"This fall, however, among my fellow fortysomething women, longing is looking remarkably different, in our public conversations and our private group chats. It's not so much about a hot, young man as it is about a cold, old monastery. And, according to the literature du jour, we most deeply crave solitude, not sex. Elizabeth Gilbert's new memoir, All the Way to the River, hit shelves this week."
"Similarly, Melissa Febos' The Dry Season, which dropped this summer, is about giving up the thing that had dominated the writer's thoughts for so long-sex-in order to see what lay dormant underneath. In Febos' case, the experiment led her to swoon over nuns, like Hildegard of Bingen and the Belgian -a real departure for a woman whose first book was about her stint as a professional dominatrix."
Earlier cultural currents celebrated fantasies of abandoning domestic life and sexual adventures with younger partners among millennial and Gen X women. Over the year, longing among fortysomething women has shifted toward solitude, monastic desire, and withdrawal rather than erotic pursuit. Public accounts portray radical personal change, solitude, and experiments with sexual renunciation that reveal dormant yearnings and new contemplative fascinations. Rigorous self-accounting accompanies recognition of ways sexual entanglements caused loss and harm. The resulting arc emphasizes disentanglement, personal sovereignty, and the search for an interior life marked by autonomy and quiet.
#midlife-longing #solitude-and-monastic-desire #celibacy-and-renunciation #self-discovery-and-sovereignty
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