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Hey, it's Mariel. Today on the show, we are talking about sex.

It's a part of life, and this is Life Kit, after all.

Now, sex can be amazing, obviously.

It can also be intoxicating, not just the act itself, but the pursuit of it, and everything

that comes before it.

The courtship part, the seduction part, the feeling that's generated in you, knowing that

you're desired.

All sorts of delicious chemicals flood our brains throughout this process.

Like once those little chemicals get released, suddenly I'm making different choices because

I want to feel more of that.

I want to keep the party going inside of me.

This is Melissa Fibos, author of The Dry Season, a memoir of pleasure in a year without sex.

So this craving for sex and seduction, it can sometimes lead us to a reckoning point, a point when what makes the most sense is to pull back.

For Melissa, that moment came in her 30s. She'd been in back-to-back relationships for most of her adult life.

Basically, when I was 15, I started being preoccupied by romance and love and sex and those pursuits and how they made me feel about myself.

And that was a huge preoccupation of mine for the next 20 years.

And then she went through a devastating breakup, which was really a devastating relationship.

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