There comes a time in every relationship when the proverbial
jig is up. The deck is depleted and you
have to show your hand. In romance, some
time between coming and going, both parties have to come clean.
There are the obvious lies of illusion to fess up about,
i.e., his internet profile said he was 5’ 11”, but without his lifts he’s
really 5’ 5”, or her skin looks flawless, but waking up to her a.m. facade feels
like staring at the dark side of the moon.
Perhaps he picks you up for the date in a Mercedes SLK, but after the
date, when he takes you back to his place, it’s a 300 sq-ft bachelor with
little more than an air mattress and a hot plate. Or maybe you’re really digging your new
girlfriend’s perky and plentiful décolletage only to get her undressed and find
her tits really reside closer to her navel than her neck. That’s the real secret Victoria’s hiding! Unless she’s under 25 years-old, or slinging
silicone, no woman’s tits are as perky or perfect as a strategic placement of
underwire and hooks purport them to be.
Let’s face it girls, we’re almost all liars to some degree. Our cheeks aren’t that rosy, our lashes
aren’t that long, our hair does not sprout from our scalps with perfect sun-kissed highlights and chestnut undertones, and though we may start the evening
with bodacious tatas, by the end of the night are tits will be deflated
somewhere around our armpits. But what
we really want to know is, will he love us anyway?
Chris Rock once joked that nobody starts a
relationship as his or her true self, rather we all send our
representative. We put our best foot
forward, hiding the bunions and ingrown toenails under Cinderella’s glass
slipper. And many of the women I see in
my office would rather flee the scene than let Prince Charming see how jacked
up her feet really are.
For example, I have a client, we’ll call her Cindy, who came
to me desperate to find true love. She
took excellent care of her body, was highly educated, poised, and had even
learned rules, stats, and players of every major US-televised sport as to make
herself more attractive to men. But
Cindy could never seem to score when it came to romance. Much like Cinderella, Cindy had been made
into the belle of the ball, but her beauty, both outside and in, was on a
ticking clock. Eventually, midnight
would strike and the prince du jour would find out that she wasn’t that
beautiful, or that sweet, and that his little princess was the one thing so
many women are afraid to be – human.
Cindy and I discovered that all her lies of illusion boiled down to one
simple lie of omission. She had been
omitting her true self from all of her relationships. She’d been operating under the common
delusion that romantic relationships are a game of tit for tat. She thought if she gave her men a beautiful
outside, then they would make her feel beautiful on the inside. But if Cindy couldn’t get her outsides to
match her insides herself, she was never going to find the love she
desired. No man could make her feel
whole when her story was only half-truths.
There’s just no tit for that.
Cindy and I worked on building her self-esteem by daring to
get acquainted with her true self. And once the real Cindy emerged, she realized falling in love was less about her makeup and pushup
bras, than it was about being woman enough to admit that, when it came to relationships, she was really
just a scared little girl.
We are, all of us, just emotional infants fumbling about in
grownup skin. In the game of love, we
compete, and bluff, and one-up each other because we’re really all just afraid
of losing. I wonder what lies might be
standing in the way of my own romantic end game. Could the big-O be eluding me because, just
like Cindy, I was a big faker? For all
my boys and toys, could it be that the one thing I really need to try in
order to come, is to come clean? Finally
show a partner who I really am? If so, I
don’t know if that can be done in the next 246 days. Perhaps my sexual revolution will end up just
like my new year’s resolutions – facedown in a pint of rum raisin, dripping all
over my brand new yoga pants. I just
don’t know. Cindy’s story was a
success. Eventually. Maybe mine will be too.
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