Jo Piazza

by Love Rehab

  Annie was then raised by her dad and his two brothers, long-confirmed bachelors and heavy drinking Irishmen who ran the town’s best (only) bar. She grew up on a barstool and drank her first pint when she was ten. In the ’80s it seemed more acceptable to give kids beer, back when you knew they weren’t allergic to every peanut, egg, and gluten molecule under the sun.

  Instead of becoming a tomboy, living with three men, Annie became the lady of the house (and the bar). She was cooking gourmet dinners by puberty and had dreams of someday turning the bar into a chic gastropub. That dream seemed like a possibility when she got a full scholarship to culinary school right after high school. Then in her second year, her dad’s liver gave out. She came home for a semester to nurse him back to health, but a semester turned into four years. By the time he finally passed away, Annie was running the bar full-time and drinking almost as much as her dad had been.

  “I heard about the cop car thing,” Joe said with a little bit of awe in his tone. “You really blared the siren all the way home?”

  “You know better than I do, buddy.” Annie went on to explain that she didn’t know if the AA meeting in town was the best idea for her to get sober. She told Joe how uncomfortable she felt being honest around all her parents’ friends and, frankly, some of her customers.

  This was nice. It was almost like we were old friends already. And Joe didn’t hate me for being a lying AA party crasher.

  “You know, Sophie,” he began. “Now that I know you don’t have a problem with alcohol, I can’t really let you keep coming to the meetings. They’re pretty strict. The lifelong AAers don’t even like to let people with drug addictions come to the AA meetings; they insist they go to the NA, Narcotics Anonymous, meetings, even though addiction is addiction is addiction.”

  “It sounds like the AA lifers are kind of snobby.”

  Joe laughed. “Some of them are. But I do think you’ve hit on something. I think you need a support group. Why don’t you start one? Call it LAA … Love Addicts Anonymous, or whatever you want to call it. And, Annie, since you have to attend some form of group therapy, those meetings could probably count toward your quota.”

  “And could you offer her one-on-one counseling?” I asked. “At the end of the meeting you said you give one-on-one counseling. Why do you do that, by the way? Are you a doctor?”

  For the first time since we met him Joe looked sheepish and a little bit ashamed. “I am a doctor. Was a doctor, no, am a doctor. I was put on probation because of my drinking. And the counseling is part of the community service I have been doing to work toward having my full privileges back.”

  “You’re a shrink?” I asked.

  “I’m a shrink,” he replied. That easy smile was back.

  “So you can probably answer this. Are love addicts the same as sex addicts?” Not that I knew much about sex addicts, but I had read a story in People magazine about the husband of a famous actress going to some rehab center in the Rocky Mountains because he claimed that he had a sex addiction after she caught him in their Malibu beach house with identical twins who dressed as cats.

  Joe laughed.

  “It really isn’t my area of expertise, but what I do know is that sex addicts are more attached to sexual behaviors and the high of conquering a new sexual partner. Once someone shows interest in them, they tend to run away. Love addicts are often more hooked on the intimacy. Both of them can be treated with group therapy, although we hear a lot more about sex addiction than love addiction. That’s why I think your group could be so helpful, Sophie.”

  “OK, Dr. Joe, I might take you up on this plan,” I said with genuine excitement.

  Even Annie looked like she was into it. I think she would have been into anything that didn’t involve having to talk about her drunken escapades with the man who took her tonsils out.

  Love Addicts Anonymous officially began with a meeting of three over banana cream pies. Maybe, just maybe, something bigger than my own problems could restore me to sanity.

  Make a decision to turn your life over to a higher power

  I threw myself into creating Love Rehab with the same fervor I had thrown myself into convincing Eric to stay with me. To my delight, when I began investigating love addiction, I learned there was actually a canon of scholarly research on the subject, most of it penned by anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher at Rutgers University.

  Dr. Fisher wrote this book about the science of love, called Why We Love, where her research consisted of interviewing couples in various states of coupling. She found pairs who had just met and were still in that early, “can’t keep their hands off each other in elevators and grocery store checkout lines” kind of lust, and she found couples who had been together for ten years and had three kids, a mortgage, and maybe a lover or two on the side. She found couples like Eric and me who had been together two or three years and were at that fight-or-flight turning point.

  Then like a mad love scientist, she injected their brains with this dye that would allow the organ to light up in funny colors when she put them through an MRI machine. Once the subjects were in the machine the doctor asked them questions about how it felt to be in love and how they would feel if that love were to all of a sudden go away. She asked them to describe their lovers and tell her how they met.

  This reminded me of how Eric and I met. Meeting narratives have always been paramount for me in the overarching story of a couple. Once I have nailed down the story in my head (and it changes the same way any story would as the rough edges are smoothed over with each and every retelling), I illustrate it in my mind like a graphic novel with word bubbles and lots of hearts and singing birds.

  Eric and I met while I was on a first date with somebody else. See, I hadn’t been totally sure that it was a first date, because dating these days is so vague. But I had been bantering back and forth with a friend of a friend for a while on e-mail, and when he asked me to go to a cocktail party his law firm was throwing, it sounded datey enough. But because I wasn’t sure, I ended up asking my friends Emily and Dave (the most wonderful couple in the world who have been dating for seven years) to come along as buffers. My “date” apparently felt the same way about me, because he added a buffer of his own, a college buddy named Eric. Needless to say, the date and I didn’t hit it off, but Eric and I talked and laughed all night. The chemistry was undeniable.

  It would have been uncouth to go home together after that, but we soon began texting, then Gchatting, then talking on the phone at a high frequency (the evolution of the beginning of love in the digital age). When we finally went on our own first date months later, it felt like we were already in a comfortably long relationship. That might be why I slept with him on that first date. Over time I continued to illustrate our meet-cute to include the two of us locking eyes over the head of my original date and Eric being so smitten he had to pull his friend aside and ask if there were any possible way he could take his place. I didn’t know if any of this really happened, but it made for a beautifully drawn story.

  Fisher’s findings from her MRI experiments were groundbreaking. She learned that people in the throes of romantic love (the early stages) experience the release of dopamine at the same levels as individuals addicted to cigarettes and even cocaine. Believing they were in love released a slew of these happy-feeling chemicals that actually did physically addict her study participants to the process.

  Dr. Fisher hypothesized that when these chemicals were no longer accessible, or when the romantic relationship ceased or went through a trauma, a person went through the same kind of withdrawal as an actual drug addict, as the person fiended to get the happy chemicals back. That’s why people going through breakups often experience depression and why their relationships become all they can think about, in the same way that addicts are consistently focused on where and how they can get their next fix. It is also why relationship trauma gives a person butterflies. Butterflies are actually anxiety over something going wrong in a relationship. People f
eel them when someone doesn’t call back or when they are uncertain about the person’s intentions. And then when the person finally reciprocates, the one waiting gets that rush of happy chemicals, just like a first hit. Love as we experience it might just be a series of chemical reactions.

  It couldn’t have been more applicable to me. When Eric and I first started seeing each other, I would be frantic waiting for him to ask me out again. My stomach would wind into knots waiting to hear back from him and I was certain that it was because he was definitely the one. Why else would I have such an intense physical reaction? I remembered being so happy when he would finally make plans with me or the first time we spent a whole day together and he didn’t suggest going back to his apartment that night. I felt such a rush of happiness that I knew, just knew, that this was true love.

  And now that it was over, I kept trying to get a hit. I googled Eric and Floozy daily, hoping for some new tidbit about their lives together, something that would make me feel involved. I created new Twitter and Facebook accounts so I could follow and friend the Flooz. That was the worst of all because the girl was like the Huffington Post of social media. She updated and posted everything and anything that happened in her life. I was obsessed and transfixed. Floozy woke up every morning and went for a run at six a.m.

  @BabyGrl14: Almost woke up the huni bunni on way for run. Not like he’d mind LOL.

  She often described her shower routine and the products she used in great detail. It was through her Twitter feed that I learned Floozy harbored fantasies of being something much bigger than Eric’s personal assistant. Floozy wanted to be a beauty blogger. She carefully described everything she used to clean and prettify her face, often with grammatical inaccuracies and mixed metaphors.

  @BabyGrl14: It gets my goat up when a face cream doesn’t do what it says it should. I mean I heard that it was grate right from the horse’s mouth.

  It was like a little stab in the eye every time Eric chose one of Floozy’s painfully misspelled mixed metaphors over me.

  They had a seemingly endless string of dates, which was also painful to watch. It seemed like Eric and I stopped “dating” fairly early on and were more content to stay home at night and order SeamlessWeb while watching The Voice. I took this as a sign that he wanted to settle in and just be himself and be comfortable around me. Maybe he was just bored?

  Eric and Floozy went to the movies and dinners and bike rides and the beach. I felt sick. I literally woke up and went to bed nauseated, but I also felt that little rush and that thrill every time I learned a new piece of information because it made me feel like I was still, in some small way, connected to Eric. This kind of behavior, I realized, was one of the things LAA would have to battle against.

  My research into the origins of love addiction coupled with my own crippling obsession only confirmed that LAA was something I needed to bring to the women of the tristate area … and to me.

  But I was trying to figure out how to spread the word. At first I thought Facebook would be a good way to announce the meeting, and then I remembered the meeting was supposed to be anonymous. How did alcoholics all find one another so easily? Could they smell it on one another? Maybe they had some kind of secret code where they walked around gently placing their forefinger on their temple when they saw someone else they thought might be an alcoholic. I had to remind myself to ask Joe.

  Love Addicts Anonymous would have to spread through word of mouth. Who did I know who had the most powerful mouth? I broached the question a week after our first meeting with Joe, sitting in that same diner with Annie and her cousin Dave.

  Dave was an inspiration to make this work. The three of us had been friends since we were kids, and ironically, given the subject of our strategy meeting, he was one of the most hated men by the women of our town.

  We still loved him, mostly because I had never found him attractive and he had never found a way to dick me over.

  Dave wasn’t at all hunky or movie-star-like, but he did get ladies. He was handsome in the face with really good hair. He actually walked into a fancy salon in the West Village in Manhattan one day and told the hairdresser that he wanted his hair to look like David Beckham’s in the new Burger King commercials. Now most guys couldn’t pull that off, but Dave could and his hair did bear a striking resemblance to the soccer player’s, even if his abs did not. He was a little chubby around the middle, something he tried to hide with layers of button-down shirts, sweaters, and fleece vests. His numero uno asset was a biting sense of humor that could keep me in stitches for days and had caused many a woman to fall prey to his charms. He adhered closely to the 2005 book The Game, in which author Neil Strauss advises men that the surefire way to a woman’s heart was “the neg,” a device wherein a man first insults a woman to put her on the defensive. Then, when she is feeling low, he promptly compliments her to boost her self-esteem and then forever endears himself to her. I saw a woman make out with Dave about ten minutes into meeting him at a rooftop party in Philadelphia five years ago.

  His sense of humor also often veered into the very wrong.

  “We just have to lure people there with the promise of fun and healing, even though they don’t know exactly what they’re getting into,” I said.

  Dave countered, “That’s pretty much what they told the Jews.”

  “Use Megan, obviously,” Annie said, ignoring him the way she usually did. Annie had never met Megan O’Brien since Annie lived in Jersey and Megan was my editor at the children’s book publishing house where I worked. The fact that Annie had heard so much about her was a testament to the force that was Megan. Megan knew everything about everyone, but she was so kind that when she told you something it never seemed like gossip. Instead it always seemed like she genuinely thought this was information you should have in your life so that you either didn’t make the same mistakes or so that you could help whomever she was talking about.

  For example: She was the one who told me that Candace Evans caught her husband looking at gay porn a week before their picture-perfect wedding in St. Maarten. When she told me, she didn’t sound like she was quoting US Weekly or being vindictive; she made it sound like I should know in case Candace ever wanted to confide in me instead of undermining me, as was her wont when she said things like I had wasted away all my marrying years dating inappropriate men.

  It was also a warning not to marry men you caught looking at gay porn.

  In addition to trafficking in personal information, Megan was a Yellow Pages, Zagat, and beauty blog all rolled into one. Need an Italian restaurant in the Village with lighting dim enough your date won’t see that big zit to the left of your nose? Spasso on Hudson and Perry. Need a nonjudgmental bikini waxer since you neglected to keep things tidy during that long-term relationship? Olga at Max Wax on Seventy-Fourth and Amsterdam. Just don’t ask Olga about her Serbian boyfriend. She’ll go on for hours. Also take a Xanax about an hour before you go. Don’t have a scrip for Xanax? Dr. Karney on Fifty-Seventh and Madison had a light touch with the prescriptions. Megan had the answer for everything, and she would know exactly who should come to our meeting.

  Megan didn’t actually need our meeting since after getting divorced at thirty-four to a man she was still dear, dear friends with, she had completely given up the fantasy of a Prince Charming and was immune to any kind of love addiction. I didn’t believe it at first. I thought everyone secretly wanted that fantasy, but Megan really didn’t.

  She has contented herself with dating a slew of really young, hot studs who she says fulfill her every wish in the bedroom and really, really rich older gentlemen with net worths in the hundred millions who fulfill her every wish at Bergdorf’s.

  “My requirement for a boyfriend these days is breathing and a jet,” she told me last time we hung out over margaritas. She calls these men her Sally Tomatoes after the jailed mobster who paid Audrey Hepburn through his lawyer to pick up Sally’s weekly weather report in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Thankfully for Megan she
also doesn’t see looks and finds much older (think Hugh Hefner, maybe even Kirk Douglas) men hilarious, charming, and chivalrous in a way that men of our generation never are. Megan wouldn’t be attending our meeting, but she would make sure that the right people heard about it.

  The next problem was location. In Manhattan we would have to rent a space, and space is a premium commodity in New York City.

  “We can do it at your house,” Annie said. “It’s like a five-minute walk from the NJ Transit stop and it’s only a half-hour ride out here. Everyone loves leaving the city.”

  Although I didn’t really believe people actually liked commuting out of New York, I was surprised and happy that Annie was getting behind this idea. I think she would have done anything not to go back to that AA meeting with Dr. Jacobson.

  I was about to agree when I saw a familiar sandy-blond head at the counter.

  “Hey, Joe!” I waved. He turned around holding a tin of banana cream pie.

  “Hey, Sophie,” he smiled sheepishly. “I guess you got me hooked.” He nodded down to the pie.

  “Are you going to eat that whole thing by yourself?” I asked, realizing only as I asked it that I was not at all casually asking if he was taking the pie home to a girlfriend (no ring, no wife).

  “I have a friend coming over tonight,” he said with a smile. Of course he did. She was probably another doctor at the hospital who looked exactly like Addison Montgomery on Private Practice. I was drawing a picture of them in my mind, cuddled on the couch talking about hilarious hospital drama while feeding each other my banana cream pie.