I looked around and I thought, Damn, I feel like I should be better at this, having been doing it for so long. How did I get here? So I thought, okay, let me take stock and see what's actually going on here, because this was the most painful experience of my life, and I would not like to repeat it. So, I started with 90 days celibate. That was laughable to some of my friends, but it was a familiar unit of time; 90 days is seen as a good metric for how long it takes to let go of a habit and see your situation more clearly. But it was also as long as I could imagine going. My [version of] abstinence included no sex, no dating, no flirting, no sexually charged friendships. And three months was a pretty radical length of time in the context of my life up until that point. It took a minute for me to figure out what celibacy was. In the first few weeks, I definitely had some flirtations and got some texts and was like, Wait a minute, this feeling inside me that's releasing these delicious brain chemicals and making me want to keep doing whatever it is I'm doing is actually the thing I need to stay away from. I had to redraw the contours of what my definition of celibacy was, but once I did that, it was not very hard; almost immediately, I was so much happier. My life got better instantly. All my other relationships started to flourish. I had vastly underestimated the amount of time and energy I had been devoting to these romantic pursuits for my entire adult life, and when I recouped that time and energy for myself, I got to spend it on every other passion that I had. I was having long, fun, languorous conversations on the phone with my friends. I was visiting family. I was writing more. I was exercising more. I donated a bunch of clothes, got a haircut, hit all my deadlines, taught better classes than I had been before. It really felt like I got infused attention and energy into every other area of my life, and I started having a great time. at I had much more emotional capacity. I had this joke when I was spending that time celibate where I started saying to my friends, 'Yeah, I'm making celibacy hot again,' which is really corny and kind of embarrassing but also was very true. I think our culture suffers from an obsession with categories. We consider our sex life and our home life and our work life as separate, but they're not; we're the same person in all of those parts of our lives, and they're deeply intertwined. I had designated sex and love as the area where I experienced some sensual pleasures of being human and living in a body, and it's where I had also located emotional intimacy. And when I sort of shut down that category, those experiences started to surface in so many other areas of my life. I had erotic experiences eating watermelon that summer that I was celibate; I had incredibly romantic experiences with dear friends of mine that were not sexual but that had a similar quality. I realized that I had been dramatically limiting myself and narrowing the aperture of my own experiences by only looking for the erotic or the sublime in lovers, when actually there were opportunities for it everywhere I looked. I also went dancing more that year than any other year of my life. I started an email list of all my friends, and every weekend, I was like, 'Who's coming dancing with me?' We would go dancing until, like, two in the morning. I also had a really fun time exploring and redefining my relationship to food and clothes. I had identified as a high femme for most of my adult life, and I had almost every day since my late teens. And during my celibacy, I started wearing sneakers all the time, and the clothes I was wearing suddenly started to change and get more comfortable and weirder. I had no idea how much my personal style was actually defined based on the imagined gaze of strangers or potential lovers or how I might appeal to the other instead of myself. And in the absence of that, I was actually trying to repel the gaze of others. After the first few weeks [of celibacy], I started to understand how deeply entrenched and embedded in my consciousness the issues in my relationship to love and sex were, and if I really wanted long-term change, I had to take a more active role in it. For me, because I had a lot of experience [with the] 12-step [program] and because I love making lists, I thought, okay, let me start by really taking stock and seeing what I've actually been up to. It was becoming clear to me that the story I had about myself and relationships was probably not true, because there was a common denominator among them all, and it was me. If I was the romantic, devoted partner that I had always thought myself to be, why was I bottoming out in such an ugly way? And why were all my relationships ending on similar grounds? So I started making a list of everyone I had ever been in a relationship with: major crushes, entanglements, one-night stands, everybody. I was looking for patterns, and they very quickly emerged. I found when I really committed to an honest accounting of my own behavior and relationships, it started to become really clear to me that I hadn't been honest with my partners and that, in fact, the behavior that I've characterized as devoted and self-sacrificing and accommodating of other people had actually been a form of manipulation. My project of celibacy had almost everything to do with the emotional part of it. The sexual symptoms that I wanted to change were consequences of the emotional dynamics more than anything else. Not having sex with other people for a year was not very hard. There were only a couple of times where I felt tempted and I clicked back into my old operating system, but for the most part, I was incredibly relieved to set down those preoccupations and all of the energy and the inner conflicts that I experienced around them. The emotional part of it was a lot harder. Making a conscious decision to change your own orientation to a part of life for which we have really, really strong cultural stories is challenging. If I'm honest, a huge part of that work has happened since my celibacy. It wasn't until I engaged in relationships with other people that the rubber really hit the road, and I got to learn how to actually practice those things. My marriage has been the greatest education of putting ideals into practice, and I got really lucky to have a good collaborator in that. The emotional rewards of doing that work has made it entirely worth it, and nothing has brought me closer to other people. I started doing research during my celibate year because once I was celibate for a while and I started to change my ideal for who I wanted to be in relationships, I realized that I needed some new role models. Before that, I had looked to women who had been artistically fulfilled but had also been really messy and chaotic in their love lives, like me. I wanted to find some people whose behavior, not just in their romantic lives but in their lives, was really aligned with what they believed. I wanted my actions and my beliefs to be more congruent. I started by reading about women who were voluntarily celibate, and almost immediately I got deeply obsessed with a lot of nuns and spiritual ladies, especially those living in medieval times, like Hildegard von Bingen, who was a naturalist and a politician and an artist and wrote a language for her nuns to speak. This lady was tied to the Catholic Church, and she lived in a stone room for 35 years and managed to do all of that after she got out. I also became super obsessed with the set of religious laywomen called the Belgian beguines, who flourished in Europe in the 13th century. They lived in separatist communes and were financially independent and made art, wrote poetry, preached; they did a lot of service in their communities. They worked as nurses and teachers and performed last rites for the dying. It was unheard of at the time for women to be living that independently. It was actually illegal in multiple ways. And eventually, a lot of the beguines were burned as heretics. At a time when it's so easy to feel discouraged by the erosion of civil rights in our country and other countries, I am so grateful to have the touch of these women who were living against the grain and leading these incredibly brave, self-actualized, joyful, fulfilled lives at a time when their lives were in danger because of it. If they could do it in the Middle Ages, I can muster the gumption today to enjoy so many of the freedoms that they didn't. After the first three months, I extended it, and then I extended it again, and when I got past the nine month mark, I was so happy and so disinclined to re enter that world that I stopped counting. I just thought, I am deeply uninterested in being in a relationship with another person. But shortly after the year mark, I started corresponding with a woman who would become my wife. Our communication didn't start as flirtation. We had read each other's work and became friends out of a sense of mutual artistic admiration. When we met, it was instant chemistry. I thought, Okay, I want to pursue this, but I want to do it really differently. I communicated that to her right off the bat, and she was like, that sounds really cool. We've been together ever since. You Might Also Like 4 Investment-Worthy Skincare Finds From Sephora The 17 Best Retinol Creams Worth Adding to Your Skin Care Routine
