Dirty Little Secrets (18 page)

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 Man Want You
and the hundreds of titles along the same lines, the answer is all the same: they want the girl who is so caught up in her own life she could take or leave a guy. Recently, on
Jersey Shore
, Vinny fell hard for a girl because she stood him up. In Hollywood, the girl who isn’t impressed by the leading male, the one who can’t be bothered by him, is the one who wins him in the end. We loose girls—grown up now—get that message again and again: You still haven’t figured out how to be the kind of girl who gets loved.

To this day, when I feel particularly unlovable I go back to the wish that I could be something other than I am. Really, we all have those things we wish we could change, don’t we? There are some things we will be able to change and others we won’t, as the well-known serenity prayer reminds us. We have to come to terms with those things that are core parts of our personality because they aren’t changeable. It is good to acknowledge this. It is good for me to acknowledge, for instance, that I am never really distant, but that all men who would be with me will go through times of being a little distant. I can give men the space to love me, but I will be able to give only so much space. I share much about who I am. I don’t do well keeping my feelings silent and unattended to. When I think I’m not getting enough attention, I ask what’s going on. And so I will never be a rules girl, not without entirely denying who I am. And I’d rather like who I am than try to be someone else.

We know now that we live in a culture that has limited ideas about what we can be—men and women. Such a mind-set entirely belies the fact that humans are incredibly diverse. Add to this that many of us have been damaged along the way. We also live in a culture that has limited approaches to what love can look like: A man falls in love with a woman—usually a rules girl!—who also falls in love with him. Their every wish is fulfilled. Often they get married. And they live happily for the rest of their lives. Every romantic comedy, every Hollywood love story—
The Notebook
,
Titanic
,
My Best Friend’s Wedding
, and
There’s Something about Mary
are all popular examples—has this basic message inside it. Likewise, on television there is sitcom after sitcom in which the family is made up of husband and wife, and if it isn’t, then that is the reason the sitcom exists because
how strange
! Every love song on the radio, every advertisement to get you to buy something: it is all to make us desire the same thing—being in healthy love with the same person forever.

In truth, half of our marriages end in divorce. People have affairs—60 percent of men and 40 percent of women (but 70 percent of married women and 54 percent of married men did not know of their spouses’ extramarital activity).
²
We have blended families. We have open marriages. We have polyamory. We also have miserable marriages, loveless ones, sexless ones, deeply passionate and jealous and abusive ones. There are many, many ways to have love.

Recognizing this fact can be helpful for adult loose girls. It allows them the possibility of reenvisioning not just what they want, but what they can do right now. Perhaps they will be able to have this mainstream vision of love—if that’s what they even want—but for now they can only have this other thing. If women give themselves the freedom to think outside the lines about what love can look like for them, they will be able to find some satisfaction.

Sami considers herself a loose girl. She spent most of her adolescence sleeping her way through her high school and the local bars, and in college she did more of the same. She did it because she was looking for someone to stay with her, but few of them did. In her twenties, she finally met someone who seemed to love her. Eventually they married, and Sami assumed that her life was complete. She had what she wanted. But as the years passed, she found herself anxious and unhappy. She sought counseling, which helped sometimes, but other times she just felt like wallowing in pointless pain. Her husband, frustrated with her unavailability, had an affair, and their marriage fell apart. For years afterward, Sami berated herself for how she ruined her marriage. She had everything she said she had ever wanted, and then she destroyed it all. She started another relationship, but about a year into it, she got those same edgy, anxious feelings. She felt miserable again. She went back into counseling again, but it only helped so much. Increasingly unhappy, she and her boyfriend broke up.

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.

W
hen 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. In truth, I was terrified. Would I ever be free of the grip of my addiction? Would I be able to stay committed to this man I loved, who loved me? That evening I understood in a deeper manner that I would always be that girl. Marriage would not release me from her. Being loved by a man would not shake her loose. She and I were one. I would need to consider how to live my life with her.

That night was an important turning point for me as a loose girl. It was the beginning of my movement toward true intimacy—perhaps not intimacy as our culture defines it, where a man and a woman fall in love and ride off into the sunset and all is forever right with the world—but
movement
toward intimacy, which is the greatest achievement for a loose girl.

Perhaps you have a daughter who you want to protect. Perhaps she has already begun heading down this path. Perhaps you are a therapist who regularly hears stories just like these from your clients. Or maybe you are the girl you see in these pages. You are the one seeking change. This chapter is indeed about change. Readers write me daily: “Tell me what to do. Tell me how to change.” To talk about change for a loose girl, we must first talk about not changing, because the bottom line is that it remains highly unlikely that you will stop feeling that urge to seek male attention when you are feeling low. As noted in the previous chapter, and like with any addiction, the first step is acceptance. Here, we examine the idea of acceptance more closely.

LOVING YOURSELF

Most of the women who spoke to me have been told at one time or another that they must love themselves before someone else will love them. Friends tell them. Therapists tell them. Their parents tell them, too. For a loose girl, though, it isn’t that simple. For most of us, loving ourselves is too complicated. We’ve screwed up too many times. We’ve pushed too many people away with our addictions. We’ve gotten pregnant, had abortions, put ourselves in situations where we were mistreated again and again. We are too miserable when we’re alone. Other people can love themselves first, but not us. When I asked a few of the women what they thought of when they heard “love yourself,” they grew silent. Mandy said she’d never really thought about what that would even entail. Carla said she guessed she was supposed to take spa days, or lavender baths, or have a candlelit dinner for one. We laughed, hearing how ridiculous that was.

Loving yourself is a lifelong process of acceptance for who you are. It is a process of acknowledging the ways you’ve screwed up, harmed yourself, done irreparable damage to relationships, and still seeing that you are a worthwhile human being. You won’t get there by taking a bath. Loving yourself is part of an endless movement toward intimacy. The women I interviewed who felt they were more in control of their loose girl than in the past all said something similar about accepting themselves as they were.

“You have to learn to be happy with who you are and the way God created you.”

“I don’t think anyone ever recovers from this, only manages.”

“I consider myself in the process of heading towards recovery.”

“I still have a difficult time being vulnerable and intimate but at least I am aware of it.”

Before we can have intimacy with anyone else, we must find a way to accept ourselves. But girls who have sex are not treated kindly in American culture. You are a slut. You don’t care about yourself. You don’t care about having real love. Otherwise, you wouldn’t stand before the mirror before you go out, trying to determine which skirt best shows off your legs. Or, if you aren’t a slut, you are the empowered girl discussed in chapter 3; you have sex because, by God, you can do whatever you want to do. You can go out in the evening and collect boys like fireflies in a jar. You don’t have to want love.

All these assumptions made about you sink into your sense of self. It is nearly impossible to keep out the voices of a culture that will not let girls define their sexual identity. And then, too, there are parents and friends and ex-boyfriends and boys at school—all of them make assumptions about who we are as sexual beings. Inevitably, we feel judged, defensive, hurt, and misunderstood.