Should Romantic Love Be at the Center of Our Lives (Melissa Febos)
Listen now (59 mins) | "But I didn't want to just stop forever being erotically and romantically and intimately connected to other people. I wanted to find out how to do that in a way that didn't..."
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Melissa Febos is the award-winning author of several poignant books, including Girlhood, and her new memoir, The Dry Season, which is out this week. I love everything she writes so much—how she shines a light on the corners of our culture and our minds that need to be illuminated so that we might live with more wholeness.
Today, we’re talking primarily about the topic of Melissa’s new book, which is love. Melissa describes how she realized she had come to be somewhat obsessed with falling, and being, in love—and the impact this had on her relationships and her life. And what happened when she decided she wanted to love differently, and relate to love differently.
We talk about being conditioned to be codependent, and the vision of long-term relationships that can leave us questioning our own. We laugh about both being really bad historically at knowing how to get out of a relationship. And we talk about what we’ve learned from having space in our partnerships now.
So much of what Melissa says rings true for me, and I know I’m not alone. I think you might also really resonate with her definition of a people pleaser.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:
ELISE:
We had a conversation when Girlhood came out. I didn't have my podcast yet. I think we did it on Instagram, but Melissa, you are such an incredible writer. You could write about paint and it would be exciting and revelatory. I remember quoting you in my book and my editor and I would have conversations about your writing and the margins of my pages. She would be like, there a God, she's such a good writer, and I would write back. So I just wanted you to know that.
MELISSA:
Thank you. I'm so happy to know that being sort of annotated or discussed in the margins is the height of three for sure.
ELISE:
I know, and when you're quoting people like you, it can be its own strange thing because at once it sort of elevates whatever you're trying to write about and then at the same time you're like, oh, if I could only just write it like that. It was that particular part of girlhood. If memory serves where you were writing about going to a meeting and the way that a man was looking at you, you were a refrigerator. Do you remember this part of your book? Yeah, I do. I do. And just like, why can't I not have what I want from you and
MELISSA:
Yeah, yeah, I'm thirsty. Why won't you? I'm thirsty. Yield the thing I want. Yeah, it was at the Cuddle Party.
ELISE:
The Cuddle Party, yes, thank you. The Cuddle party where you had to practice your boundaries, which also where didn't you have to say, I want this thing, and it had to be orally consented to
MELISSA:
Yeah. You had to say yes, no, or maybe and maybe is also a no, and then you had to say thank you for taking care of yourself.
ELISE:
Thank you. For anyone who's interested, I will find this and read it in the outro because it is such an incredible passage, but we're not talking about girlhood today, although I love that book and all of your work is related outside of it just being about you since you are a memoirist, but the dry season similarly, I was like, oh my God, I read it in a day. Yeah. Sitting in the corner of my lawn for part of it, talking to my youngest as he was playing soccer, and he was like, what are you reading? What is it about? I was like, well, Sam,
MELISSA:
I'm glad I just never have to be around and people explain the premises of my books to their children.
ELISE:
Thank you. No, thank you. Yeah, no, I was like, I dunno, Sam, some books are just about ideas more than they are about plot points. It's about love.
MELISSA:
Yeah. I mean that's often how I describe it and I'm so happy to hear that you read it in a day because that was my great hope for this book because I had so much fun writing it and I didn't want to write a big sad book about celibacy. I wanted to write a pacey book, a fun funny book about celibacy. I mean, obviously that was also deep, but it makes me really happy when people say that they enjoyed it.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, do you remember when every blurb included the word propulsive? That was the word of 2022 or 2023. That's right. Yep. Yeah, it's a propulsive book. Thank you. Which is in some ways ironic because it is about slowing down and stepping away from relationships or I thought it was fascinating as you're even trying to determine the boundaries of celibacy, what is it? Is it no flirtation? You're just figuring it out as you go?
MELISSA:
Yeah. I mean there were some rules for sure, but I had to sort of figure it out as I go, which is how I figure everything out. It was a study of close, how does it feel when I do this thing? Does that feel right? Is that what I want to stop doing? Will stopping that change how I conduct myself in this area of my life? That was the goal I wanted to love differently and to relate to love differently.
ELISE:
One of the most fascinating, startling, curious things in the book, and this is an asking for a friend thing, which is your awareness around your ability to telegraph. I don't even know what charisma, you talk about being able to turn that magnet. I talk about meeting women who have magical vaginas where they're just exuding something and you just watch. It's like watching a Venus flytrap where you're just watching people in their orbit and you don't use those words, Melissa, but there's something that you're able to do and you recognize it in other people, and it was so interesting to hear you give words to it because I think we theoretically all have that power potentially, but I do whatever I can to dull it and to turn it way down, and I have for as long as I can remember because I do not want any sexual attention, which is tied to probably trauma, and I just don't want it and don't want it. Can you tell us about that? I think as you describe it, people will know exactly what you're talking about, but the fact that you recognize it as a cultivatable skill is stunning.
MELISSA:
Yeah, I can talk about it, and it was so illuminating and at times embarrassing or cringey to study it so closely in this book because I decided to spend some time celibate because I was like, okay, I've been in relationships, romantic relationships nonstop for 20, 25 years. I should be better at it. I've done my 10,000 hours. I should not have ended at this kind of bottom. I sort of bottomed out in this very bad relationship in my mid thirties and I thought I have to do something different. And so I basically decided to make a study of how I operated in relationships, how was I conducting myself? What were the choices I was making? How was I choosing the partners I was choosing, and where was the problem and how did I change it? And so that necessitated that. I perform a kind of autopsy on what happened when I found myself attracted to someone or found someone attracted to me.
What then played out that had landed me at the location that I had ended up at 35, that was so terrible, and what I first uncovered was this, the skill which is a collaboration of, I don't know, sort of empathy and people reading, which I had always been really good at. I was this pretty kind of codependent, hyper aware kid who was very interested in reading the emotions and desires and moods of the people around me. And I also from a very young age, adolescents or even earlier, understood other people's admiration. The experience of drawing other people to me in a way that felt positive or admiring as this very sort of juicy form of temporary. It was a high that I think we all experienced to some extent or have the potential to experience to some extent, but I identify as an addict, and I think I was as a child too.
So anything that gave me that kind of juicy little jolt of getting out of myself, that release of yummy brain chemicals, dopamine, endorphins, whatever, I generally instinctively tried to become an expert at eliciting that response in myself. I just wanted more, and so people were really abundant sources of that feeling, and so I started to get really good at it. And then I had a lot of other experiences like working in restaurants, being a waitress, being a sex worker, that helped me sort of hone that skill in sometimes very kind of genuine, emotionally driven ways, sometimes in very mercenary ways when it was literally my job to earn a living by being seductive and attractive and reeling people in. But it wasn't something that I thought about in a conscious strategic way. I was just like, I'm a romantic. I'm a lover. I'm a Libra, and I sort of had a weird semi pride, semi embarrassment about it.
I didn't want to admit how kind of obsessive it could be. And then when I decided the celibacy was kind of like an elimination diet, so at first I was like, I'm not going to have sex. That's the common denominator in all these relationships. But then very quickly after that, I blurted with someone and I felt the brain chemicals and I thought, oh, no, no, no, no, it's not the sex. This is the thing that I'm chasing. It's this feeling and that I am sort of running through relationships at a faster and faster rate, trying to keep these feelings, trying to outsource a kind of self-esteem and feeling of empowerment through this dubious resource of other people. It really disrupted other stories I had going about myself where I was the hero of my own love stories, and I thought, that doesn't sound like what a hero is up to in a love story that sounds like the other guy.
And I think it sort of crystallized in this one conversation I had with a friend that I described in the book where she was post-divorce trying to figure out how to get with someone and asked me to show her how to do it, and I was forced to articulate it and found I was able to, and I guess the last thing I'll say about it is that I had this line in an early draft of the book that was like, and then I tried to seduce a stranger on a plane and an early reader circled it and was like, how did you do that? And I was like, oh, no, no, no, no. I cannot break down. I'm not going to build you a manual for how It would just be simply be too embarrassing. We can't put words to these things. And they were like, sorry, you definitely have to, and then the scene that I ended up writing is now the opener for the book, which is kind of a writer's lesson or a cautionary tale.
ELISE:
Yeah, I mean it's not in my notes, but that great line at the beginning where you're essentially, there's a code for queer women where it's like the way you put your hand and how you turn your head. Yeah. I mean I think even if there are those who don't know how to do it, we've all been in the presence of it. We've all witnessed it, and it is really something throughout the book, obviously you mentioned addiction and one of the themes is, am I not in this context? Obviously you had your love affair with hard drugs and you write, and this was interesting and use celibacy in this way. It's like you don't really know how addicted you are until you go through withdrawal or go through the detox period to even understand how, and ultimately you're married now and you resolved, I would presume, resolved so much of this for yourself, but you needed to extend it. This was a three month experiment that went much longer.
MELISSA:
Totally, totally. Yeah. And that was a question I began with early on where I thought I chose 90 days as an initial period, and that's a metric that I learned in recovery where 90 days is typically the starting phase of any kind of abstinence. If you're giving up a substance, you count days for 90 days and then see where you're at, and I think I was actually sort of hoping that it would fit into the rubric of addiction because that would be a clear diagnosis. I would've loved to have a diagnosis because a diagnosis comes with research and solutions hopefully, and I knew that I had found other solutions to addiction, and unfortunately this turned out not to fit perfectly into that. I think that my addictive personality definitely was a powerful accelerant, but it was this combination of factors that included the whole history of compulsory heterosexuality and marriage and the ways that women had learned historically to orient themselves to love and romance and committed relationships as a survival mechanism that also subjugated them and also our culture's capitalistic obsession with love and limerence and crazy obsessive, you're my drug, you're my solution.
You're my poison kind of pop song version of love where when you fall in love, that's the end of the story instead of the beginning, which anyone has ever been married know that that's just the beginning of the story, not the end, and I think it was also a symptom of, and the result of just my particular experiences and how I'd learned to psychically survive as a human being and as a woman, and so it wouldn't be easily solved when I got clean from drugs, I just stopped doing drugs and I figured out the activities I needed to do to stay stopped, but I didn't want to just stop forever being erotically and romantically and intimately connected to other people. I wanted to find out how to do that in a way that didn't feel exploitative of either of us and felt very conscious. I wanted to make very conscious choices, and I wanted my definition of love and my ideal for love and my own behavior and love relationships to correlate more closely. I wanted it to be defined by acts of love and acts of care rather than this kind of extractive or transactional transaction of good brain chemicals. I wanted something bigger than that and more sustainable, and so yeah, I had to figure out first what I was doing and then figure out where I needed to change it.
ELISE:
You write so beautifully too of being in love or being sexually attracted or charged by people's minds and intellects too, and then conflating the two in a way that ultimately proved very confusing for everyone and resulted in the loss of a lot of friendships. Right.
I'm putting it in the parking lot for now, but I want to talk to you about the mystics and Virginia Wolf and all that other through line that you were just alluding to about the way that we are conditioned to put men and romance in the center of our lives, but sort of the way that you are experiencing one of my best friends is he'll appreciate this, but he's a designer and he has so much creative sexual energy. He doesn't know what to do with it, and so he likes to make businesses and it's going everywhere all the time. It's uncontained creative, sexual energy, but they're the same. They come from the same place. And so that was really interesting to read you as a writer as you are retaking all of that energy back that you'd been spending in all of these somewhat disastrous relationships
MELISSA:
And
ELISE:
Hoarding it for yourself and your work.
MELISSA:
Yeah, it was such a powerful experience and one that I've actually had many other times. I mean, I think the nature of addiction, the nature of dependency, the nature of obsession, all of which I have a lot of experience with and I tend toward is that we convince ourselves that we need something that is actually limiting us. And even when it doesn't rise to the diagnostic criteria of addiction like this, there was this metaphor that came to me really early on in thinking about this during that year actually, and I sort of wrote it in my little notes app, and the metaphor I use it in the book is I describe my obsession with romance and locating that energy in an object that is super finite and limited like a single person or a single interaction as peering through a keyhole into a single room when I could turn around and face the universe like the whole sky.
Everything else is behind you, but you're like, oh, no, I need to see into this one room, which is what it's like to worship a drug or a person when you could be worshiping nature or art or some larger sense of the sublime that includes romantic love but is not limited to it. And I didn't know that I was doing that when I started, but I figured it out by the end and it felt so big to me that I mean truly by the end of that year, I really honestly was like, I don't know if I will ever want to be in a romantic relationship again, and that is perfectly fine with me. And if it means sacrificing this, if it means limiting my energy and my access to the divine and the sublime and limiting it again to this one very unreliable source, I won't do it. If there's a choice, it's a no brainer for me. I'm going to choose all of this because I can find so much sensuality and eroticism and creativity and all the things I thought I was going to get through another person are actually out here everywhere.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, and I think still this fantasy, right? It's funny, as I was reading too, and I had not that many, everyone gets to date their malignant narcissists and everyone gets to be in that relationship. I certainly was in that relationship in my early twenties where I was like, how is this happening to me? As I was in it, I was observing it and me, how am I falling for this and watching myself fall for it in an increasingly powerless way until I was out bounced out. And I remember similar to you as you describe your friend Nora, going through following that same trajectory that you had been on the maelstrom as you call it. And I remember having a conversation with my mom who came to see me at some point in New York, so I was just a mess, and she was just like, I know you don't know what you're doing. You have no control here On the other side of this, you'll laugh at yourself.
It took me a minute to laugh at myself, but we've all been there. And then once similarly, when I reclaimed my equanimity in my mid twenties, I didn't get in another relationship for seven years. In part, I just was like, why would I ever put that on the pire? Why would I ever take my peace of mind and sacrifice it at the altar of some potential lunatic? Now, I've been married for 13 years, I don't know, but I always describe our relationship as being alone, but together
MELISSA:
And
ELISE:
Where we give each other this, we each have our own wide sandboxes, and I don't expect him to complete me in that way, and it really works. But then at the same time, because of the dominant culture, I'm always like, are we supposed to be having pillow talk about Rumi? We're not doing that. That's the myth, right?
MELISSA:
It really is. Even it's funny because of course, this is the life of a memoirist. I finished this book and I was like, wow, what a series of revelations. And then, or I finished that experience living it at least, and then I got married and now I'm like, whoa. That was unfortunately what I thought was the whole story is actually just the prologue. Once again, I do feel like over the course of the period that I described in the book, I really changed the way I oriented myself towards love and relationships and therefore everything in my life, but I hadn't tried to do that while being in a relationship. And then at the end of the book, I get into a relationship and it is so different doing it and over and over again. I'm sure you've experienced this too. Everyone I know who is in a long-term relationship has done this kind of work where you try to do without thinking about it what you think you should.
We should sleep in the same bed every night. We should miss each other crazy. Whenever we're apart, we should this. And then for me, I'm like, some of that doesn't work. Some of that doesn't work for me. And then when I realized, my wife and I realized during the pandemic, we were like, oh, we can't sleep in the same bed every night. It was like a third of the time where we just need to zone out totally separately and not see each other until the morning. And the first thought is, is that okay? Does it mean something's wrong with us? Are we going to be like, I love Lucy or something? And then we started doing it and we were so much happier and it made us so much more affectionate and so much more excited when we do sleep in the same bed together and over and over again.
We've had to have those realizations where it's teasing out the ideas that we were conditioned with without even realizing it by TV and movies and everything growing up and just realizing that what is actually sustainable for us as two people of equal power in our relationship who want to have autonomous lives and meet our own needs and don't need to be completed by the other person. It just doesn't look like that. It does not look like that cartoon of marriage. It truly doesn't. It's much more differentiated, and thank God, I just don't think I really didn't believe in marriage before I did my celibacy. And I think it's because I was thinking of that blueprint and I knew it wouldn't work for me. I need to so much space in order to do my work and have my relationships and my recovery, and I need to have a separate life from my partner. And I just didn't believe that that would be possible longterm.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, it is amazing how we've all culturally agreed on this covenant and this very specific way of doing it and how much I think anxiety plagues couples who are maybe doing it differently, although we're seeing a lot of people break out, and it's interesting. One of the things I travel a fair amount for work, my husband less, and I always think that that's so good for us and we try to go to bed at the same time every night, and that's our sort of communion at the end of living lives that are mostly parallel play. And he gives me endless space, and I think people are so confused. They don't understand. You don't want to be married to someone who reads like you or who's obsessed with the same things. I think it would drive me crazy. I have my own spiritual life and he lets me do what I do without judgment, and he's like, I don't need to go to this retreat and listen to this person channel. No shade on you. Enjoy. I know you seem you're amazing when you come back. I sense a perceptible difference and I enjoy it, and I'll be here feeding the kids and letting them play video games.
MELISSA:
God's speed. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's definitely, early in our relationship, there were ways I sort of would fall back a little bit into some old patterns of thinking. We needed to think the same or do the same or go about things the same way. And I remember so well this one time Danika said to me, it made such a deep impression. She was like, I don't need us to be spend all our together, or you don't have to want to come with me whenever I do. She was like, what I want is to see you feeling happy to see me when you see me. I want you to be happy to see me. And if that means you need to go away for a month or several months every year to do your work and go on friend trips and all of that, great, do it just, I want the time that we spend together to be excited to see each other. And I was like, okay, this I can work with. When we are each fulfilled in our own way, our time together is so much better. And it's so interesting to have this weird different person around. I'm so much more curious about her. If she were just like me, I would be so annoyed
ELISE:
And it would be boring. He's very different. He's obsessed with very different things and has totally different skills, and I respect that too. It's nice to have some room.
So you write too, you're having a mild epiphany, you're watching TV and you're coming to the conclusion that I think it's one of those conclusions that we all come to at some point where you're like, wait, every single role, and I want to dig into this particularly around the idea of visibility and sexuality, but where every story concerning women in TV and movies invariably revolves around love, relationship, and often whether someone is sexually desirable and you have this great Virginia Wolf line, as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking
MELISSA:
That's right.
ELISE:
And then you make the corollary, you're like, as long as she thought about murder, nobody objected to a woman thinking. There is a very interesting, fascinating thing that happens with women and true crime too.
MELISSA:
It's
ELISE:
A different conversation, but it totally, yeah.
MELISSA:
There are these very, very limited areas where we will sort of tolerate women being obsessed with things that are not love and sex. And yeah, there was this, it was sort of terrifying when a few months into this celibacy first I noticed that I had certain friendships where I would hang out with these friends and I would be like, oh my God, she's still talking about this guy who cares? She's so smart and fascinating. And what I realized is that that's what I had been doing too, that so much of our friendship was predicated on us taking turns, obsessing about our relationships and trying to arm share, analyze our partners or potential partners and strategize how to get what we wanted from them or how to change them. And now that I was no longer taking my turn, I was so bored, it just seemed totally banal and as if the bar for our functioning in these areas was so tragically lower than in any other area of our lives.
And then I was like, oh, all of my guilty pleasures, these nineties rom-coms that I loved and whatever the TV movie realm, I just lost my ability to indulge in these cheesy, very reinforcing of these kind of traditional ideas about what love looks like and how women relate to it, which is all to say that it is the most important thing. It is the main thing in our lives. It is the plot that drives the action of our lives is always the D desire for companionship and partnership and to be desirable. It felt like I ate the pill and woke up and I was like, oh God, I'm in the matrix. What now?
ELISE:
Yeah. But as you sort of find, and you mentioned that metaphor of falling in love with the world or you write about the Albenese, Marguerite Porete, all these female mystics who cloistered themselves, it was the only way to avoid marriage and gave themselves over to the divine or God or whomever and the ecstasy that they write about and having a relationship with no one but everyone. And it feels present too in your friendships throughout the book, the way again that the aperture of our lives becomes winnowed around this immediate family, your partner, your children, if you should have them. And then what does it look like if we just widen that exactly what you were describing to all kids or nature, all people makes the world more interesting. For sure.
MELISSA:
Yeah, it really does. It was so, such a happy surprise to, I mean, it just kind of in a somewhat idle way was like, let me just read about some women who were voluntarily celibate and see what they were up to, what they did with that space. And it was so powerful. What I found all these women across centuries devoting themselves to God. And I think it was very genuine for a lot of them. And it also happened to excuse them from the very limited grueling life of servitude in heterosexual unions where they were essentially the chattel of men and would just reproduce incessantly until they died, which often was pretty quickly. And it makes me think back to what we were talking about earlier, about turning away from that keyhole because in devoting themselves to God, what essentially they would do in their day to day is often the very same things that my life has become oriented around, which is making art and music and communing with nature and working with my community in kind of mutual aid and doing service in my community and doing reparative work in my community and doing political work and activism.
And it really focused on the group of women rather than a single individual. And their lives were full of the thetic and romantic, and they were writing this super sexy fan fiction about Jesus all the time. I mean, they were definitely expressing their erotic selves. And I just thought it felt so comforting to be like, oh, this choice that I'm making that I didn't really understand and was somewhat instinctive is actually a part of a great long historic lineage of women being like, that's not enough. I want something bigger. I can have a bigger impact on this world, and I need to reject that in order to access that potential future.
ELISE:
So beautiful. Did you ever read Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminine Consciousness?
MELISSA:
No. Read that. I
ELISE:
Didn't. Okay.
MELISSA:
But I've heard about it so many times. I really should have.
ELISE:
And she wrote The Creation of Patriarchy, and I feel like you would love her. She created the first Women's studies program.
MELISSA:
That's
ELISE:
Great. And she writes too about this idea of these women whose choice to be cloistered, the only opportunity that many of them got to be become literate and to write. And then she writes so beautifully about this idea that the only learned women were cloistered. They weren't even allowed to be in conversation with each other, and so many of them were coming to the same awareness at the same time, but apart from each other. And she writes and just pulled up my notes, but one can safely say that up to 1700, there are fewer than 300 learned women in Western Europe known to historians,
MELISSA:
Which
ELISE:
Is just so, and I think about it all the time, and I love books like yours too, that are pulling all of these women forward into conversation with each other. And people always ask me why I'm tripping over myself at times when I write to quote and cite other people, and that's why we haven't been talking to each other for very long. And so I loved seeing them pop up.
MELISSA:
Yeah, I know. I feel exactly the same way. And it's actually been in different sort of iterations. The thing that I have arrived at in most of the things I've written when I was writing Girlhood and I started having these really powerful thoughts about my own history and weight, challenging the stories that I had come up with on my own as a younger person to make sense of my experience, most of which severely overprivileged personal responsibility and thought it was something I did or that I was alone in it. And then I started talking to other women, and this is as a full adult, a lifelong feminist, talking to other women, and was once again, just shocked by the reality of Howr from each other. We had been in these experiences around sexuality and consent and our intimate lives, and I mean that has been the most powerful tool of patriarchy, is just keeping us separated from each other.
And it's active in any kind of campaign of oppression is just not letting people share their shared experience and have the revelation of shared experience so that they can look elsewhere for the source of it and elsewhere for the solution to it. So yeah, it was really interesting too. I've read a lot about Julian of Norwich and the Anchors and Hildegard locked in her little cell with her sadistic mentor and them reading and through spiritual text, learning how to interpret the world in a different kind of way and learning what the world was, and then challenging their place in it and trying to define a new place in it. Not to be grandiose, but that was definitely what I was trying to do in a much more humble scale
ELISE:
And naming so many of these experiences. I don't remember if it was in girlhood or Whip Smart, but when did you name this idea of empty consent, which is such a powerful girlhood. Yeah. Whoa. Talk about naming something that we've all participated in and kept maybe even from ourselves, the way that you don't say no and are not saying yes, and somehow become complicit and whatever it is that happens to you,
MELISSA:
Melissa. I know. I know. It's just over and over again. It felt like with this book, I took that same onion that I had been peeling away at with the empty consent and just peeling away new layers, new layers. It never ends
ELISE:
A reframe too of you write, and I think that so many of us can relate to this. I never knew how to get out of relationships either. And so I wouldn't abandon them for a new partner, which is sort of your personal trick. I would sort of sabotage them or make them so unpalatable that someone would be like, I will leave. And then I would be like, thank God. Bye. I've been over this for another classic fucking years. I definitely know lots of those types too. How do I convince this person that it's their idea? Let me start that plan now and then suffer through this for six months. Oh
MELISSA:
My God.
ELISE:
Yeah. But the way that you write about it and then a turn on its head and fed back to you as its opposite, but the way that you saw yourself as a victim of your own relationship orchestration, this inability to say no, this desire to give people what they wanted from you, even if you didn't want to give it to them at all. Can you talk a little bit about that and then what it was conversely actually feeding in you? That was a great scene. I won't give it away, but that's a great scene at the end.
MELISSA:
It's tricky. We all write a story about ourselves as we're living, and there are true bits in there, but it's often everybody is kind of the hero of their own story, or sometimes we're the villain of our story, but neither of those is usually quite accurate. And for me, I think because I had that kind of hyper perceptive, x-ray vision about what other people wanted that I recognized as a child, I just always felt this pressure to give people what they wanted, if it was something I could do to just do it. And I think sometimes I see people describe themselves as, oh, I'm an empath, or I am a caretaker. And I think, oh, that's a little more complicated than that because that's true. There is empathy that is dynamic part of that, but it's not caring behavior necessarily. And so one of the things I did in my syllabus was I made this massive inventory of everyone I'd ever dated or even become minorly entangled with, and I pulled apart the relationship.
What happened? What did I do in that relationship? And it was really repetitive, and there was a lot of, as you alluded to before, people who I admired and I think just had a crush on his friends, that I then sort of sexualized it and things got messy and terrible, and I sort of ruined it. And then there were also a lot of people who I dated and I thought I worked so hard to make that person happy. I really just worked so laboriously to be a good partner to them, and they just were so mad at me at the end. It's deeply unfair. And when I finally really decided I wanted to look at what I had done, it became very clear to me that I had labor to make them happy for myself because I was afraid of other people's disappointment because I thought it was my job to do that because I feared conflict, because I didn't want to be fully seen because it felt too uncomfortable to say what I really thought or what I really wanted. And that pacifying other people was actually a form of manipulation. There's this amazing quote that a mentor of mine said to me at the end of that, and I said, oh, man, I always thought I was a people pleaser. This looks much more extractive and yucky and manipulative. And they said to me, Melissa, people pleasing is people using. And I was like, Ew. No, it's true. So
ELISE:
True. It's just manipulating not wild. Yeah, it's so deep. It's so deep. And it's so interesting to read you because I have, as I mentioned, I have so much trouble. It is so painful to me to say no to people that even when I do, I then feel guilty. And I'm not even talking about sexually, I'm just talking in general. And so that has also limited my desire as you just said it, to be seen. And then when people ask things of me, it actually makes me sometimes angry, how dare you ask this of me? How dare you put me in a position of having to say no to you? So I will remove myself and my friend Courtney, who coaches me, who's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You are not allowed. You have got to say No, thank you. Thanks for thinking of me. No, thank you. I'm going to pass.
MELISSA:
Yeah, God, the amount of work that has gone into my current ability to do that, which is still severely lacking, but it's just shocking years of being like, okay, strategies of trying to build a pause in whenever I get an invitation for a speaking gig or a conference or whatever, I have a 24 hour minimum wait policy because my first instinct is yes, it's always yes, and maybe it sounds exciting future, Melissa would love to do that, or maybe it's just, oh, a good, an easy quick way to make somebody happy with me. I don't know. My motives are not clear, but the instincts is always yes. And I need the time to be like, wait, what do I actually want? What is future me going to be dealing with at that time? And that's just strangers over email when it gets to intimate people.
I also, with my therapist, sort of whittled this down to when I was in a real pattern of that. And when I am in a real pattern of doing more than I want to, of agreeing to do more than I want to other people's desires, I start to see them as coercion, and I get angry instantly. As soon as I see that somebody wants something from me, whether it's emotional or work or whatever, I start to resent them because I feel like they're making me, but they're not. It's me. The call is coming from inside the house.
ELISE:
Yeah. This isn't a video podcast, so people can't see me nodding my head aggressively to everything you're saying. This is me. I think this is so many of us who never learned how to say no, who feel like what is loving is to meet everyone's needs, even at our own discomfort or displeasure. And you can tack it onto any situation. And I think now in reading the book, I had this aha of, oh, I think I shut down sexually in part, like I cannot No, it's enough. No, no, no. Yeah,
MELISSA:
No,
ELISE:
No, no, no. Do not come near me.
MELISSA:
It's so real. Yeah. No, that's the thing. It's all so connected. I think when I was younger, I thought my sex life was a separate life from the life in which I was doing too much for everybody and being a people pleaser, but it's all connected. It's the same person and all of those same things. And if I am overdrawn and doing too much for other people and feeling resentful about it, of course the idea of physical intimacy and giving and being open in that way is repulsive to me.
It took me so long to realize, unless I am being really honest and straightforward and honoring what my real yes is, and my real ambivalence is, if I'm not honoring that, then I can't ever trust my enthusiasm for anything because I am overdrawn. When I force myself to do intimate things I don't want to, then I never want to. Or when I force myself to listen to my friend about a problem that I'm sick of listening to and it hasn't changed, then I get resentful and I can't access my love for her, which if I was setting clear boundaries, I would actually feel more generous. If I want to access my own true generosity for other people, I have to exercise. No, I have to have boundaries. It's just there's no shortcut around it.
ELISE:
Normally, therapy sessions are confidential, but this podcast opens the doors in the new season of other people's problems. Therapist Hillary McBride explores the potential power of psychedelics in the therapeutic setting. Hillary leads her clients through psychedelic assisted therapy, guiding them to new vantage points on their healing journeys, experience these real unscripted sessions firsthand as they unfold in each episode, listen and follow other people's problems wherever you get your podcasts. And there's also this, I don't know if I could say, having read this book, how much of your instinct towards people or the entanglements that followed came from what you wanted and a clear spark of desire. I want to be in relationship with this woman or this man versus an inbound signal to you that you were desired. I think too, this all feels like an unraveled ball with women and an inability to actually say, no, actually I want this.
MELISSA:
Right.
ELISE:
How much of an author did you feel like you were of your own wanting?
MELISSA:
Yeah, it was very confused. It was much more confused than I thought I described earlier. It was this early source of self-esteem when I needed it, when I was young. And then even when I got older, I never thought of myself as someone who had low self-esteem because I was so confident in so many areas, and I felt self possessed and devoted to my work. But there was this very powerful thing when a certain kind of person was attracted to me, that attention was so magnetic, it felt so good. And I've been watching all these TV shows and all these movies and being desirable was the apex. I've gotten so much messaging that that was true starting from early childhood onward, that it just felt sort of irresistible. And of course, there were those experiences where it was ew, gross, but a lot of the time that attention felt like a kind of ratification of something that I craved and that was bottomless.
It never lasted. And also, I wanted to please people. So if someone who seemed powerful or that I admired in some way, and this was a really operative dynamic in some of those friendships that I soured, if the other person developed romantic feelings, even if I sort of knew I wasn't into it, I would kind of go along with it because I admired them and I wanted them to like me, and I didn't want to embarrass them or disappoint them. And then of course, it would always backfire and blow up by the end, and it would be the worst version of my worst nightmare. But I couldn't see my own desire clearly. I couldn't even recognize that I was ambivalent or not attracted to someone until I felt real physical repulsion. I'd gone too far. And that happened over and over and over again where I would get embroiled with someone and then be, oh, no, how do I get out of this?
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, as women we're conditioned or taught to be desirable but not desiring, it's a trap at the end. I loved this part right at the beginning, you sort of ponder whether you'll ever be someone who can take off your high heels if you could be a sneaker wearing, I'm very much a sneaker wearing person, Melissa, I'll have, but you write about letting that magic, not pulling the magic out. You write Now, I was less visible, but more me that is I was less visible to men and to women who dress for men and for women who dress for women whose eyes are attuned to the aesthetics defined by an internalized male gaze. I am. Melissa was in fact more visible than I had been for years. Some days when I walked through the city and no man commented on my body with his eyes or his mouth, I felt like a ghost or a superhero.
I felt the way I imagined white men must feel totally safe except for that few white men walk around thinking, wow, I feel totally safe. But I love that because it's such that place, and I think it's amazing that you would find it at a point too in your life where you're gorgeous and young and vibrant and could turn it on for all the world to see. But to experience that invisibility, which is so fear inspiring for so many women, it's what comes, we're told as we age, you're invisible. No one cares. No one looks To me, that's all I want. And that's what I try to cultivate. But that's an amazing sort of to get there now,
MELISSA:
Right? Yeah. It was such a powerful experience of that same thing where I was looking at the one little fleeting finite thing thinking, this is what I need. I need to be seen as beautiful and desirable. I need people to notice me in this way and to be approved of in this way. And then when I stopped seeking it, I was like, oh, I don't need that at all. And in fact, it was a self-imposed bondage to be seeking it all the time because over here, I am totally fine. I am completely me. I am more authentically me and all the people who I truly love and who love me, love me exactly as much as they did before. In fact, the absence of that kind of attention felt so liberating. I am also totally a sneakers person now. I wear sneakers every day, and it's actually hilarious because people who knew me when I was young will see me and be like, have you gotten much shorter in middle age? I'm like, yes. Yes, I have. I've gotten two to four inches shorter, in fact, because my heels are now on the ground, and it really feels like, oh my God, thank God for having gone through that experience before I got to perimenopause where I am now. This is the great threshold where we're supposed to freak out and be like, it's all going away. And that is just couldn't be farther from how I feel about it.
ELISE:
Yeah, same. If anything, as you write throughout the book, it's like an aggregation of power back into the self and what a fun way to move through the world, unencumbered and in many ways feeling unthreatened.
MELISSA:
Exactly. Exactly.
ELISE:
Well, thank you for this book. I can't wait for your next one, but I'm excited for everyone who has yet to read this and has yet to read you because they're in for a treat. As mentioned, I wanted to read to you from this moment in Girlhood where she's at this cuddle party and she's getting these instructions about consent, and she writes, Adam acknowledged how difficult it can be to establish clear boundaries around touch. Many of us, he said, did not learn how to say no in our families or how to differentiate between different kinds of touch. When we got to rule number three, you must ask permission and receive a verbal yes before you touch anyone. He asked us to turn to a nearby person and could perform a role play. One person was to ask, do you want to cuddle? The other was to answer no.
The first would then respond, thank you for taking care of yourself. And then she writes, I felt unnerved by the cuddle party, and it wasn't just by those men. It was how powerful my instinct was to give them what they wanted is if I didn't have a choice. So that is, in many ways, you don't have to read it before you read the dry season, but they are clearly written by the same amazing writer, and I loved this book, and she writes near the end, it is so much easier to make a person one's higher power, easier to pursue redemption in them than to look inward. I was afraid that I would betray her again, that girl who was both the agent and the victim of my romantic cycle, and obviously she is talking about herself and coming to understand the ways in which she had perceived to be people pleasing, was really about people using to have that version of herself affirmed by an audience of potential lovers and often potential friends.
She's really interesting thinker and writer who I believe is helping us really interrogate the stories we tell about who we are and so that we can tell something else instead, or at least understand that they are multivariate and different ways to show up in the world, and that we don't necessarily have to abide by the cultural script that we've been given. I know that sounds like a tall order, but in going to what Gerda Lerner writes about in her book about the beginning of feminine consciousness, we haven't had that much practice. It's only been a few hundred years that we have been doing this. Men have been doing it for much, much longer. But I think as women, we're still trying to figure out who we are and how to express that in the world. And when we've been so long confined and constrained to the home and to relationship and love doing anything other than that still feels quite frankly really strange to many of us. And so I think that the dry season holds a mirror up to that and does a really beautiful job at it as well. Anyway, I'm excited to hear what you all think about this one.
These are the moments I wish I had a book club. Friends, if you like today's episode, there are several ways to support the show. I produce it myself, so this helps me to continue to make it. First, please rate and review the show on the platform where you listen and consider sharing this episode with a friend. That's how it grows. It is so helpful. Second, please support my sponsors who make this show possible. And if you are interested in sponsoring the show, you can email me at admin [at] eliseloehnen.com.