The Intelligence of Infatuation

You need to get over your addiction to falling in love – Dave Doolin
May you live in interesting times. – proverb/curse

Eros is in the mundane – Dave Doolin

Allow me to assemble a straw man.

Hallmark, Harlequin Romance et al, the Valentine’s Day cartel, Disney, most mainstream women’s magazines, almost all dating advice aimed at women, chick flicks, and the wedding industrial complex (this list is not exhaustive) conflate the blush and the rush of New Relationship Energy with the entire experience of romantic love.

Even so, infatuation does not get its due.

In fact, infatuation gets a bad rap.

My friend Ricardo – a deep, passionate, romantic Pisces – once told me he doesn’t “do” infatuation because infatuation is not real. When I’m in a new relationship, my friend Z despairs of me. I’ll say “do you want to hear what ____ did? Can I tell you about _____? And he’ll sigh and say “If you must”. And then he’ll make disparaging remarks, mock every sweet thing the new man might have said and conclude that my new dude is full of shit or a pussy (which I don’t actually find offensive because I think vaginas are MAGIC and a man should be so lucky as to be compared with one). Once, I got frustrated with him and heatedly asked him,

Why do you ALWAYS have to do that? Why can’t you let me enjoy the sweet and fleeting moment? Why can’t you be happy that someone is making me happy?
His answer?
  • Because we’re in a sex haze and we’re out of our damn minds.
  • Because we’ll wake up in four days, four weeks, four months or four years and wonder what the hell happened.
  • Because I’ll get lured in by soft words and hard lovin’, suspend my disbelief and my romantic judgement, and get fucked over. Again. And then in addition to this mushy bullshit he’ll have to hear about the heartbreak,  too.
  • Because what I’m feeling is not real. Infatuation is not real.

Infatuation is chemistry, chemicals, biochemicals.

Doesn’t that make it more real?

Scientists tell us infatuation is oxytocin and dopamine and therefore simulated, stimulated, induced and ruthlessly temporary, as though “temporary” is a synonym for “illusion” or “delusion”.

(A note on induced experiences: saying that because infatuation is chemically induced, it isn’t real is like saying induced labour and birth isn’t real, either. Trust me. Induced labour is agonizingly real.)

Still, the needle amongst this stack ‘o hay is this: the effect of infatuation inevitably wears off. And if we think that infatuation is the entire experience of love, then when (no if, it is absolutely a when) we lose it, we feel – nay, know – that we’ve fallen out of love. And we want love. Lots of love. We’re jonesing for it. So, like good addicts, we’ll be driven to abandon our families and our lives to go out and chase that high.

The function, then, of anti-infatuation arguments is to convince us to stay the course. To convince us that infatuation isn’t the prize, the stuff that comes after it is. To convince us to be patient. (And, arguably, not a lot of us are being taught or teaching patience. I’m short of it and need schooling and I’m convinced most of the modern world does, too.)

Denigrating infatuation doesn’t do that, though. Telling me infatuation isn’t real – when I know, viscerally, in my blood, that I’m feeling something – is futile. My body knows the truth.

Instead, giving infatuation its due might be the solution.

There’s research that says the way we tell our love stories tells us the state of our relationship today and the future of our relationship tomorrow.

When my friend Heather told me about how she and her husband started out – long distance, e-mails, endless phone calls – she felt the butterflies. She re- read their e-mails and was feeling sweet on her man. She was remembering the halcyon days, and it helped her handle some of the daily irritants – and yes, that is love. Dave’s right: eros is in the mundane.

And infatuation is the bonding agent that gets us there. The evanescent thrill of infatuations is insurance against boring. And boring is thankfully inevitable.

Because interesting relationships, like interesting times, are exhausting.

Back to our straw man. Let’s not forget that all along, with every step on the yellow brick road, the seemingly empty-headed scarecrow did have a brain.

And infatuation has an intelligence, too. It’s brief, it’s primal, it’s butterflies, it’s bliss. It’s lizard-brain logic and it’s useful because the memory of your shared bliss gives you and your lover the wings you need to soar on through boring and interesting times.

August 10, 2010 | filed under: Love

14 people have we need you too.

Choice. Commitment. Freedom. Cats. ARRRR Matey.

“Learn to go through one door and many others will open for you; try to go through five doors at once and you’ll go nowhere.” – C. Andrew Ramsey, M.D., a psychiatry professor at Columbia University

Ahem. It has recently been drawn to my attention that my moaning, bemoaning and *bitching* (let’s be honest) about men and commitment is a form of projection.

The men in my life aren’t commitment-phobic.

I am.

Ooops.

Sorry, guys.

———–

Here’s how it goes down:

I start dating a guy. I get a little starry-eyed over him which means I get a lot scared. So I shit-test him (thanks, Seduction Community for the lingo): Does he have my back? Will he run when things get scary? How can I freak him out to find out how reliable he is?

I know! I’ll talk about marriage and babies!!!

And it works *almost* every time.

ALMOST inevitably the dude thinks I’m too much, too soon and retreats/disappears for period of time spanning somewhere between three weeks and three months (two outliers: eight years and nine years each).

But wait! There’s more!

Almost as inevitably as the hasty retreat is the advance. After three weeks/months, he comes back and says, Ok. I’m all in. It’s all on the table. Love, marriage, babies. House in the suburbs. White picket fence. I’ll paint it for you, baby.

But by that time, I’ve got a new dude, so I smile regretfully (and smugly – because I KNEW I WAS THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO YOU!!!) and make noises about ‘timing’.

And then I turn and look at my new dude with narrow and skeptical eyes and think, WTF? The other guy wants to marry me and you can’t decide if you’re in or out?! Get in or get out! I WANT BABIES, NEW DUDE!

And he runs away for three weeks to three months, realizes the error of his ways, comes back…

and wash, rinse, repeat.

So I use commitment as my shit-test to avoid commitment.

Because I am the one who is scared.

————-

Some maybe-scary stuff:

Maybe I don’t want the white picket fence. (But I do want the baby). Maybe I don’t want the conventional suburban marriage. (But I do want the lasting love). Maybe I don’t want the house. Maybe I want to live a little more nomadically. Maybe I don’t know how to get the life and partner I want because it is so far from the map I’ve been trained to read and follow. Maybe I don’t want a relation-ship. Maybe I want a pirate ship.

———-
It isn’t that I’m afraid to choose a partner. I am oh-so-capable of being fiercely loyal and loving.

It isn’t that I’m afraid of committing to someone I love.

It isn’t that I’m afraid of losing my freedom. I don’t think that choosing one path is a loss of freedom. I think walking it IS freedom.

It is that I’m afraid that by choosing and committing to a partner that I will have to live the life I’ve already rejected.

It is that I’m afraid that the kind of love, family and life that I want is so far removed from suburban reality that it might not be possible. And so I’ll die alone with cats.

And cats do bad things to furniture and I like my upholstery on the unshredded side.

———

The problem with choice, commitment and freedom is that we’ve framed them up so that an abundance of choice is freedom, commitment involves choosing to winnow down the choices available to you, and therefore commitment to a particular path or person or choice equals a loss of freedom.

And that’s crap.

An abundance of choice is the mirage of freedom.

We think we can do anything and so, dazzled by an array of crazysexycool opportunities, do nothing at all.

Freedom is not a buffet of opportunity.

Freedom is the ability to choose and live your choice.

Think about the opposite of freedom.

Slavery.

In slavery, you are not able to choose or live your choice. You’re not able to decide your destiny, create it, live it.

It isn’t necessarily the absence of choice that defines a lack of freedom – though that’s certainly a huge part of it – it is the absolute foreclosure of the ability to LIVE your choice.

In our society, going to university is an option. We think everyone’s got it.

So yay! I can go to university! The option is there! I can see the campus!

But…

  • if I can’t afford to go
  • if no one in my family or community shows me what that looks like
  • if the culture of the university is alien to me
  • if a million things in my day-to-day reality mean that I cannot realize a university education

then that option is meaningless. There’s no freedom there.

Freedom is the capacity to turn your option into a choice and live it.

Freedom is making the choice real. It is choosing. It is narrowing the options down and living with and through the one you choose. Freedom is a privilege and that privilege is commitment.

Come what may. Hell or high water or himalayan kittens. Spectre of death-by-cats-and-pirates and all.

—————-

PS – Speaking of pirates and pirate ships, this is my house key. Symbolic, much?


June 23, 2010 | filed under: Love, Meaning

29 people have we need you too.

How to Get Unstuck, Part 3: You Have Everything You Need and All You Need is Love. And to Launch Something. hint hint.

The third part of getting unstuck is people.

Sometimes I have to pinch myself because my life is a reverie. My life is like a dream I dreamed when I dreamed of beautiful people.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever before had the kind of love and loyalty that I have in my life right now – and all I can say is thank God and thank Twitter and Thank God For Twitter.

There is a perception that Twitter is frivolous and we’re all talking about our last ham sandwich – and we are, and that’s ambient intimacy – but I have met incredible, inspired, talented, heartfelt and heart-full people on twitter.

People who’ve become my soul’s people, my sisterfriends, my brothers-in-arms, my mothers, my lovers, my compadres.

So I could wax lyrical about Twitter, but that’s not the point.

The point is that right now, and during the past year, every time I was stuck I have been overwhelmed by the visceral, tangible support of people who want to love me up (and do).

Just over a year ago, I had a new place, a newish job, and was newly single. Life was fine. I was going to work and taking care of my kids and running on that hamster wheel every day and it all meant…nothing.

So I started a blog and discovered another blog that rocked my world, and, dare I say it, changed my life.

Yeah, I’m talking about White Hot Truth with Danielle LaPorte. I read it obsessively. It lit me up. I learned things. I stayed motivated. This thing I was doing – writing, blogging, making meaning – seemed…

possible.

And so one fine day last June, I took a day off work and drove to Whistler for a firestarter. And on the winding highway on the way to Whistler I wrestled with my identity, my purpose, my practicality, my comfortable suburban life, and my bills. (As in: how is this cute thing I do – writing – gonna pay ‘em?)

Finally, forty-five minutes into the drive and thirty-six years into my life, I gave up the fight. I gave up the stuck.

I said, fuck it. I’m an artist.

And everything Danielle said in that firestarter was for me and everything in that firestarter affirmed that I must scrape back the bullshit and be faithful to my purpose. That I must be true to who I am.

An artist. A writer.

I got misty-eyed and emotional only moments into the session.

And when I got home, I found an e-mail from Danielle:

you are one talented writer. You’re hot shit and the Real Deal and you should be getting your ass published as widely as possible.

I cried my eyes out.

I needed that.

I needed that to keep going.

I kept going.

____________________

Now, almost a year later, writing is paying the bills. I still get stuck, though. I get stuck because I take too much on. I get stuck because I’m wed to what I should do rather than what I want to do. I get stuck because there’s something I want to offer and I’m scared to offer it. I get stuck because it is easier to start a piece or an essay or a book than it is to finish it.

And people – my mentors, peers, friends – are what un-stick me every time.

I wrote a piece about Dave Doolin last week – about how much his consulting, his website, and his book have helped me improve my blogging.

And then, a couple of days later, I wrote a piece about how I was stuck.

Within moments of posting that piece, I had a text message and then an e-mail from him. Minutes after that, we were on Skype talking to each other and he was totally in it to win it with me.

Dave and I had been making noises about writing a piece together but hadn’t actually done it…and that night Dave told me we were going to write that piece together, now.

So we did. We texted on Skype and wrote a post together using a shared Google doc. We wrote the piece from start to finish in forty-five minutes.

This was huge to me.

It was huge for three reasons.

First.
Something wasn’t quite right in my life – I was stuck – and here was my friend instantly, 100% in it with me, helping me muddle my way through it.

That kind of loyalty means everything. And this is why I love Twitter (and Dave) with an unholy passion: because I first talked to Dave on Twitter. Now he’s my friend and he’s got me when I’m stuck. Wow.

Second.
I’m not a team player (don’t tell anyone). I am a writer. I like to do things by myself. Also, I’m pretty book-smart, which means I’m still scarred from years of group-work in high school where well-meaning teachers matched me up with kids who saw me and saw an easy A. So my experience with group work (slow, and all on me) is why I don’t much care for collaborating.

Recently I’ve had people – really lovely, talented, compelling people, people I really do want to work with – approach me to collaborate on projects and I’ve turned them down simply because I thought I don’t like collaborating.

But writing this piece with Dave etched a new collaborative groove in my head. Usually it takes me two to three hours to write a piece; when we wrote together, it took forty-five minutes. It was fast and it was satisfying.

It was fast because as I was writing something, he was finishing another sentence, or editing a paragraph I had just written; or as he was writing something, I was inserting digressions into the middle of his paragraph or pulling the threads through the piece. The back-and-forth and the pace and the creation was rewarding.

So that was a clicky lightbulb moment: collaborating can feed the creative process instead of stalling it.

Third.
I was stuck last week because I had a number of pieces started and zero pieces finished. I was frustrated. I wasn’t crossing anything off my list. And the less I finished, the less I finished. Over and over. Not finishing was feeding and breeding more not finishing.

And Dave instinctively knew that what I needed to get moving, to get unstuck, was to finish something. Anything. Now.

And so we started – and finished – that piece, together.

And I was lightened. The whole week hadn’t been a waste, after all.

Good-bye, stuck. Thank you, Dave.
————————–

So that’s how Danielle LaPorte helped me get going, and keep going when I first started out, and how Dave Doolin helped me get going, and keep going, last week.

Your people will get you unstuck if you let them.
————————–
Which brings me to my Big Stuck.

For a while, I’ve had the feeling that what people want from me (and what I want to give them) is not Yet Another Boring E-book.

I’ve felt that what we need to do, together, is connect.

I’ve felt like what I have to offer is writing, and love. (And writing is just a channel through which love flows.)

I’ve wanted to offer classes and consultations about how to develop your unique writing voice, and how not to be a boring writer.

(Please, let’s not be boring bloggers. There’s so much competition for that. There’s none for being you.)

But…I Am A Copywriter. I should be doing that – not hanging out on Twitter all day and talking on Skype and answering questions by e-mail.

But that stuff – the answering questions, the helping, the loving – is what I love to do.

Recently I was telling my friend (insert mental air quotes around that, please) F that my best qualities are also my worst qualities. My best quality is that I’m a Lover which means I take care of the people around me. My worst quality is that I’m a Lover, which means I make other people’s missions my own, and sometimes more important than my own.

F said, maybe helping other people with their missions IS your mission.

Maybe he’s right. I thought the same thing just a week ago when I read Danielle LaPorte’s The FireStarter Sessions vook (video-book).

In The FireStarter Sessions, Danielle insists that you MUST do what you love. You must lead with your strengths. You must choose the things that light you up so that you can light the way for yourself, and for others.

I write and I love and even my writing is loving. The things that get me really excited are helping other people. When someone e-mails me and they have a question, or they need help, a close review, or advice, I’m all in. I’ll drop the things I should be doing to do that.

I can look at someone else’s writing and instantly, instinctively know if it needs sugar or salt or more heat. I know how to season it and cook it. I know which ingredients are missing, how to amp up the emotional contrast and tension, and what technical tricks – rhetoric, typography, poetic devices – will work.

I understand how to train your writing voice to sing. I love editing your pieces. I love talking to you about your writing and encouraging you to take risks – and I’ve done that quietly, informally, and freely for several writers and bloggers.

So that’s what I want to do, and what I’m going to do – and what the people around me have encouraged me to get unstuck enough to do.

So let’s do that.

Do you want to write more persuasive, emotional, meaningful pieces?
I’ll download to you everything I know about writing and teach you to do that.

Do you want to unlock your writing voice?
I’ve got the keys.

Do you want to know how to build (and make money from) a blog, all while juggling a job, family, and life?
I can show you how I re-framed every single obstacle in my life – full-time job, single mom, two kids under five, very little child-care or support, no money, no time – into an opportunity and out of those opportunities created a rapidly growing blog, new business and new life for myself.

Do you want to guest post for A-list blogs?
I can tell you how I did it so you can do it, too.

Do you want to blog better? Do you want to know what you’re doing right (and maybe what you’re doing wrong)?
Dave Doolin and I will review your blog – the art and the science of it – consult with you, construct a report for you, and tell you how to do it better.

And do you want it in a face-to-face class or do you want it on the phone?

Because baby, I can do it both ways.

—————–
How Not To Be a Boring Writer: The Workshop

Vancouver, Saturday July 17th, 25 spaces available, $50 per person
E-mail to reserve your space (or to organize additional dates! Hell yes, I’ll travel!)

Red Shoe Blogger

I review three of your pieces and then we work together on the phone to amp up your unique writing voice.
E-mail to book a session ($100)

League of Extraordinary Bloggers

The Art and the Science of Blogging. Blog Review, Report, and Personal Consultations with Dave Doolin and Kelly Diels.
E-mail to book your blog review ($150)

May 20, 2010 | filed under: Love, Meaning, People, Purpose, Work

41 people have we need you too.

Nice Girls and Nice Guys Finish Middle (Class)

Before we get into nice discussion about nice girls and nice guys, I want you to go watch this video.

____________________

(I mean it. I’m not even going to be nice about it. Go watch and then come right back.  I’ll wait for you. I might even slip into something more comfortable.)


(that space was you, watching the video. Thank you. I love it when you do what I tell you.)

______________________

I don’t know the context for this scene. I don’t have a lot of grounding in the series but based on this - and Joan, omg Joan is My People –  I suspect I would love it.

What I do know is this: there are some angry women on Mad Men.

Betty Draper, for example, our rampant pigeon shooter, is the (very nice) poster girl for nice girl rage.

I know some nice girls are nodding their heads, right now.

I mean, we know this story: about how women bite their tongues and their carrot sticks to keep it all in check. How we, historically, have made nice and played small. How an angry woman is a spectre. How ‘hysteria’ and ‘bitch’, liberally or even hypothetically applied, can shut us up.

“I don’t want him to think I’m a bitch.”

We’re nice because anger is dangerous. So we file down our nails and with it our edges and dull our teeth and nibble at the edges of directly expressed emotion and, let’s be honest, life.

We’re the nice women. We’re doing The Right Thing at the right time in the right way and probably wearing the right shoes while we’re doing it. Nicely.

And I have no doubt that a lot of  nice women are holding it together publicly and then shrieking at their kids at home.

I submit to you that the ‘nice girl’ is confined, constrained, and angry – and really, not so ‘nice’ at all.

________________

Nice means “pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory.”

Originally, though, nice meant ‘not to cut’ which became ‘not to know’ which became ‘ignorant’ which transformed into ‘foolish’ or ’silly’ which became what we’ve got now:  pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory.

Who aspires to this?

Nice is a social strategy and its tactics are quiet, smiling, obeisance, sacrifice, agreement, gifts, doing favours, ingratiation.

Nice is a bribe. Nice is a way to be un-noticed while raging inside at being un-noticeable.

Nice is a way to gain the trust of someone who has no business trusting you. In fact, in The Gift of Fear, Gary de Becker includes the ‘niceness’ ploy as a pre-indicator of violence.

Nice is patting your irritable kid on the head and kissing your philandering husband and then going outside to kill some birds.

Because a victim, especially a nice one,  is the most dangerous creature on earth.

________________________

All of this is what nice means, but what nice does not mean – and what we often conflate it with – is “innately good.”

So that’s nice, and The Nice Girl.

What about The Nice Guy?

_______________________

Nice guys. I’ve ended things with guys and had them reply, see? this is what happens to the nice guy.

And – perhaps like a lot of women – I let them think that.

Because I was being nice.

Women do this a lot. We tell guys ‘you’re such a nice guy’ when really what we mean is I would go out with you, but:

  • you’re creeping me out
  • your house is filthy which scares me and god forbid we live like that
  • your conversation is beige
  • you don’t surprise me
  • I’m smarter than you
  • you’re not bringing it in the bedroom
  • you’re aimless and I’d have to carry this thing
  • I’m worried that I’ll have to do all the work in this relationship
  • I think that all this sweetness is an act to cover up the fact that you’re flaky and once you’ve ‘got’ me, you won’t really be there for me
  • you’re not that great of a kisser
  • you’re too much work
  • you want to eat my soul
  • I know that this sweet stuff is a front. You don’t want to be nice to me – you want to own me
  • you lack initiative
  • you’re not intellectually challenging
  • I would have to unlock you
  • I see the future and it is me shopping for your family at Christmas while you watch TV
  • I can see what you want and it is too much

When I do this – when I spare the guy’s feelings to avoid a scene and just agree that yes, the problem is that he is too nice – I perpetuate the nice guy myth.

That nice guys finish last. That the good guy never gets the girl.

Which leaves a lot of men running around, wounded, thinking that ‘nice’ is a problem – and it is, but not for the reasons they think – that must be cured. The cure, they think – or dating gurus are quick to reassure them – is to be a jerk, or a pick up artist, or just plain not nice to women.

Any PUA will tell you that women don’t like nice guys or that good guys who are ‘too nice’ to women won’t be successful with women.

Not true.

It is weak, ineffectual, closeted control-freak guys that repel women (and people, more generally). Nice isn’t the problem.

Or maybe it is.

Here’s my PSA: just like The Nice Girl, The Nice Guy isn’t really nice.

Often nice is a social strategy. Nice is a mask worn by scared, creepy, angry, bribing, entitled, controlling people.

Nice covers a lot of anger.

This is what I know about  nice guys, and why I’m suspicious of them:

Because in life, nice guys are not getting what they want, and they’re mad, and they’ll be mad at me, too when I don’t toe the line (and I won’t). The worse a guy’s character, the nicer he’ll try to act.

But I’m too nice to tell a man these ugly truths.

And so flourishes the urban myth that nice guys finish last (with women) – if they get to finish, at all.

___________________

Just like the Nice Girls, Nice Guys are angry.

Nice appears to be flexible but is rigid: Nice has muscled and restrained herself, intently and vigorously, into compliance with everyone else’s expectations and so your failure to do the same – for her, for the world – enrages her.

And I’m okay with anger – anger is fuel and anger can be hot and oh, the righteous fires that anger will light.

But repressed anger is stasis. Repressed anger is vindictive, passive-aggressive, and insidious. Repressed anger is dangerous.

The truth is this: repressed anger is the shadow of Nice. Anger, denied, trails Nice everywhere, in every light.

Here’s another truth:

The Good Guy does get the girl.

But Good Guys aren’t necessarily nice. In fact, all the man and women I know, respect, love or want to love are most definitely not nice.

Nice: pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory, deceptive, dangerous.

______________________

My point: nice guys are not nice, meaning ‘innately good’.

Nice is just the angle they’re working to get what they want. And when they don’t get what they want, they blame nice, and strip away nice and show the world who they really are.

And who they are is who the women in their lives - who lied and told them they were nice - knew they were, all along.

I have some ‘bad boys’ in my life – but they’re not really bad boys. Instead, they’re men who are at home in their skin and their masculinity, sexuality, aggression, vulnerability, heart, darkness, light – and don’t need to camouflage any of it with a layer of nice.  I know that if I ever turned one of these men down, sexually or romantically, they’d never lash out at me. These guys – these men – would never call me a bitch or even a bad word (unless…well, never mind).

But the so-called nice guys? They’re nice until you don’t want ‘em or you don’t give them what they want. And then they call you a bitch or a tease or a slut.

Nice.

April 15, 2010 | filed under: Love, Sex, Sex and the Suburbs

43 people have we need you too.

A Good Fable Never Fails to Terrorize

My child will soon be six years old.

Anyone who has – or has been – a five year old knows that turning six is a A Very Big Deal.

You leave five with fewer teeth than you started. You leave behind half-days of pretend-school (kindergarten: pffffft) and being mistaken for a pre-schooler when it ought to be clear to any one with half a wit that you are a school-kid.

Six: it’s significant.

We’re very excited about six.

Someone is so excited that she colours every waking moment – and more than a few sleeping ones, I’m sure – with vivid descriptions of the toys and dresses and yachts and mansions she desperately needs as gifts for her sixth birthday.

The constant stream of I want, I want, I want is sweet and unselfconscious and not rooted in evil, but I must confess it is starting to itch my skin raw. It makes me rethink the neighbourhood I live in and the school she goes to and pretty much every choice I have ever made to give her a life without want, which just makes her want more.

My own issues. I’ll own that.

Still, I thought it appropriate to gently tame the greed using a fable.

Last night, when we were cuddling-and-talking, I told her a story. While in our house we are bookies – bibliophiles rather than money-lenders – this child especially appreciates tales that are told off the top of my head. So I add-libbed The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

And then, at the end of the story, I might have mentioned that, like the Boy Who Cried Wolf, if she asks me continuously for every toy in the known world, I will have no way to know which toy is truly important to her – which means she will get a lot of random crap for her birthday.

(I didn’t say the last part out loud. Swear.)

She understood. She totally got it and burst into heart-wrenching, body-wracking sobs.

I am the worst mother, ever.

I cuddled her off the my-mother-shattered-me ledge and set to silently abusing myself for inadvertently abusing my baby with moral scare tactics fables. Effing wolf-calling boy.

In the morning, I had a whole set of fresh reasons for self-abuse.

“Morning” meaning today. Today Almost-Six had an appointment at the audiology clinic to have her hearing tested. Again.

She had her hearing tested at school and the hearing teacher was so alarmed that she referred her to the audiology clinic.

For The Child, this was a festive occasion: she got to stay home with me instead of going to class, and clearly a health appointment is an occasion for crinoline, taffeta, all of my jewelry (and hers) and my peacock-feather headband. I mean, obviously.

So off we set, blinging, to the audiology clinic.

I had avoided thinking in any great detail about what this appointment might mean until we were on our way to it.

When I had dedicated fleeting seconds to consider what this might mean, I thought:

this child has won the lottery in looks, intelligence and being loved. Whatever it is, we’ll take it in stride. It will be fine. Whatever it is, it will be worse for me than for her, because whatever it is, she’s been living with it for six years and she’s got it handled.

Yet driving to the clinic caused the film-strip in my mind to loop to every time I have ever snapped at her because I thought she wasn’t listening to me or was ignoring me or her sister.

And all the times I’ve silently and pridefully swelled at her ability to focus so intently on her art that she literally cannot hear anything outside of that task?

Oh my god, maybe it is because she literally cannot hear and in the six years of knowing her, I have failed to notice that simple fact.

I am the worst mother, ever.

Filling out the forms:

Have you ever noticed any hearing problems?

No.

When did you first notice that your child was having hearing problems?

I didn’t.

I have not noticed that my baby cannot hear.

I’m going to stop repeating “I am the worst mother, ever” because I think you get the point.

So. The test. She did it. She put the headphones and raised her hand and the audiology dude nodded to himself a lot and did not look visibly concerned.

He was not concerned, visibly or otherwise. He said everything was fine. She can hear just fine. No issues at all.

In the damp heat of relief (mine) – mostly that I’m not an inattentive mama, because, as I said, whatever we discovered wouldn’t have been The End of The World – we headed to the book store.

Because although the child likes ad-libbed stories, I trust that I’ve made it clear that I clearly can’t be trusted to tell them. A new bedtime book was in order.

In the car on the way to the book store, Sophie processed the experience.

Triumphant Sophie: You know, Mama, I did much better on this test than the one at school.

Abashed Mama: What do you mean, babe?

Triumphant, Disclosing Sophie: This time I raised my hand only when I heard the beeps. At school, I thought the test was kind of boring, so I made it fun by waving my hand a lot, whenever I wanted.

Shocked but connecting-the-dots Mama: You mean that during the school hearing test, you were raising your hand when there were no beeps?

Connecting-the-dots Sophie: Yes! Just like cry-wolf-boy!

(Which, at the bookstore, was the new book she welcomed into her world.)

March 30, 2010 | filed under: Family, Love

30 people have we need you too.

The Yin and Yang of Intimacy

Some of us enter intimate bonds with an acute awareness of our need to connect, to be close, not to be alone, not to be abandoned. Others approach relationships with a heightened need for personal space – our sense of self-preservation inspires vigilance against being devoured. Erotic, emotional connection generates closeness that can become overwhelming, evoking claustrophobia. It can feel instrusive. What was initially a secure enclosure becomes confining. While our need for closeness is almost as basic as our need for food, it carries with it anxieties and threats that can inhibit desire. We want closeness, but not so much that we feel trapped by it.

- Esther Perel. Mating in Captivity.

Imagine his surprise to discover that the happiest, most confident woman he’d ever met was actually – when you got her alone – a murky hole of bottomless grief. Once again, I could not stop crying. This is when he started to retreat, and that’s when I saw the other side of my passionate romantic hero – the David who was solitary as a castaway, cool to the touch, in need of more personal space than a herd of American bison.

David’s sudden emotional back-stepping probably would’ve been a catastrophe for me even under the best of circumstances, given that I am the planet’s most affectionate life-form (something like a cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle), but this was my very worst of circumstances. I was despondent and dependent, needing more care than an armful of premature infant triplets. His withdrawal only made me more needy, and my neediness only advanced his withdrawals, until soon he was retreating under fire of my weeping pleas of, “Where are you going? What happened to us?”

(Dating tip: Men LOVE this.)

- Elizabeth Gilbert. Eat Pray Love.

March 29, 2010 | filed under: Love, People

4 people have we need you too.

my sexy friend made me celibate. sort of.

The Latin Quarter. Friday night. My friend Joanie is holding court. She knows people. She’s having an mmm-hmmm hot conversation with the guy behind the bar. He looks like a kid but I’m pretty sure he owns the joint. She’s in her fifties and he’s fascinated.

I’m fascinated. She can salsa. She can hold a man’s gaze and say something utterly innocuous and make it sizzle. She’s sultry.

The woman can flirt. If I wrote down the things she says, you’d say what? There’s nothing innately smoky in that sentence.

It’s not what she says. It is how she says it. She says it hot.

So whenever we get together, we speak a mutual language: men.

We like ‘em.

LOTS.

She discovered Plenty of Fish. She announced that she was holding auditions for the role of “boyfriend”. There was a flurry of dating. Lots of dating.

If I’d had a blog then…oh the stories we’d tell.

So when she told me she’d decided to be celibate, I was incredulous. I had to get her to define the term because I was sure we were using it differently.

When you say you’re celibate, what does that mean?

She explained.

Yeah, it pretty much means “not having sex.”

Stunned. STUNNED, I tell you.

I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone who was celibate.

I’ve known people who weren’t getting laid, but that was never by choice. I have had many conversations about sex, but until then, I’d never had one with a sexy adult who said they’d decided not to have sex.

So…why? What’s that all about? What’s that like? And why, again?

She was exhausted and disappointed with the dating scene. All this energy, activity, heat-seeking action, and very little connection. Holding space for a partner. Yearning, scanning, searching, mingling, chirping, chattering.

She said it was bit hamster-on-a-wheel: a lot of activity, with very little traction or direction.

So she thought she’d opt out. For a bit. Until she got her bearings.

Or until someone inspired her to change her mind.

I’ll admit it: I was not sold.

I was, however, curious.

Joanie is juicy. What was it like for this delicious creature, built for lovin’, to be solo and sexless?

Joanie said that she found it quieted the noise in her head – the noise that she was so accustomed to hearing that she didn’t even hear it, any more.

Until it was quiet. And then it was really quiet.

When she took sex – and not just sex, but Looking For Love – off the table, she started noticing and connecting with the people around her. In the moment. Just to connect. Not to angle, anticipate, interpret, discern, or decode.

She said that when she was ‘in the market’, she’d go to a party and scan the room, trying to figure out who was with whom, who was looking, who was looking at her. And that informed who she talked to and how she talked to them.

It was all agenda. It was all seeking. It was more noise than signal.

And when she decided ‘no more sex for you!’ (to herself), the noise…subsided.

Now, when she went to a party, she was at the party, not in her head. She was with you, not wondering about your orientation or availability.

She just enjoyed herself, in the moment, instead of engineering future imaginary moments.

That blew my mind. Turn down the volume? Be here, now?

Wow.

But I wasn’t giving up sex or maybe A Great Big Love for inner peace.

Screw inner peace.

(I feel very peaceful after sex, for example.)

Right now, I’m digging me some inner peace.

I don’t know if I’m going to claim the word ‘celibate’ because it seems so dried out and well, unsexy, to me – and I doubt I have much of a commitment to the word or the course of action.

I’m not abstaining from fucking so much as avoiding fuckwittery (mine, mostly). I’ve decided I’m not allowed to be in a Grown-Up Relationship until I’m ready to grow up.

So something’s shifted in me in the last three months. I’m not having sex. I’m not collecting men.  But I am pretty damn happy.

And it’s not just me who noticed. At our recent sex toy party (strangely good timing, don’t you think?), my friend’s husband told his wife that I looked “really happy.” My daughter’s daycare leader wondered if I have “a really good man in your life, because you look so…happy.” My sister told me that she’s noticed that I seem really relaxed and…wait for it…happy.

And my friend Joanie was right: the noise was overwhelming but I was so used to it that I couldn’t hear it.

Now, suddenly, I hear all kinds of things that I ignored, before.

Like what the men – and women and children – in my life are really saying to me. And what they mean to me.

And trust me, it’s juicy.

March 23, 2010 | filed under: Love, Meaning, Sex

34 people have we need you too.

It is okay NOT to teach people how to treat you. Unless they were raised by wolves. Then Cold Play or a quick exit is in order. Your call.

Do NOT teach people how to treat you.

Dr. Phil is lying. You don’t teach people how to treat you, because most of us were not raised by wolves and therefore we do know how to properly treat each other.

I was a self-appointed teacher for a long time.

When someone did something off, or wrong, or lacking, I would explain/lecture/harangue and just generally need to talk it out. To fix the offender. To set him (and it was always a him – I don’t bother trying to fix my girl friends or my sisters) straight. To teach him how to treat me.

How condescending. I assumed that he didn’t know how to treat me correctly and that I could teach him.

Of course he knew how to behave properly. He just didn’t. No amount of teaching can fix that.

(I say “he” but there is a whole string of he’s.)

I suspect that attempting to teach someone how to treat you actually teaches them that you don’t know how to treat yourself.

Let’s be clear: I am not talking about walking away or going thermonuclear every time someone accidentally slights you or steps over a line. Absolutely have boundaries. Just don’t appoint yourself the border guard and the rehab/vocational counsellor.

I have a friend, Z. He and I used to be A Thing. When we were A Thing, he drove me off the freaking edge. He’d do something that upset me, I’d explain to him in heated detail what was wrong, and all the multiple, minute and cosmic ways he was wrong, and he’d say “okay.”

Bastard. Just. Refused. To. Engage.

(Hi sweetie. I really do love you and dinner is still on and on you. But you were a gawdawful boyfriend.)

And that – frankly – was awful and the wrong of him to do. Because he really was doing shit wrong. If he wanted to be with me, then he really should have apologized and changed his ways. But he wasn’t sorry and he wasn’t going to change his ways and let’s be honest, he didn’t really want to be with me, either.

So he wasn’t going to deal with my reaction to any of these things. I kept trying to believe he didn’t know how to behave properly with me; he did. He just didn’t want to. All my efforts to fix would be for naught.

His “ok” was simply the acknowledgement of reality. This is the way he was; I could accept it or not but there was no “fixing” it.

So that’s one reason not to fix. It is fruitless.

Here’s another reason: it is controlling and fantastic.

It means you’re treating a person like a lump of clay or a block of marble whence, Michaelangelo-like, you chip your David.

  • It means you have a fantasy of what this person/relationship should be and are trying to train the real live person to be your fantasy.
  • It means you think you have the inside track on proper behaviour and, mama-like, can train someone.
  • It means that you’re signing up to be the teacher.
  • It means you’re signing up to be the project manager.

I don’t want to be the teacher, project manager or the mother. I am already those things in every other sphere of my life. I want to be the lover.

And - my sisters, I’m talking to you – would you find it hot if your lover:

Wanted to fix you, teach you, sculpt you, make you into a better person and his fantasy?

I would be fucking appalled and think ‘this guy is a control-freak with Woman Issues’ and run far, far away.

Or try to fix him.

And yet…I think women have been trained to be The Teacher in relationships. To see potential. To kiss frogs. To be the catalyst and path to princedom.

No wonder we have this apparent un-match going on in relationships where women want to commit and work on relationships and fix their partner and men resist commitment and relationships and especially relationships that require work. Who really wants to be reminded of all their flaws and the fixes required?

(except I’m not 100% buying that bill of goods. My male friends don’t seem to have any issues committing or any abiding fear of relationships. Even Z, the batty-making one referenced above, now yearns for a deep, intimate, committed relationship.)

Remember my freak outs attempts to educate Z that were followed by his “okay” that Was Not Okay?

Recently, I freaked out on a different friend of mine and I was totally in the  wrong. His response?

“ok.”

And this time, that was the right thing to do.

He didn’t try to teach me how to behave. There was a line that I crossed and he wasn’t going there with me. He wasn’t going to bother to explain why I was wrong; how I should have behaved; how best to make it up to him; or reward me for good behaviour and punish me for bad. I was simply wrong. It was my responsibility to see it, or not.

I saw it. Immediately.

(OMG how I saw it. Insert cringe here.)

And I did my best to fix it, right away, and will most likely not do that again.

(Most likely. Not 100% guaranteed. Perfection is not my thing.)

So Dr. Phil is wrong. So is Cold Play.

You don’t teach people how to treat you. You simply know how you must be treated and accept nothing else. You trust that the people in your life can fix themselves, course-correct, and that they weren’t raised by wolves.

Ok.

March 22, 2010 | filed under: Love, Meaning

63 people have we need you too.

hearsay brilliance: “Only go when the light is green”

A bit of hearsay brilliance from my friend’s therapist:

You’re looking for red flags to slow your roll. Stop looking for red flags. Instead, proceed only when you see green flags.

That’s a world of difference.

_________________

this note is part of a series outlining the story of the Very Bad Lying Man, a few months after the fact:

December 2009. The thin line – cleavage, even – between vulnerability as strength and just out-and-out stupidity.

Here are the breadcrumbs. Bits of the Very Bad Lying Man fell into these posts while the un-love story was happening:

August 2009. Vacation. Day 1. I am THAT Scene in When Harry Met Sally, but It Is Real. And Better.

August 2009. On Being a Needy Girlfriend and What IT SHOULD Teach You

August 2009. When Tough Love Turns Poetic. In a blood, guts, and broken-ego kinda way.

September 2009. On Harm, Healing, Ceilings and How Absent Apologies are the Pits – The Sorry Series, #1

September 2009. How To Receive an Apology. How To Accept an Apology. How To Forgive. Or Maybe Not. – The Sorry Series, #4

December 2009. ask and ye shall…well just ask, anyways.

January 2010. I am the female Bluebeard of suburban Vancouver and I am running out of closet space.

February 2010. Love is a Compass.

February 2010. sexifesto

March 2010. butterflies are a drug and I’m in rehab

March 2010. hearsay brilliance: “Only go when the light is green”

| filed under: Love, Meaning, Very Bad Lying Man

13 people have we need you too.

The Myth of The One. Letting it Spill. Letting it Go.

I believe there are any number of people who could be your lover and your love. Sometimes timing tells you who to love or who not to love. Sometimes love is a decision and you love the one you’re with. Although I don’t entirely unbelieve in soul-mates, I don’t think there is only The One.

And yet.

There was a man. A man I never forgot.

We dated years and years ago. It was love. It was terrible timing. He was the last man I dated before I embarked on a married-with-kids life with someone else.

We met again. When I hugged him, he smelled the same. He smelled good. He still wears the same cologne and in an olefactory second my life kaleidoscoped: for years, every Christmas, I bought that cologne - his cologne – for someone else. Unconsciously. I didn’t even know I was doing it until I smelled him, again.

I wanted X to smell like Y.

I wanted X to be Y.

I knew this already. Even while enmeshed in my family life, I googled him. I checked for him on Facebook. I asked mutual friends about him. I heard he was married and living in the same neighbourhood as me.

After my split, I thought about him a lot.

I thought about our first date – the most romantic date of my life – and our kisses – the best of my life – and how my three page, 100 item list of Things I Want in a Partner was, essentially, a portrait of him.

I thought about all the little but grand ways he tried to make my life easier, when we were together – a really, trying, exhausting time of three jobs and pending grad school – and how I have always wanted that kind of support. How I am looking for it, still.

I was having coffee with a friend, who said, oh guess who I saw yesterday? And I said Y.

Neither of us had seen him for years. She said, how could you possibly know that? I said, because I’ve been thinking about him. I said, is he still married? Is he single? If he’s single, I’m going to marry him.

She said, he’s single. And he asked about you.

I said, give me his phone number.

We went for a drink, the three of us. To catch up. The two of us – Y and I -sat close, talked all night, talked with our hands and our hands landed on each others arms and wrists and touch was part of the conversation and our mutual friend sighed Why am I here? and texted friends all night.

And I thought: it is not just me. It is him, too. It is still here. It is here, right now, with us, and of us.

I told him everything – every detail of the last two handfuls of years – except the thing I most wanted to say. I wanted to tell him something – the truth.

That I was sorry. That I needed to say I was sorry.

That he had offered me everything I wanted and I was unable to accept it.

That I didn’t know what to do with his competence because I don’t know what to do when a man doesn’t need me.

That I had felt like I wasn’t showing up.

That I was sorry – not so I could shoe-horn myself back into his life, but because it needed to be said.

But I said nothing.

And then…nothing.

So maybe it was just me. Okay.

That certainty, that surety, that he was for me and I was for him, for always: I was shaken. I couldn’t shake it. Despite the manifestly unshaky evidence -nothing - that it was only me feeling this way.

A year passed. I left an unprepared, rambling mess of a voicemail.

Two weeks later, he called me. He was tired. I could hear it in his voice.

We met.  We had a raw conversation. We opened Pandora’s box and told the brave truth about who we were, to each other, then. And now, even though now was not to be, because he was not free to love me.

I looked at him and it was love, again, still, for me. At the bottom of Pandora’s box was hope.

That hope, like water, was hard to contain in my porous membrane and it spilled all over the place. At a lunchy-brainstorm-afternoon-with-kids, I poured out my hopeful, storytelling heart to Danielle LaPorte, who doesn’t believe in meant-to-be, and she looked at me with tears in her eyes and made me promise to invite her to our wedding. She loves weddings. (I don’t.)

But he had a life, and someone, and so of course it was not to be. It was all my own fantasy.

What???? What about that little rock of certainty, my little nugget of knowledge that we were supposed to be together? Where do I go from here?

Nowhere. I walked away from my imaginary future, but not really. I hoped. I wished. I wrestled with my truth and wondered: what do I do with my certainty that he was The One?

I go back to where I started, to what I really know when I scrape back the stories: that there is no One. No pre-destined. No meant to be.

Like this:

We’re not from the same tribe, are we?
Feline. Bear.
Fire. Earth.
Arrow. Tree.

Finally, I revel in that.
We are choice.
Precise and free in the choosing.
Not slotted, or arranged, or karmic.
Not mated, or introduced.
Not even necessary.

Rather: Essential, my Love.

Rather: Chosen, my Love.

With select scars and stories,
full of rise and honey and dreams.

Chosen.

And that, my Love,
is everything and more.

- poem by Danielle LaPorte (for my Operation Secret Valentine)

And now, I’m not sorry. I’m grateful to have been haunted by – and have exorcised –  this ghost.

I’m seven days into my thirty-seventh year and I’m kissing my illusions tenderly and setting them free. Letting them run wherever they need to be.

The One. Meant to Be. The transformative power of my kiss. Hope.

Faith, freedom, lucidity and choice are far more powerful than spindly hope and whimsical tales.

I hope.

Oh hell. There it is again.

March 21, 2010 | filed under: Love, Meaning

39 people have we need you too.

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