Can't Help Myself Read online

  As I listened to her talk about her new reality, I had enough sense to feel ashamed.

  “I’m an idiot,” I told her. “Here I am, devastated about a dumb breakup with a guy I was dating for less than a year, and meanwhile, you lost a spouse. You’re experiencing real grief. I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid.”

  Lisa’s response shocked me. She told me I wasn’t stupid at all.

  “Sometimes breakups are worse than death,” she explained matter-of-factly. “The pain of rejection is different, but it can cut much deeper.”

  Lisa told me she was sure that if her husband were alive, he’d want to be with her. The whole point of their marriage was that they never wanted to let each other go.

  “But a breakup means that someone is content to live without you,” she said, looking at me like I was the one who deserved pity. “Patrick is healthy and alive and chooses not to have you around.”

  It was true. Patrick was in Brookline, on that stupid beige couch, under that framed Globe Sports page from 2004 that said “Finally!” probably eating a peanut butter sandwich, not thinking of me at all.

  “Asshole,” I whispered.

  The conversation validated all that I’d been through over the past year.

  It also made me realize that if Lisa could separate her grief from my experience, I should be able to do the same for readers.

  At the end of 2008, I published a call-out for love problems on the Globe’s website and crossed my fingers that someone would respond. I freaked out when I saw the first email, shaking as I opened it, realizing that real humans—people I didn’t know—were going to tell me about their lives.

  A friend in the paper’s design department made a logo—a tiny envelope with a heart—and we decided to call the column Love Letters.

  The first letter I answered—on January 22, 2009—was from a writer who went by “Desperate,” who lived in the suburban town of Rockland, Massachusetts.

  The entry drew reader comments within minutes. I was ecstatic.

  There were a few trolls who used the comments section to make fun of the letter writer (or to make strange, non-sequitur declarations about Tom Brady), but they were outnumbered by thoughtful people who seemed to want to help. As the days went on and I published more letters, I’d ask, after entries, something like, “Readers, what do you think?” to make sure everyone knew it was a discussion.

  Some of the first commenters who began logging their advice every day were Valentino, TheRealJBar, Sally, Alice, TrickyCrayon, and Rico, who only referred to himself in the third person (as in, “Rico thinks you should break up with your boyfriend”). The list grew, and I became a fan of commenters like Tricia, TrueLuv4Eva, MHouston, Two-Sheds, Bklynmom, Smash, and BackBayBabe.

  I knew very little about who these daily commenters were in real life, but I began to fantasize. My mom—who’d just ended an engagement when I launched Love Letters—had her own theories. “What if Rico is a woman?” she asked, calling me from Maryland after she’d finished teaching for the night and scrolled through the comments section. “I think Alice is probably very attractive,” she guessed.

  I could tell the column was keeping her mind off her own breakup. Like me, she was trying to figure out where she fit in the world, now that her plan for the future—a life as a married woman—had faded away.

  We were easily distracted, because within months of the launch of Love Letters, the number of comments tripled and then quadrupled. Most days, the website had a few hundred pieces of advice from readers within hours.

  It also appeared that it wasn’t just a local thing. Despite my theory that Boston needed its own advice column, people wrote in from all over the country, sometimes noting to me privately that they’d gone to college in Boston and landed elsewhere. As for the locals, they stunned me with their email addresses. Some came from places like fidelity.com, harvard.edu, and .gov. I was shocked to see that a few of the commenters were mental health professionals.

  Those regular commenters kept coming back and developed their own packs of loyal fans. Letter writers would say, “I want to know what TheRealJBar has to say.” To be honest, I wanted to know what TheRealJBar had to say, too.

  People wanted my advice—but they also wanted to crowd-source their love lives.

  I knew it was misery loving company. And yet, with the online company, I was starting to feel a lot less miserable. I didn’t know where I was drifting, but I knew I wasn’t the only person who felt unattached. My peers might be coupling up, getting married, having kids, and leaving me behind, but I had a new group of imaginary friends who kept me busy. They gave me countless problems to consider. With them, maybe I didn’t need Patrick.

  That said, I did hope he was reading.

  Desperate in Rockland

  (the first letter)

  Q. I am seeing a man who has lived by himself for sixteen years. He has said he loves me, and when he is with me he is an angel. He is from Maryland, and when he leaves me he becomes distant and sometimes rude. He has even stopped speaking to me for six months because I made him angry. He says he wants what I want, which is a solid relationship, maybe ending up in marriage.

  My problem is he does not like talking on the phone and, right now, that is our only option. He calls when he feels like it, and that may amount to maybe once a week. I want to know if this man has commitment issues and if I should run. I have tried to break it off three times, but he calls and we start talking again, and he does the same thing all over again. I like him, but I find it hard to get to know him. He won’t even show me his feet. He was a serviceman for twenty-three years, so maybe that has something to do with his feet, but I am looking for a drama-free life and he is not helping.

  —Desperate, Rockland

  A.You’ve told us you feel like you don’t know him. You’ve told us he cut you out of his life for six months—because he was in a bad mood.

  You’ve told us you want marriage, but he won’t show you his feet.

  We all deserve someone who will expose their feet.

  I get that this guy has a tough time with emotional intimacy, but his inability to include you in his life means he’s wasting your time. Perhaps it’s time to use your feet to walk away.

  —Meredith

  Readers? What do you think?

  I totally agree with Meredith here. Your beau is downright cruel. If he is not willing to seek therapy (and I mean actually GO to a therapist, not just say he’s going to do it), I would run the other way. Until he gets his act together, he is not dating material, much less marriage material. You deserve better than this! MOVE-ON

  He treats you like this because you’re “desperate.” If you have confidence and other options, he may act differently. Just stop being desperate…that’s the key :-)

  PATSFAN0269

  Run for the hills, woman! J GILLY

  Chapter 2

  You Make Me Wanna Snoop

  You’d think it would take a while—like, more than a few weeks—for people to trust a new advice columnist with their personal problems.

  You’d think people would want to read a few dozen responses from that advice columnist, just to make sure she’s not some self-help–spewing fraud, before submitting any letters of their own.

  But within weeks of the launch of Love Letters, my inbox was full of notes from strangers who detailed steamy one-night stands, serial cheating, horrible first dates, and the overwhelming grief and financial devastation caused by divorce. It was as if people in Boston had been desperate to confess.

  One of the first letters was from a guy who was ready to walk out on his fiancée. I got the sense he was telling me something no one else knew.

  “I’m getting married next month, but I think I’m in love with another woman,” he wrote. “I was always anxious about the engagement and upcoming marriage, but I took that to be cold feet or whatever. Then I met someone else who I connected with instantly, in many ways more deeply than with my fiancée. I haven’t cheated on her, but I’ve wanted to.”

  The ease with which these letter writers shared their secrets and concerns was humbling—and jarring.

  “You don’t even know me,” I’d mutter to my computer screen while reading submissions.

  Of course, that wasn’t entirely true. From my name, readers knew that I was probably Jewish. If they googled me, they saw a picture of a short, average-width blond woman in her early thirties. My relationship status wasn’t public on Facebook, but my profile suggested I wasn’t married.

  Occasionally a reader would write in to ask me about my credentials, and I would tell them what I told my editors—that most advice columnists weren’t practicing mental health professionals, because responsible mental health professionals don’t give directives based on a four-hundred-word generalization of a problem. My column might be helpful, but the real mission was to engage and entertain.

  That kind of question, though, led me to do more research about where I fit into the history of advice givers, and the more I read, the more I learned that it was a pretty Jewish thing to do. Ann Landers, Dear Abby, and Judith Martin, also known as Miss Manners, were all Jewish, which made sense to me. I wasn’t raised with much religion, but I knew Judaism was big on questions and discussion. Happiness in marriage seemed to be a big deal for the faith. At least that’s what I’d learned from Fiddler on the Roof.

  Eventually I read about A Bintel Brief, the Yiddish advice column started by the editor of The Forward, and was shocked to see how the romantic quandaries of the early twentieth century were not so different from the ones I saw now.

  As the column grew, I met readers in real life who asked whether I had a system for answering letters—how I chose problems and came up with my responses. I explained that I answered lett
ers at random, usually in the order they were received, and that my opinions came from my gut.

  I did have some rules, though, when it came to process. I learned I needed specific controls to come up with proper advice.

  I experienced writer’s block at the office—in part because I feared my coworkers could look over my shoulder and see people’s private correspondence—so I answered all letters at home, in pajamas.

  I also needed complete silence, no music allowed. If my favorite Janet Jackson songs were on in the background, I’d be more likely to tell people to get single. If I was listening to something like Bon Iver, I’d tell letter writers to do all they could to be held by someone who loved them.

  Every letter was unique; people with similar problems always faced different circumstances. I told my mom, “No two letters are alike, and they all include such specific details.” With every one, I started from scratch.

  But when it came to those unique letters, I did see trends. One of the most common quandaries was the anxiety that accompanied the wait for “I love you.” I received so many “When will my partner say ‘I love you’?” queries in the first months of Love Letters that I could have published a spinoff advice column called “Those Three Words.”

  The other common problem—which was more difficult for me to unpack—was snooping.

  In 2009 and 2010, with the growth of Facebook and ever-improving smartphone messaging systems, there were new and complicated ways to spy on a partner. I was shocked by the number of people who had no respect for their significant other’s privacy—or, in some cases, the law. They broke into email accounts. They cracked codes.

  My ex, Patrick, wasn’t a technology guy, so I wouldn’t have been able to do much snooping on him when we were together, even if I’d wanted to. He didn’t have a Facebook account and used an early-model flip phone.

  But even before Patrick, I’d never snooped on anyone. Part of it was that I believed in privacy, but I was also too afraid of what I might discover. I’d always preferred blissful ignorance to finding out someone didn’t love me anymore. I wanted to pretend things were working even when they weren’t.

  I would have made sweeping judgments about these letter writers—the readers who were so quick to admit an invasion of privacy—if not for the fact that I was related to a snoop. That made me a bit more empathetic.

  My older sister, Brette, whom I’d thought of as a mostly respectful human being, had become a first-time snoop at thirty-four years old.

  After one intense decade-long relationship from twenty-one to thirty-one, which was followed by several years of hooking up with men (and a few women) around New York City, Brette—a casting director—met someone she wanted to date exclusively.

  “I picked him up while he was manning a booth at the Bryant Park holiday market,” Brette explained during a late-night phone call.

  “Of course you did,” I responded, once again in awe of my sister’s ability to turn any gathering of humans—including an outdoors crafts fair—into a singles event.

  “He’s a glassblower, and he’s ten years younger.”

  “Of course he is,” I said, because this was so like my sister.

  “We met in the booth where he was selling his glass,” she said. “I saw him and I had to have him.”

  Brette explained that her holiday market acquisition was a twenty-four-year-old named Ben. He blew glass full-time and often visited Cape Cod, where his family owned a toy store.

  She described him as round, jolly, and with a big beard.

  “Like Santa?” I asked.

  “But Jewish!” Brette gushed.

  Brette said that after meeting young Ben at the holiday market, she asked him to join her at a get-together she was planning at a bar in Midtown. He accepted the invite and met her at the venue, where they wound up making out in front of Brette’s friends.

  After that first “date,” they began spending weekends together. He would travel from his apartment in the Hudson River Valley, where he had a glassblowing studio, and would stay with her in her apartment in Alphabet City.

  From what I could tell, Brette and Ben never got sick of each other, even though many of their dates lasted an entire weekend. She was the happiest I’d seen her in years.

  My mom and I had concerns about their age difference—specifically whether Brette should be spending so much time with a twenty-four-year-old artist who was nowhere close to settling down—but we couldn’t help but love Ben once we met him. He was like human Xanax, the sort of guy whose kind smile could dissolve any of our bad moods or family bickering. We were in awe of his art, specifically his collection of intricate glass marbles. He also made complicated and colorful glass pipes that reminded us of Truffula Trees.

  Whenever we all met up at Brette’s place in New York, Ben would show us his latest creations. A pipe that looked like a candy cane. A pipe that looked like something you’d find in a coral reef. A pipe that looked like a cat’s butt. (Cat butt pipes would become Ben’s most popular offering. You put whatever you’re smoking in the cat’s butthole, just below the glass tail.)

  “They’re for pot,” my mom would say, of the intricate creations, pretending not to be fazed, her smile tense. She’d always been a cool, open-book kind of mom, but because she’d spent her college years cooped up in a practice room at Juilliard, she’d never done drugs.

  “I can recognize the smell of marijuana now,” she’d tell me, impressed with herself. “It smells very sweet.”

  My mom and I loved to watch Ben and Brette get affectionate with each other because it wasn’t your typical PDA. They stroked each other like pets and spoke in an invented language. Brette had always made up strange words and nicknames—her childhood name for me was Lush (rhyming with tush), which she never defined or explained—but Ben was the first guy who met her at her level of weirdness.

  “Bee-bah, I love you,” Brette would murmur to Ben, while rubbing his arms.

  “Bee-bah, I love you, too, lady,” he’d say in return.

  With their round faces and curly brown hair, they looked like bear cubs at play—or in heat. Once, during a visit to New York, I walked in on them cuddling in bed. She was stroking his chest hair and called it “chest Narnia.” She pointed to his nipple and said, “Aslan.” I nodded and exited the room.

  At the start of their relationship, Brette claimed she understood that the partnership might have a shelf life because of Ben’s age. At twenty-four, he hadn’t had many dating experiences, whereas at thirty-four, Brette had sown enough oats to choke a horse.

  The longer they dated, though, the more she wanted him to be her real partner. Brette didn’t know if Ben was capable of a long-term commitment, but she wanted him to try.

  “But he’s so young,” I told her one night, thinking about how not ready for commitment I’d been at twenty-four. “Think about where you were at that age, Brette. He’s a kid.”

  “I know,” Brette said, with a sad sigh.

  “Also,” she added, “there’s another obstacle. A big one.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Katya.”

  My sister said the name “Katya” the way Cruella De Vil says “the puppies.”

  Brette explained that one of Ben’s closest friends was a woman named Katya, another artist he’d known for years. She was younger and thinner than Brette, with ivory skin, long brownish hair, and Cara Delevingne eyebrows.

  Brette feared that now that Ben had a serious girlfriend, Katya would realize what she was missing and try to steal him away. Brette admitted that she’d pored over Katya’s social media photos looking for evidence of a diabolical plan. She was also full-on snooping—checking Ben’s texts and Facebook messages for proof. This surprised me because Brette was nothing like my friends and readers who played detective with the people they dated. I thought she was too self-assured—and maybe even too ignorant about technology—to take part in that kind of behavior.

  I opened Katya’s Facebook page, the part that was public, to see what all the fuss was about. A few photos were of her and Ben in outdoorsy locations. They looked like pals, smiling with their arms around each other.