I just dug up this post from my archives (I still can’t believe I’ve been blogging for over eight years now) because for the past few days I keep circling back to this message; I’ve been hearing it everywhere. Perhaps it’s topical, presenting itself to me as a reminder to apply these learnings to my marriage. And perhaps I’m meant to share this again with you because you need to hear it.

Watching Oprah’s Life Class the other day, I heard the “Fake It To Make It” message once again. Keisha, a woman who chose to adopt her incarcerated brother’s little boy expressed her deep resentment toward her nephew, a hearing impaired child with Diabetes. He was hungry for her affections, and she confessed that she was at war with herself because while she didn’t want to damage this sweet boy, she also was deeply resentful, hating having to sacrifice, and didn’t want to hug him or give him the affection he so often craved. She wanted to find love elsewhere, wanted to pursue her degree in medicine, and he got in the way of her plans. Brave woman to admit to that truth. Intellectually, of course she realized he didn’t deserve any of this, that he deserved only love, but she couldn’t get past her feelings of “This isn’t fair! I never would’ve signed up for this had I known.” At one point, Oprah addressed the audience to remind viewers to look within their own lives, not at Keisha’s, and figure out where they are ignoring the love that’s right in front of them for the taking. Keisha was looking for someone to love, to start a real life, oblivious to the fact that this boy was that someone she could love. Yes, she wanted romantic love, a partner, but it was coming at her in a different form. The little boy, Oprah said, was there to help her open up some heart space. Bishop T.D. Jakes’s advice to Keisha was to fake it, that the feelings would come. Fake it to make it. I felt myself nodding.

Belief follows behavior. Sometimes you have to force yourself to invest in the choices you’ve made and to make the most of your situation. It can’t hurt to at least try. It was the message I needed to hear this week. Fake it to make it in every aspect of your life. Your job, your love life, even your health…

I took a Health Psychology class in college, where I learned, among other things, about the power of positive (and craptastic) thinking, particularly its impact on our health. I already knew that imagining myself making contact with the ball on a softball field would improve my chances of slamming the thing for real. That we can literally practice in our mind, visualizing it happening, and studies have proven that it works.

I also knew, as a writer, that I could elicit a physical response from words alone.
With just a paragraph of description, with nothing but imagery and words, we can cause a physical reaction. Simply describing, for example, the texture of a lemon, its pores, and slightly green tip. The resistance of a knife as it cleaves through the skin, cleanly. The sound of the knife pushing forward on the wooden board. The way the halves rock and teeter, laid out on their sides. How some of the seeds are left whole, small winks hiding beneath the translucent pockets of sour. Wiping the knife blade clean of the acrid juices, and that first squirt, clean and bright, a spray. Then pulling a wedge to my lips, taking that quick first lick, just to test, and the wince that comes after that first sharp taste, a sting and burn, and a bloom of saliva from the back of your jaws.

I could salivate just from reading it, a physical response to imagery. Then I studied the Placebo Effect, “the power of healing that can stem simply from a patient’s belief that a treatment will be effective.” Basically in a randomized and double-blind study, patients were divided into two groups: one received actual medication, and the other group was given a look-alike placebo pill. The study was double-blind, meaning not just the patients, but the doctors too had no idea which was which. And all the patients believed the pill would help them… and it did. Just the belief that it was working improved the patients’ health. This could be the reason so many people believe in the effectiveness of alternative medicines. In fact, “Ten years and $2.5 billion in research have found no cures from alternative medicine. Yet these mostly unproven treatments are now mainstream and used by more than a third of all Americans.”

The Placebo Effect has always fascinated me, not so much with regard to our health, or the validity of acupuncture or chiropractic treatments, but with how this concept of “belief following behavior” could be applied to my dating life.

The practice of forcing myself to date the men who were actually interested in me—the over-eager boring ones who never made me work for it, the ones who’d make great fathers, and put me first—was a test-study of the “belief follows behavior” axiom. If I forced myself to date celery instead of funnel cake (behavior), I’d soon actually believe that I prefer these celeriac men (belief). The same way that forcing yourself to smile even if you’re miserable (behavior), actually DOES make you feel better (belief). “If I’m smiling, I must be happy.” Then we actually feel happier. So if I forced myself to continue to date a man to whom I had no attraction (behavior), the assumption is that I’d grow to be attracted to him (belief). That’s why we hear so many stories of, “Well, I wasn’t attracted at first, but then the more I got to know him, the more I liked him.”

It extends beyond our dating lives, touching almost everything. Believe you’re already a thin person, you start to eat and behave like a thin person. Insert cough here. No need to worry; there’s a placebo for that.

A YEAR AGO: Food and Mood Dreams, Obsession Under Pressure
2 YEARS AGO: Not A Euphemism
4 YEARS AGO: Back in LA

Longing. I swear I long for longing itself. Much the way I’ve been so adept at falling in love with the ideas of things, I hunger for the ache and the want, for the beginnings based on everything we bring to them. I’m infatuation-centric, which explains my highs, even the height of my lows. It means I still long for the giddiness, the sexy surprises, the can’t think straight without you motions. In so many ways, ways that reveal my naiveté, I still believe one of my deepest loves was one of my first loves. It was like walking in the dark, with the obvious obstacles of being teens living in your parents home. We’d speak on the phone for hours, and then there were letters. Little folded nuggets of gold, unfolded and inflated, as real as the chambers of a heart. Although I was young—fourteen-years-old, I was in what felt, what still feels, like the deepest love of my life. I don’t know if I’ve ever come as close. I know, usually we chalk early love up to innocence, to a time when big life events don’t lean on you, when really, you’re more in love with what the other sees in you than in what you see in them.

My earliest relationships were intimate, not in the physical exploration of our bodies as much as in exposing our current emotions, laying our feelings out raw, like a bouquet of wildflowers, picked fresh, still sticky and damp, loosened from a fist, splayed across a table. There was an intimacy of confession, of how we really feel about our parents or our uncles, people and thoughts we pretty much keep to ourselves when we’re “fully grown” adults ourselves, when the top-of-mind parents and uncles cats & cradle their way toward the back of the line. We fall asleep in a web of thought and song lyrics, mixed tapes, where theirs is the voice you want to hear most. Where their’s is the first call when you have news. And at such a young age, it’s all shared in the living of it, not in the retelling. “You grow up together, then you grow apart.” Or, at least that’s what I was told. He just “grew apart. Changed, wanted different.” “Wanted different” would lodge itself into my female book of male wisdom pages, marked beside the page on “wanting the chase more than the woman.” “Make yourself unavailable, and he’ll want you all the more.” I wrote it with bubble dotted i’s in my high school journal. People underestimate teens. I don’t know, truly, how much I’ve changed since those early years. It’s the same me in there, fascinated by what motivates people to behave as they do, still seduced by mixed tapes, lyrics and acoustic guitars.

I wonder what wisdom I know now, the way I did then, without directly expressing it. Wonder what I’d long for in us, the us we are today. I wonder how the coffee clutch conversations of girls would change, what I’d long for privately when falling asleep at night. If I’d think of you when I’d hear some passerby chirp about “living life. It’s so short, and you only have one, so make it count.” I’d wonder if I should’ve held onto us longer, learned to have longing without losing, or if I should’ve been long gone, making up for a life that hasn’t really been lived yet. I wonder how I’d wear that retrospect.

Florida, Abigail, life update tomorrow.

It’s in the universe. And it’s on The Bachelorette. Perhaps you couldn’t give two rosy shits about The Bachelorette, or about my unapologetic need to eat any and all dating candy, but on a more universal level what “happened to Ashley” “happens” to all of us. The air-quotes you just saw, that’s me trying to force you to get my point: that we decide what happens when something happens to us.

For those living under a rock (or with noses in something, I dunno, like a newspaper that reports actual news), here’s the quick story: bachelorette Ashley Hebert was warned by a friend before the show began to watch out for a guy named Bentley Williams, who was—wait for it—”on the show for the wrong reasons.” But Ashley decides that the red in that flag really isn’t her color, deciding to “keep an open mind.” Ashley then fell hard for the 28-year-old dad from Utah. He’d tell her how amazing she was, stroke her hair, touch the small of her back, then, privately, he’d mock vomit, wishing Ashley were Emily (a previous contestant from the same season as Ashley). During his private one-on-one interviews with the camera, he’d trash Ashley’s looks and sling as many insults as he could. Why did he want this attention and what did it serve, acting like an empty ball sack, treating a woman this way, as he models behavior for his own young daughter? Wrong question.

Right question: Why did Ashley fall hard for a guy she hardly knew?

A la Straight Up & Dirty… Women declare their love before knowing how he handles anger, stress, or her when she’s gone and chicked out in a fit of insecurity. She’s practicing her would-be new monogram before knowing how he handles alcohol, meddling family, or texts from his ex. It can’t be “OMG, he’s the one!” before she knows if he’s the one who’s up to his manscaping in debt and mommy issues. Quite simply, like so many of us, Ashley fell in love with an idea. A bad idea.

Insecure, I used to believe that the hotter the guy who liked me equated to the hotter I actually was. This hot hot guy wants me?! And that, right there, is why Ashley fell so fast. Because he seemed hard to get, and she got him. We ask for what we get.

As a viewer, it’s easy to know what Ashley doesn’t and to roll our eyes and judge, but in truth, we’ve all been her. Maybe we didn’t whine as much, but we’ve been the gas instead of the brakes. We’ve been the one to push, to allow, to convince ourselves of who he really is, what we really are as an “us” or could be. We haven’t done it on national TV, but we’ve been a broken record in the face of our closet friends. “I’m just so confused.” “Mixed messages.” “Ugh, I can’t take it! I need answers now!”

But we have our answers. And when we don’t, we make our own, even if they’re the wrong ones. When there are empty spaces, we can’t help but want to fill them. I used to live at this address. If he wasn’t exactly where I was at the exact same time, I’d cut him off. If he wasn’t pursuing me hard enough, I’d end hard, easy. Because it was far easier than waiting for him to decide how he felt about me.

The biggest problem, and truth, standing in my way was this: if a guy is into you, he’ll move heaven and earth to be with you. He’d “sleep out in the rain, if she said that’s the way it ought to be.” Anything short of that full court press made us a no-go.

But… if you’ve given the relationship time to develop, and he’s not stepping up his game in a really big way, if he’s not putting his foot on the gas and making YOU set the pace of the relationship by adding just enough brakes, then it’s time to find a new ride. Because you never want to be on the wrong bus when the right one shows up.

i once made a Georgia peach pie with a cinnamon lattice crust and served it alongside home-spun brown sugar ice cream. But I cant recall with whom I’d enjoyed such a summer pleasure. And that’s when my obsessions made perfect sense. My memories were, sometimes are, about the food, not the people.

Other times, magical memory moments, are all about the connection, a look, a squeezed knee under a table at an Italian restaurant. The restaurant name escapes you, but you remember the exact table and then something vaguely about salmon. But you can’t recall if it was that you were at a carb palace of a restaurant, and you thought to yourself I should order the salmon. I should order the salmon. Or, if maybe you’d said aloud to this could-be soul-mate across from you that there’s no way you’re ordering the salmon. Maybe you caught a sliver of conversation from an older woman, a woman who wears skirt suits to dinner, and you remarked to your date that this was exactly the place you’d thought it would be, that no matter where you go in New York, no matter how luxurious the food palate offered, there will always be someone asking for dry salmon, no oil, lemon on the side.

My memory for food is remarkable to me. The way some people can be standing across the world, in a tony town they’d read about all their life, saved for, seen in photographs, and now there, in the mix of smells and sounds, a feast of look at this, did you see that, they’ll suddenly smell The Catskills. “Oh my God, I smell camp.” And memories of not wanting to touch the bottom of the lake with his bare feet are unavoidable. You’re re-planted in familiar soil, no matter how foreign you get.

People say that relationships work this way. That there will be familiar strains and patterns, no matter how foreign this new type of person you’re with is, you take yourself with you everywhere. So, unless you change, nothing really will. I’m just not one of the people saying this. 

The fact that I associate a magical snow day, stowed away in a dark bar, playing Connect Four with drinking Shiraz  will never change. We can’t control what we remember, only what we choose to make of those shiraz-tinted memories. I think I hold them just a little too close, idealize a then, because it’s easier than pushing myself to find the magical moments worth capturing now. That, or I just need to eat at better restaurants.

QUESTION FROM A GREEK TRAGEDY READER: I really don’t know why I’m writing, as I somehow feel all the answers I need are in each of the replies you’ve given to your readers already. But, I do need advice, as I am also trying to get over a guy. I really thought he was the one.

He is a bit of a cliche–he went to the East to find himself, to travel the world, etc. etc., (the Eat, Pray, Love – male version) after his divorce, and after he was made redundant in his job. He’s taken on a profession as a yoga teacher. We met while he was traveling, teaching yoga; I was a yoga student.

I guess he was different–he was sort of intelligent but not an intellectual. And since I, too, traveled a lot for my job and he was traveling, we would follow the other to wherever the other was to spend time. We did spend 4 months in one country together. We had our problems, but nothing so big. Suddenly he bails on me after a wonderful time traveling around China. I’m in one country, and he’s in another (he’s in India, of course). He hints at it in an email, but I actually am the one who lays it down and says ” Yes, let’s break up.”

He had been wanting a relationship and then he became non-committal throughout the time we were together, and I was tired of it. And this cowardly hinting was really not my style. It’s been a month and some weeks– but I’m still ruminating over the break up and am very sad about it all. I have bouts of crying still. I did fall in love with the bloke, and now he’s taken up with his best friend of 3 or more years (another yoga teacher); and so quickly, too!

She was the one he called each time we ran into a bump on the road of our relationship. He’s admitted to me that he has had feelings for her in the past, which she brushed away, then. After his divorce she was there to help him out. I suddenly feel like a trick horse–our relationship, a reason for him to call her and ask for advice. But I can’t get over it all still. I really did fall for him hard. I am hurting so much that I want a lobotomy to remove all the memories of us together! I’m wondering how I can get through this. I feel incredibly used and have somehow lost faith in myself ( even if i know I’m successful, attractive and smart despite being on the wrong side of 30). What do I do to get past this?

I want to be over this now and its been very difficult. I’m now in yet another foreign country doing research and I have no close friends here. I feel rather alone and abandoned. My work has taken second place. And I just can’t get over how sad I feel. Anger would have been easier to deal with. I would so appreciate a shake from you and some of your straight up advice.

–Aimless and Confused in Bangkok

You say Bangkok, I say ban-cock. Let’s call the whole thing off.

This is so When Harry Met Sally. In case you haven’t seen the film, the recap goes like this: Harry, a neurotic pessimist, becomes friends with Sally, an optimistic picky eater, when they agree that theirs will be nothing but a platonic friendship. Harry marries a woman who tends to retain water, then divorces her when she cheats on him with a tax attorney named Ira. Meanwhile, Sally falls in love with Joe, then breaks up with him after playing a game of “I Spy” with a little girl who spies “a family.” Sally wants marriage and the carriage. Joe, not so much. Fast forward, and our heroes trail and error their way through relationships, sharing every detail with each other. Until, that is, Sally discovers that Joe is marrying his perky secretary, that he does want a family, just not with Sally! Taking comfort in her friend Harry’s arms, Sally is a mess of tears and leaky mascara, which lead to some sex, which ruins their friendship. They both date others, then Harry pursues the crap out of Sally. Coulda, woulda, shoulda is Sally’s favorite rhyme. He had his chance. We’re done. And they are done, until Harry realizes he wants to spend the rest of his life with Sally and is willing to scream it from the rooftop. Their wedding follows, with a delicious cake, with the sauce on the side. THE END

ASK YOURSELF THIS: WHO ARE YOU IN THIS WHEN HARRY MET SALLY SCENARIO?

Sometimes it helps to look at your own situation from a new perspective, temporarily lifting yourself out of the relationship equation to get a bird’s-eye view of you. This doesn’t just apply to romantic relationships, by the way. Look at families, alliances, friendships and endships.

It’s easy to vilify, to call him a creep for leading you on, but the truth is, he’s as lost as you are. You’re both just feeling your way through this stuff. If your Yogi-boy is Harry, and this other woman has been his Sally the whole time, then it’s clear to see that you simply are not his happy ending. 

Here’s the fantastic news, love. You don’t want to be on the wrong bus when the right one pulls up. By not being in this love triangle tangle, you’re free to create your own happy ending.

“WHAT DO I DO TO GET OVER THIS?” YOU ASK.
I answer: Every time your whiny victim self comes out feeling sad and missing his smell, you give yourself permission to be a tearjerker and play your sadass clit-rock. Love her. Appreciate her for her ability to love openly; comfort her the way you’d console a child. Put a time limit on that shit though. Then take a look at your no-room-for-bullshit self. Imagine her. Seriously, close your eyes and picture her. Is she a big black woman? A Jillian Michaels lookalike? She’s going to kick your ass if you don’t quit feeling sorry for yourself. Get the hell out of the house. Sit in a cafe, realize that life goes on outside of you and your dramas. And love her. Love your inner “We ain’t got time for this shit, now move it or lose it” self. Watch them both duke it out. Get some distance from it. Just watch. And it will suddenly feel less dire.

Keep yourself busy, go outside, cut off all communication with Sir Yogi, and I promise, promise, promise you will be writing in again to tell us how giddy you are about your new life.

GOT QUESTIONS? NEED ADVICE?
If you have questions or need advice on anything from where to eat to how to get over the bastard, just email your question to my advice email address. Am I a doctor? I don’t even play one on TV, but people keep asking, so I might as well air it and share it.

QUESTION FROM A GREEK TRAGEDY READER:

I am a 29-year-old single mom, recently divorced. After a year of being separated, I met my current boyfriend: 30, never been married, set in his OCD ways. A year after breaking up with his live-in girlfriend he met me.

We met over ten months ago at the apartment complex where we lived. After a month of friendship, we continued to move things forward and began a romantic relationship. From the beginning we were talking serious talk: marriage, kids, family—not with each other, necessarily, but simply getting to know each other and what we wanted in our lives.

Please note: he still seems to hold onto this childhood fantasy that he’d marry his high school sweetheart, the one that would have him on a pedestal and he’d never be #2. His parents and grandparents were high school sweethearts, and that was his dream. He also wanted a woman who was never married, wanting his children and their marriage to be her one and only.

The fact that it wasn’t the case with me had caused an adjustment for him. He says he loves me, and I believe him since he decided to take on this challenge (for him) and go with it.

We moved in together about a month ago. We are a great team, we get along great, I can’t say enough about our interaction. We are a great couple (I believe it, and so he says). But there are a couple of issues.

I am still insecure because of my past experiences, and the fact that my ex-husband cheated on me. I try to play detective sometimes. And what makes it worse is the fact that he has A LOT of female friends. Some of them he’s “been with” in the past. Also, his last ex still contacts him, used to drop by with cupcakes etc. We talk a lot about these females, and he has a perfect answer for everything. Although talking to him makes me feel more secure about him and trust him more, there is still this part of me that would doubt him. I was thinking it was my insecurity, so I was trying to settle it within myself because I didn’t want him to get tired of my questioning every single text that appears in his phone from different women.

But here is the issue and the reason why I feel I couldn’t trust him completely. He has a password on his cell phone, he had a good explanation for it, but still I couldn’t help but wonder. Then sometimes when texting he would act weird, like he didn’t want me to see the screen, sometimes he would just carry his phone in his pocket while at home. Things like that. So at some point I learned his password and before we moved in together I went through it. The only thing I really saw was him talking to a woman that day, at the end he says “ok my movie is about to start, I will talk to you later” but he wasn’t going to watch a movie, he was coming over my place. I did talk to him about it in a round about way later at some point, and in general terms, like, “Honey, why do men….” So he said, that it is because the person they are talking to is really not a close friend and maybe someone who just happens to contact them after a long time, so men just don’t give too much explanation. Ok I bought that. But I was still not satisfied because he still seemed weird with his phone. And right before we moved in he was texting with some one who he called “brown eyes” and tried to tell me she was someone from work. But to me, why would a man nickname a coworker “brown eyes” in their phone? Anyways, after we moved in together, I tried to check his phone once again and the password had changed. So it raised another question in my little insecure but very not naïve mind. Eventually I was able to get into his phone and to my (not surprise) there were txt deleted that I am not sure what was being talked about, but it was from women who I had a gut feeling about. But the main one was the brown eye girl, who supposedly was his coworker, she is not a coworker, when confronted he wouldn’t answer the question as to who she was especially after he knew I already knew the truth. He tried to say she was a nobody, but wouldn’t say much else. Then once I said, why would you tell other women “I miss you, I miss seeing you everyday, I looooove that picture, beautiful hair, you have made my day…etc” he says that that is the way he is with his close friends, and tried to show me other people who says I miss you too, or admires their picture (one of them being his ex, who sent him a picture of herself). But wouldn’t answer the question, then if there is nothing to hide why have a password? Why lie about this person being a coworker when in fact she wasn’t? Why say she is a nobody, but then say that she is a close friend which is why he is saying I miss you? Etc…eventually this is what he said “IT IS TIME TO STOP FAKING, I GUESS I AM DONE”…meaning he was breaking up with me. I don’t know what he was faking, there was no explanation or clarification. So now I am wondering a whole bunch of things.

I live with the man, we haven’t talked in two days, I do not know what to do. Should I wait for him to talk to me? Should I bring it up? I have to think about my son, so I really do not know what do to. If we do talk and he wants to stay together, should I accept it, but ask for some changes on the whole phone thing or whatever. I don’t know.

He said that I never trusted him from the beginning, that I never accepted the fact that he has a lot of female friends. I said to him that some of his actions made me doubt him, such as having a password on his phone, why would someone do that? I don’t have a password. Plus he has disrespected me by saying stuff like that to other women, I don’t talk like that to other men, or have passwords, and I talk to my ex-husband about our son in front of him, so I don’t create any situations where he would have to doubt my commitment to him. He continues to say that trust shouldn’t be based on a password. And won’t admit to doing anything wrong.

I need some advice please because I am so confused now. What did he mean with “Time to stop faking”? Faking what? His love for me? The fact that he was okay with taking on this challenge? Maybe he can’t let go of younger women? I don’t know. and I don’t know if I should even be with him. But everything else is so perfect it makes it so hard for me.

Confused Woman mother of One.

IF YOU WERE IN FRONT OF ME, I’D KIcK YOU IN THE HEAD. Then I’d help you up off the floor, and warn you that it’s the very last time I’m helping you. You need to help yourself.

Confused?! About what could you possibly be confused? How did you ever let it come to this? Ever get yourself into this situation at all? Never mind putting your son in this situation? That’s the only confusion you should be confronting.

Children need stability, not people weaving in and out of their lives, disappearing. You never ever should have moved in with this guy. Period. If I were living in your town, no joke, I would drive to your home with empty boxes and force you to either move or pack up his things and push him out the door. I wouldn’t leave until it was done. Locks changed. You need to save yourself from yourself. I want to shake you. You are that far gone.

Okay. I’ve taken a breath. I’m calmer. Here is all there is to say: move out now. NOW. Check your bank statements and credit report. This man was using you for something. Your cooking, a roof over his head, your car? Something. You fed a need, and he is a cheater. Not a possibility, a fact. No amount of promises, however heartfelt, will ever set this right. He is bad news. And so are you if you don’t get him the hell out of your life.

This was not caused by your insecurities. Darlin’, this ain’t paranoia. You have every reason to feel insecure. People in healthy relationships, monogamous relationships, do not password-protect their lives. They live them openly because there is nothing to hide. Nothing, nothing, can excuse this away. No amount of logic or reason.

He is 100% cheating on you. I don’t care if he’s not having sex with them, if he is, isn’t, it doesn’t even matter. “She’s just a friend” isn’t true unless–and let me be clear here–unless he invites her to spend time with YOU. Every single woman, every single “friend,” should be someone you have met, spent time with. You need to hear him tell these friends that he loves you, that you live together.

I am angry with you. I am. I don’t know you, but I’ve been you in some wanting needing form. This is the worst you, the worst example you could possibly set for your son. You need to fix this, not with questions, not with “talks” or sit downs or rules. You need to either kick him out or find a new place, as soon as humanly possible.

Once you’re settled in your own space, just you and your son, I want you to figure out what in you allowed you to ever believe this was an acceptable standard of living. Why were you so quick to move in with him? You have a lot of personal work to do, and I suggest you find a therapist today. You need a professional who can help you see how your neediness is directing you to make such horrendous choices.

GOT QUESTIONS? NEED ADVICE?
If you have questions or need advice on anything from where to eat to how to get over the bastard, just email your question to my advice email address. Am I a doctor? I don’t even play one on TV, but people keep asking, so I might as well air it and share it.