One of the biggest challenges grown-up loose girls face is recognizing that they have not lived in a vacuum. Like any other human, they have made mistakes. They learned negative patterns. They got themselves entangled in situations that they will never be free of. They have kids with the wrong people. They mess up their careers. The longer we live, after all, the more opportunities we have to love and lose. This is just a fact of life.
The media sets us all up to believe that somehow everyone else has perfect lives, everyone else gets their needs met all the time, but not us. Certainly, loose girls are guilty of this feeling. They assume that they are the only ones who can’t get loved. They are the only ones obsessed with men. They are the only ones who mess up all their relationships. In truth, of course, most of us are like that. Life is suffering. Happiness is fleeting. So, the key to being a grown-up loose girl is acceptance. We will always struggle with these feelings. We will always think first of which guy can make us feel better. And we will always wrestle with neediness when the person we love goes away. The next chapter explores this idea of acceptance in much greater detail.
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.{117} 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).{118} 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.