Love, Lust & Faking It

by Jenny McCarthy

  “Oh my God, are you okay? I’m so sorry. He thought you were a speedboat.”

  Cough, cough. “No shit he thought I was a speedboat. You’re such an irresponsible bitch.”

  “Me? Why aren’t you in the drawer?”

  “Because I’m tired of hiding. I need to be free. You used to take me on trips. Now I just sit here and hear the sounds of Dancing with the Stars from a distance, knowing you’re sitting on the couch watching it without me.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re right. I know it’s your favorite show. I promise I’ll TiVo it if I can’t have you watch it with me.”

  The next day I had to go to New York. I knew if I didn’t take Vibrator with me, it would be over. So off we went to the airport. As I walked through security, I heard a man shout, “Whose bag is this?” My heart stopped. Oh no, Vibrator. You’ve been detected. I forgot to remove your batteries. I sheepishly replied, “Mine.” The security agent said, “Open your bag, please?”

  I stood there in silence. I didn’t know how to respond. What if they took Vibrator away from me? “Yes, you can open it,” I replied. He opened the bag and saw Vibrator staring at him. The security agent looked at me with an inquisitive look on his face. I calmly said, “It’s my boyfriend. Don’t take him from me.” The agent looked at me like I was crazy and then zipped up my bag. We made it through! Close one. Sadly though, that trip to New York was a disaster. Vibrator’s batteries died, and the hotel gift shop was closed. I frantically searched the room and discovered two AA batteries inside the remote control. They were weak. Vibrator sounded like he had had a stroke.

  “Whhhat the f*ck isssss wung wit me?” asked Vibrator.

  “They don’t have anything else. I can’t help you till tomorrow. I’m so sorry. I should have been more prepared,” I replied.

  “I’m breakingggg upt wit you,” he said.

  “Don’t be such a jerk,” I replied.

  Vibrator got up and stumbled out of the room. Later he e-mailed me …

  Dear Jenny,

  I think the Alicia Keys “Fallin’” song says it best…

  Sometimes I love ya, uhh, sometimes you make me blue

  Sometimes I feel good, at times I feel USED!!!!!

  Needless to say, I was confused. I couldn’t tell if he was over me or if he was still in love with me. When I got back to L.A., I discovered the break-up note. Vibrator did indeed dump me. Every day I wonder what happened to him. Did he find someone else? Did he find love? I’m still devastated by this abrupt ending. All I wish now is that Vibrator has found a good life. After all, even vibrators deserve happy endings.

  [4]

  Why Do We Love Who We Love?

  Okay, neuroscience world: here’s some scientific evidence as to why we love the people we love. I watched this doctor by the name of Dr. Helen Fisher in one of those TED conferences online and was fascinated by what she found. How many times have we wondered why we walked into a room and fell in love with that particular dude over all the other dudes? I made a call and asked her to spill the beans on her research.

  JENNY: How do I describe your title?

  DR. FISHER: Research Professor, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University.

  JENNY: Wow, that sounds so much better then my 1994

  Playboy Playmate of the Year title.

  DR. FISHER: (Chuckles.)

  JENNY: What made you decide to look into the science behind why we love whom we love?

  DR. FISHER: I had written my book, Why We Love, and I studied the brain circuitry of romantic love and because of it match.com called me two days before Christmas and asked me, “Why do you fall in love with one person rather than another?” And at the time I said, “I don’t know.” And that set me on this course of looking at some of the brain circuitry of why you’re drawn to one person rather than another.

  JENNY: Do we tend to fall in love with someone similar to ourselves?

  DR. FISHER: Yes, generally we fall in love with someone from the same socioeconomic background, same general level of intelligence, same general level of good looks, same religious and social values, your childhood plays a role. But I wanted to know if body chemistry plays a role. People will say, “Well, we had chemistry or we didn’t have chemistry.” And I thought to myself, Well, what do they mean by that? Maybe there is some chemistry that pulls us to one person rather than another, and that started me in on my whole thing.

  JENNY: Your discovery led you to create these different personality types. They totally made sense to me. Can you explain them to everyone else?

  DR. FISHER: I think we’ve evolved four very broad personality styles associated with the brain chemicals: dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and the last one is estrogen and oxytocin. I call these personality styles the Explorer, the Builder, the Director, and the Negotiator.

  JENNY: Okay, start with the Explorer.

  DR. FISHER: Explorers are people who are expressive of the dopamine system. They tend to be novelty seeking, risk taking, spontaneous, energetic, curious, creative, adaptable, flexible, often very liberal.

  JENNY: That’s so me. Okay, now tell me about the Builder.

  DR. FISHER: The Builder is expressive of the serotonin system and tends to be traditional, conventional, cautious but not scared, social, they’ve got more close friends, they’re networking people, they’re managerial, they’re loyal, they’re conscientious, they tend to be concrete thinkers, literal thinkers, they follow the rules, they respect authority.

  JENNY: Yeah, that is not me. That’s why I had a hard time in Catholic school. I couldn’t follow the rules and didn’t have much respect for evil nuns.

  DR. FISHER: The third is the Director, and it is expressive of the testosterone system; women as well as men Directors tend to be analytical, logical, direct, decisive, tough-minded, good at what we call will-based systems in science—things like math, engineering, computers, mechanics; they tend to be skeptical, they’re ambitious, they’re rank oriented, they’re competitive, they like to debate, they focus deeply but narrowly, and they contain their emotions.

  JENNY: And what about the fourth?

  DR. FISHER: The Negotiator is expressive of the estrogen and oxytocin system; they tend to see the big picture, they’re imaginative, they’re intuitive, they’ve got good verbal skills and people skills, they’re emotionally expressive, they’re altruistic, nurturing.

  JENNY: Aren’t we all a little of these?

  DR. FISHER: Yes, I think that we’re all a combination of all of these, but we have personalities and we express some more than others. The standard, very feminine one is the Negotiator, but there are a lot of women that are the Explorer type and the Builder type.

  JENNY: So because I am an Explorer type, would I only be attracted to Explorers?

  DR. FISHER: Well, there are two parts to a personality. There’s your temperament, which is what I study, your biology, and your character, which comes from your cultural upbringing. Let’s say you were an Explorer that grew up with an alcoholic father and everything was chaos and unpredictable and recklessness and you decided you didn’t want somebody who was that way. Just because of your upbringing. So you marry a Builder instead, and after about five years you might get bored.

  JENNY: Indeed.

  DR. FISHER: So, I mean, there’s much more to personalities than temperament. About 50 percent of who you are is temperament, but anyway, on the dating site www.chemistry.com, I studied about one thousand people, and yes, Explorers do tend to be attracted to other Explorers. They want somebody equally curious, equally creative, equally energetic.

  JENNY: So what about those Builders?

  DR. FISHER: Builders do tend to be attracted to other Builders; traditional goes with traditional.

  JENNY: That makes sense.

  DR. FISHER: But the third and fourth categories, high testosterone tends to go for high estrogen, and high estrogen tends to go for high testosterone. I think a good example is Hillary and Bill Clinton, and Hillary is very hig
h testosterone and she goes for Bill, who is clearly high estrogen.

  JENNY: I’m sure Bill will love to hear that! But Bill and Hillary are a really good example that you can mix and match. So they can mix and match?

  DR. FISHER: Oh my goodness, of course! I mean, what I’ve stumbled on is some basic patterns of nature that dopamine goes for dopamine, serotonin goes for serotonin; testosterone goes for estrogen and vice versa. However, there are huge variations on them, for example, take the guy who’s been around the block a million times and had sex with everybody and is very much the explorer type, curious about everything, they get into their late thirties and suddenly want to settle down, and who do they choose? A Builder who offers home and family and stability and community. So you know, many many many things play a role in mate choice. But what I’m trying to add is really the dramatic role of temperament, biology.

  JENNY: Well all I can say is … I can’t wait to explore some Explorers!!

  DR. FISHER: Enjoy!

  [5]

  Prove Your Love: Tattoo It!

  Thursdays in college were called “nickel draft nights.” A beer was seriously five cents. That was a good thing, considering I only had fifty cents in my pocket most of the time. Once when I was a sophomore, I was determined to get drunk and felt up. After my fourth beer I realized I was not even close to being buzzed yet. I needed at least twenty more cents to achieve the perfect set of beer goggles. Then it happened. “Can I buy you a beer?” Wow. This big spender was cute, and I wasn’t even wasted yet. And he was buying me a beer. Two points for him! He threw down a nickel, and I downed another drink. Then he threw down another nickel, and I downed another one. Fifteen cents later I found myself pressed up against the wall with my tongue down his throat.

  “Wanna walk back to my place?” he slurred. “Hell yeah,” is what I vaguely remember answering. We stumbled out of the bar and walked down the main street. My stomach was feeling woozy, so I slurred, “Let’s get a pizza slice to soak up the booze. I don’t want to puke on you.” He agreed and held on to me, not to help me walk but because he was holding himself up using my body. When we arrived at the pizza place there was a line so we were forced to stare at the drunk people in the tattoo shop next door. “Look at those idiots getting tattoos,” I said. My drunken dude replied, “I wonder how much it costs, I always wanted to get one.”

  Now let me just pause the story for a moment to tell you something about me in college. I was the one who said, “F*ck it,” and did what most people wouldn’t do. If my friends needed someone to test pills they found in a drawer, I volunteered. If people needed someone to drive cross-country with them to visit a boyfriend, I jumped in the car and drove with them. This was, without a doubt, the fallout from going to Catholic school for twelve years. I wanted to be free from rules and went against everything that I “shouldn’t” do. So, I hear this cute drunk guy say, “I always wanted to get one,” and of course I reply, “Let’s do it. I got a few bucks left on my credit card.” He pushed me against the wall for another deep throat session with his tongue. I guess he really wanted a tattoo. After a hot, wet kiss he said, “You’re the coolest chick ever. Let’s get a tattoo that matches each other.” I replied with the most romantic response I could muster, which was, “F*ck yeah.”

  We opened the door to the tattoo parlor and began looking for permanent art to immortalize this moment. In my drunken stupor I remember looking at him, thinking, I think I love this drunk dude. He pointed to a symbol on the wall and said, “How about that one?” It was a yin-yang symbol. For those who don’t know, it’s a Chinese symbol that represents how things work. One half of the circle is dark and the other side is white. They symbolize good and bad and together they balance each other. He said, “Why don’t we each get one side of the symbol? That way when we’re together we are balanced as one.” I almost died! This man standing before me was so deep. He was like Yoda, only much cuter. (Looking back now, I realize that it wasn’t spiritual insight; he probably had just finished watching a Steven Seagal movie.) I took my credit card out and paid for both of our tattoos.

  He was up first and took it like a champ. I hopped up on the table and stared into his eyes, thinking this guy might just be the one. As the needle zapped my skin I felt a rush of excitement flow through my body. I knew it went against all of the moral issues I had growing up. My mom hated tattoos, and the fact that it was a symbol outside Catholicism would make her hit the rosary even harder than when I got a hickey. I looked at the drunk guy and smiled. “Together we are one”—how cool is that, I kept thinking. As blood dripped down my lower back I became woozy. I never had gotten that slice of pizza to soak up the booze, and the evidence of that projected out of my mouth all over the floor. This didn’t seem to shock anyone. It was late, everyone was drunk, and a mop came out of nowhere, erasing the evidence in seconds. I smiled coyly and said, “Whoops.” Cute drunk guy didn’t care. I was his yin and he was my yang.

  The tattoo was complete and we stood next to each other with our butts facing the mirror. The tattoo was on our lower backs so when we stood next to each other it made a circle. My half completed his half. Someone walked by us and looked and said in the most perfect Chelsea Handler delivery, “That’s the dumbest tattoo I have ever seen. Are you guys gay?” We looked at each other and lowered our tops. Oh my God, what had I just done? Was I just drunk, or was I caught up in the romance of permanent ink love? I went back to my apartment and passed out. The next day I showed my roommates, and they confirmed how stupid my tattoo looked. “Idiot, it looks like a sperm without the other half of the yang.” I was so humiliated.

  A month later I went back home to visit my mom and caught the stomach flu. I was vomiting into the toilet, and my shirt bunched up. The next thing I know, my mom started screaming and whacking me with her hand because she saw my tattoo. “For the love of Jesus Christ, Jenny, you got a tattoo!” I cried out, “Mom, ouch! Please stop hitting me, I’m puking!”

  “What in the h-e-l-l is that thing?” she yelled. “It’s a yin-yang,” I replied. “Is it a devil thing?” she yelled again. “No, Mom, it means balance.” She replied, “It looks like a sperm!”

  In case you’re wondering, I never got the tattoo removed, and I have had to answer the question, “What in the hell is that sperm doing on your back?” for almost twenty years.

  I’m not against tattoos after this experience. I dig’em and really want to get one I like in this lifetime, but what I would like to remind people is that there seems to be a curse (at least in Hollywood)—when you tattoo someone’s name on you or share a symbol, it never seems to work out.

  I have often wondered what the drunk guy thinks about sharing a tattoo with me for all these years. Who knows, maybe we’ll bump into each other again. After all, he is my yang.

  [6]

  How to Love Yourself: A Lesson from Byron Katie

  Love myself? I come from a tough South Side Chicago neighborhood. We never learned about loving ourselves. We learned about how to numb our feelings with alcohol, and that felt pretty good. But love ourselves? No way. If a future Jenny had visited little Jenny in Chicago and told her that she was going to make loving herself her greatest mission when she got older, I would have thought for sure that meant that I was gonna either be a nun or turn into a giant dork. Obviously, the latter won out.

  For years, everyone told me, “You can’t love others without loving yourself.” I pretended to understand and went through the motions but always felt like I was missing something—kind of like when Dennis Miller tells jokes and you laugh along with everyone else but secretly think to yourself, “WTF?” I suffered with this loving-myself dilemma for years in my twenties. I read book after book on how to love yourself, and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me WHY this concept didn’t hit home. Yogis would say, “Do you love yourself?” I would say, “I guess so. I’m not annoying to myself, so I guess I love myself.” It seemed a little weird, but I still tried everything possible to accompl
ish this goal. I even tried hugging myself. I knew things got to be really dorky when I found myself doing affirmations in the mirror.

  “I love you, Jenny… you stupid idiot.”

  I couldn’t hold the seriousness of what I was trying to do for more than a few seconds at a time. It just seemed so lame, not to mention exhausting. I actually started hating myself for failing. Then I started reading books by Byron Katie, and my life was forever changed. I had to share her work with you in case any of you gals out there are also struggling to figure out how to love the most important person in your life … you!

  JENNY: Byron, please tell everyone about “The Work” that you created to help people understand painful thoughts that we feel about ourselves sometimes.

  KATIE: The Work is a way to identify and question the thoughts that cause all the suffering in the world. It consists of four questions that you apply to a stressful thought. It’s a way to understand what’s hurting you, a way to end all your stress and suffering. It works for everyone with an open mind, and it has a profound effect on your whole life.

  JENNY: It did mine! Talk about the four questions.

  KATIE: The first question is, “Is it true?” The second is, “Can you absolutely know that it’s true?” The third is, “How do you react—what happens—when you believe that thought?” The fourth is, “Who would you be without the thought?” Then you turn the original thought around, and find genuine, specific examples of how the turnaround is true in your life. This is a way of letting you experience the opposite of what you have been believing.

  JENNY: How do you do The Work?

  KATIE: There are detailed instructions on my Web site, www.thework.com. It’s an amazingly simple and powerful process. The Work treats all stress and unhappiness at its source. When you question your thinking thoroughly, you return to your natural state of peace and joy, where depression, frustration, sadness, and anger can’t exist. You become your own therapist, your own teacher, your own cure. There is no advice in The Work, no attempt at substituting positive for negative, nothing that you can do wrong, no goal. The only thing you need to bring to it is a willingness to answer the questions. It’s not a process of learning; it’s a process of unlearning. I found The Work—or more accurately, The Work found me—when I was extremely depressed and suicidal, and had been for ten years. One morning I opened my eyes, and all that darkness was gone. What I discovered in that moment was that all our suffering comes from believing our stressful thoughts. I saw that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I questioned them, I didn’t suffer, and I have discovered that this is true for every human being. We believe a stressful thought, and suffering follows. We believe, “He wronged me,” for example, and the cycle starts. I suffer from believing that he wronged me, and then I try to place blame or guilt on him, and it cycles back and forth.