How three days inside a convent resurrected my desire

That conversation continued across Europe this summer, where more single, brilliant, gorgeous friends confessed they too had taken themselves out of circulation. Not because they’d sworn off intimacy, or because they’d found some higher calling. They were simply tired, underwhelmed, deflated.

One friend discovered her boyfriend of two years had gotten another woman pregnant when the woman tagged him in an ultrasound announcement on Instagram. Another could recite the greatest hits of avoidant partners from memory: “I’m not in the right place for a relationship,” “You deserve more,” “I’m not emotionally available.” 

My own dating hiatus wasn’t exactly intentional. It arrived after a string of situationships that, while supposedly casual, seemed to interpret “casual” as permission to abandon basic manners. Manners like: not disappearing, sticking to a date, sending a text after we’d had sex. You know, the basic things that make anyone horny. 

After one too many letdowns—and truthfully, having my feelings hurt—I decided to stop dating. Then I stopped looking. Then, more surprisingly, I stopped wanting. Eventually, numbness replaced cynicism. 

I knew instinctively that I needed time alone, but my vow of abstinence felt less like a choice and more like a corner I had been backed into. I felt I’d become just another casualty of heteropessimism—the growing sense among many straight women that dating men has become characterized by relentless disappointment. I won’t lie, the first month without sex was difficult. The second felt stranger still. But after that, something unexpected happened: my desire didn’t intensify. It simply packed its little metaphorical bags and left.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned

If I’d accidentally been living like a nun for half a year, then perhaps it was fitting that my resurrection should begin inside a convent. I’d booked three nights alone at Hôtel du Couvent, a newly opened hotel inside a restored seventeenth-century convent perched above Nice’s old town. It was, by any reasonable standard, an absurd indulgence. I’d spent weeks justifying the cost to myself before eventually deciding that if I was going to spend three days alone in the South of France, I wanted to do it somewhere chic.

At check-in, a woman in a minimalist burgundy uniform—designed to echo the building’s monastic past—handed me a tiny madeleine and a glass of ice-cool water before walking me through the practicalities of my stay. “Oh,” she smiled, almost as an afterthought. “There’s a cannon fired everyday at noon. Do not be alarmed.”

We crossed the limestone cloisters toward my room. Above us, nestled inside a small grotto carved into the hillside, a statue of the Virgin Mary watched over the courtyard. In my room, afternoon light spilled through the French windows, cutting geometric patches of sunshine across the cool terracotta floor. A bowl of ripe apricots sat beside a bottle of Champagne on the coffee table. For the next three days, this little room would become my sanctuary. Best of all, I’d accidentally left my laptop at home.

Every afternoon was beautifully uneventful. I made the same slow journey to the pool at the very top of the hillside. The path wound through herb gardens thick with rosemary, lavender, and thyme. Grapevines stretched overhead, dappling the stone paths with shifting shadows. Every so often I’d pass a tiny religious alcove tucked into the hillside—a place to pause, to pray, or perhaps just to escape the beating sun for a moment. 

The infinity pool overlooked the whole of Nice. Sweat trickled lazily down my thighs, mixed with sunscreen and yesterday’s fake tan. My Diet Coke fizzed loudly enough to momentarily drown out the raucous humming of cicadas in the trees behind me. I settled in with my book titled Slags (by Emma Jane Unsworth), and noticed the woman on the bed next to me was reading something called How to be a Renaissance Woman. I couldn’t help but laugh at the contrast. 

One afternoon, I returned to my room to have a cold shower and a siesta. Every window overlooked the same central courtyard, the French shutters pinned open by housekeeping. You could easily peer into the suites on the other side, accidentally catching glimpses of other people’s lives. A man typed by the window. A couple shared an aperitif on their balcony. A housekeeper shook out freshly laundered linen. There was an undeniable pleasure to the voyeurism of it all. 

After my shower, I wandered naked across my room, only to glance across the courtyard and lock eyes with a man and a woman, lying in bed. They weren’t doing anything remotely sexual—just lying in robes, turned slightly toward each other, as though caught half way through a conversation. There was a small space between their bodies, and then a much larger one between theirs and mine. I could only see a fragment of whatever was happening between them, while they could see all of me.

I froze, then hurried out of view, slightly mortified. 

Unexpectedly, I laughed out loud. Then—forgive me, Father, for I have sinned—I masturbated. 

I wondered what they’d been doing before I appeared at the window. Whether seeing me stark naked had interrupted them, or had perhaps become a part of whatever happened next. Would that space between them eventually close? My mind wandered further: out of my room, along the old wooden-floored corridors of the convent, across the courtyard and into theirs. The ascetic setting made the whole fantasy feel forbidden; my desire running loose in a place built around chastity and restraint—under the watchful eye of the stone-carved Madonna.

For months, empty space had felt exactly that: empty. Now I was suddenly ambushed by possibility, carrying my body along with it. The things I couldn’t see were precisely the things my imagination wanted me to fill in.

And on the third day…

The silence in the convent sharpened everything. Without emails to answer or places to be, my senses seemed to switch back on, one by one, in sharper focus. I noticed the sweetness of the apricots—I hadn’t even realised I liked apricots. The cool stone beneath my feet. The Diet Coke fizz. The minty syrup of the fruit salad I had delivered to my room. The staff member who delivered it, lingering just a touch too long. The midday cannon’s boom, reverberating across the city before disappearing into the hills.

Even Nice itself was charged with erotic possibility. It pulsed with a heightened awareness of bodies—bronzed limbs draped across beaches, beads of sweat gathering above lips, ice cream melting faster than it could be eaten, and, on one surreal evening walk, paramedics performing CPR behind hastily erected privacy screens just below the promenade. Heat, sweat, heartbeats. The city oscillated constantly between eros and thanatos, life and death. 

When I got back to my room, I downloaded a dating app for the first time since deleting them all at the start of my unintentional celibacy. I set my age range to 22-60. “Why the hell not?” I thought. 

Within an hour I had messages from several 23 year olds. One opened with, “Our babies will be so beautiful.” 

“What should we name them?” I played along.

“I want four. Can you handle that?” he said.

“Well,” I replied, “I suppose we better get started.”

A 60-year-old “CEO” invited me to spend the weekend in Saint-Tropez or Monaco. “Your choice,” he said. Then, a message popped up from a 36-year old tech “développeur” named François.

His opening gambit was that he’d heard my flight home had been canceled and I’d have to stay in France for eternity. “That’s sort of my dream anyway,” I replied. He’d also noticed that, as stated on my profile, my guilty pleasure was rosé with ice cubes—sue me—and, in an amazing turn of events, he happened to have both.  

As I sipped from the hotel’s complimentary bottle of champagne, our messages picked up momentum; we slipped into the kind of flirting that felt like a very fast game of ping pong. We teased each other about the French and the English. He told me about Antibes, my next destination, and instructed me to get in a car, get lost, stop in tiny villages, and drink the coffee. If I found myself with a free afternoon, he’d show me his favorite viewpoints. Some of it was silly, and none of it was particularly consequential, but before long I found myself staring at my phone waiting for the little notification to appear again.

It was my last night in the convent, and I considered inviting him over. I hesitated. Over the previous three days I’d built something inside those old convent walls that felt unexpectedly precious, something I felt strangely protective of. What if inviting another person into that—into me—would taint it? 

I didn’t want to risk it.

The next day, I checked out and headed to Antibes to visit a friend. François and I kept messaging, unsuccessfully trying to find a moment to meet. Then, on my final day, a message appeared: “I can’t let you leave without seeing you. Even if it’s only for an hour.”

One forty-minute drive later, François arrived. At five in the afternoon, we met at a little café on the main square. My friend was due to collect me at 6:30 before we drove to a birthday party, which meant there was nowhere for the afternoon to go. We simply sat opposite each other and talked. That was it. And somehow it felt more intimate than so many of the more textbook dates I’d been on. 

There was something strangely romantic about the fact he knew nothing would happen afterwards. He knew I wasn’t free that evening, he knew I was leaving town, and yet he wanted to come see me anyway. After so many previous dates where attention had felt conditional on what might happen later, the absence of expectation almost felt radical. It was erotic. We had simply an hour and a half, a café table between us, and no real idea of what—if anything—would come next. Instead of feeling limiting, all that space seemed to leave room for something else—for tension, for possibility. 

When my friend arrived, I hugged François goodbye and walked away through the square. “That was so wholesome,” I laughed. Later, he told me I’d had a glint in my eye. Something cheeky, he said. Something sexy. He confessed how badly he’d wanted to take me home. 

Return to the flesh

Looking back, this isn’t a story about a handsome Frenchman. That story never really got started. It’s more about a convent, and the irony that a place steeped in discipline, contemplation, and abstinence became the place where my body woke from a deep sleep. 

Modern life leaves remarkably little room for our minds to wander. Every hour is accounted for, every spare moment filled, every date evaluated before it’s even begun. Like arousal itself, desire resists being rushed. It gathers through attention, anticipation, and surrender.

For months, I’d assumed I was suffering from a bad case of heteropessimism, and maybe there’s some truth in that. But looking back, I wonder if heteropessimism is less the illness than the symptom. Have we become onlookers to our own desire instead of participants? We experience romance through text messages, sex through porn, and connection through screens. We leave remarkably little room for fantasy and for our minds to create something of their own. Yet that liminal space between anticipation and touch is where so much of desire is born.

Perhaps what we’re suffering from is actually just a crisis of imagination.

It took three days in a convent for me to realize that I hadn’t stopped wanting because I’d lost faith in men. The actions of men I’d dated may have contributed to my pessimism, but that didn’t give them dominion over my desire. I’d stopped paying attention: to my body, to other bodies, to taste and sound and heat and touch; to all the tiny details that give the mind something to work with. Slowing down gave me time to notice again, to imagine, and finally, to desire. 

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