'I gave up sex for a year, and it changed my life'

After a string of failed relationships Melissa Febos took a vow of abstinence to understand why she jumped from one romance to the next, with unexpected results...

- INTERVIEW BY CHARLOTTE HEATHCOTE

When serial monogamist Melissa Febos was pushed to breaking point by a toxic relationship, she took drastic action - she pledged to boycott sex and relationships for 90 days.

Yet once that time passed, Melissa, 44, an English professor at the University of Iowa in the US, felt so energised and refreshed by stepping back from the merry-go-round of romance that she decided to keep on going.

In the end, she enjoyed an entire year of abstinence, an experience that transformed her life and is the subject of her new book, The Dry Season.

"At the end of the three months, it was clear to me that I had barely begun," she says. "My whole relationship to love and sex needed an overhaul if I wanted to change the pattern I was in.

"From adolescence until my early 30s, I was in non-stop relationships and very preoccupied with infatuation, flirtation and seduction. I definitely enjoyed myself. I fell in love many times and it was thrilling and quite wonderful."

But as soon as each relationship began to feel secure, Melissa's interest would start to wane. "I never had a relationship that lasted longer than three years and most of them were shorter. I was always falling in love and breaking up. Those are exhausting pastimes."

ADDICT

Friends and family suggested she might benefit from spending some time on her own. As a former heroin addict, Melissa sometimes feared she had swapped one addiction for another - love addiction. But then someone new would catch her eye and the cycle would begin again.

Then she fell into a "super addictive, toxic, destructive relationship... I abandoned everything else I cared about, I lost touch with friends, I cried every day. It was obsessive and unhealthy.

"I neglected my writing and my health and my family, and I had friends who broke up with me because I was quite out of my mind," she adds.