Stop with the comfort foods. It’s okay to be a little hungry.
Once you start to live with a healthy love diet, you want to be able to resist temptation in your weaker moments, so you need to create an environment where you can’t fall back into those old bad habits.
If you love donuts, but you know that they will inspire remorse after the initial thrill of eating them, keep them out of the kitchen. Don’t drive by the donut shop on your commute, and delete the number of the bakery that delivers on your speed dial.
The donut is a metaphor for your ex—warm, sweet, familiar, and loaded with trans fats that clog the arteries and eventually lead to a blockage of the heart. If you’re in a friends-with-benefits situation, then ask yourself who is really getting the benefit. The ex and the FWB are the equivalent of relationship snacks. They stave off hunger in the short term and give you a sugar high for a brief and comforting moment; then comes the inevitable blood sugar low, followed by the crash and burn. Next time around, your hunger grows more acute.
You made the list of tempting treats in Rule #3. Now go back, revisit the list, and recheck your cupboards. Are you sneaking stuff back in there and pretending it doesn’t really count?
If your ex continues to ping you for a Tuesday-night booty call or your study mate wants to have sex before and/or after your note-review session, don’t let it become a habit unless you’re sure that’s what is in your long-term interest. Instead, pause and ask yourself, “What am I getting out of this? How will it make me feel during? Afterward?”
We all have cravings, physical and emotional, and sprinkles and glaze may address them in the moment, but we’re planning for the long run. And don’t kid yourself by saying you will eat only half the donut—or just this one time it doesn’t matter, you won’t do it again.
The donut is a metaphor for your ex—warm, sweet, familiar, and loaded with trans fats that clog the arteries and eventually lead to a blockage of the heart.
To stay on the analogy for just one more moment, it’s easier to skip the cream-filled donut entirely because a single bite is engineered by teams of food chemists to make you crave the whole thing and then lunge for another one. This is not an equal struggle! The mouthfeel of warm, smooth paste is fighting not only your own willpower but also all the brain chemistry triggered by the sugar and corn syrup and the fats so carefully engineered to produce a reaction.
Similarly, when you have sex with people, it unleashes all the feels. That’s what sex does. Especially with someone whose buttons you know how to press and who can press yours back. It’s too hard! Easier to stay away, block their number, find new hangouts where you know you won’t run into them.
Give yourself a chance by giving yourself a clean break. You don’t need to hang on to an ex. Sometimes you need to be brave. It requires quitting, cold turkey.
The same is true for the sexless trysts, the crushes, those unrequited obsessions that consume our emotional energy and imagination yet leave us depleted. Count up all the hours you have wasted hunched over your laptop obsessing over your exes’ feeds—it starts as a quick, casual check, and then the pattern of a solitary night in is set: nonstop checking fueled by insecurity and jealousy. Social stalking gets you nowhere and leaves you angry and empty. Think of the energy and time you have wasted, the books unread, the people unmet, the hobbies untried, the gym unused, as you myopically slip down the solitary Instagram rabbit hole logging whom they’ve tagged, not to mention the countless hours cross-referencing who has tagged them back.
In the same way you pick idly at chips promising this is literally your last one, you may be in a relationship that you know isn’t going anywhere, but you’re hungry for love, and it feels less frightening than nothing. You’re busy, and it’s easy; it keeps the engine running. Maybe he’s married, so it’s not a possibility in the long run. It’s just a distraction.
So before you have any more hookups or go on any more dates, do another inventory. Make a list of all the people in your life and rate them in terms of energy in, energy out. Is there anyone in your life right now who is blocking your love quest? It might be an ex or a neighbor or an old college friend. It may also be your best friend, your parents, or your brother.
This may be the best girlfriend who gets twitchy and hypercritical when you start dating someone. It could also be the overbearing boss who demands you stay late or work weekends during the times you should be out exploring other arenas of your life. Or it could also be the demanding or dysfunctional family members who view your finding love as a direct threat to their well-being, or who want to persuade you to settle for someone who makes their own lives more comfortable.
Write down the name of each person whose opinion is getting in the way of your love goal. And then make a note to stop sharing the details of any new relationship with them until you are sure the relationship is solid enough to withstand their feedback. Oversharing with your friends is so damned easy, and once a secret is out there, you can’t wrestle it back. This goes for conversations as well as putting intimate details online.
There’s a moment in the first season of Issa Rae’s brilliantly observed Insecure, a dramedy on HBO about the life of a single twenty-something woman living in Los Angeles, where Molly, a successful lawyer and Issa’s best friend, falls for a gorgeous, kind guy who works as the manager of a car rental company. By the time we meet her, Molly has been on many online dates with assholes, but this guy is different. He treats her with respect. He makes her feel great about herself. They have real attraction—both physical and emotional. So when she asks him to share his most intimate—and embarrassing—moment ever one night after splitting a bottle of wine, he admits to a drunk dalliance with a male friend when he was in college. She freaks out. And in the next scene we see her regaling her gaggle of opinionated, gossipy friends with his secret confession.
The viewer knows instantly Molly has ruined any chance of making that relationship work because to move forward with the guy will be against all the opinions of her judgy friends. Women do this all the time. We give our girl squads—fun though they are—too much information and power. We invite them to play therapist, but without the training or objective distance a therapist has. We fail to ask ourselves the hard questions—why are we with him? Does he make us happy? Who cares if he once drunkenly fumbled with a guy if it was ten years ago and he makes you feel great? Too late. Your friends have already condemned him. But they don’t always know what’s good for you.
Private oversharing with girlfriends is one barrier to firming up a new relationship—another barrier is social media, which creates a bogus urgency to publicly overshare. Most of us do it. We overshare the most banal details—the waffles we ate for breakfast, the new Olivia von Halle pajamas we wore to bed, how much we lifted at the gym (guilty!), whom we made out with while drunk at the club.
On one level, it’s supposed to make people feel connected to you, included in the journey of your day. On another level, it’s a profound search for validation. And when you spend too much time on it, it turns you from a participant in your own life into a performer in search of an audience.
How many friends do you have on Facebook? On Instagram? And LinkedIn? “You’re not the same person on Facebook that you are on Instagram that you are on LinkedIn,” cyberpsychologist Mary Aiken adds. “So you’re presenting all of these selves and it’s a lot of work and maintenance. It’s exhausting.” It also leaves little time or energy to nurture the work of a real relationship. Spend time on developing actual friendships. “Dunbar’s number dictates that the maximum number of relationships we can cope with as a species is 150,” Aiken says. “After that, we begin to suffer from social exhaustion.”
Like a fragile sapling, a new relationship needs space and light to grow strong. Relationships are built on mutual loyalty and respect. And that means keeping the intimate details, the moments of deep sharing and trust, between yourselves.
So that means identifying all the people in your life who want you to be truly happy—and still, sharing any future partner with those people only when you are ready to.
Don’t turn dates into anecdotes to entertain your friends unless you are sure you’re not going to see the guy again. Keep something on the plate for later.
CASE STUDIES
Louise*, 38, on knowing when it was truly over.
Louise, a marketer, and Martin, an engineer, went out for four years in their early twenties. “I had known Martin a little at high school, where he was two years older than me and a total catch, and we ran into each other randomly after college and started dating, and I was over the moon. I was completely in love with him for the first two years,” Louise says. “He was my first real boyfriend, and we had a fantastic time together. We had this amazing friend group, we traveled together. He was my lover, my best friend, I loved his family, our mothers got along, we talked about our future together. And then after about two years I slowly began to realize I was more ambitious than he was. That I wanted to explore more things, better work, new friends, and he was happier just spending time with me at home or with his old familiar friends. I had a recurring dream that I was a sailboat and I was trying to sail faster, and he was an anchor, slowing me down.
“He turned from this guy who’d always seemed ahead of me into someone who was now behind me.
“It took me a year to admit this to myself. Partly because everyone assumed we were happy and because admitting we weren’t, even to my mom, would have been disloyal to him. And among my friends, I was the lucky one, the one who had found someone already, and I didn’t want to give up that status. And it was partly because I couldn’t bear the idea of telling him because I knew that for him, this was it. He’d found me and he wanted to keep me, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. I finally told him I needed a break, and he was devastated, but then to try and prevent too much pain we kept saying we would stay best friends, and it was just like we couldn’t actually split up.
“It was partly my fault. I knew I didn’t want to marry him, but if I was staring at an empty Saturday night, I would call him. And he would get mad and start telling me I wasn’t being fair. Which I wasn’t. But then we would go out for dinner and I would think, ‘Well, maybe I’m wrong, and we should stay together.’ And we’d have great sex and go out for Sunday brunch, and it would feel so reassuring instead of facing a very uncertain, lonely weekend. I hadn’t found anyone new yet, and I was scared that maybe I wouldn’t, and so I was in this emotional no-man’s-land. I was trying to persuade myself to leave and get on with a new life, but at the same time I was too nervous to make the leap I needed to, so I would come running back to him.”
This EWB (ex with benefits) situation lasted for about a year. “It was harder to find new people than I expected—and then one night we sat down for a drink, and he told me he had accepted a job in Brazil, which meant we would have to split properly because he couldn’t go on like this. Even though I knew I was eventually going to meet someone else, I still remember the internal panic when he told me. But I also knew he was right and I couldn’t stand in his way. He would move abroad a month later, and we had sex for the last time. It was so familiar and good and caring and so sad.
“I changed jobs, I bought an apartment, my life started growing in the way I had hoped it would. And he met someone in Brazil. I dated a few men, and then about five years after Martin moved, I met the man I would marry and have two kids with.
“After ten or so years, Martin got a huge job and reached out unexpectedly when he moved back to the US and suggested the four of us go out for dinner together. I thought about it, but I never replied. I thought I might be toxic for him, and I didn’t need to see him with someone else. We were done.”
Amy, 35, on turning a devastating breakup into a business.
Amy was twenty-seven, living in Vancouver and the director of marketing for a luxury hotel company, when she met the man she thought she would marry. They were introduced at a party by a mutual friend and began flirting on Twitter for a few months before they finally started dating.
A year and a half later, the two moved in together and started talking seriously about their future. He was an entrepreneur who had started a company, and while she had a blossoming career in marketing and PR, she envisioned staying home once they had children. “I wanted to be flexible around his work schedule,” she says. Her mother stayed at home while her father worked, and Amy based her future life on that model. “I knew we would eventually have kids, so I stopped excelling in my corporate job,” she says. “Everything was about him.” She even started “practicing” how to be the perfect wife. “I entered that relationship not even being able to boil eggs and learned how to have dinners waiting,” she says. “I even packed him lunches.”
She was twenty-nine when she lost her job due to major budget cuts and wound up treating her boyfriend to a European trip with her savings. It was meant to be a romantic getaway—but instead led to their breakup: “I discovered infidelity and was completely heartbroken,” she explains. It caught her by total surprise—suddenly she was without a house, job, or partner. “I spiraled into a depression, started having panic attacks, stopped eating, and lost about twenty pounds in less than a month,” she says. “I had thoughts of suicide.”
Stunned by the physical and emotional impact of her breakup, she sought answers in therapy, Reiki, yoga retreats—even psychics. While it eased the immediate pain, she was still brimming with anger and resentment, which made dating new people hard.
Then one day, as she was retelling the story to a friend, he asked if she had any good memories of her ex. “In my anger, I forgot everything that was amazing about our relationship,” she says. She also neglected to consider the part she played in its dissolution. “That same day, I wrote my ex a letter taking accountability in what happened,” she says. “That set me free.”
Amy moved to New York for work, back in marketing, and began penning an online relationship column, too. “So many women would write to me in pain over their breakups,” she explains. “I began to see a pattern.” She began researching what happens physiologically when people break up and learned that love literally acts like a drug—and a breakup can trigger “an intense physical withdrawal,” she says. “Plus, there’s so much shame behind it.”
Amy realized that there was a need for a place for women to share their thoughts and feelings about bad breakups, without being judged, so she organized a weekend “breakup boot camp” retreat where she invited a psychologist to talk about what happens in one’s nervous system following a breakup, plus what exercises to do when feeling triggered. “Like how to avoid Facebook stalking because you want that next dopamine rush,” Amy explains. “You really are physically in pain after a breakup—but it gets better with time.”
Amy is proof of this. Due to huge demand, she is currently planning the second workshop and has plans to make this her full-time work. And while she has not yet found her life partner, she feels confident that she will. “I really believe that patience is key,” she says. “This time, I want to make the right choice.”