But in my sister’s wedding photos, my sister looks so natural and happy and just…I know it’s a cliché, but she looks angelic. She is luminous. She really is. No one went out of their way to tell me I looked nice that day or paid special attention to the new boyfriend I had with me. Everyone was too busy being enchanted by my sister. They were all just thrilled to see her so happy.
I get a good feeling whenever I look at her photos. She was so generous and patient with me that weekend—even though I was feeling a little sorry for myself because my new boyfriend was flirting with all of the bridesmaids. My sister never acted like the whole day was about her. If anything, she seemed to want to share her big day with me.
Because when we fixate on boys starting at a very young age, every pointless, empty interaction with a dude starts to seem powerful and electric. I don’t mean to discount the glory of hormones and attraction and young love, but—to think of how rich and full my mind and my heart could’ve been without my boy obsession! I might’ve learned how to, I don’t know, speak Russian, or play the piano, or reupholster furniture!
This is the unsung glory of marriage: No more rich fucking tapestries necessary. Time to garden, read, play guitar, cook, write, hang out with friends, and—perhaps most importantly—watch fifteen hours of reality TV in a row.
The world has told you lies about how small you are. You will look back on this time and say, “I had it all, but I didn’t even know it. I was at the center, I could breathe in happiness, I could swim to the moon. I had everything I needed.”
But this is true of so many of the shiny distractions of our culture. Anything that temporarily fills your vision and is also delightful and tempting and gorgeous, whether it be a $5k leather jacket or a charming plate of aged cheeses or a long read on Taylor Swift befriending a wide selection of fun-loving supermodels, can derail your whole day and your values and your priorities and your identity along with it. That’s just the nature of modern living. Everything is custom-designed to make us drop what we’re doing and drool and feel inadequate and long for more. It’s all crack, I tell you. IT’S 2016 AND THE WHOLE WORLD IS MADE OF CRACK.
But when you’re swimming through hollow, crass junk every single day, it’s hard not to be affected by it. Until one day you’ve seen one episode too many and you say to yourself, “I can’t bathe in this stuff every day or I’ll turn into someone I don’t like.”
You could, instead, see your job as a daily exercise in denying the impulses you recognize as unhealthy. Or maybe you could just look at it as a way to pay the rent while you figure out what you really want from your life. Or maybe you could view it as a way to climb the editorial ladder and then leap over to a publication that supports your values. A chance to climb that ladder and rack up valuable experience is not to be trifled with. I may have been tired of covering television toward the end of my seven-year stint as a TV critic, but few other jobs would’ve allowed me so much time to write. I struggled to file delightful new insights every few days, like any writer does. There’s something to be said for pushing past the naturally repellent aspects of any job and keeping the faith that you’re picking up skills that you’ll be able to use elsewhere. Even though I used to say, “I think I’ve learned everything I can learn here,” occasionally, I don’t think I would’ve landed in the same place if I’d only tolerated that job for two or three years. I learned to put my mixed feelings aside and meet my deadlines, week after week.
You feel like your diagnosis is the end of the world because it IS the end of a world that you inhabited for a long time. And somehow this feels like your fault. It feels like something that will plague you forever. You feel like you’ll never get over the stigma of this. You think that anyone you have feelings for will cringe and run away, and that behavior will only confirm your darkest fears: that you’re fucked-up and selfish and unworthy of love.
You are just a person with regular flaws, fumbling your way toward a satisfying life. You’ve been handed a big challenge, but one that’s going to help you to grow up and take care of yourself and connect honestly with other people. You don’t have to love this challenge right now. You can cry every day and feel terrible about it. But this challenge wasn’t meant to topple everything else you’re doing that’s good in your life. This challenge fits right in with your exercising and eating healthier and traveling and connecting with friends and taking care of yourself. This is you, facing whatever comes next while also acknowledging that you’ve been thrown for a loop. In the months after my dad’s death, I could see that I would have to become a new kind of person in order to survive. I felt terrible, of course, but you can feel terrible and also feel fully alive. You can feel crushed and also feel inspired and hopeful. In your darkest moments, look for some hope. It’s there.
People who stand up for themselves are magnetic—partly because most people don’t.
I’ve also felt like someone’s parent before. I know how you feel, and it sucks. You feel responsible for holding this grown adult together. But it can also feel good, in a weird way. It’s satisfying to be needed that much, especially if you’ve never been needed before. It can bring out all of your nurturing instincts, whether you’re a man or a woman. If you walk in the door and there’s someone there, happy to see you, cooking you dinner, thrilled to hear about your day? That can be pretty satisfying. Some of us have never had that. And if he gives you a lot of credit for being someone who knows how to go out into the real world and bring home the bacon? Well, it’s hard not to take pride in that.
But you know what we both needed? To break our co-dependent bond and face ourselves. That wasn’t going to happen when we were together. So he was a casualty of my youth. And I didn’t find someone who was the same intellectual match for me for years after that. I fell in love, but I didn’t feel that comforted and loved again until I met my husband.
The strange irony of being a very sensitive person who wants to say, “I don’t like that,” or “You hurt me,” is that you tend to take it too personally when other people say, “I don’t like that,” or “You hurt me.” You feel attacked, and so you conclude that the other person must be “wrong” to say something so direct, so critical, so negative. So you avoid asserting yourself the same way that other people do, because other people will surely encounter your assertiveness as injurious, the way you have.
Listen closely when someone asserts his or her boundaries. Because that’s healthy behavior, even if it’s not to your taste at this point. Learn from them. Because most people avoid problems instead of asserting themselves. They clam up. They disappear. That’s the coward’s path, even if it’s a path a lot of us take.
When I look back now, I see someone who felt plenty of things but never really trusted her own feelings to guide her: I would daydream about meeting a better boyfriend, but I wouldn’t dump my not-all-that-great one. I would be plagued by the feeling that I was wasting my time at my job, but I wouldn’t quit. I would blow off my friends when I felt wronged by them, but I wouldn’t tell them when they neglected me or hurt my feelings.
I didn’t feel my feelings that much, because I was worried that if I did, I would fall apart and I’d quit my job and I’d dump my boyfriend and I’d be totally depressed. I didn’t trust myself to fix things in my own life, and I was afraid of being alone. I wanted to avoid making any rash decisions about anything, because that way at least I would feel safe and secure and nothing would have to change.
If I felt very angry or very sad, that could only mean that I was about to scare away my boyfriend and my family and whatever remaining friends I had. I didn’t believe that anyone would ever love me as long as I let my emotions out and felt vulnerable.
Lots of people believe that, and there are a wide range of negative side effects that flow forth from that belief. “I don’t know” might seem like a relatively minor side effect, but I think it might mean that you’re mildly depressed.
Don’t take the word “mildly” mildly here! Being mildly depressed can fuck with your life on every level. It keeps you from feeling great at work or feeling exhilarated after a great yoga class. It turns you into someone who’s always peering into someone else’s windows, wondering why the people inside seem so passionate and happy and thrilled, wondering if they’re just simpleminded or stupid, wondering if they grew up in happier homes so they’re not damned to shuffle around in a haze of uncertainty the way that you are.
Turn and look at them silently, as if to say, “We’ve talked about this, remember?” Making a giant stink about it every time it comes up will only make you more upset. You can calmly restate your boundaries. That will bring better results in the long run than getting angry and going off.
There was a time when I could barely stand to visit my mother. I was going through a sad and angry period, and I just wanted to say, “Look at me! This is who I am! I’m complicated! I’m not a happy clown! You have to love me anyway!”
What worked was saying, “I am in a shitty mood this morning. It’s not about you, so don’t think that it is, okay? I love you. Just be patient with me.”
They may have felt much less loved than you felt growing up, even if your upbringing was compromised in some ways. You have to express your anger, too. But when you do, do it from a loving place. Do it knowing that it will make everyone feel more clear about what is and isn’t appropriate.
Having healthy, clear boundaries can actually bring people closer to each other. By telling people exactly what you expect, what you will and won’t do, what you want and what you don’t want from them, you will put them at ease.
The narcissistic swagger of a cheater, with its undercurrents of anger and insecurity, is pretty unmistakable. I can befriend guys like that, but even if they’re intellectually interesting, I can never take them seriously emotionally. They’re never really putting their hearts on the line. It’s like they’re buying and selling sexual stocks constantly. Every move is a hedge. Their position is always covered.
I think you’re playing a similar game in order to keep yourself protected and safe. For one thing, if you had closer relationships with women, you’d never wriggle your way into unavailable-man pants. You don’t have enough real emotional intimacy in your life, so you’re taking this strange shortcut to emotional intensity with taken men. You’re substituting the electricity of sneaking around for rich, meaningful connections with people you can actually trust and lean on.
You’re also very competitive, so when a guy gives you attention, you feel like you’re “winning” somehow. We all grow up believing that only one of us can win—one beautiful princess at the ball, among all the goofy sidekicks and maiden aunts.
This is the downside of living in a gigantic country like the U.S.: You move away for college, you move away for work, you move away because you meet a great guy or girl, and one day you wake up and you’re two thousand miles away from anyone who knows you really well. For someone who’s not great at small talk, who can never quite hit that lowest common denominator of casual chattiness, who can never quite manage to burble happily about the weather and the news and those cute shoes and the new restaurant down the block, making brand-new friends sounds about as appealing as a trip to the podiatrist.
But even though I was a socially paralyzed shut-in, I realize now that my standards were also way too fucking high. No one was smart enough or interesting enough for me. No one was perfectly equipped to understand every inch of my tortured soul.
You can’t get a BFF overnight, and you shouldn’t be in the market for that right now anyway. You just need a few people to hang out with every now and then. Mostly, though, you need to practice the art of coming out of your shell, of listening, of making a connection. You can do this with a retiree or a new mom. Maybe it won’t amount to anything, but it’s still good for you. You can simply exchange a few words, learn something. You can simply show up, hold your own space, feel alive, take in the atmosphere, and be prepared to talk if that situation arises.
Do it now in order to prepare yourself for doing it twenty years from now, because you’ll always have to do it. You don’t just get the big group of buddies and then sleepwalk through the rest of your life. Life isn’t like that.
You have a great life already. You’re not starting from zero. You just have to get out of this ashamed, protective place and know that if you work hard to get your head in the right place, people will be drawn to you. You can’t get discouraged when great friendships don’t appear immediately. You have to keep the faith and keep trying and recognize that it’s good for you, and good for everybody else, too.
Meet some new people. Forget the small talk. Practice asking big questions and listening to the answers. Practice NOT filling up the pauses in conversation with empty words. Practice being comfortable with silence. Practice paying less attention to how you’re coming across. Focus on the other person instead. Stay attuned to his emotions, the meaning behind what he says. Does he seem lonely? Does she feel isolated? Does he feel dissatisfied?
But definitely don’t just cross your fingers and hope that he picks a different job. No way. Just tell him. Trust me, I’ve known plenty of people who didn’t tell their partners important things—like introducing former lovers as “old friends” in passing without thinking about it—and then the truth comes out and one really minor, stupid lie turns into what feels like a major violation of trust and a big wound that needs to be mended. When you conceal the truth, you make your past affair feel, to your boyfriend, like it still holds sexual intrigue for you. You give the impression, with a small lie, that you still DESERVE to feel shame over this.
Tell him everything, and while you’re at it, talk with him about the importance of honesty in a relationship. Without honesty, there really isn’t a relationship at all. Don’t live that way. Don’t try to seem better than you are. Show him who you are, mistakes and all. That’s how you’ll build a solid foundation of trust between you two, so you can move forward and make a whole lifetime of mistakes together. (Ha!) Tell him the truth. Then put down this load and don’t pick it up again. You’ve carried it around for long enough.