Jo Piazza

by Love Rehab

  Given the circumstances, I’m telling you now.

  I like spending time with you. I’d be happy to spend more time with you. I’d enjoy another chance to get comfortable with you in bed and rock your world. But if this is the end of the road, I have zero regrets.

  Peace,

  Max

  “So what should I do?” Lila asked, genuinely bewildered.

  Annie was the first to reply, probably because she was usually on the sending end of such missives.

  “You never talk to him again. He’s gross. That e-mail is fucked up.”

  Lila slumped in her chair.

  “I thought it was sweet.”

  That was another problem we were all having. We didn’t know what good communication with men was even like anymore. They threw us the tiniest of slivers of bones, like, “I like spending time with you,” and we forget that a paragraph earlier they told us they lied to us about having sex with someone else the night before our date.

  It went on like that as every woman stood up around the room.

  “I texted nine times.”

  “I checked his e-mail again.”

  “I Facebook stalked his new girlfriend.”

  “I followed his every move on Instagram and then started going to the same coffee shop in the morning.”

  That began a twenty-minute discussion of what was more dangerous when it came to cyber stalking, Facebook or Instagram. Facebook provided more depth for the serious stalker, more photos, a deeper dive into whom they were spending time with, but Instagram gave an immediacy that is poisonous for a woman hanging by a thread.

  “I drove by his house four times.”

  “I told a mutual friend he had the clap.”

  “I created a fake e-mail account to e-mail my ex, claiming my name was Marianne Faithfull, but I wasn’t the Marianne Faithfull.”

  “I was hammered and out, and Hot Bobby [a guy Olivia had gone on two and a half dates with] was home and sober. So obviously I go over there and we hook up. He had a teeny tiny room with a modular closet with his television on top. I started asking him if he would consider me his girlfriend. He wouldn’t answer. So I got up butt-ass naked and for whatever reason started walking on top of the bed toward the door like I was leaving. Hot Bobby was, like, grabbing at my foot and I was kicking and trying to avoid him. I started to fall forward and reached for one of the shelves to steady me. I tore down Hot Bobby’s closet, television and all. Do you think he will text me again?”

  We shook our heads.

  Rule 3: Stop the drunk booty call.

  It is never, ever attractive.

  “I’ll miss hearing about Hot Bobby,” Lila said.

  Jordana cocked her head to one side. “Hot Bobby’s Closet sounds a bit like a home decorating show hosted by a scrumptious homosexual on the Bravo network.”

  “Mmmmm. Or an indie punk band fronted by Jared Leto,” I said.

  We spent the next five minutes in a sidebar talking about our collective tween crushes on Jordan Catalano and the way he just leaned on things.

  As each woman divulged her dirty little secret for the week, you could see her visibly relax, like a weight had been removed from her shoulders. It felt nice to be able to tell people our secret crazy. It felt much better than telling our “noncrazy” friends, who we knew in our heart of hearts would say, “Yes, of course that makes sense,” before getting on the phone with someone else to recount how very sad they believed us to be.

  Since I still felt a little in charge of the group, I suggested we brainstorm some more rules to break these patterns.

  “No more social media,” Lila said. “Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest are ruining my life.”

  “Pinterest?” Princess asked with curiosity. “I thought that one was just for posting pictures of pretty food, puppies, and Robert Pattinson with his shirt off.”

  “Oh, it is,” Lila said. “But the problem is that I can access my ex’s new girlfriend’s Pinterest page. I tried to copy her recipe for crème brûlée cupcakes yesterday, and I ordered one of the throw cushions that she embroiders with horrible inspirational phrases. It says ‘hang in there.’”

  “It’s good advice,” I said sympathetically. “You are hanging in there.”

  “I don’t want to hang in there with her goddamned pillow!” Lila, who was normally quite composed, erupted. She quickly got ahold of herself. “Anyway, I think the ability to peek in on ex-boyfriends and their new girlfriends’ lives is dangerous.”

  Cameron chimed in. “Not just exes, but new or potential boyfriends. I knew everything about Tandoori Chicken Guy ten minutes after our date.”

  Eyebrows raised at Cam’s use of the word date.

  “Was it really a date?” Annie asked.

  “Ughhhh. I think everything is a date. I was already figuring out how our lives fit together based on his Facebook pictures.”

  They had hit the nail on the head. Social media didn’t create our neuroses or unhealthy obsessions. Let’s face it; women have been driving themselves crazy over men since Adam taunted Eve about how she shouldn’t eat the apple because the apple would make her chubby. Eve ate the damn thing out of spite and became man’s scapegoat number one for all eternity.

  Still, social media did allow our too, too complex lady brains to go into hyperdrive, facilitating the cycle of addiction to romantic love.

  “No more social media,” I said with conviction. “Let’s just spend some time offline and see how that works out for us.”

  Everyone nodded in agreement.

  We had our fourth rule!

  Rule 4: Never mix social media and relationships,

  until he puts a ring on it … then maybe.

  Then I proposed an activity that Joe had suggested to help us figure out our behavior patterns. We needed to create a moral inventory. It was the fourth of the proper twelve steps.

  “What’s a moral inventory?” Jordana asked.

  “I’ve done that one before,” Katrina said, sitting up with excitement after lying prone on the floor with two quartz crystals balanced precariously on her cheekbones to alleviate tension in her gallbladder. “I did it when I went to a silent retreat in Bern. It’s where you make a list of all the things you do that keep you from achieving your best self.”

  “That one sounds fun,” Jordana said, the room nodding in agreement.

  It was a nice simple step to begin with. How hard could it be to write down what was wrong with you? It seemed much harder to write down all the things that were right, and we were already on such a roll after the weekly progress reports. I grabbed a stack of sketch pads that I used to sketch out ideas for work and a handful of pencils, figuring people would want to erase as they went along. I told everyone we would devote fifteen minutes to making our lists and then reconvene to read them and talk about them.

  Five minutes in I realized this was much harder than it seemed. What did I do wrong in my relationships that made them all end badly? Of course, all relationships end badly until, hopefully, the one that never ends at all. What had I particularly done with Eric? Right off the bat I think that I might have come on too strong. Cameron and I definitely had that in common. Only two months into our relationship I had three glasses of wine and babbled “I love you” as we were having sex. Eric ignored me. The next morning I defensively brought it up.

  “You know, when I said I loved you last night, I didn’t mean it. Everyone says things like that during sex.”

  “I know,” he said without batting an eye over the Sports section of the New York Times.

  “But what did you think when I said it?” I pushed.

  “I thought, man, I’m about to come.” He smiled and tweaked my boob, a habit that hurt more than tickled but that I had come to find endearing.

  “Did you think ‘I love you too’?” I wasn’t prepared to let it go.

  “I thought I was about to come,” he said, pulling me into his lap and making that statement a reality then and there.


  I kept on like that, slipping “accidental” “love you”s into conversations where I could claim deniability later and then bickering over them in the morning, until finally one day he relented and submitted to a “love ya too” (emphasis strongly on the ya, as if by leaving off two letters the entire meaning of the phrase could be inexorably altered), after which point I proceeded to tack on an “I love you” to every phone conversation and before we parted, until it became pretty commonplace and he simply accepted that it was something we were now saying and doing. After a while I suppose I had forgotten how it all started and come to believe that he was a willing participant in the lovefest. And after that I simply shifted the narrative of how we fell in love in my head.

  I wrote down “needy” on my list followed by “pushy.” And then added “too quick to fall in love.” Then I had a breakthrough. This was something I did with all my boyfriends leading up to Eric too. Eric was no anomaly.

  It went all the way back to Michael Macintyre in high school. I made a binder of what our wedding would look like and gave it to him before he went off to college a year before me. That was before cell phones, but even I knew the reason he never answered the phone in his dorm.

  I was a love pusher. I just wanted my boyfriends to like me so much that I never really considered whether I liked them. It just felt good to make someone like me.

  Surprised to find fifteen minutes up and just three things on my list, I reconvened the group.

  “I’ll go first.” I broke the ice. “I’m a needy love pusher. I make people tell me they love me before they’ve ever had a chance to fall in love with me.” This was met with nods of approval.

  “That’s all?” Katrina said.

  “It was only fifteen minutes, and I think that is actually quite a big revelation for me. I don’t think I ever realized it was something I did until just now. In my head I genuinely thought all ‘I love you’s came organically and that love just happened to me through a series of madcap moments the way it does in Reese Witherspoon movies, but if you look back through my catalog of boyfriends the ‘love issue’ always came up under duress instigated by me.”

  And that wasn’t all of it. “Since it was said under duress, I made them all feel trapped and eventually they grew to completely despise me.

  “The bigger problem,” I admitted, “is I don’t know if I actually loved them or just wanted to be in love.” I was starting to realize that there was a big difference. Everyone clapped, and Prithi put her arm around me when I sat down.

  Katrina looked like she approved before she stood in front of the group with two pages of her flaws.

  I crossed my arms. It wasn’t quite fair that she was so adept at this listicling since she had done this before and on a silent retreat no less, where she probably had days of peace and quiet and Swedish massage to come up with all her moral failings.

  Stella wrote down her moral failings, and Melinda, who was coming weekly as her translator, read them aloud.

  “I turn into a chameleon. I pretend to like what they like. If they like the Beatles, then I like the Beatles, even though I think ‘Here Comes the Sun’ is one of the worst songs ever written. If they like running, I pretend to like running. I act like I like sashimi when really I only like raw fish in rolls. I think that by becoming more like them they will like me.”

  We all nodded. Everyone did at least a little bit of that. While dating a Colombian in college I pretended to be completely into the fútbol (I even pronounced it like I imagined Gisele would: the Foooootbowl), when I couldn’t name a single position in the fútbol (soccer, damnit) besides the goalie.

  Cameron raised her hand.

  “I envy people in relationships.” We looked at her quizzically. Of course we all envied people in relationships. Somehow relationships became the be-all and end-all of what women strive for in their twenties and thirties. Even as we pretend we’re striving for something else, like a great career or that perfect ass or self-actualization through lots of yoga and meditation, we still sneak a peek at the left ring finger of every man we meet to see if he is worth spending our time talking to. We still hope and pray that every man we encounter is going to be the one who sweeps us off our feet and declares our dating days dead in the water.

  But Cameron had more to say. “I kind of hate them. And I don’t want to hate them, especially my friends. I want to look at my friends who are in relationships and be totally happy for them because they’ve achieved something that I want. If a friend of mine runs a marathon or climbs a mountain, I am proud of them. If they get a man to ask them to move in with them, I don’t want to talk to them for weeks. And it makes me feel like a bad person. It makes me feel even worse, but somehow I can’t stop it.”

  I got her. To some extent we all hate our married or long-term coupled friends. I think that’s why Bridget Jones decided to refer to them as the “smug marrieds,” because what else could we say about them? For the most part, save for a few couples that I don’t think ever should have gotten together (he’s gay, she’s a mensch), my married friends are quite happy. They have something I want, but maybe I should have just been happy that what I wanted was out there and possible instead of feeling awful when one of my friends’ husbands stroked his wife’s back or texted her something funny, just because he happened to be thinking about her during our brunch date on a Saturday.

  Once everyone had their turn and felt properly unburdened of what had turned into a multitude of issues, the room was decidedly blue. Admitting what is wrong with you is not a fun game and while LAA wasn’t supposed to be a bed of roses, we were supposed to leave feeling better about ourselves. It was also hard to accept that what we were lonely for was actually someone we hadn’t met yet. We didn’t so much miss all the jerks we were leaving behind as we were terrified of not finding the one that was right for us.

  The camp counselor in me (TRUTH: I only survived one summer of camp counseloring due to my aversion to bugs, an extreme allergy to poison ivy, and Annie not being invited back after canoeing to the boys’ side of camp to buy some bootleg tequila) came out.

  “This is a good thing, ladies,” I blurted out with a tad too much contrived enthusiasm. “We don’t have to feel like shit because of what we’ve done in the past. The point of this exercise is to own our faults and try not to repeat them. I have an idea if everyone can stay just a little bit longer.”

  Everyone agreed they had nowhere better to be on a Sunday night. I left them to their devices while I scoured the garage for Eleanor’s personal guilty pleasure—hoping that no one had moved it since the funeral.

  It ended up being pretty easy to find. Covered by a sheet in the far back corner of the car port was a karaoke machine complete with two microphones. It took me only a few minutes to set it up on the television in the basement, thanks to Eleanor’s detailed cursive instructions left for her nurses on how to make the thing work. I remembered that when she was on her last legs, she demanded to karaoke with her support staff on Sunday nights, singing mainly show tune staples. Tito, Eleanor always said, did a wonderful baritone “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”

  My grandmother was partial to Pat Benatar.

  I called everyone to the basement.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do. Everyone pick a song that you think represents your worst moral failing and sing it.”

  There was a groan, but I decided to translate it as a groan of delight. Of course I could have been deluding myself. Maybe I was also a karaoke pusher. But if I was, I didn’t care. I couldn’t imagine how anyone wouldn’t be happier after a few rounds of karaoke.

  Katrina went first, choosing Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” since high on her list was the fact that she didn’t think she respected herself enough to search for a man who loved her for the right reasons. Stella hummed along to Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” since her biggest failing, conveyed to us through a series of notes, was that she was unable to appreciate herself as much as the boyfriend
s she always put on a pedestal. Prithi sang “Papa Don’t Preach,” natch.

  I went through the list of thousands of songs stored in the machine until I came up with the perfect song for my personal moral inventory.

  I was so into “I Would Do Anything for Love” that it wasn’t until I was to hell and back about four times (who knew the abridged version of the song was seven minutes!) before I realized that Joe had crashed our meeting and was standing on the stairs holding his lighter aloft in the air and waving it back and forth. I blushed but finished the last two and a half minutes, totally breathless, to cheers and applause, delighted that I had jarred the room out of its self-inflicted depression. Two hours later a very happy crew dispersed in a haze of melodic humming, with an extra bob in their steps.

  Joe stuck around to help clean and chatted with Annie about her upcoming court appearance where she had to chat with the judge about her progress in therapy.

  “Karaoke, huh?” he said when we were momentarily alone in the kitchen.

  “We did a moral inventory of our flaws and everyone was so bummed that I had to do something to brighten the mood,” I explained. “Karaoke makes everyone happy.”

  “Not if you can’t carry a tune,” he said.

  “Especially if you can’t carry a tune.”

  “Not me. I hate doing anything I am bad at. I’m awful at just letting go if I know I can’t do things perfectly. I’m actually awful at letting go altogether except when I drink.”

  “Is that why you drink?”

  “I think that alcoholics and addicts are predisposed to their drug of choice but, yeah, I think I drank when I wanted to loosen up and that it got out of control.” Joe seemed ready to shift the topic away from him when he asked, “What was on your moral inventory?”