How to Grow Up (11 page)

A rule I eventually devised—and it took a while—was
Beware of Sex. The warning came first as a whisper, then as a haunting echo, then as an annoying nag, and finally as a blood-curdling scream. What I'm saying is, though I started to know better, it took some disasters before respect for this warning was stronger than the dizzy pull toward romance. And part of the problem was limerence.

Freshly sprung from my monogamous LTR, I had no idea how vulnerable I would be to the onslaught of chemicals your brain releases when you're attracted to someone. These chemicals are responsible for every single people-in-love-are-crazy-fools song, movie plot, and Shakespearean drama ever written. They stimulate the same area of the brain that lights up when you snort a fat rail of cocaine. This state of mind,
limerence
, is a biological relative of obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you are an addict, or perhaps have the sort of low-dopamine, low-serotonin brain soup best served with a side of SSRIs, you are perhaps more sensitive to the mind-altering power of limerence. And if you are a romantic, you are perhaps more likely to label this heady, overwhelming sensation
love
. Being a low-serotonin addict with romantic tendencies, I had to experience many crashed-and-burned affairs to understand that for me, love really
was
a drug.

As someone who hangs out in 12-step circles, I was aware of support groups for people who find themselves addicted to sex, or love, or both. Before I dealt with my own addictions, I'd thought these love-addict people were terrible killjoys, if not flat-out crazy. Love and sex and the ecstasy that accompanies them were the best things in the
world
. They made life worth living! They were worth fighting for—dying for, even! (I told you I was a
romantic.) But as I began to face up to my drinking and my copious drug ingestion, I started to understand that a person really can be addicted to lots of different things, because the highs induced by the dopamine machine in your brain can become addictive. Some people find that activities the rest of humanity is able to indulge in without consequence—dating, food, shopping—trigger in their special chemistry a reaction that spurs increasingly compulsive behavior. From my own experience and the stories of other alcoholics who sober up only to find themselves ruining their lives with a brand-new eating disorder or maxed-out credit card or STD, I've come to the conclusion that some brains are just super addict-y, and can get obsessively focused on whatever triggers a dopamine release. Your friend who can't stop checking her phone for incoming Likes and text messages? Dopamine fiend. The one who gets weirdly manic and sweaty and spaced out while you're browsing at Topshop? Dopamine fiend. The one who falls in love and off the face of the earth every other month? Dopamine fiend. Maybe that friend is actually
you
. It's certainly me.

Because it would take me about a year to learn about sex and love chemicals and that psychedelic state limerence. I mistook my first post-LTR romance for True Love instead of what it was—hot sex with a sociopath. I was so out of my mind with the tsunami of dopamine this Johnny Depp look-alike provoked in my nervous system, I ignored a ton of red flags. First of all, he was unbearably pretentious. Asked a friend of mine in a cynical voice, “Does Fake Johnny Depp
really
begin every morning with a poached egg on a bed of brown rice and miso?” I understood his
skepticism, but the answer was yes, Fake Johnny Depp
did
prepare himself a breakfast of poached eggs, brown rice, and miso each morning. Which prompted the next question: “Well, does he have to talk about it
in that voice
?”

I understood the voice my friends were speaking of. Not only did Fake Johnny Depp talk about his breakfast selection as if it were the most precious, even spiritual moment of his day—he talked about everything like that. The fuzzy kangaroo paw he was planting in his garden. The Roland Barthes essay he'd read while eating his poached eggs and miso in said kangaroo paw garden. He was a recent graduate of Oberlin, and he used the word
praxis
in daily conversation. Frequently I had to ask Fake Johnny Depp what he had just said, ask him to repeat it in the language of the common American English speaker. Because I was in limerence, overdosing on crush chemicals, I thought all this shit was adorable. I liked his swingy “mushroom hairdo,” as a concerned friend unkindly called it. I was ready to go shack up with him in a yurt in the forests of Maine, so that he could apprentice to an obscure elderly artist whose hand-carved wooden bowls had garnered much praise on the artisanal hand-carved wooden bowl scene. Everything I had worked for—my writing career, the nonprofit literary organization I directed, my home in San Francisco—I would have thrown away for this guy. All because I loved his swingy mushroom hairdo and the way he flung me around in the sack.

Fake Johnny Depp was, according to my best amateur research in the DSM, suffering from borderline personality disorder, so thankfully the relationship was doomed. People with
borderline personality disorder—or, as I like to cheerfully call it, the beeps—are dangerously easy to fall into limerence with, because their signature behavior of delusional mania looks a lot like the throes of first love. They're like a parasitical mimic, taking on the characteristics of love but actually burrowing into your psyche and laying eggs there—eggs that will hatch and
drive you mad
! “What has happened to my awesome true love affair?!” I asked myself, sinking deeper and deeper into the sort of psychotic fighting that kept us up until five a.m., forcing me to cancel plans because I was so sleep deprived and dehydrated from sobbing. I'd lie to my friends about my canceled plans, because I didn't want them to know I'd been up all night fighting with Fake Johnny Depp, because they already didn't like him very much (note: when your friends don't like your date, it's a red flag) and I wanted everybody to get along. But lying about my relationship to my friends made me feel ashamed and low-self-esteem-y, like I was in an abusive relationship. And I started to wonder:
Am
I in an abusive relationship? Because even though Fake Johnny Depp's torments were never physical, they made me feel so completely unhinged that I actually hit
myself
. Nothing slams the self-esteem like hitting your own freaking self. This was the cycle of violence I found myself in, due in no small part to the heady effects of limerence upon my delicate system.

When Fake Johnny Depp ended our brief and volatile affair to take up with a trust fund princess who paid his way to Africa, I was startled to find myself
relieved
. As I walked away from his apartment, the thought
He's not my problem anymore
rang through my head, and I actually felt sorry for the girl he'd newly attached
himself to. He soon left her for one of his grad school professors, who paid his passage to Iceland, then left her for a host of others, on and on; he's currently swindling a poor sod who is footing the bills while Fake Johnny Depp fake-farms a plot of land out in Red Hook, like Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid at Versailles.

“What was I thinking?” I gasped to Lee. “He's clearly
so crazy
. Nobody liked him. We fought all the time and I can't even tell you one thing we fought about.”

“Was the sex good?” Lee inquired.

“Yes.”

“Well, there you go. Good sex does something to your brain chemicals.” And so my BGB hipped me to the concept of limerence. Prone to making the occasional cameo at support groups for sex and love addicts, Lee, too, was particularly sensitive to the effects of limerence on his common sense. “You gotta watch out, girl,” he warned.

“What am I supposed to do, never have sex again?” I wailed dramatically.

“One step at a time.”

I wish that Fake Johnny Depp—clearly a Sex Only person, if not an Avoid Completely person— was the first and last time I confused lust with love and allowed an unsuitable paramour to take up space in my heart and my head. But it takes a while to understand what's wrong with you, and even after you've figured it out, it takes a while to
care
, so I continued dating and sleeping with hotties who were less than Marriage Material.

Take, for example, my yearlong intrigue with a recovering heroin addict living on probation and opiate blockers in her
mother's sewing room on the other side of the country. It took us a long time to meet in person, as various issues—say, a court case for driving the getaway car for a grocery store holdup with a dirty syringe—got in the way of her coming to visit me. Because of the distance (and the whole sleeping on a twin bed in her mother's house thing), visiting her seemed out of the question. But goshdarnnit I am plucky and resourceful, and a
romantic
who was apparently experiencing the effects of the infatuation chemical norepinephrine, which makes you do batshit crazy things for “love.” Sadly, experiencing obstacles in love actually
increases
dopamine. Cruel world!

When I arrived in upstate New York to visit Internet Girlfriend, her mother was not thrilled to meet me, a thirtysomething, heavily tattooed woman from California, but she endured it the way she had endured the traumatizing years of her daughter's drug addiction—years that weren't actually that long ago. However, after she walked in on us having sex to a Dario Argento movie on the twin bed, I decided we had to leave the nest and bought her a bus ticket to stay with me at a friend's house in the city. Internet Girlfriend didn't like taking my money; she even tried to sell her opiate blockers to junkies at the bus station. I sent Tali a text message from the bus station, seated on a plastic chair near a losing pile of scratch tickets while IG was off hustling the hustlers.
Is it nice or not nice that the recovering junkie is trying to sell her opiate blockers to heroin addicts at a bus station?
Tali texted back quickly:
Oh girl. What are you doing?

I only ever saw Internet Girlfriend in person once after that visit, but the double-whammy dopamine punch of sext messages
(text messages + dirty talk = double dopamine!) kept me in and out of limerence for a solid year. At the end of that year, I broke up with her in an epically long text message while simultaneously flipping through
Vogue
and eating Thanksgiving leftovers. The more I reflected on the apocalypse that was the Internet Girlfriend Affair, the more it revealed itself to be a treasure trove of brand new Rules for Love—what not to date. Don't date people who sell pills in bus stations. Don't date people who you know in your gut are lying to you all the time, whose stories are so shady you start to hope they
are
lying to you. Don't date people whose idea of a good tattoo is an evil, fanged carrot eating a bunny. Not to be a snob, but maybe no hooking up with people who live with their parents. No long-distance relationships. (I know there are lots of long-distance love stories out there; I've seen them on TV talk shows and commercials for dating Web sites. But these are
my
Rules for Love, and for me, if I'm not in the same city as someone, I can't experience real-time hangouts, free of the wild dopamine stimulants of travel and deprivation.) Also, Internet Girlfriend was twenty-five years old. There is a saying among recovering addicts that your emotional maturity freezes at the age you start abusing your drug of choice, and that you don't start growing again until you get sober. I've found this to be true, which means at that point, though I was thirty-seven years old, I was emotionally twenty-five years old. And the more I fooled around with and dated young people, the more I found them to be, well, young. In an annoying way. I didn't want to hang around while they figured out the significant life lessons I knew were right around the corner. I didn't want to wait for them to
understand—no,
really
understand—that, for better or worse, I was not their mother. And I didn't want them to grow up and out of the dynamics we'd established. They'd still be young and full of life and lust for the wild world of dating, but as I got older, I realized that if I had anything to say about it, this would be my last time on the market. So I turned in my cougar card, as my new Rules for Love stipulated that the younger generations were off-limits for dating.

I was beginning to realize that having off-the-rails sexual chemistry is not only
not
necessary for a stable relationship; the off-the-rails-ness of it is actually detrimental. Dopamine isn't the only chemical in your relationship chemistry kit. There are other, sweeter chemicals that start surging as the dopamine lightens up, chemicals that facilitate attachment and affection and maybe actual true love. So I made another Rule for Love: no more sex addicts. In fact, no addicts who don't have at least three years sober in a reputable recovery program. Just at the beginning stages of staying clean from heroin, Internet Girlfriend couldn't even see how she was out of her brain with all the other ways you can get yourself high. I was only beginning to understand it myself. For a little while, I didn't
want
to understand it. But then I really, really did.

A funny thing happens when you start implementing standards in your romantic life—they grow. As I started to get a handle on my dopamine issues, I got bored with sleeping around with sexy losers. In my Rules for Love, dates do friendly-type things for one another, not leave their dates to walk home after a hot make-out on the roof of a perfectly functioning automobile (true
story). I felt a strange new pride in myself for even
recognizing
this. Having standards was so new and exciting, I swear I was getting dopamine off it.

My Rules for Love continued to morph into actual standards. In recovery circles you are encouraged to make a sort of wish list detailing all the qualities you would like your next beloved to possess. They can be serious, crucial, and deep—I want someone who communicates without yelling; someone who has a spiritual practice; someone who doesn't hate their mom. They can also be shallow, or superficial—I want someone smoking hot; I want someone who has their own apartment; I want someone who makes more money than I do. Some parts of the list are deal breakers—no drug addicts. Some aren't—I guess the person doesn't
need
to have a car, as long as they have a driver's license, because I don't. I kept my list in a little notebook, adding to it as I made my way through broken-down love affairs.
No recent breakups
, I wrote after the crappy experience of being someone else's rebound. After one fling left me with a killer sinus infection, I wrote
No smokers
. I'm a codependent smoker. If my date smokes, I'll smoke. Smoking is awesome in your twenties, but frankly, any older than that and you just look slavish and weak willed (or, even worse, like you're desperate to stay in your twenties).