III

Reckoning, Anger, and Obsession

The Cheat Sheet

Polly,

I’m a new reader and dig your crazy no-bullshit advice. But I’m writing not so much for advice but to throw down the gauntlet. My understanding is that always ends well.

The subject is me cheating on my wife. I’m sick of feeling guilty about wanting to, and rationally I’m having a hard time figuring out why I shouldn’t because I think it may actually help our marriage and improve the chances of us providing a happy home for our children. Clearly a convenient conclusion, but one I’ve done a lot of thinking about.

Here are the supporting facts:

1.My wife is no longer interested in sex. She is too busy and tired from stressing over the kids and delivering our little royals to their next playdate to generate biological feelings for me. Before the children were born, we had a “zestful” sexual relationship, but no longer.

2.It is said men in general have a much higher sex drive. I am a man and find this to be a considerably large understatement, along the lines of saying Transformers might be a shitty movie.

3.I find my wife sexy; I also find other women sexy. Some of these women will have sex with me, and we will enjoy it.

4.Having sex with other women will relieve much of the emotional resentment I have against my wife for her sexual indifference (even though I empathize with her), and we will have a better emotional relationship as a lack of sex will no longer be a source of conflict.

5.I will feel physically better if I have sex with other women because I will be released from the buzzing, thrumming miasma of lust that plagues me every moment during a sexless week. Believe me, most men are familiar with these feelings.

6.My wife is an outstanding mother and otherwise a good wife and best friend.

7.I believe my children will be happier raised in a home with a caring mother and father present.

8.My wife and I have spoken about my inescapable need for physical affection; we have tried methods to rekindle her physical passions, but to no avail.

9.Deep down, I believe she would tolerate my affairs as long as I was safe, respectful, and discreet and continued to be a good father and husband. I think she would prefer that approach over a frank discussion about open marriage, which would hurt and offend her with its brazenness. I would rather carry the burden of culpability than dispel her sense of our family.

10.Affairs with other women will not change my love for her.

Finally—and this is more of an observation—if gay men can maintain their marriages while entertaining outside engagements, isn’t it biased and unrealistic to punish their heterosexual peers for addressing the same urges?

My challenge to you is to make a compelling case why, on balance, I should not pursue outside affairs in the interests of my family’s longevity and happiness, provided the facts above. I don’t think you can.

Sincerely,

Cheating Gauntlet Man

Dear CGM,

Cheating is called cheating for a reason. The issue on the table is honesty, not sex. If the lack of sex in your relationship poses a serious threat to your marriage, you should sit down with your wife and tell her that. You should ask to see a couples therapist together. You should say that you need her to commit to some concrete plan for changing things between you, whether that means letting someone watch the kids one afternoon and one evening per week so you can have time together, or deciding on a minimum fooling-around schedule, or reading a book about sex therapy and then talking about it, or some combination of those things. Tell her that you need to know that things are going to change, because your frustration and powerlessness in this area are affecting your outlook on your life and your marriage.

Here’s what you shouldn’t do: assume that your wife would be fine with you discreetly running around town, fucking other women, or that she’d prefer that scenario to discussing this openly. Because I can personally fucking guarantee you, your wife would rather talk about it. She is not remotely okay with you fucking around. You’ve been watching too much Mad Men. Making a rousing argument for fucking other women on the sneak is a pretty elaborate way to justify something that’s unjustifiable. It’s a brave-looking way of being a total chickenshit.

Fucking other people when your wife thinks that you two are monogamous is dishonest, hurtful, and beyond insulting. It’s the kind of thing that many people never, ever get over. It’s the kind of thing that will lead to you, alone, in a one-bedroom apartment, while your sexy, wonderful wife remarries someone handsome and loyal and honest who makes his desires known instead of hiding behind logic and lists.

Married gay people who screw around on the side tend to have conversations about it first. The difference between discussing it openly and honestly and just sneaking around behind someone’s back is enormous. Having an open marriage and cheating are two entirely different things. The former is a choice. The latter is a crime that’s willfully committed against the other person. When you cheat on someone, you betray their trust, you rip apart their love for you, you embarrass the hell out of them, you depress them (in this case, at a time when she has little people who depend on her and she can’t really afford to be depressed beyond belief), and you permanently alter their ability to respect you. Do you know how bad that feels, loving and believing in someone more than anyone else and then having your love injured irreparably?

It’s unspeakably arrogant to assume that your wife will never find out so you don’t have to examine any of these very real consequences. How often do you think random women who sleep with married men end up telling the wives about the affairs? How often do you think wives find out by other means? All the fucking time.

To me, what really works about marriage is the feeling that you have someone on your side, who would never do anything to hurt you. When that person betrays you, it’s hard to get that feeling back. And in the company of children, believing in your partner is unquestionably crucial—it’s intoxicating, really. You know that you’re supported and cared for. Having that support and trust and care ripped from you, when there are little kids in the picture, could make someone feel more vulnerable and heartsick than you can possibly imagine.

I know you think I’m being dramatic. I am not being dramatic.

Now, to be fair, I think that for heterosexual men, what really works about marriage is the feeling that you have a woman on your side, who loves you and loves your kids and who is also very attracted to you. When that person rejects you, over and over again, it’s hard to get that feeling of well-being back. Believing in your marriage and having regular sex with your wife is also unquestionably crucial, and intoxicating, really. Having that support and attention ripped from you, when there are little kids in the picture, could make a man feel more vulnerable and heartsick than his wife can possibly imagine.

If that feels accurate to you, then my guess is that you don’t really want to sleep with random women as much as you think you do. What you really want is to feel desired and adored by your wife, whom you love very much. You feel invisible. You feel like she doesn’t want or even love you anymore.

Your challenge in this situation is to show up and make yourself vulnerable, not to disappear and force her into an inherently vulnerable position. Your challenge is to resist the urge to avenge your wife’s lack of desire (by fucking other women). Even though you’ve gone to elaborate lengths to make this form of punishment appear harmless and logical, on some level this is about you feeling hurt and neglected and powerless to change it.

When you feel hurt and vulnerable and you’re willing to talk openly about it? That’s an opportunity for your marriage to grow into something more beautiful than it was before. You already have a decent marriage. Don’t run away and protect yourself and lie and hide and fuck yourself and your kids over in the process. That may be the easy way out in the short term. In the long term, though, you’ll drop a bomb in the middle of your life, and you won’t be able to pick up the pieces once it goes off.

Honesty. That’s all you need. You need to go to your wife and be very honest about your sexual needs. If she waves you off and doesn’t listen, don’t accept that. Make her understand that this is a gigantic thing in your life, and your marriage is at stake.

Now, I have to admit, I’m sort of wondering how involved you are with your little royals. You talk about your wife ushering them hither and thither, but not you. And you seem to assume that you’ll have plenty of free time to wander off and fuck other women. Does your wife have that kind of free time? If she wanted to have an affair, could she conceivably free up her schedule to fuck someone on the sly? I’m guessing that she’s running around in circles, picking little shoes up off the floor, or waking up in the middle of the night with a sick kid, or doing another load of laundry because you forgot. While you imagine fucking other women, what is your wife doing? Loading the dishwasher? Sleeping, because she never gets enough sleep and she feels exhausted all the time because she never has a second to herself?

If so, I would suggest that you get to know your little royals a little better. Tell your wife that you’re going to take Saturdays from ten to four, and she can do whatever she wants. Her interest in sucking your cock may experience an uptick under such circumstances.

But if your kids are very little and your wife is very, very busy with them in ways that you could be, too, if you got off your smug ass and made it so, yet you sit back and watch her rushing around in circles and you still expect her to keep everything running AND fuck you every night once the kids are tucked away? You really should divorce your wife and hire a housekeeper, a nanny, and a live-in sex worker instead. Because that’s the level of service you seem to require.

I suggest you spend more time with your kids, and also more time thinking about what’s best for them, so the burden of stress doesn’t always rest on your wife. Find out how you can do more around the house so your wife is less annoyed with you. Meditate. Exercise more often to burn off all of that free-floating lust. But more than anything else, learn to speak honestly to your wife. Explain to her what your minimum needs are, and (IMPORTANT!) ask her what her minimum needs are in order to feel happy. Explain that you really feel like your marriage will suffer horribly if you don’t have more sex, and (IMPORTANT!) ask her if you can’t watch the kids more or take over the dishes every night so she can read a book. Say, “I’ll put the kids down, then we make out right after that, then I’ll do all the dishes while you go to sleep.” Believe me that there are ways to entice her.

Obviously, you need to adjust your expectations a little about how much sex you can have, and she needs to adjust her expectations that sex can only happen when she’s totally in the mood. Sometimes you get in the mood by going for it, plain and simple. Sometimes you get in the mood by saying, “Well, it’s Friday at 3:00 p.m. and we’re home alone. It’s now or never.” Sometimes you get in the mood by watching your husband usher the royals to a playdate while you flip through a magazine for once in your sorry life.

I know, it’s all so romantic. The faster you accept that having a family sometimes means not fucking like rabbits whenever the mood strikes, the faster you’re going to wake up to a new paradigm that isn’t as compromised and flat as it sounds; it’s just different. The sex is actually just as good. We were built for it. Everyone gets worked up over how it should start, how it should unfold, how spontaneous it should be, how much it should resemble a scene out of Top Gun, all blowing curtains and plinky soft rock. Sex itself is pretty excellent with or without the candles and the plinky plonk.

Now, I would address the idea of an open marriage, but I think you need to completely redesign your marriage to accommodate your wife’s and your needs before you think about that option. And anyway, open marriage means both of you can have sex with other people. It doesn’t mean that you can but she can’t. (I’ve heard of this arrangement, and sorry, but it’s sexist and idiotic.) That path is pretty perilous, particularly with kids in the picture. Maybe they can swing it in France. If I had access to lots of red wine and stinky cheese and smoking-hot Parisian men, I might pry open my sad little heteronormative mind to just about anything.

But you haven’t really worked on your sex life in earnest yet. It’s understandable that this is not your wife’s top priority, but if you’re really contemplating cheating as much as you seem to be, then you’ll be doing her a big favor by making the bleakness of your current outlook very, very clear to her. She needs to stop waiting for magic to happen and start making a concrete effort to meet you halfway. You need to meet her halfway, too. If I were the one charged with handling the lion’s share of the kid-related shit, I don’t think I could look my husband in the eye without sneering, let alone fuck him.

Right now, you are keeping a big part of who you are hidden. As long as you’re lying, you can’t have a good marriage. More lying won’t fix that.

Polly

I’m Tired of Being So Nice

Dear Polly,

I am trying to figure out how to be less nice. I don’t want to be less generous or less kind, just less nice. You know what I mean—that craven, smiley, oh-gosh-no-of-course-go-ahead-of-me, laughing-at-every-unfunny-joke, acting-thrilled-to-see-people-who-treat-me-like-shit veneer. It degrades my life. It has always degraded my life. I am only now starting to understand how much. I’m mad about it.

I’ve always been “nice.” Obviously, that doesn’t make me a particularly good person. I’ve done plenty of vile shit. The older I get, the more I have to pry my desperate grasp off the idea that niceness somehow gives me value (it is THE thing that gives me value). That it obligates the world to treat me well in return. I mean, I have long known that this does not work, and yet I kept/keep doing it. Mostly what being nice buys me is a load of bullshit from most people, a lack of respect from the people I admire, and a frightening well of anger that is fed when things don’t go in accordance with my stupid broken theory that I don’t believe in anyway.

Here is what I mean by nice: I am so good at feigning fascination that deeply unfascinating people waylay me at every opportunity to get some more of the ego food I’m always dishing out. It means that I attract people who can’t tolerate a single unflattering remark about themselves and who will turn vicious the second I let my genial admiration go slack. It means that when people try to take things from me, my automatic response is to give those things, and that it costs me a ton in guilt/shame/fear not to give in to people immediately. I assess my value in how much people “like” me, even when I don’t like them, and even when I see their contempt for me growing every time I don’t stand up for myself. Even when I dislike them. Even when I truly hate them.

It means I have always had narcissists in my life. It means that when I try to talk to my new boyfriend (who very clearly wants the best for me) about some minor adjustments I need to make to our relationship, I think, “It would be easier to just break up.” It means I let my ex-boyfriend and an ex-boss simultaneously almost destroy me, because who could be mean to someone so nice? I must be getting what I deserve. It means that when I say a necessary no, I have a moment of triumph and then spend the rest of the day under an avalanche of guilt. It means I try to redirect the conversation when anyone makes a bigoted remark instead of saying, “Um, EXCUSE ME?” It means I want to sink into the floor when someone rightly says to me, “Um, EXCUSE ME?”

What I want is to be actually kind. I want to give things where they’re needed. Or even wanted! But I want to do it consciously, not by reflex, not because the cost of saying no is so absurdly high I can’t deal with it. I want to be able to say, “You hurt me,” when I’m hurt. I want to be able to say, “I don’t like that.” I want to be able to say, “I’m leaving now,” instead of sitting in a meeting for two hours past the time I said I absolutely had to leave.

Polly, what do I DO with this? What do I do with all this fakery and anger and saccharine sweetness? What if I do dispose of my niceness and what’s left is something no one likes? Help me, help me please!

Pleadingly,

Nicely Nicely

Dear NN,

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.

Here’s the thing: Being nice is worthless if you’re just going to feel resentful about it in the end. You might as well just be outspoken and state your needs from the outset. Because as much as people resent assertive women, they resent disingenuous, overly friendly, secretly furious women even more.

Maybe you need to ask yourself, “How secretly furious am I?”

I can certainly understand why you’d feel so angry. By simply showing up and being a woman, you’re asked to satisfy an incredibly tangled and contradictory set of demands. You are supposed to be assertive but not too assertive. You are supposed to speak your mind but only on subjects about which everyone already agrees. You are supposed to toe the party line while pretending that it’s your personal choice.

Trust me, I’ve been there. So this is what I want you to accept, first and foremost: You are a nice person, and you’re also full of anger. You’re a walking tangle of contradictions. That’s okay. Most of us are like that. Women, most of all. How could we not be? People want us to be sexy warriors who roll over and play dead on command. They want us to be flirty burlesque dancers in burkas, aggressive conquistadors with cookies in the oven, Dorothy Parker meets Dorothy Gale, Sandra Bernhard meets Sandra Dee, Kristen Stewart meets Martha Stewart.

Experiments in asking for exactly what you want will go badly. Do it anyway. Do it and expect people to react badly. Because you’re sensitive, you won’t like this. Think about how they feel, and try to empathize. Think about how you might soften your message. Watch how other people do it. I know it sounds like a management technique, but good communicators usually start with something positive, then move to the negative gently: “I love this about you, but I have to draw the line here.” “I know you’re trying your best, but this is what I still need from you.” “I care about you so much and you’re such an important friend to me, but I don’t think I can do this one thing.”

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.

I used to admire people who could hang with anything. Now the women I admire the most are women who never pretend to be different than they are. Women like that express their anger. They admit when they’re down. They don’t beat themselves up over their bad moods. They allow themselves to be grumpy sometimes. They grant themselves the right to be grouchy, or to say nothing, or to decline your offer without a lengthy explanation.

Sometimes it seems like the rest of us are on a never-ending self-improvement conveyor belt. We’re running faster and faster, struggling to be our best selves, but every day we fail and we hate ourselves for it.

Fuck that. Let’s be mortal. Let’s not be sexy warrior princesses or burlesque dancers in burkas or conquistadors with cookies in the oven. How many years do we have to wait just to speak our minds? Let’s be flinty and unreasonable instead. Let’s tell the truth, without a smile. Let’s let our words drop, one by one, without explanation, without apology, like the first few pebbles before a landslide.

Polly

The Weight of Rage

Hi, Polly,

I have always been a “big” girl. Growing up, I was always in the ninety to ninety-fifth percentile of height and weight. I grew up with a mother who admonished me to eat less and suck in my stomach. I’ve been sucking in my stomach and worrying about my figure since I was six. I was on an experimental weight-loss drug in middle school. I was in Weight Watchers when I was thirteen. All in my mom’s efforts to get me to lose weight. But I’m a grown lady now, and I’m sick to death of my family’s comments and concerns about my weight, my food, and my health. It hurts my feelings and makes me feel like a child, and I’m about to come unglued on the people I love most.

Growing up with that kind of scrutiny and pressure has irreparably poisoned my relationship with my mother. I don’t like her to touch me, and any comment she makes about me feels like a damning judgment. I didn’t even take her with me when I shopped for my wedding gown, because I wanted to feel confident and pretty when I made such a big decision. These things you’re supposed to do with your mother I did alone rather than subject myself to what she might possibly say. Even my dad will sometimes do things that hurt my feelings, like express shock that I went to the gym.

My husband is suffering from the anger I feel whenever my weight or health is brought up; I automatically jump to the conclusion that anything he wants to do that’s health-related is actually because I’m fat. He only has good intentions for us to be healthy and to bond together.

I’m able to shop wherever I feel like shopping. I am perfectly healthy, with normal cholesterol and normal blood pressure, according to my doctor visit last week. I’m a nice-looking person. I look good in my clothes. I was a beautiful bride. I just really like food. I feel like I need some kind of framed document asserting that I am healthy, that I am FINE, but even then I don’t think I’d be left alone about it. Now I’m newly married to a man who wants me to eat well and live well, and every time I talk about food and he looks at me, I project onto him disapproval, revulsion, disgust. I feel myself doing this. I want it to stop, lest it poison my marriage.

Why won’t my parents leave me alone? Even my mother acknowledges she could have ignored my baby fat and I probably would have lost it naturally as a teen. I know they mean well and they’re hounding me because they love me or whatever, but they’re hurting my feelings to a degree I don’t think they understand; I’m sitting here crying and writing to an advice columnist, after all. I’m so angry and so hurt. Why can’t I get the acceptance from them that I want so desperately, that it has taken YEARS of therapy and self-care for me to give myself? My happiness would improve exponentially if they would just realize this topic is off-limits. What can I do? How can I set this boundary and have it stick? What would you do if you were me?

Sincerely,

Just a Normal Girl

Dear JANG,

If I were you, I would forward this letter to your mother. She might not understand at first. It might make her angry. She might say, “How dare you call me out for the ONE thing I did wrong, when all I wanted was for you to be healthy and happy?” She might write you off as crazy, in spite of the fact that your letter couldn’t be clearer or more heartbreaking.

But I would forward your letter to her anyway. I would do it because you are haunted by her bad decisions, every day of your life, and you need to spell that out. Because it’s starting to affect your ability to love her—and yourself, and everybody else. You’re so angry that you can’t see her clearly anymore, and I don’t think that will improve unless you tell her. It sounds like she’s reasonably rational and not insanely defensive about this, so directly addressing it doesn’t threaten to further damage your relationship. You need to be gentle; get your husband or a friend to edit out anything that might be perceived as an attack. But it’s time to declare talk about your weight, exercise, and eating OFF-LIMITS. You want to love her and enjoy her company. You need this. You need to know she won’t push you into that space anymore. You want to be free from that awful space. And who wouldn’t?

Even knowing what we all know about eating disorders today, many parents don’t understand how fundamentally unkind it is to disrupt a kid’s natural relationship to food. When you tell a fucking six-year-old that she needs to watch her figure, you’re interrupting her natural development, her understanding of what food is, how it feels to be full, and how it feels to be hungry. You’re training her to see a fat person in the mirror.

I’m not some health guru. I like cheese and bread and bread and cheese, to infinity and beyond. But when I was a teenager, I watched my friend’s mother hover around her, commenting on her weight every time she had a snack. She even posted a photo of her daughter in a bikini on the fridge so she’d be reminded of her own body every time she ate. I watched as she got smaller and smaller, eating an apple and a Diet Coke for lunch every day. She didn’t look healthy anymore. She didn’t seem happy anymore. And her entire experience—of herself, of food—was forever changed. Her relationship to her body and to food wouldn’t be easy or natural or relaxed for a long time after that. She would have to work hard for fifteen years to fix those mistakes.

This is one of those well-intentioned things that parents get dramatically wrong, over and over again. It doesn’t take overt body shaming, either. All it takes is being a parent who sees a kid’s decisions as a natural extension of his or her own. “I would stop eating right now, so you should, too. I would try my damnedest to be skinnier, so you’d better try your damnedest, too.” It’s like trying to turn your children into an extension of yourself, instead of welcoming the fact that they are completely different and separate and independent.

As a parent, you do have to constantly remind yourself that you are not a god, molding a human in your own image. You are merely supporting whatever your child chooses to become, even if those choices don’t always thrill you. It’s easy enough to embrace and support a toddler who loves dolphins or playing house. It’s harder to accept and appreciate a fully grown human who has her own body and her own ideas.

So, look, the reasons for your anger and frustration couldn’t be more clear, and they’re completely justified. I think you need to express them. I don’t think you’ll be happy until you do.

It’s a complicated problem, but it has a simple solution: Draw boundaries and stick to them. Express the emotional side of it with care; go into detail if you want. But then shift gears and tell your family precisely what you expect from them: “No more talk about weight, food, or how I look. None.” Don’t apologize for it. Don’t second-guess yourself. Don’t get mad if you can help it. Just say, “Hey, this is what I need.”

I have a friend who knows how to confidently ask for what he wants from people. It’s amazing how effective it is and how successful and charismatic you can be if you stay calm and ask people what you want from them without seeming to take offense. He presupposes that people will want to help him, and then they do. He sets boundaries, too, without making it personal. “I don’t do that.” “I would never agree to a plan like that.” “This is how I like to do it.” As women, we often want to bend and adjust and please other people first, and then we find ourselves resenting it. Don’t let that happen to you, JANG.

Things will improve. If your parents mess up—and they will—don’t overreact. 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.

So that’s the practical advice I have for you. On the emotional side, I understand why you’d be really angry and why you’d project that anger onto your husband. You’re assuming that he feels the same way about your weight as your family does. You have to work hard to deconstruct this belief. I would explain to your husband that you need to do some therapeutic exercises around this, where you relax and talk and he reminds you that he thinks you’re beautiful and he’s attracted to you and loves you the way you are. Most marriages need something like this built into the woodwork, a time when both partners can hear the things they need to hear repeatedly. For many of us, it can be challenging to pinpoint exactly what will make us feel better. It takes work. And maybe what you need from your husband isn’t about how you look at all; maybe it’s about him loving you no matter what. Lots of people want that. “I will love you even if all your hair falls out. I will love you even if both your arms fall off.” It’s kind of comical, but it also goes to the heart of what you went through as a kid. “You’re not good until you get smaller. You won’t be okay with us until you’re the right shape.” Fuck being the right shape. I’m your kid! Love me as I am!

I know it hurts. I can relate to that feeling. 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!” But sometimes my mother is afraid of complicated. Eventually, I figured it out; she always assumed my anger and frustration were about her, that I was angry at her, and not just lonely or depressed. Sure, I wrote her letters. I ranted and I raged. But that only confirmed her suspicion that I was unstable. 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.” And once I could say that to her, and she could hear me, it changed everything.

I bet you’re a lot wiser and a lot stronger than your parents in many ways. 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. Only crazy motherfuckers encounter healthy boundaries as an insult. I don’t think your parents are crazy motherfuckers. They messed up in the past, but they’re not malicious; they’re just clueless. I bet they feel pretty guilty, too. I bet they feel sad about how things turned out between you.

Once you demand a compassionate space where you can feel safe from judgment, you’ll feel more compassionate toward them. Once you forgive yourself for standing up for what you want, and not becoming what they defined as perfect, you’ll have room to forgive them. If you work hard and expect setbacks and stay firm in your beliefs, you’ll get there. I know you’re angry and hurt. It’ll take a long time. But you’ll get there.

It will never be perfect, of course. That’s okay. Imperfect things are even better. You know that better than anyone. Imperfect things are the most beautiful things of all.

Polly

Cheaters Become You

Dear Polly,

I’m in my mid-twenties, and I’ve developed a pattern of getting involved with attached men. At first, I thought (pretended?) it was a coincidence, but at this point it’s clear that I am the common denominator.

There was the guy who DID break up with his girlfriend as promised, but then I said (honestly) that I couldn’t trust him and wouldn’t date him—but proceeded to hook up with him again months later, after he had started a new relationship. There were a few inappropriate one-off-ish hookups with guys who were unavailable, a couple of walking-a-thin-line ongoing text things with married co-workers at a former job (yes, using the m-word horrifies me), and most recently an awful, drawn-out situation with a co-worker at my new job. We’ll call him Aaron.

The Aaron situation has felt by far the worst. It started with an instantaneous attraction/friendship/spark, even though he’s not at all my usual type physically. The night we met at a house party, we spent the entire time talking one-on-one in a kitchen alcove, and I got immediate friend requests/follows from him, only to find out from mutual friends that not only did he have a serious long-term girlfriend but she had been there that night, being ignored while he blatantly flirted with me. Aaron and I connected at a few happy hours in the following month, two of which resulted in car make-out sessions (like high school all over again). After that, I had a flash of morality or fear and told him not to pursue me any further. Nothing happened for a few months, save some excessive eye contact.

In May, a close male friend who’s also a co-worker sat me down and told me I was damaging my personal and professional reputation by being involved with Aaron. Obviously, this resulted in tears, mortification, and above all shame. Particularly because I felt I had ultimately done the right thing and had essentially chosen to NOT get involved with him. My friend didn’t believe that I never slept with him; apparently, rumors were swirling heavily. Our relationship was strained for months, he and I not speaking, which was just awful. Then the friendship recovered. Aaron broke up with his girlfriend and immediately dated yet another co-worker of ours. I believe now that he didn’t cut ties with the first girlfriend, just kept two relationships going at once (in different cities). Obviously, a pretty terrible guy.

About a month ago, I saw Aaron, and we spent the entire night talking one-on-one again. A few nights later, we ended up leaving a bar together (where many co-workers were present; he seems to lack remorse and/or any kind of discretion; maybe he just knows that he always gets away with things) but not sleeping together. Two weeks after that, we finally slept together while his live-in girlfriend was out of town. Part of me felt like it was a double-jeopardy situation: I had already paid the price for sleeping with him, everybody thought it had already happened, so why shouldn’t I at least get to actually do it? The other part of me knew that I wasn’t taking his girlfriend into account. I haven’t spoken to him since. I feel really sick about it.

Why do I keep putting myself in these situations? The only long-term serious relationship I’ve had was in college, during which I was cheated on extensively. When I think about it in a simple cost-benefit analysis structure, the Aaron thing seems downright absurd. The potential costs are so high—my relationship with my friend, this poor girl who is LIVING with Aaron, my own feelings—and the benefit is so low: The sex wasn’t even good. Maybe when you’re the one someone is cheating with, you’re not putting yourself at risk in the same way you are when you’re in a relationship. And some twisted part of my head/heart thinks if a guy is SO drawn to me that he’s willing to risk his relationship, it must mean he feels really strongly. That drama is addictive. I even find myself rooting for budding potential affairs on TV shows I watch. Is that normal? WTF? All of this history has also served to make me incredibly cynical about men in general. They ALL seem to be cheaters, and I just don’t think I can trust them—any of them.

I have trouble reconciling my behavior in my love life (and a general refusal to be vulnerable, admit feelings, appear weak) with the rest of my life. If you just struck out all the men, it would be clear that I’m a good person. I love and support my friends, I’ve dedicated myself to a career that I believe is changing the world for the better, and I’m close with my family. Why can’t I act in my love life the way I do in the rest of my life?

I’m so tired of this life. I just want to be the person I feel like I am.

Always the Other Woman

Dear ATOW,

I believe that you’re a good person. I can also tell from the tone of your letter that you’ve turned the corner from innocently saying, “Oh my god, why does this keep happening to me?” to “Why do I keep putting myself in these situations?” That’s a start. But you still aren’t taking full responsibility for your recklessness, your disregard for other women, and your willingness to cater to the needs of creepy, unethical guys.

I would suggest you lose the whole notion of “situations.” You talk about it as if you’re caught in these messy tar pits and helpless to pull yourself free. Every single time you speak to a guy who’s involved with someone else, you’re making a choice. And by taking things a step farther, you’re choosing to grab exactly what you want without apology. So don’t walk around telling these stories about how “one thing led to another” anymore. No one wants to hear your self-created, self-perpetuated narratives. You may not know a guy’s girlfriend, and certainly he has more responsibility to that person than you do. But you’re actively participating in something that’s not just wrong; it’s also terrible for you.

Where does the drama come from in these situations? It’s stolen. The excitement and tension and secrecy are created at the expense of Aaron’s girlfriend’s trust and love for him. When you talk to him, all of the intensity there couldn’t have less to do with you. It’s drawn straight from his girlfriend’s trust in him. He’s getting a charge from sneaking around, NOT from you.

So instead of asking, “Why do I keep putting myself in these situations?” I think you need to ask, “Why do I choose to spend time with assholes and break their girlfriends’ hearts?” Or, “Once I know a guy is a remorseless dick, why do I continue to speak to him?” “Why do I like hurting female strangers so much?” “Why do I have so little trouble disregarding the feelings of other people—my friend, my co-workers, etc.?”

I know I’m being harsh, but it’s clear from your story about not speaking to your friend for a long time (after he had the audacity to be honest with you) that you’ve struggled to come to terms with your own responsibility, and your language—you “ended up” doing this or that, Aaron “seems to lack remorse,” somehow men are untrustworthy but you’re not—indicates that you still want to portray this as an ongoing tale that’s only partially created by your choices.

You’re not mysteriously falling into the same situation repeatedly. You only recognize interest when it has a faintly predatory intensity to it. What you need to know is that a lot of women find this intensity hugely unappealing. Some of us can feel this energy from across a football field. 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.

It’s not that I don’t understand how you might land there. I was pretty unethical at your age. I felt like I couldn’t trust women, with their complicated needs and demands and judgments. I wanted to run around without considering whether I was stepping on some oversensitive girl’s toes. I had an easy time writing off other women.

I bring this up because I think this is part of your puzzle. You don’t have compassion for other women, because you don’t have compassion for yourself. You’re angry at yourself, so you take that anger out on other people. 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. So every time we’re at a party, or a dinner, or a club, we organize the scene based on the same notion: Either we are the one who sparkles and thrills, or we’re some dog in the corner. We’re either the girl in the kitchen alcove, giggling and flirting, or the sad ignored girlfriend in the blurry background. We’re either the white-hot sexy girl making out in the car or the sniffling loser girlfriend waiting around at home for her boyfriend to come back.

This isn’t really winning. It’s hurting yourself and hurting other women in one blow. It’s serving your ass on a platter not to a prince but to a predator. It’s feeding into everything sick and wrong about the blindest, least soulful dimensions of our culture. When you soak up the attentions of some smarmy creep, you’re throwing away your compassion and your power and you’re empowering that creep to pick a “winner.” He’s the one who determines which girl is superior and which girl is a sucker and which girl isn’t worthy of his predatory gaze.

But do you know where the really strong, smart women are? They’re in the other room, talking contentedly together. They would never in a million years let some dipshit with bad intentions offer them a false sense of superiority and intrigue just for being a shiny distraction from his girlfriend. And anyway, strong, empowered women are kryptonite to a guy like Aaron. You think he digs you because you’re extra-sexy? He digs you because you’re drawn in by his bullshit. He digs you because you’re pretending. He digs you because you’re just like him: strong on the outside, weak and needy on the inside.

Seducing guys is the easiest thing in the world, if that’s what you really want to do. But don’t tell yourself a story about how special you are just because you can lure a guy away from his girlfriend. That’s not some special honor. It’s embarrassing.

I can sense from your letter that at some level you already know these things. I’m shoving them in your face because you haven’t yet reckoned with the ugliness of what you’re choosing. You need to take a hard look at these things. Because it’s not just about self-destructive behavior; it’s about choosing to hurt other women and choosing to cater to a guy who’s hurting other women. It’s about STOMPING ON PEOPLE.

So why do you want to stomp on people? In addition to seeing men as cheaters, do you see women as only being out for themselves? Do you recognize how these characterizations are a projection of your own behavior? Do you see how your ruthlessness with yourself extends to other people? Do you see how your anger at yourself plays out? You’re not just tempted to injure others; you feel that you’re perfectly entitled to injure them. That you deserve it. That the world has fucked you over enough, and now you get to take whatever you want.

This goes beyond attraction or “situations” or even destructive behaviors. You’re working out some deep-seated hurt in these scenarios. You have a lot to sort out. You need to quadruple the energy you put into your female friendships and pull way back on the social/romantic throttle. You need to talk honestly—not just with men, who I’m guessing are your primary cohort—about how confused and misguided and unfair you’ve been. You need to stop saying, “Why does this always happen?” and start saying, “I am never fucking doing THAT again, that’s for sure.”

So this is the end of one part of your story. The cheaters chapter is officially over.

At the end of the chapter, you are ragged and wrecked. You feel ashamed, and that makes you angry. You feel like everyone misunderstands you and blames you for things that aren’t your fault. You feel lonely. You’re tired of having to figure this stuff out all by yourself. You just want a little help, for once, instead of always having to go it alone.

You may wonder, without the excitement, without the drama of the forbidden guy, what is there? Stay with that thought. Stay with the messy aftermath. Imagine yourself at a party, not sparkling. Imagine losing. Imagine being small and sorrowful and admitting how little you really know. Imagine saying the wrong thing and feeling awkward, over and over again. This messiness, this pain, this void, are where real strength and happiness begin. Forget seduction and intrigue. Talk to the other women at a party. Then go home and take a bath and feel good about sticking to your principles and being the honorable person you really are, deep inside.

Polly

That Bitter Aftertaste

Dear Polly,

I’m a thirty-two-year-old single woman. I love my life—my friends, my job, the city in which I live. I have a creative outlet and I exercise and I have a lot of passion for living. But inside I have a problem with bitterness. I feel bitter every single day. I can’t stop thinking about the men who have hurt me, and I think about at least two or three of them every day (not always the same ones), sometimes during the day, but mostly at night when I’m trying to fall asleep. I think about when things were good and then how they hurt me, and I wonder why they didn’t love me, and I imagine what I would say to them if I saw them again, and then I tumble into a stony feeling of grit, of wanting to be invulnerable. I have a physical response to these emotions: My chest hurts, my stomach hurts, and the pain stretches out to my fingertips. I lose my breath in the pain. I sometimes wonder if in some way I actually enjoy this awful feeling, just because it’s feeling something in my heart. But I fear that it will make me sick in the long run. I feel like it’s gonna give me cancer or ulcers just to think these sad, echoing thoughts every day.

I don’t want to be bitter, and I don’t want to be that friend everyone feels sorry for because she’s perpetually single, but that’s what I’m turning into. When things do go well with a guy, I am able to forget about my past pain and let myself believe in a future with someone I like, if cautiously. But it never works out, and I don’t know why. I’m not clingy or high-maintenance; I like who I am and what I’m doing with my life; I have my own life but I want to share it with someone, and I just keep getting hurt. With the last two guys I dated, I actually felt that elusive “click” of feeling connected to someone and like I could be myself with them, and being able to see myself with them for a long time, which hasn’t happened in ages, but it turned out that neither of them were interested in trying a long-term relationship with me. And I don’t know how many instances of the death of hope I can take or how many men will fit in my Rolodex of Men Who’ve Made Me Bitter.

It’s getting really, really hard to keep getting out there and trying and to stay positive and open about myself and about men. I’m sick of convincing/allowing myself to let go and be vulnerable and then being crushed in the end, and I’m sick of feeling this nightly blank emptiness punctuated by the stabbing emotional pain of bitterness. I haven’t had a real boyfriend in over five years. I’m tired and I’m lonely and I’m beginning to feel like a ghost. How can I stop obsessing over the people who have hurt me, and how can I move forward in my romantic life without fear or, worse, apathy? Thanks for your help.

Signed,

Alone Again, Naturally

Dear AAN,

The first thing you need to know—understand, believe, breathe in—is that there is nothing wrong with you. There. Is. Nothing. Wrong. With. You. The guys who hurt you, the guys who don’t want to date you: These people are irrelevant. They are not your mother. They are not your father or your sister or your best friend. Compared to your parents, your friends, they are nothing—flies in the room, cockroaches in the cupboard. Nothing. Fixating on them is like fixating on marrying George Clooney. They are irrelevant.

So why do they feel relevant to you? Because you BELIEVE that there’s something wrong with you, and you’re trying to figure out what it is. That belief is what’s wrong with you.

Every night you pray to the gods of rejection. Your prayer ritual involves replaying the past, loading one reel after another, footage of men who broke your heart, as if that’s romantic or special, getting your heart broken. Meanwhile, those guys—like so many—were probably just allergic to emotion or seriousness of purpose or vulnerability. I’m not being a dick about it; ask any man and he’ll back me up. Maybe they simply weren’t mature enough to handle you or anyone else. And yet the reel footage seems dramatic; the mystery seems compelling. How did you screw it all up? What did you do to turn them away? The problem lies somewhere in you, not in them. They were rational, intelligent beings whose rejections said something important about what’s screwed up about you. If only you could figure out what it was!

Cobbling together a string of rejections by men and trying to make sense of them is like trying to read tea leaves. Why? Because single men have many, many allergies.

Most single men are gluten-sensitive, lactose-intolerant, asthmatic mutants. They can’t tolerate wheat or soy or fleeting glimpses of heaviness. When they sense substance, regrets, high stakes, potential long-term entanglements, concern, interest, a pulse, they flee in terror like neurotic dogs in the presence of teetering lamps. The smallest change in weather, the tiniest shift in cabin pressure, the most minuscule adjustment in tone or mood, sends them running.

It’s not personal. It’s not even interesting. It’s certainly not the stuff of mystery, nothing to build a lifelong religion around. YOU ARE CURRENTLY PRAYING AT THE ALTAR OF THE MOST TEDIOUS RELIGION IN THE UNIVERSE. (I’m not shaming you! Sweet Christ in high heaven almighty, NO. I understand. Every single woman reading this understands!) Go ask a man what he thinks about another man having rejected you. He’ll snort like even contemplating it for half a second demeans both of you. If you push it, he’ll say maybe the guy met someone on the subway, or maybe he had a bad reaction to some mussels, and then he didn’t feel like explaining it, or maybe he was bored. Guys assume that other guys are indifferent unless they have explicit proof otherwise.

So should you.

Instead of digging into the reasons for this state of affairs, instead treating it as your personal fucking responsibility to root out the problem and eradicate it, instead of redoubling your efforts to be more lovable and better, always approaching some infinite ideal of the whip-smart but easygoing professional with a body like a fuck doll, you need to take a good look at yourself and accept what you see. When it comes to love, at least, you must try to stop being or seeming “better.” You need to accept exactly who you are and stop wishing it would change, that you’d be more palatable to the masses. “I am a reasonably good-looking woman with a tendency to cry at the drop of a hat.” “I am opinionated and impatient, and I have a bad habit of fixating on stuff I don’t understand.” “I am bored by most people, and I wish I had the money and the space to own llamas.”

When I finally decided to stop seeming cooler and more easygoing than I actually was, when I finally stopped pretending that nothing bothered me, that I didn’t need to talk about heavy stuff or express my emotions, when I finally stopped seeing tears as a weakness (being utterly unable to cry is a pretty blatant weakness, if you ask me), that’s when I realized that I was trying to truss up my weird in a shiny conventional package. Guys always thought I was a Little Debbie snack cake, but then they’d open the package and find anchovies and feel disappointed. Instead of questioning why I was spending time with guys who only craved fluff and sugar, I grew ashamed of my oily, salty nature. I tried to act sweeter, snackier, Littler.

Anchovies don’t have the easiest time imitating Ho Hos. If you ever want to go insane, try behaving like something you’re not. At my lowest points, I was (unconsciously) committed to repressing all ME-ness and approximating what I saw as my current boyfriend’s ideal woman. Needless to say, I was not convincing at this charade. But I didn’t even know that I was acting! I thought I was just trying to be less wrong, less bad, less crazy.

Why did I believe these things about myself? Because I often went out with men who liked me because I was semi-attractive and smart and funny. I often attracted these men by pouring on the charm, appearing nonchalant, appearing devil-may-care. My goal was to mask the fact that I was an extremely emotional, thoughtful, moody, obnoxious, demanding anchovy. These boyfriends wanted to make it work because they wanted a semi-attractive, smart, funny girlfriend, not because they wanted ME.

As long as you aim to please men, you don’t. The second you decide to please yourself, guess what? Everybody wants a slice of that action. I’ll never forget, right after I vowed to stop settling for mediocre, half-interested men (even if it meant becoming a dog lady, which suddenly seemed sort of appealing), I went to this wedding and I was mobbed by guys. I could finally see clearly that half of them just wanted to sleep with me and weren’t looking for anything serious. The other half was deluded into thinking I was super-fun and easygoing around the clock (um, no), and that seemed like a great kind of a girlfriend to have. Maybe one of them was actually into me, but he was wrong in thinking that we’d be good together. I could see that. It was like that moment where the kid who’s never heard a single sound before fires up his cochlear implant for the first time. My sudden ability to see attraction and rejection as a mere matter of appetite and taste and misinformation transformed my view of the world.

Strangely, everything started to pulsate with possibility! You’d think that marching around saying, “Oh, we wouldn’t work. I’m way too bossy for you,” might feel a little pessimistic, but instead it felt liberating. I was curious but detached until I could get more information. I wanted to fall in love with someone. That was my goal, and I wasn’t shy about saying so. But I needed to see a real hunger for anchovies, to the point where nothing else would do.

So first, you have to break your bad nightly habit. But you must be totally committed to cutting this shitty religion of yours off at the knees. Before you go to bed at night, I want you to write down at least three things you’re grateful for. They could be people, or places, or experiences. If you think of more, write those down, too. Then I want you to write down at least two things you did that day that you’re proud of. If you didn’t do anything that impressive, just write down something you did that was really just pure YOU. Maybe you made up a song about armpits, or ate two Cronuts in one sitting, or ran four miles and then watched a really stupid episode of CSI: Barcelona. Notice that you get credit for doing the so-called wrong thing, like napping, or eating butter bombs, or crying over a really good performance on So You Think You Can Dance.

You are going to fall in love with what you have and fall in love with who you are. Do not take the so-called bad or wrong things about you, that boyfriends or men or even women have told you, and try to “get rid” of those things. Put that stuff on the list right next to the stuff you’re proud of. “Cried after hearing the ‘Hugs Are Fun’ song on Yo Gabba Gabba!” “Slipped on the stairs and wondered if my landlord thought I was drunk, then craved a drink.” “Bailed on the dinner party and made mac and cheese out of a box instead, and it was awesome.”

Your bitterness is caused by the notion that these men form one all-powerful, critical OZ that thinks you’re not good enough. Everything you do during the day backs this up. You are rejectable. Look at how you fuck things up. Look how not cute enough you are. Look how grumpy. Look how not attractive your attitude can be.

You have to quiet the bad OZ voices, during the day and at night. Stop pushing back against a phantom. You are not a ghost; this creation of yours is. Maybe it’s an echo of something from your childhood. Maybe it’s just a bad cognitive habit you’ve had for a while. If it helps to map out a life alone—what could make that look better, look okay?—then do it. For me, I needed to think that if I didn’t find the right man, I’d definitely be pouring my time into crazy interesting things. I would learn to sew my own clothes and paint. I would adopt fifteen dogs. I would write poetry on the walls of my dining room. Instead of being afraid of getting “weird” and “lonely,” I needed to believe that I would engage with the world, create things, reveal myself to others as a serious freak without shame, and just generally throw myself into the world with abandon.

But I also respect your interest in sharing your life. Most of us feel the same way.

But you MUST stop fucking yourself over with this lazy, self-destructive nightly habit of yours. Do the things you need to do (show up to work, exercise, be good to your friends), and otherwise give yourself exactly what you need to be happy, and do not punish yourself for a second. Give yourself love and attention and respect. Treat your thoughts and feelings like the precious gems that they are. Respect yourself enough to allow yourself to be stubborn, shy, recalcitrant, angry, confused. Forgive yourself for this Bitter Era, but proclaim that it’s over. Today, it ends. Buy a pretty notebook for your gratitude and your self-acceptance, and put it by the bed. Dare to believe that this could change you. Don’t be cynical. Don’t go through the motions with this. The Bitter Era is done. You are celebrating yourself now, who you are RIGHT NOW, not a week from now, not a year from now. You are looking for someone with a taste for you, and nothing less will do. Believe that there is someone who fits that description. Believe that you deserve it, you deserve to be loved. It’s all going to work out just fine.

And when you finally find the right person for you, it will feel effortless. It will feel right. It won’t be perfect, but it will still be worlds apart from these other relationships you’ve had. But you know what? You won’t be surprised. Because once you build your own religion around gratitude and pride in who you are, at your best and at your worst, you’ll feel better than you ever have before. It will only seem natural for people to want to be closer to you.

Look around you, the way you’re living now. Commit it to memory. Because everything is about to change.

Polly