Should Romantic Love Be at the Center of Our Lives? (Melissa Febos)

Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

Elise Loehnen

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality, Self-improvement, Education

4.8 • 900 Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In her new memoir, The Dry Season, Melissa Febos (award-winning author of Girlhood) examines her (and our culture’s) relationship to love, to falling in love with someone, to being in love with someone. Today, we talk about why she decided to spend a year celibate after a particularly rough breakup, and what more she wanted from a relationship, from herself, and for her life. We talk about being conditioned to be codependent, the lovely things that have happened in our own long-term relationships when we’ve gone off script, what it actually means to be a people pleaser—and more. For links to Melissa Febos’s books and the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Elise Lunan, host of Pulling the Thread. Today I'm talking to a very brilliant author, Melissa Fibos.
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0:49.1	Hi, it's Elise Lunan, host of pulling the thread.
0:52.8	On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and
0:57.9	why we're here.
0:59.1	My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness
1:04.2	so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
1:09.5	Here is today's guest, Melissa Fibos, on deciding to spend a year
1:13.6	celibate after a particularly rough breakup. But I didn't want to just stop forever being
1:20.6	erotically and romantically and intimately connected to other people. I wanted to find out
1:24.8	how to do that in a way that didn't feel exploitative of either of us
1:30.6	and felt very conscious. I wanted to make very conscious choices. And I wanted my definition of
1:37.9	love and my ideal for love and my own behavior and love relationships to correlate more closely.
1:43.9	You know, I wanted it to be defined by acts of love and acts of care rather than this kind
1:49.0	of extractive or transactional transaction of good brain chemicals.
1:54.4	I wanted something bigger than that and more sustainable.
1:57.0	Melissa Fibos is the award-winning author of several poignant books, including Girlhood, and her new memoir, The Dry Season, which is out this week.
	...

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