If Someone Says "You Complete Me," RUN! (11 page)

Now, going back to what I said earlier, if I’m a player, before we go any further in this relationship, I need to let you know that, because you need to be able to make the decision whether to stay with me. That should be your decision. I already have my information. This is who I am. This is what I’m going to do. So you, on the other side, should have the opportunity to say, “My line in the sand is I don’t want to be with the player. As much as I think you are fantastic and could bone you every day, I’m not going to be in a relationship with you because eventually your being a player is going to make me unhappy, and then we will both be miserable. So let’s nip this in the bud.” Those truths are important.

I’ve said it before and you will hear me say it again and again, because I feel like people need to hear it: Don’t think you can change this just because you want it to be different. Know what your line in the sand is. If that’s your line, then say, “I can’t go past that.”

If you’re with a person who you know has other people in his life, committing to him might not be the smartest idea. And I’m not just talking about a married person. In the neighborhood, they would say if he’s a player or she’s a player, chances are she’s always been a player and she’s always going to be a player.

Now, the only thing you have to decide is are you okay with that? If you are okay with him being a player, then proceed. If you’re not, do not go down the path. You’re not going to change his behavior. It might stop for a little while, but it’s not going to change. So the decision you make is your education. “Yes, I know this person fools around, but I’m okay with it because it’s not the thing that motivates me. I’m all right with it.”

While I haven’t met a lot of people who are okay with that, there are also not that many people who will say, “Hey, I don’t want to be with someone who is sleeping with fifty people.” Instead, people say, “No, no, I’m going to do this anyway because I know I can change him.”

I am telling you: you can’t change him. And you can’t be pissed off that’s who he is, because you knew it before. You went into it knowing. You see these things. You feel these things. Your instincts tell you everything you need to know—“Danger, Will Robinson!”—because your stomach turns over, or somebody says something to you and it’s just got that little tone and it’s like… “Hmmm, is something going on?” Then you hear it again. And you say to yourself, “No, no, that can’t be happening. I’m imagining it.” So you are in denial or you ignore it or you think you can fix it later, and so you say, “Yes, I’ll marry you.” Like, wait. No, no, no. That’s not going to work. It might work for a little while, but eventually the shit will hit the fan.

You’ve got to talk about this. Those are the red flags. Those are the red flags, and your body knows them. Everybody knows that clenching sensation in the stomach when you feel something that says, “I don’t like this. This is not good behavior.” Yet we go forward and invest in the relationship anyway. We do it for all the reasons that I’ve been talking about. We want to have that magical “happily ever after.” How do we know who lived happily ever after? They just say it at the end of the story. But who actually did it? Has anyone? Cinderella? I don’t know. How did her kids turn out?

As the song goes, players gonna play. If you’re with a player, he is going to play. He is just going to do that. Cheaters are going to cheat. They’re scorpions, right? They can’t help it. They are not people who are comfortable with just one person. They’ve learned how to lie and make you feel like you are imagining things. They will say, “No, it’s you. You don’t trust me. I’m not doing anything.” But it ain’t you. You should have the right to know that up front, because otherwise it can do your head in.

If it turns out that there were no signs, and you never saw anything, and no one ever said to you, “Hey, it’s kind of weird what I see going on in your relationship,” and you really believe that your player boyfriend isn’t playing, if none of that happened, then this book may have led you down the wrong path.

I think you do see signs, though, and I think people tell you things. Whether they say it out loud to your face or you just feel it in your gut, you know when something is being said. Living in denial isn’t going to help anything, and a player isn’t going to change his stripes.

Just an aside: people will see shit in your relationship that they don’t see in their own. Do you care what your friends think? Do you listen to them when they say, “He is a dirty dog,” or “She’s really kind of loose and you don’t want that”? Or do you do, as some of my friends have done, banish people, never to speak to them again until there’s a divorce, and then say to everybody, “Oh, I should have listened to you.”

Why put yourself through this?

True, people ignore their own issues but are very aware of the issues in your life. Just be aware of that. Sometimes people are telling you things to mess you up, or hurt you, or put you in a trick bag, but 80 percent of the time, you know what’s going on, whether you want to admit it or not.

If your man was fucking around when you met him, he will be fucking around after you marry him. If you’re cool with that, fantastic. You don’t have anything to worry about, because you won’t be running to divorce court. You can say, “I accept that. I can do that. That’s cool.” Because everybody knows what they’ve got as soon as they’ve walked into it.

I have an issue when people don’t know that the person they are with—wait, what I mean is not that they don’t know, but that they
don’t acknowledge to themselves
that there is something going on here. If you don’t have any reason to be hiding stuff, then, sure, why shouldn’t your partner have your password? Because, you know, eventually you are going to call and say, “Oh, my God, I’m trying to get into my e-mail and I can’t remember my password.” Now, if you have been bullshitting about what your password is, then you have a little issue on your hands. So, for me, if you don’t have any reason to hide stuff from your partner, why do it and create this hazard that doesn’t need to be there?

Now, maybe you say to your partner, “You know what? I just feel like that’s my private stuff, and I can say what I want and I can be the person I want to be.” Your partner has every right to respond, “Are you saying it to anybody else?”

Because, see, when you put doubt in the relationship, when you give somebody a reason to wonder if something is happening on the side, that’s not good. That also leads to divorce. If you’re a person who is in a relationship, or you are going to get married, you need to tell the person you’re with, “Hey, I made a friend. I made a new friend, and it feels odd, because it feels like I’m getting a tug, I’m getting a release.” Whether it is an ego boost or a sexual release or attraction, it doesn’t matter. A secret
release is a relationship. Sorry. If you meet somebody online, and you’re already married, and you’re sharing with him and giving to him, that’s a relationship. That’s cheating. Sorry. It doesn’t feel like cheating because it’s not physical, but you’re cheating.

As I said, there are big lies and small lies. Technically, I’m not a fan of lies, but there are okay lies. There are lies your kids are going to tell you: “Did you burn that?” “No.”

But if you left a mess in the kitchen, you have to fess up, especially if you’re the only one in the house. If you’re the only person who could have left the mess, you should probably say, “Yeah, I messed it up.”

“Did you take out the garbage?”

“Yes, I did”—and you know you didn’t? Now, do you really want the wrath of the other person who has asked you to do this? Do you want her wrath by lying to her and saying you did it when you didn’t?

No, I can’t think of a great reason to lie—unless you don’t want to be on the phone with somebody. Or if you’re home and you don’t want to talk. Yeah, that’s me. Sometimes people call, and I’ll say in a whispery voice, “Tell them I’m not here.” That is a lie. Now, that’s a lie I can live with, but I’m not in a relationship. I’m not lying to my partner, understand?

Have I ever lied in a relationship? The fact that I got married as often as I did is a lie. I said it earlier in the
book, I knew better and I hurt people because I should have said, “This isn’t for me.” So, yes, I have. And that’s why I can say to you you’re better off with the truth.

The other thing about lies is you have to keep track of them, and it’s hard. The older you get, the harder it is, because you can barely remember where you put your keys, your glasses, and your underwear.

That’s what happens when you leave your underwear somewhere and you go home, you change into your clothes and your partner goes, “Where are your underwear?” Now, you can lie and say, “Well, I pooped my pants and I had to take them off.”

But then that person is going to wonder, “Well, why did you poop your pants? Are you okay? Should we go to the hospital? Oh, my God, are you dying?”

Just don’t.

What, this has never happened to you?

So, if you can help it, don’t lie. The sun is brighter, your life is better, and everything is easier and simpler.

T
here are some people in the world who just have “It.” And they are always going to get some, because they just can. It is charisma, sensuality, and sexuality all rolled into one. It oozes. Think of Marilyn Monroe. She just had It. Gay men, straight men, gay women, straight women—everyone wanted to touch her, and you can’t explain why. You just knew that you must touch her. She was like velvet. You know how you feel about velvet. You just want to roll up on her.

I’ve only felt that way about the minions. You know,
the little yellow guys from
Despicable Me
. I don’t know why, but I just wanted to touch them and kiss them on the head.

It is just an energy that other people want to be close to; it makes them tingly. It’s attraction, but to the umpteenth degree. The best example of It I can give you is Jean-Paul Belmondo, the French movie star. One day, I was in a restaurant. I looked out the window and everything stopped, the air became very still. There was nothing else happening because I had just spotted Jean-Paul Belmondo. Let’s just say I was breathless. (That’s the title of one of his movies, by the way.) He had to be eighty-one at the time. When I tell you it was all I could do to keep my knees together, to keep my legs from flying open, and to keep myself from saying, “Entrez-vous.” All I can say is, he had It. It was oozing out of him, into the restaurant, up my chair, in my face, kind of going, “Hey!” and every fantasy imaginable ran through my head. The man was eighty-one. And I know that if we’d have done the deed, he would have killed me before I killed him. Given all I know about the world, while he may not have approached me for a relationship, we could have arranged a booty call. And there’s nothing wrong with a booty call, because sometimes you just want to hit it and run. Especially if it’s Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Yeah, I would have given Jean-Paul Belmondo a booty call, y’all.

For some reason, people think this is a bad thing. I don’t. Booty calls can keep you from making strategic mistakes. If you’re in a sexual place and you have a friend who doesn’t want any more from you than that and your friendship, I say go to him. As long as you both have the same expectations and articulate them so you understand one another.

Which brings me to this: If you’re with a man or woman who has It or you’re a person who has It, and you know you have It, and you meet somebody and you say, “Hi, I’m going to partner up with you,” you need to let him know this is who you are. You need to let him know that this your way, meaning you are a sexy beast and people are going to be drawn to you.

It sort of goes back to being with a player. While people who have It may not necessarily be players, it does mean that other people are constantly going to be attracted to them, to want them. If you are with this person, you may find that threatening or even annoying. If you meet somebody who has It, really pay attention and see how people respond to him.

I know a couple, and the man has It. There’s no question. She, after meeting him and realizing that she kind of dug him, started to just watch interactions he had with other people and how other people responded. Based on that, she made her decision about whether she could be with him as a partner.

When you’re with someone who has It, the people around you will say they didn’t notice, even if they did. Meaning, your girlfriends, acquaintances, the waitress, and anyone else in the vicinity has, or is going to, hit on your man. People will put it out there. So you have to develop some skills and be sharp and on top of your game.

That’s why I say to pay attention to the way other people talk to you, and to consider what their agenda may be in telling you something. More often than not, they are telling you something because of their own issues. They are either trying to get to you. Or trying to get rid of you. Or they are boning your guy. Or trying really hard to. So recognize when someone is messing with you and be prepared to deal with it.

It is not an easy kind of relationship, being with someone with It, so you have to make a decision if you can live with someone who has It or not. Then you and the It person have to sit down and work out some parameters on behavior, out of respect for you. I know this only because I have been there and done that. But I’m not going to tell you which side I was on…

Not too long ago, I was at a function and saw a woman who looked sixty years old. She was a gorgeous lady, and somebody said, “You know she’s eighty?” I said, “Who?” And this beautiful woman turned around and said, “Me.”
I was like, “Oh, no.” I couldn’t believe this woman was eighty. I watched her in action, and it was impressive. There was no question this woman had It.

That’s right. It has no expiration date. People who have It usually keep it for their entire lives. It’s not about physical beauty or even just general sexiness. It’s just an energy that attracts other people. When someone has It, it defies old age.

They’re pretty lucky. For other people, shit is changing every day. They’re afraid that they are going to get old and nobody is going to want them, so they look and behave younger than they ever have. They go to the gym, they stay active, they dye their hair, they get a little Botox.

Age can be a big thing with women. It drives fear, and that is utter bullshit. Women are afraid that once they get older, men will no longer find them attractive. That there’s some sort of expiration date on them. This goes beyond the so-called biological clock. The truth of the matter is you never know who is going to find you attractive. You never know where chemistry is going to happen.

Women are as attractive as they want to be. Take this face, my face—it is not the face that launched a thousand ships; a thousand laughs, maybe, but not a thousand ships. I was never raised to think that it was about my face. It was always about my head, my brain. My mother was very clear with me about that from a young age—I was
going to have to develop myself and use my intelligence to get whatever I wanted because the face wasn’t going to do it.

So my brain is pretty good, and when I want to attract something or someone, when I’m ready, I just open it up. I open up my energy and put it out there. Then, when I’m done, I close it shut. I can put out the “come hither” finger. It’s all about attitude. When I met that eighty-year-old woman, I saw her do it to a younger guy who was just like, “Wow, this woman is amazing,” and then I saw her turn it off. It was the most remarkable thing. It made me think, “Maybe everybody can do that. If they’re smart enough.”

Attitude is important that way. When you’re walking around with your head down or your eyes glued to your phone, this is not saying, “Come talk to me.” If you’re walking around with your head up, a smile on your face, and an open expression, with an energy, and then you zoom in on somebody, that’s saying, “You know what? You might want to come and talk to me. I might have something interesting to say to you.”

Think back to the older woman. She’s standing there, thinking, “So, you think because I’m eighty that maybe I’m not all that interesting, maybe I’m not for you. First, come over and talk to me. You don’t have to get past any preconceived notions yet. See what I have to say, what I have to offer. Now, you want to talk to me again?
Each time you come back, you might get a little bit more, unless I realize you’re an asshole and then I’m gone again. I turn it off.”

When people approach you, to talk to you, you know, you can control your attitude. Each of us can: men, women, little kids. Little kids are the best with it. When they want your attention, you are going to know, and they will jump through hoops and have no shame in getting you to pay attention. It’s like these little arms going, “Hey! I’m here! Watch me! Listen to me!” It’s a wonderful thing.

It’s something you can do, too, in your own way, so be aware of it.