The opt-out revolution

On Reddit forums and ‘The Dry Season’

I have to confess something: I am addicted to Reddit forums.

During the collapse of Twitter as it devolved into the shit-posting morass of X, I found myself navigating to the dating subreddits — ones for men, ones for women, ones that decry the behavior of men, and especially the ones that bitch about the behaviors of women.

Here anonymous strangers gripe about apps. About loneliness. About heartbreak and companionship. These stories mesmerize me because they feel like kicking over the rotting log of America. Revealing everyone’s loneliness, isolation, and struggle, all presented in forums for advice, ridicule, and desperate efforts to help and to form human connections. These aren’t the glossy, Instagrammable lives of an influencer; this is gross reality, horribly written, emotionally stunted, and above all, raw as hell.

In every post’s comments, there is always the advice to quit. To just stop. To drop out of the pursuit of romance altogether, deliberately or out of sheer exhaustion. For women, it often results from rage — the relentless objectification and emotional toll. For men, it seems to be more of a resignation. Women are too difficult. Dating is too difficult. Communication is difficult. Easier to lift weights. Easier to spend time on Reddit.

“Ophelia” by John Everett Millais

It’s hard to quantify. But dating, relationships, marriage, they all do seem harder now. The ubiquity of AI has made every word and interaction feel stilted and hard to parse. Are we building genuine connection or conversing with a bot? Has an overreliance on smartphones made us incapable of meeting good people in real life, or are we bad at picking dates? Have gender dynamics been mined for outrage bait, making it harder for us to see people as humans, or are we just deeply reprehensible to the opposite sex? Is marriage hard or is the collapse of safety nets hard? How do you wrench happiness out of the cold, miserly hands of capitalism? How do you be less lonely in a world with billion-dollar industries designed to profit from loneliness?

This is where Melissa Febos comes in. Her new book The Dry Season explores her year of intentional celibacy. It’s a bit of a funny premise. One year? Amateur stuff — make it five, make it relatable. But Febos realizes the humor in the conceit. Her goal is not to be relatable, but to mine the depths of our cultural biases and personal understanding. And this time, she’s doing it with love, connection, and relationships.

Febos came to her year of celibacy after a disappointing one-night stand that left her wondering, in true Reddit form, “Am I the asshole?” A serial monogamist, Febos describes herself as a hungry ghost, with an insatiable appetite for connection and romance. But these appetites made her, like a ghost, a bit of a pest. Using lessons she’d learned in recovery, Febos decided she needed a detox. What if she stopped seeking romance and instead made space for other things in her life?

Unlike other modern celibacy movements like incels or the 4B movement in Korea, where women refuse to engage in relationships out of a punitive desire to hurt men, Febos comes to her year of celibacy with an “enough already” attitude.

She’s also seeking to find a way to live as a woman and a writer with deep ambitions in a culture where those ambitions are often sublimated and sidelined in favor of marriage, relationships, and children.

Every single, childfree ambitious woman has had to put up with the condescending reassurances of their friends letting them know that while publishing a book is great, children are the greatest joy. Or that they wouldn’t trade success for their spouse. In 2025, it feels like many people have given up trying to have it all and are just trying to survive.

Febos is a queer woman, but she operates out of a heterosexual dynamic of relationships. Part of the question driving her year of celibacy is profoundly political: Can a woman be happy? Can a woman be alone?

Because our deepest intimacies are deeply political. We cannot separate our bodies from the world they exist in.

In this context, Febos is trying to find a new model of love, ambition, and living. One where joy and passion escape from the cultural pressure cooker like a steam. Throughout the book, Febos examines models of women who were intentionally celibate; Margery Kempe, Hildegard von Bingen, and the feminist separatists of the 1960s. The celibacy of nuns and mystics was often a way for women to opt out of the repressive and often deadly dynamics of marriage and childbirth. Febos, too, is looking for an escape. Heterosexual dynamics have trapped us; what more can there be when we opt out and find a new model?

What Febos finds at the end of it all is, of course, herself. And all of herself, not just the good and enjoyable parts, but the ones that have hurt people she loved. She writes of her years in a particularly difficult relationship she calls the “Maelstrom,” noting that that for good and for bad, “The manner in which I had loved people was a symptom of how I moved through the world and understood my place in it.”

In a profile for the New York Times, Febos’ mother, Nancy Sowell, a therapist, observes that her daughter learned, “you don’t have to be so defensive in the world. You can afford to have your heart be open because there’s somebody home inside who always loves you.”

While she is writing about a phase of her life nine years before the book’s publication, it could not have come at a more timely cultural moment. Increasingly, people are opting out. In 2024, the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life found that “only 56 percent of Gen Z adults—and 54 percent of Gen Z men—said they were involved in a romantic relationship at any point during their teenage years. This represents a remarkable change from previous generations, where teenage dating was much more common. More than three-quarters of Baby Boomers (78 percent) and Generation Xers (76 percent) report having had a boyfriend or girlfriend as teenagers.”

This generational opting-out has led to a lot of hand-wringing about the future of families and babies, and about male loneliness. A kind of cultural hysteria over what will happen if the marriage market changes. Beneath all that panic lies the fear of what could happen if women are happy on their own terms.

The Dry Season is an exploration of the terrifying power of a self-actualized woman, one who can be alone. One who is not always in the throes of fixing herself through serums, self-help, a new relationship, or a TikTok-inspired fitness challenge, but who is happy with herself and her life, with the work she’s chosen and the life she’s living. A woman who has the ability to say no to the shitty systems and compulsory heterosexual dynamics that are thrust upon us through politics and culture. She is not taking the scraps thrown at her and calling it good enough because she is too afraid to ask for more.

This generational opting out has led to a lot of hand-wringing about the future of families and babies and male loneliness. A kind of cultural hysteria over what will happen if the marriage market changes. Beneath all that panic lies the often unsaid fear of what happens if women are happy on their own terms.

It’s radical. It’s profound. It can scare all of us. Because who are we if we aren’t defining and validating ourselves by external relationships? Are we happy?

Searching the Reddit forums every night before I sleep is a reminder that even now, even as our systems collapse and the world we thought we knew reveals itself to be something else completely, it doesn’t stop us from being humans, desperately seeking new narratives for our happiness.

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• You can buy The Dry Season wherever books are sold. I highly recommend ordering from your local independent bookstore or BookShop.org.

• I also wrote more deeply about the AI-driven enshittification of dating apps and the vulturistic capitalism that thrives on our loneliness.