thirty-two

  

I left Sasha’s around four o’clock that afternoon with a heart lighter than it had been in weeks, a head full of complicated emotions about her and Stu, and in my purse, a compact disc containing the interview she’d conducted with my mother.

“Just listen,” she told me, pressing it into my hand when I’d finally left. “It’s interesting.”

At home I wandered into the guest bathroom and looked again at the gleaming tile that Dad and I had put in. I hadn’t talked to my dad since his revelation to me. I didn’t know what he was feeling—was he sorry he’d told me, worried how I was taking it, remorseful that he’d betrayed my mom—once by cheating on her, and again my confessing it to me? I needed to call him, to tell him how I felt—except I didn’t know yet. In the space of a few hours my entire idea of my father had changed, the whole dynamic of my family I always thought I understood, and I didn’t know what to do with that.

It was still early, so I hauled all the supplies my dad and I had bought inside from the garage and started working, mixing up a bucket of grout to finish off the bathroom tub. I carried in my laptop, too, and even set the CD into it to listen while I worked, but in the end I never pushed play, and I finished the job to only the scraping sounds of my trowel and the gentle drip of water from my sponge.

  

On Monday morning I wrote my column, and this time it flowed like floodwater:

What happens if, despite all your efforts, your determination, your calm, rational thoughts in the light of day, you still just can’t handle your bad breakup?

No matter how much we wish relationships could be broken down like scientific formulae, separated into their constituent parts that always react in predictable ways, they aren’t, and they don’t. Because they’re between human beings, and we are all messy and illogical and flawed.

Rejection touches a nerve so deep and primordial, sometimes we can’t stop ourselves from acting instinctively—for our survival. From our earliest societies, if your tribe rejected you—and ejected you—you were literally, utterly vulnerable to destruction: from starvation, from exposure, from saber-toothed tigers and bears. As children, we knew that without our parents’ love and care, we would die. Somewhere inside, we are still hard-wired to panic at rejection, to desperately cling to the people who love us. Our atavistic instincts make us fight to hold on to the safety and protection of love.

It’s hard to override instincts. The logical human mind is a wondrous and powerful thing, but it’s got nothing on ingrained unconscious drives.

So despite knowing better, you find yourself standing out in front of your ex’s house in the rain, staring into the windows and contemplating breaking in. You write the sappy letters; you make the ill-advised late-night drunken phone calls; you cry and scream and throw things and behave in ways you never—not once in your whole rational life—would have predicted yourself doing.

This may hurt, and it may be frightening, and you may not think you can live through the welter of pain and fear that has overcome your usual rational mind. But you can, and you will. This too, truly, will pass.

And in the meantime, if you are overwhelmed by your basic instincts, if you fight too hard and too fiercely to hold on to the love you think you will die without, if you make stupid, embarrassing mistakes—in other words, if you are human—forgive yourself: over and over and over again.

You messed up. You will probably mess up again. We can’t help it—that’s what we do. Don’t let those occasional lapses into irrational behavior define you or become who you are. Stand up, dust off, get back on your horse and ride.

Remember that romantic love—wonderful, intense, life-altering though it can be—isn’t the sum total of the love in your life. Your romantic partner isn’t your entire “tribe”; he or she isn’t the sole source of the acceptance and support that we all—to a person, without exception—need. Find all the rich veins of love running through your life and mine them: Family. Friends. Pets.

No, it isn’t the same. In the first swamping wave of rejection it won’t even feel like remotely enough. But it is there even when the person you think you can’t live without decides not to be there anymore. You are not alone. In the wise words of Gloria Gaynor, you will survive.

Forgive yourself. Forgive the people you love—even the one who rejected you, because they are human too, and dealing with their own insecurities and pain and mistakes.

Then take a breath, calm down, and cowgirl— or -boy—up.

  

My dad was right about the bathroom—finishing just the one little thing made a huge difference in how I saw the whole house. It had been so easy just to ignore the work it needed when I could escape to Kendall’s perfect condo every night. Now that I was literally faced with it every day, I had to deal with it. And suddenly, looking at how much we’d improved just that one little area, I wanted to. The vision in my head the night Sasha and I sat on my living room floor after my closing, dreaming of how we could make the house look—the one I’d carried with me until all the hidden little issues it had overwhelmed me and made me give up on ever making it into what I hoped—began to bloom in my mind again.

The Breakup Doctor was getting me—little by little, but finally close enough for me to get excited—back to my regular practice. I could be up and running within a couple of weeks, if I worked hard enough.

But regardless of how reluctant I might have been to tear myself away from what I wanted to be doing—working on the house—to what I needed to do—my new clients—the moment I sat down with anyone, everything else fell away and I was completely, totally involved in their problems.

Bristol MacGuire was currently in the on-again portion of the back-and-forth cycle she and her boyfriend James had perpetuated for years. “But I don’t know...the last few times it hasn’t been like I thought it would when we get back together,” she told me over coffee at the Sunrise Café off Cypress. “It doesn’t feel...healthy.”

“That’s because it’s not, and you’ve been trying to tell yourself that for years every time you break up with him,” I told her after listening to her entire story. “It’s scary to be alone. You won’t be forever—but you might be for a while. Do you have the courage to trust your instincts that are telling you that you want something better, someone different? Can you believe in yourself enough to make it through the hard part of ending it once and for all?”

She swore she wanted to try. I left her with my card, instructions to call me when her resolve faltered—no matter the time—and a bright, hopeful expression on her face that had erased the beaten one she’d shown up with.

I sneaked back to the house between all my appointments to get in as much work as I could—even if it was just painting a single wall with one of the random gallons of paint I’d bought half-price from the “oops” rack at Home Depot, along with a package of the cheapest brushes I could buy. (“They’re only really good for one job,” the paint clerk had warned me disapprovingly. “That’s okay,” I told him. “So am I.”) Then I would head out again to meet with whoever was next in my calendar.

Frank Farqu—unfortunate name—fidgeted and squirmed as we talked about his ex-girlfriend Carole. Finally, after creative probing on my part, I got the whole story out of him—she’d broken up with him two months earlier, but he couldn’t stand to let her go. He called her at all hours of the day and night, left notes on her car at her work, sent flowers every week, and was even in the process of closing on a house in her neighborhood—across the street from hers. “But I got it at foreclosure—really cheap,” he assured me, as though that explained everything.

“Frank,” I said gently, “you’re stalking her.” This time the memory of my own behavior brought up a flare of empathy, rather than shame.

He looked horrified. “No! It’s not like that! I would never do anything to hurt her—I love her!”

There followed a careful discourse by me on the difference between dating and stalking (one was mutual, and the other was criminal). I managed to convince him not to close on the house—and I gave him the name of my friend Monique, a real estate attorney who could help him get out of the contract—but realized that Frank needed more intensive care than a brief Breakup Doctor consult could provide. We set up weekly appointments, with regular consults in the meantime, as I didn’t think Frank should be left to his own devices that long. And I managed to extract a promise from him that he would leave Carole completely alone for twenty-four hours, when he and I would meet again. Baby steps.

Finally, when I found a block of time one evening to get one entire room painted—my future office—I set up my ladder, opened and stirred the can of paint—“Elysian Fields,” a mossy green—then brought in my laptop and pressed play.