A Pact to Make the Heart Grow Fonder? When Andrew and I left our Vermont college town, we thought we were so incredibly in love, we tried an experiment. He flew home to Canada to work, I drove to San Francisco, and we agreed not to have sex for almost a year. Not with each other during visits. Not with anyone. We were so certain of our strong connection that we could risk abstinence. We told ourselves we wanted to see how much the experiment would make us long for each other. Our sex had been the urgent, reckless kind you have in the kitchen before lunch because you can't wait for the short walk to the bedroom. The first time we kissed was at 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning after jumping naked into a mountain lake. This is when I swooned for him. He was tall and Slavic, looking like Pete Sampras with a beard. He played bass guitar and made hummus from scratch. He believed in love and austerity: only one pair of jeans, one old Ramones T-shirt. And no sex for a year. Maybe our love was already fading and we didn't want to admit it, so instead we schemed and saved until we could afford two open-ended multistop plane tickets. Then we flew to Southeast Asia, where our combined burn rate was $10 a day. We landed in Hong Kong in sweltering heat and held hands on the crowded airport bus into Kowloon. We had waited so long for this, but I was nervous. I had never been to Asia before. I had never tried abstinence. We found a cramped room on the seventh floor of a makeshift hotel run by a passel of chain-smoking Pakistani men who cooked rice over Sterno in the cramped lobby. That was where we had our first sex in a year. I wish I could say it was worth the wait. Instead I felt guilty, partly because I could hear the Pakistani men down the hall saying evening prayers, and partly because I felt so distant, as if I didn't know the words to our song anymore. I worried our experiment had done the opposite of what we had wanted, and we had no connection anymore. Our next stop was the lush coast of Thailand, where Andrew stayed in the beach hut and tried to sit in the lotus position. He had only talked about meditation before, but now he read books on Buddhism and became quieter, going further inside himself. It was the most modest spiritual journey: an overly serious 23-year-old man sitting on a dirt floor in Koh Samet trying to figure out what his life meant. The hitch was that he had brought a girl with him, a girl who lay on the beach alone, waiting to fall back into lust and wondering why it wasn't happening faster. We kissed that night under a cloud of mosquito netting. He had these sculptured cheekbones and an easy smile, and I was still so attracted to his dark eyes. But we seemed self-conscious. I had believed that one of the greatest things in the world was how love grew and grew and opened. I didn't understand yet that love could also shut down. The next morning two middle-aged German men in tiny Speedos walked the beach with a thin teenage prostitute. The girl looked 14 - hair to her jaw and boyish in a yellow bikini. The men swam out until the water was up to their necks. Then they tossed the girl back and forth in the air as if she were a beach ball. She screamed and laughed, and I felt lonelier than I ever had in my life. In Delhi we took a train to Agra and slept in a dive hotel that only rented rooms with twin beds. We didn't mind. We didn't even try to have sex. Maybe we were becoming the unintended consequence of our experiment. Not having sex for that whole year made it easier to continue not having sex, all of which I took as a very bad sign. In Agra we walked the Taj Mahal, then headed back to the hotel where Andrew meditated some more, and I lay in my metal bed having what seemed like my first existential breakdown. It was the hugeness of the Taj Mahal that tripped me up - that massive, marble testament to love. I thought my love for Andrew was my belief system. Now I needed to find a new religion. The scary weight of that pinned me to the bed while I listened to the rickshaw drivers argue on the street. Susan Conley lives in Maine. Her latest novel is "Paris Was the Place."