A YEAR WITHOUT A MAN

In this nonfiction book, two women respond to a series of disappointing relationships by swearing off men for a year.

At a glance, DeHart and Long didn’t have much in common. DeHart was a hotshot executive at a large tech company who juggled a demanding career, a broad profile of investment properties, and the care of her two children with her spouse. Long, a stay-at-home wife and mother, spent her abundant free time shopping, volunteering, and maintaining the custom home she shared with her husband and three children. Just beneath the surface, though, the two shared an unshakeable habit: Both tended to pursue difficult relationships with disappointing men, due to their fears of being alone. Indeed, early on, DeHart admitted, “I do not know how to live in this world without a man”—a sentiment that many women will find relatable. A chance encounter at a party led the women to bond over their failing marriages and embark together on a plan to improve their lives: They challenged themselves to swear off sex and romance for a full year, starting on June 1, 2010. Rather than looking for male partners to assuage the anxieties in their lives, the two pursued an intense regimen of therapy, holistic healing, and travel to improve their relationships with themselves and grow closer to each other. This chronicle of their efforts—written in a series of vignettes, with the two authors alternately narrating—is refreshingly honest in revealing the women’s struggles to adhere to their plan, despite temptation from potential suitors. They also show their processes of recognizing the patterns in their behavior that resulted in unfulfilling relationships, and their nonlinear progression toward true independence and self-love. The book’s tone is playfully crass and wrenchingly earnest, by turns, and its narrators are aspirational but never feel out of touch.

A powerful journey to independent womanhood, described with frankness and self-effacing humor.