Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [60]
About five years later, she met another man and fell in love, but he lived in Europe, and she didn’t want to disrupt her career. She fretted for months, and then she realized she didn’t have to live with him. The more she thought about it, the more she realized she didn’t want to. Her family was furious. Her friends told her she obviously had intimacy issues, but she was happy living so far from him. Their relationship worked like this. Her friends were right: she did have intimacy issues. Terrible ones. But what could she do about it? It was who she was. And the more she tried to be someone else, the worse she felt. She had figured out a way to be happy in a relationship, unconventional as it was.
It is possible that over time Sami will grow out of this stage of her life or will become capable of a different kind of intimacy, if that’s her hope. But for now, she should be able to have love on her terms. What I’m really talking about here is humility. One of the greatest keys to emotional and psychological growth is humility. When we can look at ourselves honestly and without judgment, and can accept that this is our reflection, only then can there be the possibility of any change. People don’t like this. They tell me, “You mustn’t give up,” which is not at all how I see it. They say that I will have real love if I hand over my life to Jesus or if I try their newfangled therapy.
But acceptance is real love. There is no greater love. It provides more intimacy with oneself than anything else. The longer adult loose girls spend trying to be something else, trying to change themselves into something they aren’t, the longer they will feel ashamed of who they are. Meanwhile, loose girls can have love, too. It just may not look like it does for everyone else—at least not at first. If the old adage that you can’t be in love until you love yourself first is true, then loose girls have to learn to love themselves for not loving themselves. It is the first rule of acceptance, which is also the first step toward real intimacy for loose girls.
Chapter 10
THE BEGINNING OF CHANGE
I’m still here, I move around to try to get a new me, but I still remain the same. And now I’m moving again, this time with a real hope to make it work, to change things, to rip off this part of me.
When my husband and I got engaged, I threw myself into wedding planning. I needed to believe that my life was about to change—not just that I would be a wife, settled down, but that I would somehow stop feeling that old desperation that had continually gotten me into trouble with men. I figured that by taking my game piece off the table, that part of me would evaporate. Someone loved me. He loved me enough to marry me. What’s more, he was wonderful—kind, attentive, available. I no longer needed to spend my time searching for what I didn’t quite get yet was pure fantasy. I no longer needed to try to fill my emptiness. It would be filled now through my marriage.
A few months after the wedding, though, I found myself out again at a bar. There was a guy there. Beautiful—big eyes and full lips. He brushed his hair back from his face with his hand. He turned his eyes to me, and it was as though the entire world went away. There was no husband, no marriage. No friends at my table. No noise. There was me and there was this guy, a guy who would surely penetrate my pain, who would show me through his attention to me that I was worthwhile.
Later that night, having left alone, dodging that boy’s advances, I sat in the bedroom where my husband unknowingly slept and tried to calm myself.