In the competitive arenas of personal development, entertainment and leisure, consumption and pleasure (and its by-product, the obligation to ‘get your rocks off’ with just about everything), a life without sex is an invisible life. But voluntary or not, abstinence begins as a perception, a feeling. Over the course of a year, Emmanuelle Richard met with women and men who entrusted her with intimate details of their sex lives. Their anonymized words inform her own experience of emptiness. In every instance, one overriding issue stands out for those who no longer make love: the lack of a sense of touch.