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they can’t get one or because once they do, they screw it up by needing too much and/or cheating. This is a big irony that loose girls face: many claim that all they want is a relationship, one in which they are truly loved by a man. But many times loose girls grow restless after they’ve gotten that, and they wind up looking outside the committed relationship for something new. When their emptiness, their sense of being worthless, isn’t healed through the relationship, they head back out there, certain that it means they just didn’t find the right one yet. Many women who come to me note that they don’t understand why they do this, that they feel out of control, as though controlled by puppet strings, held by someone else. Indeed, they are being controlled by the addiction, by the pursuit of that high that comes when they feel like maybe this time they will get what they need to seal that void inside.

One of the biggest challenges grown-up loose girls face is recognizing that they have not lived in a vacuum. Like any other human, they have made mistakes. They learned negative patterns. They got themselves entangled in situations that they will never be free of. They have kids with the wrong people. They mess up their careers. The longer we live, after all, the more opportunities we have to love and lose. This is just a fact of life.

The media sets us all up to believe that somehow everyone else has perfect lives, everyone else gets their needs met all the time, but not us. Certainly, loose girls are guilty of this feeling. They assume that they are the only ones who can’t get loved. They are the only ones obsessed with men. They are the only ones who mess up all their relationships. In truth, of course, most of us are like that. Life is suffering. Happiness is fleeting. So, the key to being a grown-up loose girl is acceptance. We will always struggle with these feelings. We will always think first of which guy can make us feel better. And we will always wrestle with neediness when the person we love goes away. The next chapter explores this idea of acceptance in much greater detail.

For most of my life I wanted to be “mysterious.” This was one of my greatest aspirations. I just knew that if I were unreadable, if I were so taken up with my career or children or anything other than boys, if my needs weren’t telegraphed to other people, that boys and men would pursue me constantly and I’d never feel unloved again.

I had plenty of reason to believe this. Our culture is very supportive of what can be called “the rules girl,” coined by Ellen Fein’s and Sherrie Schneider’s The Rules books, meant to capture Mr. Right.1 A rules girl never calls a man back and never lets him know how interested she might be. She never looks nervous or uncertain. She needs nothing from men, and the second he stops fawning all over her, she goes away without shedding a tear (God forbid, or it might mess up her perfectly applied makeup).

The rules girl is, in other terms, the opposite of the loose girl. She is not needy, and she most certainly isn’t slutty. And, of course, men adore her. A perfect example of this can be found on the reality show The Hills. Kristin Cavallari gets whatever guy she wants. She’s beautiful and skinny, sure. So is Audrina, yet Justin Bobby keeps her at arm’s length for years. But when Kristin enters his life, he’s ready to commit. The same thing happened to Lauren Conrad back when The Hills was Laguna Beach. Lauren was in love with Stephen, who seemed to only have eyes for Kristin, even though everyone could see Kristin would break his heart and Lauren wouldn’t. What did Kristin have that Audrina and Lauren didn’t? She had the power that comes to a girl who doesn’t give a flying you-know-what about whether that boy lives or dies. That’s what she had.

The rules girl is held up in our culture as the girl you want—or want to be. In the books Why Men Love Bitches and Why Men Marry Bitches, the author Sherry Argov notes that men don’t want the nice girl. They want the one who doesn’t really have time for them. In Make Every