I know I’m not here for the décor, but I find myself wondering: Can somebody with such bad taste help me? Is this a reflection of his judgment? (An acquaintance told me that she’d been profoundly distracted by the crooked pictures hanging in her therapist’s office; why wouldn’t she just straighten the damn things?)
For about five minutes, I glance at the magazine covers—Time, Parents, Vanity Fair—and then the door to the therapy room opens and out walks a woman. She whizzes behind the screen, but I can tell in the split second I see her that she’s pretty, well dressed, and tearful. Then Wendell appears in the waiting area.
“I’ll just be a minute,” he says, and he heads into the hallway, presumably to use the restroom.
As I wait, I wonder what the pretty woman was crying about.
When Wendell returns, he gestures for me to enter his office. There’s no hesitation at the doorway now. I go straight to position A, by the window, he to position C, by the side table, and I launch right in.
“Blah-blah-blah-blah,” I begin. “And if you can believe this, Boyfriend said, ‘Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah,’ so I said, ‘Well, blah-blah-blah?’”
Or at least, that’s what I’m sure it sounds like to Wendell. This goes on for a while. I’ve brought in pages of notes for this session, numbered, annotated, and in chronological order, just like I organized the interviews I did as a journalist before I became a therapist.
I confess to Wendell that I’d caved and phoned Boyfriend and that he’d let it go to voicemail. Humiliated, I had to wait a full day for him to call me back, knowing the entire time that the last thing anyone wants to do is talk to the person he’s just broken up with but who still wants to be together.
“You’re probably going to ask what I wanted to get out of calling him,” I say, anticipating his next question.
Wendell raises his right eyebrow—just the one, I notice, and I wonder how he does that—but before he can respond, I plow ahead. First, I explain, I wanted Boyfriend to tell me that he missed me and this was all a big mistake. But barring that “unlikely possibility” (added so that Wendell knows I have self-awareness, even though I’d believed that Boyfriend would tell me he’d reconsidered), I wanted to get clear on how we had arrived at this point. If I could just get my questions answered, I’d stop going over the breakup in my head ad nauseam, in an infinite loop of confusion. Which is why, I tell Wendell, I subjected Boyfriend to a several-hour interrogation—I mean conversation—in which I tried to solve the mystery of What the Fuck Led to Our Sudden Breakup.
“And then he says, ‘Being around a kid is limiting and distracting,’” I go on, reading verbatim quotes. “‘It never would have been enough alone time with you. And I realized that no matter how great the kid, I’m never going to want to live with any child other than my own.’ So then I said, ‘Why did you hide all this from me?’ and he said, ‘Because I needed to figure it out before I said anything.’ And then I said, ‘But don’t you think we should have discussed this?’ and he said, ‘What’s to discuss? It’s binary. Either I could live with a kid or I couldn’t, and only I could figure that out.’ And just as my brain is about to burst, he says, ‘I really love you, but love doesn’t conquer all.’
“It’s binary!” I say to Wendell, shaking my papers in the air. I’d put an asterisk next to this word in my notes. “Binary! If it’s so binary, why get into the binary situation in the first place?”
I’m insufferable and I know it, but I can’t stop.
For the next several weeks, I come to Wendell’s office and report the details of my circular conversations with Boyfriend (admittedly, there are several more) while Wendell tries to interject something useful (that he’s not sure how this is helping me; that this feels masochistic; that I keep telling the same story hoping for a different outcome). He says that I want Boyfriend to explain himself to me—and that he is explaining himself to me—but that I keep going back because his explanation isn’t what I want to hear. Wendell says that if I’ve been taking such copious notes during our phone calls, I probably haven’t been able to listen to Boyfriend, and if my goal is to be open to understanding his perspective, that’s hard to do when I’m trying to prove a point rather than have an interaction in earnest. And, he adds, I’m doing the same thing to him in our sessions.
I agree, then go right back to railing against Boyfriend.
In one session, I explain with excruciating specificity the arrangements for getting Boyfriend’s belongings returned to him. In another, I repeatedly ask, Am I crazy or is he? (Wendell says neither of us is crazy, which infuriates me.) Another consists of an analysis of what kind of person says, “I want to marry you, just not you with a kid.” For this session, I’ve created an infographic on gender differences. A man can say “I don’t want to have to look at the Legos” and “I’ll never love a kid who’s not mine” and get away with it. A woman who said that would be crucified.
I also pepper our sessions with reports of what I’ve discovered in my daily Google-stalking: the women Boyfriend must be dating (based on elaborate stories I create from social media Likes); how fabulous his life is without me (based on his Tweets about his business trip); how he isn’t even sad about the breakup (because he photographs salads in restaurants—how can he even eat?). I’m convinced that Boyfriend has quickly transitioned into his post-me life completely unscathed. It’s a refrain I recognize from divorcing couples I see in which one person is struggling mightily and the other seems fine, happy even, to be moving on.
I tell Wendell that, like these patients, I want some sign of the scar tissue left behind. I want to know, in the end, that I mattered.
“Did I matter?” I ask over and over.
I continue like this, letting my freak flag fly, until finally Wendell kicks me.
One morning, as I drone on about Boyfriend, Wendell scoots to the edge of his couch, stands up, walks over to me, and, with his very long leg, lightly kicks my foot. Smiling, he returns to his seat.
“Ouch!” I say reflexively, even though it didn’t hurt. I’m startled. “What was that?”
“Well, you seem like you’re enjoying the experience of suffering, so I thought I’d help you out with that.”
“What?”
“There’s a difference between pain and suffering,” Wendell says. “You’re going to have to feel pain—everyone feels pain at times—but you don’t have to suffer so much. You’re not choosing the pain, but you’re choosing the suffering.” He goes on to explain that all of this perseverating I’m doing, all of this endless rumination and speculation about Boyfriend’s life, is adding to the pain and causing me to suffer. So, he suggests, if I’m clinging to the suffering so tightly, I must be getting something out of it. It must be serving some purpose for me.
Is it?
I think about why I might be obsessively Google-stalking Boyfriend despite how bad I know it makes me feel. Is it a way to stay connected to Boyfriend and his daily routine, even if it’s only one-sided? Maybe. Is it a way to numb out so I don’t have to think about the reality of what happened? Possibly. Is it a way of avoiding what I should be paying attention to in my life but don’t want to?