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.
When 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.