Being the partner we wish to have

Some people are their own worst enemies. Like Rebecca, a girl I know who I hesitate to call a friend. She once invited me for coffee on the pretext of soliciting dating advice, but really it was an excuse for her to unload about the sorry state of her love life. During that extended session — which felt like therapy, and I still wonder if I shouldn’t send her a bill — Rebecca confessed that she’s never been able to hold down a relationship.

“Nothing longer than two months,” she said. “I guess there’s something wrong with me.”

“Oh?” I asked, seizing the opportunity for a teachable moment. Even after her hour-long kvetching session, I still wanted to help her find love. After all, she’s an attractive, smart girl — a good catch if she can keep her mouth shut. “Can you think of anything you might be doing to drive men away?” I mentally willed her to realize that she talks too much, that people can’t squeeze a word into her personal monologue.

“I don’t know,” she said. She paused. I thought she might actually be considering the question, but then, “I guess I just have bad luck.”

In “The Wedding Date,” hunky Dermot Mulroney’s character — a male escort — says that every woman is in exactly the relationship she wants to be in. Even the bitter singles, he says, have created their non-relationships.

If we follow this reasoning — written in a script for the character of a male hooker, but still — then we are all responsible for the state of our relationships. It’s frightening, on one hand, to think we might be the cause of all those bad dates with useless people, or that the reason we can’t go the distance with a potential mate is not something extrinsic to our nature — bad luck or a dark curse — but rather something wholly and completely within us.

But if this is terrifying, it’s also empowering. If we have the power to push people away, to create barriers with our poor behavior and nervous tics, then we also have the power to draw them closer, to weed out the parts of our personality that don’t work in healthy relationships and to cultivate mannerisms that make for good mates.

In a recent

New York

Times piece, the writer tells the story of Cami Walker,

partner, we must first learn to give it. “You must be the change you wish to see in the world,” Gandhi told us. For people like Rebecca, that means sitting back and listening for a change. Whether she takes my advice — and whether love follows — will have to be seen. 

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