Scrap the Satin and Tulle: Why Your Wedding Day is Probably NOT Going to Be the Best Day of Your Life

Ah, June. The magical month that kicks off the nuptial season. Truth be told, I’m actually so beyond the wedding season of life that I’ve even passed the baby shower cluster, quickly approaching the “first born high school graduation onslaught.” Nevertheless, I find weddings just plain fun, but too often, for the bride, it can be a day of grand disappointment wrought from unrealistic expectations.

We’ve all heard horror stories of weddings gone awry–raging bridezillas, meddling mothers, overbearing mothers-in-law. While all these things might be simple annoyances on any other day, they reach fiasco proportions on one’s wedding day, tarnishing the “this is the happiest day of my life” image that so many brides feel to be their right and privilege. How do things become so warped, how do nerves become so raw, and how do otherwise rational women morph into raging lunatics?

It’s called conditioning.

It’s because we as women, from the time we get our first Bride Barbie, dream of the moment when we will be belle of the ball, queen of our own prom, princess for our Prince Charming.
So we spend hours planning for our wedding day. Savings, which could perhaps be better spent toward a down payment on a house, are instead invested in creating an unforgettable moment in time.

Unfortunately, this obsessive preparedness for a single day often curtails appropriate preparation for the emotional, financial, spiritual, and just plain logistical parameters of marriage—simple questions are left unresolved. How many hours of TV is OK? Will we hire a housekeeper? Whose family will we spend holidays with? To unmarried couples, these seem like small issues. But as anyone married for more than a few hours knows, these seemingly minor concerns can quickly balloon into large issues. These questions are much easier settled, or at least carefully discussed, before couples exchange vows. But premarital counseling, if couples participate in it at all, is often just one more item to check off the ‘to do’ list and usually completed in a few hours.

I don’t think I’m being unnecessarily alarmist to suggest that most brides spend more time shopping for their dresses than they do participating in premarital counseling or practical planning for the realities of married life. And even though its effectiveness is backed by empirical and anecdotal evidence, counseling is often neglected completely or conducted with someone who may have mediocre training or experience.

A friend of mine who was married in Colorado less than two years ago recalls her disappointing premarital counseling. The facilitator scoffed at her concerns about their credit card debt—instead telling her to focus on the strengths in her relationships with her fiancé. Needless to say, the couple is now in the unfortunate situation of being maxed out on their credit cards, and money is a huge issue in the marriage, erasing their ability to focus on the “strengths” of their relationship.

So how many brides actually end up with that ‘happy ever after’ vision they have in their heads? Very few. We all know the divorce statistics in this country. And despite all the work, the wedding day is hardly ever perfect. I’ve been to two weddings where the brides had such big arguments with their future husbands on the day of the big event that they told me later they seriously considered scrapping the walk down the aisle.

In the movies, jittery brides and grooms ditch their intendeds at the altar all the time, but in real life, couples would rather take a chance and spare embarrassment before friends and family, knowing they can get a no-fault divorce later if it just ‘doesn’t work out.’ By taking this lackadaisical view, we are scoffing at the institution of marriage.

So if the day’s not going to be perfect, and the marriage is inevitably going to be more work than you bargained for, here’s what you disillusioned women who’ve tied the knot need to know, along with you soon-to-be brides crash dieting and waking in a cold sweat at 3 a.m. over concerns about the hue of ribbon in the toss-away garter.

First of all, your wedding day is no longer about you and your spouse becoming one beautiful and perfectly harmonized partnership for all eternity.

Instead, here’s what a wedding has become: a wedding is a party for your parents, their friends, and your friends. It’s a multi-billion dollar business. It’s a time to impress. It’s so your niece can be the flower girl in a frilly dress. And your nephew will change out of his soccer jersey for a few hours. It’s so your parents have a formal picture of everyone together. It’s a day that you are giving to honor your parents because you know it would break your mother’s heart if you eloped. It’s a day that recognizes that as much of a liberated woman as you have become, you will still give a nod to tradition and let your father walk you down the aisle.

These elements are all important to your family and to you and your future spouse for varied and often complicated reasons. And I’m all for weddings, and flowers, and cake, and pink Chuck Taylors peeking out from under a pile of silk and tulle. The problem arises when we expend all our energy trying to create the “best day of our life.”

Brides, when anyone tells you that your wedding day will be the best day of your life, examine their motives. More likely than not, it’s an unmarried bridesmaid or a vendor trying to upsell you a dress that’s too expensive and requires $400 foundation garments to make it all hold together or is trying to convince you to upgrade the menu to include a caviar appetizer.

The Perfect Day myth is an emotional and fiscal crime setting up brides for heartbreaking disappointment. Instead of spending months preparing for a single day, engaged couples need to invest their time and energy in preparing for a lifetime together.

And that lifetime, if prepared for properly, could be full of many “Best Days.”

Here’s what I’ve found after 15 years of marriage, acknowledging the stark reality that I’ve threatened to leave my husband at least as many times . I still love him like crazy. I admire him and appreciate him more than I did on our wedding day. I wonder on a regular basis how it was that I got him (and why he sticks around). My life as it is today is certainly not the result of my feeble efforts, luck, or some twisted favoritism people refer to as being ‘blessed.’ It’s been the result of a lot of work and forbearance.

Maybe it’s that I knew from the outset that plenty of perfect $45,000 wedding days end in divorce while plenty of potluck picnic shelter events garner years of contentment.

I did have a beautiful wedding day, but it was by no means the highlight of my life. It was merely the kick-off. Here’s how my wedding day stacks up against the last 15 years: Our honeymoon in New Zealand was everything I dreamed of, but visions of my kids pole boating in the rain at Tuileries Gardens, hiking with my husband through the cool dark caverns that burst open to illuminate the library in Petra, sleeping under the almost blindingly bright stars in the dessert at Siwa, desperately hitchhiking for the first time in a blizzard in Iceland, breathing in the timeless dust at the Wailing Wall as I felt my husband’s hand resting on my back, and reclining against my suitcase on a rocky beach, exhausted and waiting with my kids for the next train in Italy all compete for “best of my life” moments when my husband and I reminisce.

Though I will never forget seeing my husband’s face at the front of the church as I shakily held my father’s arm as he walked me down the aisle, recalling the first moment my daughter’s round little arms reached for me is a memory that conjures up deeper emotions.

I’ll also have to admit that although there was no videographer to capture the moment, the promise of life imparted when I heard my son say “Mama” for the first time still outranks how I felt when I heard my husband promise, “I do.”

In fact, even my husband saying I looked beautiful on our wedding day doesn’t mean as much as when he casually remarked a few months ago, as I was folding laundry while wearing yoga pants, that he thinks I look better than I did when he met me.

And then there was a Saturday last month when my entire family, kids included, worked to clean the house while we alternately listened to Taylor Swift and Joe Jackson. That day was better than my wedding day. We did some yard work and got a dozen donuts. I think we played a game that afternoon, but I don’t really even remember. We just hung out. We were a family. Jorge probably paid some bills, and I may have threatened the kids once or twice to stop bickering or I’d dock their allowance. We put the kids to bed early, letting them sleep in our room. All four of us rested there together, and most likely Jorge was snoring before the kids were asleep. When they were good and asleep, I nudged him awake, and we slipped out of the bedroom to the sofa. I rested my head on his chest, without a thought that this had been the best day of my life. Instead, I dozed off with the secure promise of knowing that there would be many more, just like this.

Yeah, I think that was the best day of my life.

And it didn’t cost much. And it will happen again and again. And there weren’t months of anxiety or planning, and my husband didn’t need to buy me diamonds, or make brunch plans, and I didn’t have to go on a crash diet, or worry that my eyebrows were not perfectly shaped or that I had a blemish on my cheek. I didn’t worry about a menu or linen colors or a perfectly clean house. I just woke up and went to bed, but I did it with the best people in my life.

That’s why we have weddings for a day, but live marriages for a lifetime.

Passion and Commitment: Why You Need Both

There are wonderful times when life catches me completely off guard. Like a week ago when I attended my five-year-old’s first piano recital.  It was, initially, reminiscent of the recitals I’d played in as a child, where the first children to play were the youngest and least skilled, and the last were those who could show some mastery over their lessons. Needless to say, I never played last at a recital in any of my seven to eight years of piano lessons.  I liked playing the piano, still do, but I was never passionate about it.

However, last Sunday, I saw passion.  As I sat there in church watching one student succeed another, a few of them showing fine technical skill, I expected no great epiphanies at the keyboard. But then the last student to play, an 11-year-old boy who had been taking lessons only four years, sat down to regale the audience with five minutes or so of “Pirates of the Caribbean,” and I sat there dumbfounded. Not only did this boy demonstrate technical skill way beyond his years, but he played with the passion of a man who has found and lost love, watched a beloved die, walked through fire….

Where does feeling like that come from in an 11-year-old boy?

I have no idea.

But I do know that it was not passion alone that made that young man stroke the keys as if he was born to play. The piano teacher’s sister informed me after the recital that the boy’s parents could hardly keep him from the piano, that he played all the time.

That’s not just passion. That’s commitment.

And if you ever want to succeed at something, and I mean really succeed, you have to have both.

How often have I seen a person with passion for an art, skill, or subject fail to reach potential, not for lack of talent but for lack of commitment. And commitment, mind you, is more than hard work.  It comes with cost and sacrifice.

A friend of mine had to give a meditation recently at a wedding, and she was anxious about how to do it because she had been asked not to be too religious. “How can I talk about passion,” she asked, “and not draw an anomaly to the passion of Christ?”

I don’t know what she ultimately came up with, but even though I’m not religious, I know there is much to learn from what we refer to as “Christ’s passion.”  Jesus, whether mortal or God, was willing to take the cost, make the ultimate sacrifice, for what he believed. The result? His life and teachings form one of the world’s most influential religions. And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the influence of Jesus’ passion and commitment.

I suspect, knowing my friend, that she perhaps touched on the necessity of passion and commitment to a successful marriage. It is one thing to love another person, even deeply love him.  It is quite another to commit yourself to maintaining that love for life. That not only takes work, like the work of resolving minor disputes before they become big resentments, but the work of sacrifice–willingly and lovingly giving up to get more. And I don’t mean more in a greedy sense. I mean more fulfillment, more meaning, and, ultimately, more passion.

Because that’s the thing about commitment that is passion-inspired. It builds more passion.

I will not pretend to know about passion and commitment within the framework of a marriage.  I know I tried commitment without passion for a very long time, and it didn’t seem to do much other than take up valuable space in the short span of what we know as life.

But I do know about passion in other things. I have had a passion for writing since I was a small child, yet for a brief period while in college and grad school, I let a couple of mentors convince me to pursue a career as professor instead of as a writer. To my good fortune, poverty eventually drove me out of academe, and I began to see, after working as an ex parte brief writer, speech writer, and copywriter, that one could indeed earn a living writing.

For five years, I spent every waking hour I wasn’t at my salaried job working to build my own business as a writer. And once I cut the cord to the world of the regular paycheck and began freelancing full-time, I worked 80-hour weeks for a couple of years to build a client base. There was never a time that any of it felt exhausting. Why?  Because I was passionately committed to living my dream.

The same held true when I finally bought the farm I’d always dreamed of owning and built the house I’d always dreamed of building, working until the wee hours of the morning at times painting cathedral ceilings while lying on my back on a scaffold, hanging wallpaper, and sanding and varnishing cabinets, stair treads, and trim. Passion launched me. Commitment held me.

I have no doubt I will hear one day of that 11-year-old boy at my daughter’s piano recital rocking the world stage as a concert pianist. Because the boy is not just passionate; he is committed. He practices his passion daily.

That’s the key—daily commitment to passion.

As one of my favorite poets, Pablo Neruda, remarks, you should live “as if you were on fire from within.” Doing anything less is not really living; it is not really committing. If you believe in your passion, whether it is the passion you hold for your work or the passion you hold for your lover, then commit to it, live as if “the moon lives in the lining of your skin.”

The Art of Letting Go

I’ve always had a bit of trouble with letting go. Raised by my father to be a “fix-it” type person, I have suffered from a belief that everything can be made right with a little adjustment and ingenuity…including relationships.

But this isn’t always so.

Sometimes you just have to abandon ship and let the old girl sink.

How do you know when it’s time to bail on a marriage, a friendship, perhaps even a parent?  Probably when the relationship keeps you awake at least four nights out of the week and your contact with the person gives you a case of the jitters equivalent to five cups of coffee drunk in quick succession or gives you a sudden desire to send your car off a cliff…with yourself in it.

Evolved creatures though we are, we tend to resist change, even if continuing in the same rut feels about as good as ripping a band-aid off a hairy leg 100 times in a row.  I should know.  I have resisted giving up on people with immense relish over the years.

I think it started with my mother. A highly respected educator, even by me (though I admit I window gazed in her AP English class just to annoy her), she was never particularly skilled at letting me be me.  The result has been a decades-long battle of the wills between us that I finally had to just throw into the ditch.  Meaning I accepted the fact that my mother would never approve of me no matter what I did.  I let go….

The unfortunate thing is it took more than half my life to do it.  Wisdom cannot be rushed.

Over the years, I’ve sped up this “process of elimination,” but it’s still been pretty slow. It took me at least five years to finally throw in the towel on an unfulfilling marriage.

The trouble with me (and with a lot of people, I suspect) is that I’m not very good at giving up on people. While in grad school, I taught college English and Humanities and reveled in the adrenaline rush of getting a student who started the semester with solid D’s to writing polished B+ essays.  However, when I had to flunk an entire English Comp class of unprepared 18-year-old boys, it frustrated me beyond measure. Why didn’t they give a shit?

The reality is, not everyone gives a shit. And sometimes you just have to accept that and move on.

I’ve played mentor to a few aspiring writers over the years. Sometimes the relationships have been mutually rewarding. Sometimes they have not.  It’s the “have not” ones that have kept me up at night.  When I have invested months, and sometimes years, of my life in teaching a young person not only how to write in a way that will sell but how to find markets for her work, only to have her turn tail and give up, especially when she has potential and talent, it messes with my head.

It’s like being a parent in some ways. You have to tell yourself, “I’m investing in this person because I believe in her. If she chooses to give up and walk away, it’s her choice.” Too often I have gotten caught up in “fix-it” mode, believing I could make someone believe in herself through my own confidence and will. But it doesn’t always work that way.

Some months ago, I began the process of letting go of an aspiring writer and friend who had given up, convinced after years of being put down by others that she was always being judged even when she wasn’t.  It was among the more frustrating experiences of my life, watching someone with loads of potential back herself into a corner and decide, perhaps unconsciously, she was not worthy of great things. Even worse, she blamed me for her retreat.

Being the hardheaded fixer that I am, I persisted in trying to reach out, only to be greeted with hostility.

Eventually, however, I had to do what I did with my disapproving, negative mother, and my toxic spouse…I let go.  I said to myself, “Enough is enough.  You cannot force someone to live to her full potential. Allow free will, and walk away.”

When I watch friends struggle with this all too common problem with their children, I empathize. I know what it is to want the best for someone you love and to watch that person dig himself or herself into a deep hole. And frequently, as the digger digs, he looks up at you, the self-proclaimed “fixer,” and wishes you’d fall in so he could bury you.

If you haven’t jumped ship by this point, it truly is time to bail and expend your energy where it is wanted or at least accepted.

There is an old Zen proverb, which you’ve probably heard: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”  On a couple of occasions, I have thought the student was ready and that I was the teacher.

Sometimes we miscalculate. Sometimes the student is never ready.

When that happens, it really is okay to cut your losses and move on.

I know my mother will never be ready to accept me as I am.  I know my ex-husband will never believe in himself as I tried to believe in him.  I also know I have had students who don’t want to learn.

In the grand scheme of things, it seems a little whacked to waste energy on negative people. But perhaps it is the stubborn human will to convert the faithless, no matter how hopeless the cases, that drives us.

As for me, I am making a new commitment to watch carefully for the people who would happily suck me into their black holes of anger and resentment and to focus instead on aligning myself with those who are willing to learn…and willing to teach in return.  I choose not to waste energy beating half dead horses or worrying too much about their final gasps of air.  As Elizabeth Gilbert , author of the popular treatise on finding joy, Eat, Pray, Love, has noted, “As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff is bad for you.”

Emotional Diarrhea: The Neediness of Men

It occurs to me I should not be blogging now.  It is 1 a.m. I am sick with bronchitis. I am exhausted. My daughter is sleeping in my bed. I have spent the past two hours mothering…but not to a child—to a man. A man who took nearly an hour to tell me what was wrong. It took him that long to run through all the various diversions he felt compelled to run through before finally being honest about the fact that he was suffering and needed me.

You women who read this will know what I am talking about—the way the men in our lives can emotionally exhaust us more than our children do.

Children are simple and direct: “Mommy, I am tired and hungry. Mommy, I miss Grandpa, and I am sad.”  Their wants and fears come out easily, then the tears, then the hugs and kisses and the soothing, and it is over.

Not so with men.

Over the course of their wayward socialization and upbringing, men’s emotional directness has been bred right out of them…unless it’s something they can solve with a fist fight. If they have to cope with an emotion that is not anger (or that can’t be translated into anger), they are lost.

We women pay the price.

That’s because we are not just their wives and lovers. We are their best friends and the stand-ins for the mothers whose skirts they once cried into as little boys. They do not have our network of emotional sustenance. We fill our emotional buckets with the kind and encouraging words of other women. It is a resource men lack. If they do not have an understanding wife or girlfriend, their emotional buckets stand empty.

I have said this often enough on this blog—that women are the one and only emotional stand-in for men in most cases. Even your husband’s best friend isn’t going to be capable of much more than a pat on the back, followed by, “Hey, how about we go for a ride?”

A male friend said to me recently, “For men, emotional sustenance is supposed to be provided by a beer and a football game.”

But when beer and sports don’t cut it, the lucky few with loving women in their lives will come limping and sheepish to our arms, beating around the bush for a couple of hours, but coming nonetheless—to women who, more often than not, have just finished a 10-hour day at the office, made a barely competent dinner for the family, bathed, soothed, and put to bed a couple of kids, and are now sitting blithely for the first time all day on the floor in a corner of the bedroom gleefully painting toenails red. Thrilled for the first moment of peace and absence of need in their lives.

But then the man intrudes like a roving brown bear.

The best among us will set aside the red toenail polish, summon our last ounce of understanding and tolerance, and listen. But sometimes we just cannot help it. We turn the look of death on the beaten down husband, fling the bottle of red nail polish at the quickly closing door, and peevishly deny him sex for a week.

It’s not that we are cruel, guys.  (And yes, I know you are reading this, slightly aghast.)  It’s that we are exhausted.  Women’s lives, whether because of biology or socialization, are loaded with caregiving—we tend to the emotional needs of our children, our friends, our lovers, our colleagues, even our pets, and we do it like it is second nature (because it is), but because we do it all day for days on end, we eventually run down, especially when the caregiving is sparingly returned.

One of my girlfriends told me recently she is actually grateful her husband has a few female friends. “It takes some of the heat off me,” she explains. “I get so bitchy when he’s needy.”

It’s not that we are angry at our husband’s or boyfriend’s failure to be an invincible knight in shining armor.  Most of us are realists, and we do not expect men to fight off their dragons all on their own. We don’t think men in emotional need are weak.  In fact, when we first fall in love, we find this sensitivity about them wonderfully endearing.

But sometimes, we do resent his deep emotional dependence on us, a dependence we do not share because we usually have female friends and relatives who tend to our emotional bucket filling long before the man in our life ever shows up with a water hose.  By day’s end, we have often already been hosed down, dried off, and are ready for that glass of wine and a book in front of the fire.

But instead, in walks this man who has no deep emotional connection to anyone but us, and we can see from the wild look in his eyes that he is needy. And, as one of my girlfriends put it recently, because men have so much pent up emotional baggage, their need often turns into what she terms “emotional diarrhea.”  She adds, “It’s like a contagion, and it can take over your life.”

Pretty soon your peaceful evening has turned into his dumping ground, as he recounts his screwed up day, awaits your verification that he is wonderful and his boss is just an idiot, and depends on you to restore his sense of manhood by sharing a rousing romp in the hay just to seal the deal that all is well.

Pretty soon it’s 2 a.m.

He is snoring peacefully, and you’re lying awake staring at the ceiling fan, wondering if any of your girlfriends are awake doing the same thing.

For the men who are reading this and wondering if they have deeply erred in sharing that most vulnerable part of themselves with their wives and lovers, let me provide some assurance: if the women in your life have to come your aid (no matter if they are staring at the ceiling wide awake at 2 a.m. afterwards), they adore you. Even if you’ve gotten a door slammed behind you with a bottle of red nail polish thrown against it a few times, still…rest assured…they love you.

If you can give a little back in return, then give it.  Even if it as clumsy as a bouquet of flowers, still, give it.  The acknowledgement will not go unnoticed.  The women in your life do not need you so much as you think (sorry to disappoint, gentlemen).  As a dear friend of mine puts it, women have other resources at the ready for their emotional sustenance: “Women are like the inflatable insulation that is blown into the wall and attic spaces of old houses — they simply know where the gaps exist and fill them, intrinsically. The men are not capable… It’s when we expect them to be that things go south.”

It is so true. Occasionally, however, give the unexpected.  Fill a gap here and there, and watch that woman who has thrown a few too many bottles of nail polish and…ahem…other things at you morph into something a good deal softer and a good deal more ready to be there for you when life runs, as it will, counter to your expectations.

 

The Female Brain Run Amuck: A Cheese and Bread Plate Analysis

I have to confess I’ve not received too many extravagant gifts from men. While I know there are women out there who would appear to belong to “the ring a month club” courtesy of their boyfriends and husbands, that has never been me.  The best I’ve gotten from a guy short of an engagement ring is a pair of cross-country skis.  (And let me tell you, that was thrilling enough.)

So I have to admit from the outset I don’t exactly come at the whole “guy showers girl with extravagant gifts” thing with a very clear perspective on the issue.  Which is no doubt why my current boyfriend has thrown me a bit off kilter…and many of my girlfriends, too, who (like me) have never really experienced much in the wine, roses, and diamonds department.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I’d much rather have a kayak or a hiking trip to Peru than a diamond any day, but I’ve not gotten anything along those lines either.  However, I digress….

My new beau is a whole different animal from what I’m used to.  Not only does he have something on the verge of a conniption fit if I try to lift a 40-pound bag of dog chow out of the trunk of my car, but he insists on stopping along the side of the road to adjust the headlights on my car when I complain about them not performing well enough in the fog.  (And yes, he has the tools for things of this nature magically handy at all times.)  He also pulls out my chair at dinner (even when it’s at my own house) and refuses to allow me to stand up to refill my own wine glass.  He is a model of chivalry, and I still can’t quite get used to it.  The attention verges on decadence to my way of thinking.

But one of my well-heeled girlfriends begs to disagree.  She does not find it in the least disturbing that he also buys me shoes, scarves, jewelry, new tires for my car, and anything else he can think of to bring a twinge of a smile to my face.  In fact, she said to me only yesterday, “This is how a man is supposed to treat a woman, Debbie.  He is wooing you.”

If that’s true, what have all the other men in my life been doing the past 20 years?

I’m not the only one asking this question, by the way.

A girls’ getaway to California this last week proved my point…and also proved what I think most educated men already know—that a woman (and a group of women even more so) can take the tiniest shred of an idea and run with it way past left field.

After a day out shopping in Sausalito and strolling through the John Muir Woods, my girlfriends and I returned to our hotel room to find an “edible arrangement” waiting in a refrigerator that the hotel staff had carted up to our room for the very purpose of keeping my chocolate-covered apple slices and pineapples appetizingly chilled. We all knew who the charming culprit was—my boyfriend (whom I will leave unnamed until I am certain I have charmed him to the degree he won’t dump me for talking about him on my blog).

Of course, before any female analysis of the chocolate-covered fruit in the pot could begin, we all set about devouring it as quickly as possible. (I got first dibs on the chocolate-covered strawberries—it was my boyfriend after all.)

Once the four of us were satiated, our bodies strewn across two queen-sized beds, torsos propped on pillows as if we were having a high school slumber party all over again, Sarah piped up, “I don’t think anyone has ever sent me a gift like that when I’ve been away traveling.” I see her cocking her head to the side and getting that slight twitch at the corner of her lip that she gets when she’s about to claim something is suspect.  “Have you, Shiloh?”

Shiloh, whose heart has been recently decimated, shakes her head. “No, never.”

Megan, who is in her third trimester, continues munching her chocolate-covered apple slice and offers no opinion.

“I’ve never experienced anything like this either,” I say, though I can sense I have gained temporary “admired woman” status among my friends.

We make a rather hasty group decision (because it’s almost dinner time) to chalk this up to a delightful form of male chivalry and admiration to which all of us are unaccustomed but which seems…well…kind of nice.  Who doesn’t like to end their day with chocolate-covered berries and pineapples carved into flowers?

So…out we go to dinner at an Italian café, followed by cocktails and bread pudding at the hotel bar.  We return to our hotel room.  We are casually sprawled about the room again in our yoga pants and PJs, and there is a knock at the door.

It’s 10 p.m.

We exchange looks. No one moves.

Then Shiloh, the bravest among us, hops up, opens the door, and a white-coated waiter is standing there with a platter loaded with more chocolate-covered berries, grapes, bread, and half a dozen types of cheese. He presents a card.  Shiloh opens it, reads it, looks at me.

“Holy shit,” I say, nevermind the presence of the room service waiter.

Of course, as with the first delivery, we really waste no time digging into the edible delights, though we conduct our female analysis of the situation in tandem with the devouring of Stilton on rye.

“Um,” Sarah finally volunteers, her lip curling just a little again, “does this strike you as a bit over the top?

Shiloh and I look up in mid-chew.

“It is a little over the top,” Shiloh says.

“Twice in one day,” Sarah adds.

I nod and put down my goat cheese, feeling a bit disconcerted.  Something about the decadence of it all is starting to unnerve me.

I can see Sarah’s brain at work. She is thinking, Is this guy a stalker? Is he marking his turf? Is he just loaded and has nothing better to do with his money?

I decide to take a shower, knowing that as soon as the bathroom door closes behind me, the girls will start analyzing, saying all the things they don’t dare say in front of me…not yet anyway.  (That is how women are. Whoever leaves the room will undoubtedly become the subject of the conversation.)

Ten minutes later when I re-enter the bedroom, all is rather quiet, as if some conclusion has been reached without my consent. “He’s not an idiot,” Sarah says. “He is trying to impress your friends, too. He knows the weight of female opinion.” And Shiloh and I have to admit there is some truth in this. After all, I’ve ditched guys I might never have ditched based on the weight of female opinion. What man in his right mind would dare anger the girlfriend contingent? And, conversely, not try to woo them, too?

There is no more discussion of the edible arrangement and room service cheese plate, however, until late the next day. I am in Macy’s in Union Square, waiting for Shiloh to purchase deadly stilettos and a red coat. I call the man who has been the subject of so much feminine analysis.

After some chatting, I remark that the girls and I will be returning to the hotel soon to eat the remainder of yesterday’s cheese plate.

“Wait a minute. What did you say?” he asks.

“The chocolate-covered strawberries and cheese plate you had delivered to our room late last night,” I say.

“What?” He is a little perplexed. “That was supposed to have been delivered tonight.”

I am overcome with relief at these words. I make haste of our conversation and run to Sarah’s side. “Guess what?! The room service was supposed to come tonight. It was a mistake!”

Her face lights up. “Thank God!” she says. “Two deliveries in one day is too much, too much like a cat pissing on his territory.  This is excellent news.”

We share this latest tidbit with Shiloh, who also shows great relief.

And then Sarah says, “We really need to call room service and complain.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because you might have ended the relationship over this,” she explains. “Remember last night how we were analyzing?  Thinking he was too intense?  Wondering if he didn’t have a screw or two loose in showering you with so much attention in one day?”

“Yes,” I agree, “we did take it rather far.”

“But then it’s also disturbing how much we can read into a cheese plate,” Sarah adds.

“I think we should get a complimentary cheese plate in restitution for the error,” Shiloh suggests.

We all nod, and when we get back to the hotel room, Shiloh takes charge of the situation, calls room service, explains the near-relationship-ending error they have made, and receives a response from the maitre de of “Oh, yes that was shitty of us.”

Half an hour later, we have a new cheese plate along with complimentary spring water. “The berries will be coming later,” says the waiter. “We have to heat up the chocolate. So sorry.”

Even the waiter knows not to mess with a room full of tittering females bent on analysis of male motives. Though in our heart of hearts we also know that to a man, a cheese plate is a cheese plate, and a chocolate-dipped strawberry is just something you give to a woman you love…and her girlfriends you are trying to charm.

True Love…and Why I Think Mark Twain Never Knew It

One of Mark Twain’s most famous and often quoted lines is “Familiarity breeds contempt…and children.” How well many of us identify with this quip, especially the first part, which actually isn’t exactly funny. Only last week, I was chatting with a colleague who said, “I’ve been married 40 years, and I’m just grateful my wife still speaks to me.”

I suspect many of us who are married (or have been) have asked ourselves if this is just the way things are. We marry, as a friend of mine says he did, as a result of drinking too much alcohol (wife no.1) or “a momentary lapse of reason” (wife no. 2) and hope for the best, thinking if we get lucky our lives might look a little something like a fairytale.

Cautionary fable might be more like it, however.

A friend of mine told me the other night after I found my brain rattled by yet another run-in with love gone awry, “Your life reads like a movie.”  The comment was uttered partly in admiration and partly in an “it’s entertaining to hear about, but I sure wouldn’t want to live it” manner of speaking. You see, I’ve been proposed to six times. That I turned down four of those offers would make me appear wise. The problem is I accepted two. I only wish I had the excuse that I was drunk at the time.

I’m not sure marriage is the problem though.  My friends and I often talk about the poisonous metals present in wedding rings that make the wearer turn into a creature no longer recognizable—a beast who has become demanding, critical, resentful, and likely to take advantage of all his or her partner’s weaknesses. I do not necessarily excuse myself from having been poisoned by 14 karat gold rings. Maybe next time I’ll try platinum.

My ex-husband says marriage sets up expectations where there were none before, and that’s the downfall of us all.

I have to disagree (no surprise there—the poisonous wedding band metals are likely still in my system).

I’m not exactly a hopeless romantic either. I’ve never subscribed to the idea of “soul mates.” I remain unconvinced there is one man out there destined to fulfill all of my romantic desires. That being said, however, I do believe in true love.

What is true love?

Well, I’ll tell you…it’s certainly not what you think.  It’s not love at first sight.  It’s not the passion you feel when the devastatingly handsome man with the sparkly brown eyes kisses you for the first time. It’s not the chest flutters you get when you think of him.  All of that, my dears, is infatuation. And infatuation is fleeting.  Even love is fleeting.

But true love: that is something else entirely, and I guarantee it is not something the father of American colloquial letters ever experienced.

How do I know?

I know because familiarity makes true love grow.  Whereas the love most of us experience and marry into begins as a bright flame that gradually sputters and often even goes out completely, true love can begin tentatively (though not always) and then widens and deepens with time and familiarity.

It does not retreat over time. It builds.

I’ve heard psychologists say the average person experiences true love only once a lifetime, twice if he or she is lucky.  Those statistics are pretty sad. It means when you find it (if you’re smart enough to recognize it and, even more importantly, nurture it) you better damn well hang onto it.

Unfortunately, most of us never find it, or, if we do, we kill it as promptly as we can or maybe even deter it from growing in the first place. That’s because true love is scary as hell.

I should know. I’ve experienced it at least once, a fact which terrifies me to no small degree at the tender age of 37 given that true love experience number one didn’t work out so well. If psychologists are to be believed, I’m on my last chance at this gig.

I had my first experience of true love quite accidentally.  It was one of those “I have nothing to lose” relationships I thought would never last that makes one go full out on vulnerability, risk, and “reckless honesty,” as fellow contributor Susannah Herrada likes to call it. The interesting side effect of throwing all caution to wind is that it connects you with another human being on levels the average romantic relationship never experiences.

I have frequently tried to explain this to people who have never experienced it, and usually, at best, I receive blank looks.  Other times, I find my sanity questioned.  So I’ll make an effort here to tell you what I’m talking about, to tell you what true love looks like.  Maybe you’ve seen it, experienced it. Maybe it’s right there in front of you waiting to happen if only you will let go of all your inhibitions, fears, and resentments.

You know you have a case of true love on your hands, friends, when you not only experience all the usual characteristics of love (or infatuation) like persistent thinking about that beautiful man with the sky blue eyes and persistent longing for him but also the ability to feel that persistent longing (and find it deepening) with time.  And I don’t mean the growth of infatuation over a few months. I mean that two or three years into the relationship you love that person more than you did after six months’ acquaintance, and you find that love deepening with each passing day.  It’s that rare kind of love you might see once in a blue moon when a couple who has been married 50 years is still holding hands and kissing on the front porch at sunset.

Where true love is concerned, you not only love your beloved’s finest qualities but you love his weaknesses, too.  You don’t just accept those weaknesses, you love them.  And you long to protect them, not use them to manipulate and harm.  This is a person whose eyes you can gaze into for hours, maybe days, without boredom.  And again, you still feel this desire after years and years.  There is nothing he can do to deter you from loving him. You may feel anger against him, but it does not diminish your love, no matter how much you may wish it would.

You see, true love is not all wine and roses. In fact, it can hurt to the core, even when it is good. Because when you love someone to the depth that you reveal all of yourself, every last shred of your vulnerability, you make that person a part of you. It’s not living on tenterhooks, mind you. True love is a deeply secure feeling, but it is deeply painful when the beloved is outside your reach. It is the kind of love Pablo Neruda describes in Sonnet XVII when he says it is a love “where I does not exist, nor you / so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, / so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.”

True love is the kind of love that risks all without hesitation.  It says, “I trust you. Take all that I have, and I lose nothing.”

But before you jump up and raise your hand, and say, “Yes! Yes! I’ve seen that! I’ve known that!” examine your love.  I once loved a man so deeply and fully and accepted and adored all that he was, even the qualities others saw as liabilities, that I offered, if need be, to sacrifice all that I knew to occupy a space beside him till death.  I waited for him “like a lonely house,” windows aching, and when he would not come of his own volition, I gave him a hard shove, an ultimatum.

And still he would not take that final leap into space that says, “I will expend the last full measure of my devotion for love of you.”

I found myself facing the hard reality that I felt true love for him, but he did not feel it for me. As a friend of mine once said to me, “Real love does not need shoving.”

The object of my affection, you see, had given doubt a foothold and allowed it to fester until he was overcome with fear, as most of us are, of giving way to full-on vulnerability, the vulnerability that says “be willing to give up all that you know to get something better.”

It’s the same kind of fear, you see, that makes people miserable in their jobs fail to leave them to start the business they’ve always dreamed of owning or that prevents a grand move to another continent when a delightfully tantalizing (if frightening) opportunity beckons.

You have to give up to get. It is a law of nature. Death of one thing is necessary to create life in another.

You may be wondering how I have fared in this grand scheme of true love gone awry.  Well, I can say I have fared better than the man who let me go.  At least I will never need ask “what if?”  I threw my heart into the ring and risked its pulverization, found it pulverized, in fact.  And when the dust had settled, I picked up the pieces, poured them into my pocket, and set about the long, slow process of putting them all back together for round two.

Because yes, there will be a round 2.

That is how life goes.  The lessons keep coming until we learn them.

I often wonder if the man I believed to be the love of my life will ever learn his own. In the aftermath of the end of that relationship, he said to me, “I am a fool.  I will regret this all my life.”

It may be so.

But only if when his round 2 comes, he commits the same error a second time.

I wish I knew the secret to finding true love. I still am not certain if it requires a certain mix of two people.  I am not certain if you can have it with one person but not another. I do know, however, that it’s worth trying on for size.  That person who is in your life right now, that sometimes makes your heart skip a beat, consider taking the frightening risk of being real with him and see where it leads.

Because one thing I do know is that you will never find true love by being anything other than who you are and loving someone else for any other reason than that he is being exactly the same—the person he is and wants to be.

 

 

The Case for Honesty: When It’s Time to Stop Keeping Up with the Joneses

It was almost like I was meant to read Mel Robbins’ column in the August issue of SUCCESS magazine. It was the night before my (ex)husband and I were to finally sign the separation agreement that would formally end our association as husband and wife and dissolve any claims we might have on one another. It was 11 p.m. I picked up the magazine there on the ottoman, flipped through it, and landed on Robbins’ essay, “Fight For Your Happiness.”

I wouldn’t say I needed to read Robbins’ column that night. My days and nights of soul searching were long passed. In fact, they had passed a good six months before I even asked my husband for a divorce. But her essay verified for me what few people, particularly unhappily married ones, are willing to acknowledge—that holding a doomed relationship together for the sake of the kids is…well…perhaps among the worst things you could do to your children.

I wasn’t having any cold feet, mind you. But sometimes it helps to know you’re not a lone wolf in the wilderness. In her column, Robbins talks about a close friend who decided to leave her marriage of 23 years. The friend’s announcement came as a shock. As Robbins points out, the couple had highly successful careers, three children, a beautiful home, took fantastic vacations together, and had lots of money. Their life was perfect…or, as is so often the case, it appeared so.

Robbins notes of her friend, “Inside, Lisa felt miserable. She and her husband had become roommates—they hadn’t touched one another in years. She laughed less and less. She gained 30 pounds.” The only thing they had left in common, Robbins says, was their three children.

So the two decided to divorce, and their kids said, “Now everything makes sense.”

What struck me about “Lisa’s story” was how similar it was to my own and how similar it is to that of so many people I care about. While some might read Robbins’ essay, which encourages readers to make the hard changes that ultimately lead to joy, as a call to action, I read it as a cry for honesty.

We may laugh about the old adage of “keeping up with the Joneses.” But most of us do it even as we recognize we’re doing it. The big question here is: WHY?

I’m not sure I have the answer. I’m no better than the average–I probably hung onto my marriage years longer than I should have. I recognized it was moving onto the rocks even before my daughter was born, and there’s nothing like bringing a child into the world to make a rocky coast even more treacherous. I’ll never forget our first Thanksgiving after Heidi’s birth. She was two months old, and my best friend, who was single at the time, joined us for the holiday. After we’d cleaned up dishes from the noon meal, she said to me, “I want to have a happy little family just like yours, Debbie.”

Full in the throes of postpartum depression, a newborn on my hip, my business running at full throttle, and my active duty Navy husband rarely in the picture, I was floored by her statement. I was at one of the lowest lows in my life.

I failed to notice, however, that to anyone on the outside looking in, my life looked grand. A year earlier, I had completed construction of my dream house following marriage to my high school sweetheart. My business was growing by leaps and bounds, gross income doubling every year. Things were so good, in fact, that eight months after Heidi’s birth, her dad retired from the military, and we lived secure in the fact that we could more than manage on one income. To celebrate his retirement and the newfound freedom of our lives, he and I left Heidi with the grandparents for three weeks and went on a luxurious nearly month-long vacation—a week in the Florida Keys, a week in the Caribbean, and a week lounging around on Sanibel Island. We would follow that up two years later with a trip through Northern Europe, and every October, we rented a house on the northern Outer Banks for a week in celebration of Heidi’s birthday.

This was life at its very best, yes?

Hardly.

As is so often the case, what is visible on the surface is hardly indicative of what lies beneath. Behind all the smiling photographs of a perfect family life, things were not so wonderful. Today I look at professional photographs from the Christmas after Heidi turned two and am amazed at the happy expressions on my face…on my husband’s face. As I finished dressing into black velvet for the occasion, he told me he wasn’t going to participate in the photo shoot because it was a farce. And he was right. It was. He and I were no more in love at that point than a cow is happy to eat a patch of crown vetch. But I finally convinced him to play the game. The result? Falsely blissful Christmas photos for posterity.

If this sounds familiar, just wait. It gets better.

When I complained, about two years after Heidi’s birth, about the wreck of my marriage to a close friend, she puzzled over what to do. She believed, the child of divorced parents herself, that maintaining the family unit was critical. After a few moments of consideration, she said, “Have you considered having an affair?”

Had it indeed come to this?

Yes, it had. And I spent the next two years of my life trying to decide if I was doing my daughter any favors by maintaining a marriage with a man I no longer loved.

Because what I had to consider was whether or not it made a difference if my husband and I rarely showed affection in front of Heidi, whether or not it mattered if family dinners were typically strained and difficult, whether or not my daughter would adopt all of this lack of intimacy and tenderness between her parents as a confirmation of its “normalcy.” Did I want her to grow up and settle? To say to herself “Well, I guess this is how love is; I guess this is what marriage looks like.”

Was it going to benefit my daughter for me to “fake it” with her dad for the next 12 to 15 years?

I ultimately decided the answer to that question was a resounding “no.”

I had decided that the best things I could give my daughter were my honesty and my happiness. And if I gave her those two things, it would likely also increase my chances of finding love that was real…because I was about to be real, to stop the charade of the perfect life I’d been carrying on, well, since early adulthood at least.

And what does real love look like? Well, as a friend of mine said recently, “Real love sure as hell isn’t something you can clock in or clock out of.”

Yet that’s exactly what my ex and I had done. And it’s what thousands of other couples do every day, denying each other intimacy because it’s inconvenient, because they’re busy, because they’re hurting and don’t want to hurt anymore, because they’re afraid. So they give and receive love when it’s comfortable and deny its dispensation and acceptance when it’s not. And eventually, love is gone completely…if it ever really existed in the first place…because it has lived like a houseplant that everyone keeps forgetting to water regularly.

And when a relationship reaches that point of dryness and wilt, it’s typically very hard to save.

But that doesn’t mean one has to give up and settle for a life that looks perfect but sure as hell isn’t. As “Lisa” discovered, you can always choose happiness. And you might even find yourself surprised by how that choice our culture so often deems selfish (probably because so much of the culture lives with its absence and so must justify it) changes not only you…but the people you love.

The same friend who cautioned me against the dangers of “clocking in and clocking out” on love has had no easy ride in this life, but, as Robbins noted in her essay, happiness is not always the easiest choice to make. Sometimes you have to fight for it. My friend did, and he lives by his own special creed on this one: “If I have lived my life without happiness, I have lived it in vain.”

The Dysfunctional Family Holiday…And Why You Should Dump It

As I write this, people everywhere are suffering. Even among my small circle of acquaintance, the trouble is great. One of my colleagues is watching his life partner, who was first diagnosed with breast cancer, now struggle with cancer in her bones, lungs, liver, and abdominal cavity. Another friend is watching an old school friend fight for his life to recover from cardiac surgery. Meanwhile a dear friend’s boss and his wife try to cope with the loss of a child, and one of my clients is about to see her husband go into surgery tomorrow to remove a cancerous tumor from his kidney.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

My oldest and dearest friend and I talk almost daily about the trouble in this world, how a day does not seem to go by where someone we know and care about is not struggling. And we talk, too, about why life has to be this way, why it seems to get more and more heartbreaking the older we get.

We are in our mid-30s, part of that unenviable “sandwich” generation, caring for young children, caring for ailing, aging parents, watching our friends and acquaintances struggle with their first signs of the onset of deteriorating bodies and lives. Illness, death, infidelity, divorce, births, neuroses—we are watching it all like a grand drama here in our own lives.

It is hard sometimes not to feel hopeless.

“I think it’s only going to get worse,” Sarah confides to me one night.

“I think you’re right,” I agree, realizing that despite everything we’ve been led to believe, life does not get easier with age and wisdom.

When she tells me about one of her friends who just lost her mother and sister in the last year, then struggled with her husband being in the ICU on the brink of death for weeks, only to lose a son in a car accident shortly after her husband came home, I tell her, “She should write a book.”

“About what?” Sarah asks.

“About how she has survived it,” I reply, thinking I would surely drive my car into a tree if so much tragedy befell me at once.

“Her women friends,” Sarah tells me. “That’s how she says she has gotten through.”

It might strike some people as odd that the woman did not say her family had pulled her through, so enamored are we as a culture with the idea that families are the be all and end all of existence. But that, as I and many of my women friends know, is, more often than not, a tragic myth.

Years ago, a couple I knew lost a son who was in the military. Always the loving pair with a big happy family (they had three other children) to outside eyes, this death tore them to pieces. One grieved with tears and talking; the other withdrew. They did not understand one another. Their more than two-decade old marriage dissolved within the year.

Why do families so often fail at love in the most critical of times?

It is a question to which I do not have the answer, though I have seen it often in my own life and in the lives of the people I love most dearly in this world.

Mark Twain once quipped that “familiarity breeds contempt,” and that may be true to some degree. But perhaps the greater truth is that the loving family that stands by us through thick and thin is as much a myth as Prince Charming and “happily ever after.” Yet we buy into it nevertheless, wondering what is wrong with us when our spouses, children, parents, aunts and uncles don’t provide the succor we need in times of crisis.

An acquaintance mentioned to me recently how his parents had this grand idea of having a summer family get-together where everyone stayed in a rented vacation house for a week—parents, kids, grandparents, sisters, brothers…everyone. “They think it’s going to be some big happy family,” he remarked. “But it’s never been that way, and it won’t be this time either. That’s just not how we roll.”

I don’t know if it’s how anyone rolls, to be quite honest.

We don’t choose our families, not really. We may get to choose our spouses, but most of us are so young and stupid when we do that that we might as well be picking out the cutest puppy at the pet shop on a whim of temporary adoration. It’s difficult to ask people whom we have not chosen and who have not chosen us to give us their all. Maybe they don’t like us. Maybe we don’t like them.

The old saying goes, “Blood is thicker than water.” I don’t know if that’s true. When one of my friends tells me my mother is crazy, I reply, “Yep, you’re right.”

And then I thank heaven for my friends. If I had to rely on my family to get me through the tough times, I’d be in dire shape.

Ironically though, it is with our disgruntled families that most of us spend our precious free hours—our vacations, holidays, birthdays. What should be the happiest days of our lives are peppered with disappointment, disillusionment, and sometimes even verbal brawls because we try to impose our vision of “the family” onto a group of people who maybe really don’t have a damn thing in common other than a blood line.

I know a handful of people who have made a stand against the drama. One couple I know who found each other late in life skip the family drama entirely for the holidays and have all their close friends over for Christmas dinner instead. I also have some friends that hold a “dysfunctional Thanksgiving”—a gathering of friends who have eschewed their relatives for this iconic American holiday.

I’ve decided it’s high time I do the same. This year I’m skipping Christmas. I have a long history of dysfunctional holidays that I’ve decided it’s high time I put in the past. From relatives who get into tear-inducing fights post-Christmas dinner to stressed out women who cook and bake for days out of obligation instead of love, I’m fed up. I’m taking my daughter to Disney World. And given my low tolerance for mass consumerism and waist-high people, it’s a grand testament to just how fed up I am.

Maybe one day when all the relatives who drive us crazy are gone and we’ve all divorced and remarried to people we actually like, my friends and I will join together for holidays we can actually enjoy among families we have chosen. Until then, do not be surprised to find me on a beach halfway across the world come Christmas and New Year’s…with no blood relative in sight, save perhaps my daughter.

Because life is too short to spend it being miserable among people who no more want to be with us than we want to be with them.

Why I Write This Blog…and the Audience I Never Expected

Yesterday morning when I was engaging in my more conventional role as serious journalist, interviewing a horticultural research scientist for an article in The Progressive Farmer, I was surprised when my source ended our conversation with the comment, “I looked you up, by the way, and read your blog. I think it’s great. I’m going to tell my wife to read it.”

A year ago, this comment would have surprised me. After all, if you’ve read “The Scoop,” you know I started this blog as something of a testimony on behalf of women who have it all, or thought they did, and have discovered that the life they strived for isn’t always everything it’s cracked up to be. I and my contributors have always written with that strong-willed but sometimes brokenhearted female audience in mind.

But here’s the sticking point: half my followers are male. And they are more likely to respond to my commentary than women. Even more intriguing—I’ve never had a one respond with disgust or anger.

This seems to fly in the face of the warning I received from my ex-husband once he became one of the many followers of my blog, perhaps interested to know the woman he never knew when married. “You know,” he told me one day last winter, “that blog of yours is honest and funny, but you’re never going to get a date again.”

He wasn’t quite right about that, though the blog has proved to be an excellent filter. Let’s just say it very quickly separates the men from the boys. And it would seem there are an awful lot of “boys” out there, but I don’t think too many of them are following my blog.

The men who find themselves strangely glued to the electronic pages of “I Only Love You Because I Have To” send me e-mails or call me on the phone (if they happen to be friends, acquaintances, or colleagues) and say things like this:

“I’m so glad I read your post about Valentine’s gifts. I was almost going to ask my wife to get me Bose noise-cancelling headphone for my birthday. Thank heaven I didn’t.”

“I have passed your blog address along to my daughters. I think they really need to read this.”

“Um, I just need to tell you, Deborah, that the reason I don’t help my wife with the housework is because I get tired of being told how I never do it right.”

“I love your blog. It’s like being a fly on the wall inside the female brain!”

And then there is the husband of one of my girlfriends who tells me, “I read it all the time, so I will know exactly what I’m doing wrong.”

This male audience was not something I expected at all. In fact, I tended to think early on that perhaps my ex was right—that men would interpret my posts as a rant against their gender, the disgruntled ravings of a disappointed female. I have been pleasantly surprised, however, to learn that for once in my more than a decade of column writing, the audience is not misinterpreting.

I really like men. They wouldn’t frustrate me so darn much if I didn’t. I’d just give up and become a lesbian. (And um, yes, I know women who have done this.) And heaven knows, there are days when my girlfriends and I lament our sexual orientation, wishing we could find a way to be attracted to women so we could live out our lives in the blissful company of someone who gets us.

Unfortunately, however, for the myriad ways in which our husbands, lovers, and boyfriends drive us to distraction, we still cannot get enough of them. We keep going back for more—junkies for disillusionment that we are. Or maybe it’s the drama. I have often wondered what on earth we women would talk about were it not for men. They dominate all of our conversations with one another.

If men knew the degree to which women analyze them, discuss them, dissect their actions and words in the company of other “researchers,” they might never have a thing to do with us. And, in reality, some of them don’t. I have known plenty of men, personally and through friends, who depart before the drama of the female brain has time to set things in motion. They play Lothario up until that first night in a woman’s arms, and then they promptly hit the road and move onto the next specimen before the last has a chance to know what hit her.

But there are those who hang on through it all, looking a little sheepish at times when they accidentally walk in on a gathering of women. Like last night in my all-female dance class when the studio owner’s husband walked in unbeknownst to us as we were gathered in a little circle, not dancing but talking, of course, about men. When I happened to turn around and saw him there, I almost squealed, “You didn’t hear us, did you?”

“Oh, no, I didn’t hear anything,” he said, looking to the side, looking to the floor, and then quickly grabbing whatever it was he wanted and heading for the door again post haste.

Yet an hour earlier this very same man, the moment he had pulled into the dance studio parking lot when we were all gathered around our cars, wondering why the assistant dance instructor’s vehicle smelled of toasted brakes, was only a little alarmed when we pounced on him and said, “There’s something wrong with Ashley’s car. Can you look at it?”

Surrounded by women with expectant faces, what was the poor man to do? It is a moment every male dreads—far worse than having a wife who expects him to know every intricacy of engine repair just because he has testosterone is a gaggle of women expecting the same. “You’re a man,” Ashley blurted out, “so we figured you might know what was wrong with it.”

He handled it with impressive grace, however, kneeling down to look at each wheel, then announcing the car in question seemed to be bereft of brake pads, in the back of his mind no doubt wondering why estrogen makes women overlook details like basic car maintenance.

For a brief moment, he looked a bit heroic, not because he successfully passed the test of identifying the problem with Ashley’s car but because he didn’t bat an eye when surrounded by tittering females placing demands on him. And his wife wasn’t even around. He chose to be gallant because these were his wife’s friends. His actions reminded each of us that men have their moments, those endearing spaces where we cannot help but like them an awful lot, inexplicable though they may seem to us 90 percent of the rest of the time.

So while I did indeed profess to write this blog for women, the other audience I have gained is one I’m glad to have. Because as anyone who has read my posts with care can probably see, I am not angry at men, despite the personal trials I have had with some of their number. If anything makes me angry, it is perhaps the lack of willingness on the part of both sexes in far too many cases not to try to understand one another or, at the very least, stop misinterpreting so willfully.

The next time you find yourself in crisis, ladies, and your husband is offering you countless solutions to make things right while you feel invalidated and ignored because you are crying and all you want is for him to say, “This is the most horrible thing ever; let me hold you while you cry,” try to remember that Mr. Fix-It is expressing his love in the only way he knows how. At least the only way he knows how without your guidance. Either guide him to what you need or forgive him for giving the only thing he knows how to give.

And gentlemen, the next time you find yourself about to take flight because your girlfriend is crying, and you feel your inability to make her stop crying is going to emasculate you and strip you of your confidence in being able to make things right, see if you can’t take a moment to put your arms around her and just be there, the way she would be for you if you would let her, and trust that you are doing exactly the right thing to be heroic.

The Five Types of Dates…And When It’s Time to Shop Elsewhere

Earlier this week a married friend and I were discussing online dating or perhaps I should say “profiling.” She was remarking on how many friends she and her husband had tried to assist in making profiles that might actually get them noticed, including not posting that picture with the chubby arm or noting that one’s favorite pastime is drinking beer.

Not that she was advocating for dishonesty, mind you. But perhaps you should let the guy see the chubby arm after he’s smitten enough with you that he thinks your triceps look like Michelle Obama’s or let the girl know how much you like beer after she’s discovered it’s not accompanied by nightly, obsessive football watching.

But apart from the apparent trickiness of creating just the right profile is weeding through the profiles of all those guys who want to take you out (precisely because you kept your jiggly triceps to yourself when so many others didn’t). Thus, with the careful input of my friends, I’ve come up with a basic dating guide for women that will hopefully help you weed out the studs from the duds before you waste precious hours of your life dating a guy who kisses you as if he’s probing for a gold tooth:

The Egoist: He’s not always easy to spot on first glance, though he’s invariably immaculately dressed, drives a luxury car, and will send you lots of pictures of himself without any prompting or acknowledgement from you that you really care to see them. (He might even send you a few of his car.) He just assumes you’re into him because, after all, how could you not be? He’s smart, handsome, funny, and maybe even rich. He is convinced that the only thing he needs to complete his persona is an equally smart, funny, and beautiful woman. This is the type of man who wants “a complicated woman without complications,” as a good friend of mine describes it. Of course, no such thing exists, and once he discovers this, he bolts. Another thing that will send him packing faster than you can say “no, I’m not having sex with you tonight” is your questioning of his arguments or your failure to be enamored with his intelligence.

What to do with this guy: Ditch him as fast you can. I don’t care how handsome he is or if he pays for dinner every time you go out. The kind of woman he really wants is one who salivates over him constantly and believes he is always right. And unless you’re willing to play the exhausting game of suppressing your thoughts when they don’t agree with his, this will be a highly unsatisfying relationship. Not to mention the fact that he’s likely so self-absorbed, he is sadly clueless on how to kiss a woman in a way that will make her want to see him again anyway.

The Hobbyist: This guy is a hopeless romantic and obviously so from the get-go in most cases. He never tires of you, is the only date type who will look you in the eye for more than five seconds at a time, and who tells you how stunningly beautiful you are on the first date. He’s so into you that it sometimes sends the red flags up, so much has the coolness of most men trained us to believe that anyone who seems to adore us must be crazy. He will call you just as he says, will never stand you up, and will even go a little berserk if he goes too long without hearing from you. You have become, as another friend of mine explains, “his newest hobby.” And the major plus here: he really, really knows how to kiss, among other things.

What to do with this guy: Sometimes it can be a little hard to tell “the hobbyist” from the “the stalker,” but give him a chance as long as he’s not staking out your workplace. See if you can’t let your cynical mind adjust to the idea that maybe you actually are worthy of some serious admiration. Because this rare type is the only one who is not going to leave you guessing 24/7. He’s far too honest and romantic to play games. And he’s probably the only one of the five types of dates who won’t be scared off if you talk to him the way you do your girlfriends.

The Quiet Man: This is the toughest date you will ever go on. He may smile a lot and be enjoying every minute of looking at your lovely face, but he doesn’t say a word, at least not unless you ask him a question. And then his answer is likely cursory. He’s just not the chatting type, and talking about himself to a complete stranger makes him nervous as hell, all the more if the stranger is beautiful. He would actually be quite content to just walk quietly with you along the beach or sit with your hand in his in the movie theater, and while that may not sound so bad, keep in mind his quiet nature probably extends into the bedroom, too. He’s unlikely to be very assertive: translation—conventional and dull.

What to do with this guy: Before you dismiss the “Quiet Man” as hopeless, recognize that he can be trained. It is possible to make him open up and lose his inhibitions, but you have to be willing to invest some major time. If you’re patient, giving, and willing to ease him into intimacy gently, you could help this guy find his inner “hobbyist.”

The Joker: No doubt about it, this one can be loads of fun. He makes you laugh. He knows how to have a good time. And he seems pretty comfortable in his own skin. He’s also not usually threatened (at least not very much) by a woman who shares those qualities (unlike the “Egoist”). However, keep in mind that his fun-loving behavior could be covering up some feelings of inadequacy. He will be a tough nut to crack if you want him to whisper sweet nothings in your ear some day. That’s way outside his comfort zone. He’d rather just give you a laughing orgasm.

What to do with this guy: Again, patience is the order of the day here if you think he’s worth it. Enjoy his “hanging out with the guys” type of camaraderie, and recognize that this type, kind of like “the hobbyist,” is likely more willing to accept you as you are because, well, let’s face it, you’re pretty darn funny when you’re not trying to be perfect. He can be coaxed into a deeper level of interaction once you establish trust with him. How do you do that? Keep laughing at his jokes, but never laugh at those rare moments of soul baring.

Mr. Hopeless: This is the guy who is late to pick you up, fails to change into a clean shirt, and forgets to open the car door for you on the first date. He’s not really comfortable with himself; therefore, he’s not really comfortable with you either. And, on top of that, he has maybe two interests outside his job: one of which is playing Frisbee with his dog. These are the men that a friend of mine likes to advise “go to the library and read a book or take up roller skating. Just please do something to make yourself interesting.”

What to do with this guy: Unless you are suffering from low self-esteem yourself, run fast and hard. Dating this type can feel like pulling teeth on a whole different scale from that of the “Quiet Man.” No amount of questioning is going to get you to any depth here. Because even if he has depth, he’s not confident enough in himself to share it. And don’t worry, you won’t have to let him down easy. He’ll never call you. He’s too scared.