by Hale, Mandy
A more important development over the course of my thirty-day love cleanse was that I entered into a new place of understanding and patience and love for me—for the often wrong, often imperfect, often uncertain person whose heart had lost many battles with love, but refused to lose the war. At the end of the day, the love cleanse didn’t magically take away my feelings for Mr. E as I had hoped it would, but it did help me find the courage to look those feelings in the eye and tell them that from here on out, I would be the one in charge—and I didn’t have to allow my emotions to rule the day. I realized I may never be in complete control of my heart, but the power to have complete control of my emotions was mine. I could be grateful for the chips and cracks in my heart left by past loves, because that’s how new love would find its way in. And I could go bravely and confidently into the world, daring love to find me, because at last, I had found myself. And that was perhaps the greatest lesson of all.
The next hurdle I decided to overcome on my journey of dating myself was my fear of having dinner or going to a movie alone. I had always wanted to try solo dining and movie going, but had never quite worked up the nerve. What was at the heart of this fear? I was determined to find out.
I quickly learned I wasn’t alone in my hesitancy. Google the phrase dining alone, and the first page of results is all articles about “How to handle the traumatic experience of dining alone” and “How to survive dinner—party of one.” So much drama over something that should be so simple! I realized that if I was going to be able to speak authentically on the subject of “loving your single life” to my readers, I needed to walk the talk and learn to love all aspects of my single life, including something that challenged me a little—like going out to dinner or to a movie or enjoying a sunny day on the patio at Starbucks without the armor of my girlfriends.
So I began to venture out.
I first went to brunch alone one Sunday afternoon at a popular brunch spot in Nashville’s Hillsboro Village. I requested a seat on the crowded patio, and the hostess escorted me to a table in the dead center of the room, right in the middle of all the action. At first it felt a little awkward, and I felt a little exposed, naked even. The natural instinct is to sit staring into your phone the entire time so as to avoid the curious stares of the people around you, but I felt like hiding behind my phone was no different from hiding behind my friends. So even though it was hard, I kept my phone in my purse. And within a few minutes, the initial weirdness started to pass, and I actually started to enjoy myself. The sun felt wonderful, there was a nice afternoon breeze blowing, and the food was delicious. What was not to love?
The poor servers, however, didn’t seem to know how to handle my solo status, and I think even felt a little sorry for me. I’m pretty sure they thought I was being stood up. Every five minutes I would have a waiter or waitress at my table: “Is there anything I can get for you? Are you still doing okay? Can I bring you a dessert menu?” And although the service there was always great, I had never received that much attention in the past while dining in a group. It was interesting to watch how other people reacted to my aloneness, like it was something to pity or fear. When did spending quality time with oneself become a bad thing in our culture?
Having successfully conquered the dining-alone portion of my personal challenge, I decided it was time to try going to a movie alone. This initially didn’t seem quite as intimidating as eating at a crowded restaurant alone, but when I entered the theater and realized just how much of a couple’s activity going to a movie really is, my heart sank a little. I would certainly stick out like a sore thumb here.
I needn’t have worried. Even though by the time I got settled into my seat with a giant box of Junior Mints and a Coke Zero, I was feeling relaxed, content, and eager to get this party of one started, another lady who was also seeing the movie alone spotted me and decided to plop down right next to me and jabber through the entire film. It was funny; I had gone into the theater almost dreading the idea of sitting through a movie alone, and now I wanted nothing more than to be left alone! I almost think God sat that lady next to me on purpose that day, to show me one of the great silver linings of flying solo—not having to listen to someone chatter incessantly for two hours straight! A week or so later I had to do a redo since my first effort at seeing a movie alone turned into a joint venture with me and Mrs. Chatterbox, and I actually found that I enjoyed going to a movie by myself as much or more than I did having company. I’m such a movie geek that sitting in a darkened, quiet theater with my feet kicked up and not a care in the world is the ultimate form of relaxation for me, almost like getting a massage. And I don’t want anyone else lying next to me interjecting comments and opinions while I’m getting a massage, so why would seeing a movie be any different? Though I still don’t do much dining alone, I am proud to say that these days I regularly take solo trips to the movies and love nothing more than kicking back at Starbucks armed with nothing more than a good book and a Frappuccino.
So, having successfully made it to the end of my love cleanse and having overcome my issues with solo outings, I decided I would devote the rest of my summer of dating me to just having some good, old-fashioned fun. And I didn’t have to look any further than my own Tennessee backyard! I traveled to Memphis with a girlfriend to tour Graceland for the second time in my life, just because. I attended a couple of nights of the CMA Music Festival in downtown Nashville and had an absolute blast. Living in Nashville, it’s easy to take incredible musical events like that for granted, but sitting outside under the stars on a hot July night listening to one great act after another reminded me of why it’s so cool to live in Music City, USA.
I also hit the open road a few times on spontaneous road trips. New Kids on the Block were touring that summer, and I indulged myself by hitting four of their tour stops, without apologies. After all, I was answering to no one but myself, so why shouldn’t I spend a little time reminiscing about my first loves?
I highly recommend setting aside a season of time to focus on yourself and get back to the basics of you, whatever that process might look like for you. It doesn’t have to emulate mine. It needs to be true to who you are. My Summer of No Regrets 2010 had been amazing, but it had been all about someone else: Mr. E. My Summer of Me 2011 was about getting to know me, falling in love with me, learning to make me happy. And because I took time to get my foundation in check, I now felt healthier and happier and readier than ever to start testing that foundation. I knew that no matter what, never again would my proverbial house be in danger of being blown down by the Big Bad Wolf of heartbreak, because I had learned to stand alone without fear. Armed with that knowledge, I was ready to open the door of my heart with confidence, knowing that for perhaps the first time ever, I was ready for whoever walked through it.
Fall 2011 dawned brightly and happily for me. For the first time in almost five years, I felt free. I felt like I had truly let go and moved on from the past. From Steven, from my multitude of bad dates over the years, and especially from Mr. E. I wasn’t thinking about him anymore; I wasn’t crying over him anymore; I felt like I had finally unchained myself from him and his memory for the first and the last time. I shared this in a long phone conversation with my friend Jennifer one night, going on and on about how footloose and fancy-free I felt to have finally laid my Mr. E ghost to rest and moved on with my life. She was sad and a little weepy over her ex, her own version of Mr. E, and I assured her unequivocally that better days and greener pastures were ahead.
“You will get there!” I encouraged her. “And it’s amazing! If I can get there, anyone can! I’m finally over him! And it’s so incredible!”
As is typical in Boy Land, me throwing it out there into the universe that I was “finally over him” meant that I set off an internal alarm somewhere in Mr. E’s psyche, immediately prompting him to call me.
What is it they say? The minute you get over someone is the very minute they come back around? How do they know? How do they always k
now?
The very next night after my “free-as-a-bird” conversation with Jennifer, Mr. E called for the first time in many months.
I happened to be taking a nap with the ringer off when he called. When I woke up to discover one missed call and saw his name flashing across my phone screen, I promptly dropped the phone, flicked it away from me as far to the edge of the bed as it could get without falling off, and covered it with my quilt.
One night about two weeks later, just as I was getting the initial phone call out of my head, I was on the way over to a girlfriend’s house, phone in hand. As I was navigating my way there via GPS, suddenly the screen lit up. There it was. His name again. And I was powerless to make it stop. Short of tossing my BlackBerry out the window, I didn’t know what else to do but hit the send button. So I did, and just like that, Mr. E was back in my life again.
I know the typical response to this is, “What? How could you allow him back into your life after you spent so much time trying to get him out of your life?”
For the naysayers out there, I’d like to say this: you can’t always follow The Rules or the He’s Just Not That Into You checklists or even the advice of the most renowned love gurus when it comes to matters of the heart.* I mean, come on—even the Millionaire Matchmaker, Patti Stanger, found herself unmatched and single. Love isn’t black and white, and you can’t always simplify it by trying to make it a black-and-white issue. The bottom line was this: I still loved Mr. E. I had loved him for five long years. It wasn’t a dark, tortured love; I wasn’t a masochist; I wasn’t attracted to him because he was a bad boy or someone I couldn’t have. I just loved him, purely and simply, for his heart and for the person I knew him to be, despite his flaws. I had prayed about these feelings. I had asked God to take away these feelings. I had let Mr. E go and had gone about my merry way. And he had come back. The Single Woman’s message centers around following your heart and soul above all else, and I can’t even count the number of times I’ve tweeted about letting things go and seeing if they come back to you. I’m a firm believer that if God, in His infinite wisdom, gives you another shot at love, you should take it. I’d rather put my heart on the line, risk everything, and walk away with nothing than play it safe and not do what every fiber of my heart was telling me to do—which was to give this man another chance.
So I did.
What can I say? I wasn’t following logic. I was following my heart.
I wasn’t standing out here on this limb alone. And this time, it seemed, it wasn’t one-sided love.
This time he had raised the stakes.
He “missed me.” He “needed me in his life.” And, for the first time in five years, he loved me.
Yes, one September day he said those three words I thought I’d sooner see pigs fly through the streets of downtown Nashville than ever hear him utter.
“When I called you earlier, Mandy, and I left you that voice mail, there was something I wanted to say. But, no, I can’t.”
“What?” I asked cluelessly, completely oblivious about just how hard my world was about to be rocked.
“I wanted to say . . . uh . . . no, I can’t say it.”
“What?” I asked again, now growing a little impatient.
“I can’t believe I’m having so much trouble saying this to you,” he said. “This is silly!”
“What?” I exclaimed, by now past the point of frustration. “And you should know if you don’t just say it, I’m hanging up.”
“Okay, okay. Here goes. When I was leaving you a voice mail earlier, I wanted to say . . . well, I wanted to tell you . . . that I love you.”
Silence.
I couldn’t find my voice.
“I like saying that to you,” he said with a smile in his voice.
Still, I said nothing. I couldn’t speak. Was I hallucinating? Had I heard correctly? Did the man who was so petrified of the L-word that he put an entire country between us every time we got too close just tell me that he loves me?!
“Are you there?” he asked.
“Yes. Yes!” I said, finally locating my vocal chords. “I’m still here.”
“Well, what do you have to say about that?”
“I don’t know what to say about that,” I stammered. “That was about the last thing in the world I ever expected to hear you say.”
He laughed affectionately. “And that’s why I love you,” he said, leaving me once again shaking my head, still having trouble believing that the moment I had wished for, hoped for, prayed for, for so long had finally dropped into my lap, and completely out of nowhere.
“Well,” I said, smiling now too. “Not that I haven’t made it abundantly clear over the last several hundred years or so, but . . . I love you too.”
“I like the way it sounds, hearing you say that,” he responded.
“I do too,” I said, thinking that something about this moment, unlike all the moments of uncertainty before, felt so right. So real. So special. It was as though we were finally in the same place at the same time; and though we couldn’t have been any farther apart physically, with him on the opposite side of the country in Seattle, I had never felt so close to him.
From that day forward, we started talking on the phone every few days, sometimes saying those three words to each other, sometimes not.
We started to talk more about the future than we ever had before. For the first time ever, he expressed to me how he wanted to get married and have kids, and the person he pictured experiencing all of this with was me. “You’re the light at the end of the tunnel for me, Mandy,” he said. “You feel like coming home.”
And, as fate would have it, the last weekend in September, just two weeks after I redid my vision board, pasting a picture of the Statue of Liberty on it with the declaration: “I will travel to New York City,” the opportunity for me to travel to New York City presented itself. On the very same weekend that Mr. E would be in NYC on business. His newspaper was sending him there to conduct an important interview for an upcoming story.
There were other reasons for me to be in New York that weekend, but since Mr. E lived in Seattle and I myself hadn’t traveled to New York City in six years, the whole thing seemed like much more than just a coincidence at work.
It felt like a defining moment in our relationship.
It felt like it was finally time. Time to step up to the plate. Time to be completely spontaneous and take a chance. Time to stop playing it so safe in my life for once, and not just go out on a limb but dance on it.
It felt like now or never.
It was a very spur-of-the-moment, spontaneous trip. My friend Whitney and I planned it in about three days. It seemed that fate was aligning to work out every last detail, down to the place we would stay (with Whitney’s aunt, in her fabulous apartment on Lexington Avenue, for free).
The night before the trip, however, I started to get cold feet. I started to doubt myself. I started to give in a little to the fear that I was, once again, the one going the distance and making it happen with Mr. E, while he wasn’t really being required to make much of an effort to see me at all. These were all thoughts I expressed to him in the late-night hours before Whitney and I were to set out on our adventure.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I just feel like I need to see more from you. I need to not just hear you say that you love me. I need to actually see it in action.”
“You need me to prove my love to you, is what you’re saying?” he asked.
“Well, yes,” I said. “I mean, it’s been five years. I feel like it’s time for the grand gesture. Basically, if you were Matthew McConaughey and I was Kate Hudson, you would be chasing me to the airport right now.”
He laughed. “I hear what you’re saying. You need the grand gesture. I get it. And I can do that.”
The confidence in his voice took me by surprise a bit; I can’t lie. He was actually ready for this. He was calm, cool, collected, and seemed completely ready to step up and take my breath away. W
hich left just one final question.
“I need to ask you something,” I said seriously. “And I need you to answer me straight, with a yes or a no. No deflecting, no avoiding, no placating me—just a yes-or-no answer. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” he said, just as seriously.
I took a deep breath.
“I know you say you love me, and obviously I love you too, both as a friend and as more . . .”
“Yes?”
“But”—I paused—“are you . . . in love with me?”
It was a bold question, I knew. And the answer had the potential either to break my heart or usher in a new start—a new chapter in the saga of me and Mr. E that had never been explored. But I had to know, either way. I had to know before I took the leap and ventured all the way to New York that he was going to be there to catch me, not just with words but with actions.
And then . . .
“I would have to say, yes,” he replied, a big smile in his voice. “Now what do you think about that?”
At three the next morning, I left for New York City. I didn’t know exactly what was ahead of me, but I knew in my heart what I was leaving behind me: Fear. Safety. Security. Everything that had come before.
And I didn’t look back.
* Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, The Rules series (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1995); Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo, He’s Just Not That Into You (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
Chapter 19
Destination: New York City
Whitney and I left for New York at 3:00 a.m. on a Thursday. Our complicated travel plan was the result of (1) my extreme distaste for flying and (2) the fact that we planned a trip to New York in about three days’ notice and spur-of-the-moment air travel was insanely expensive. Whitney and I drove to Washington, DC, and then hopped a commuter bus into the city, making for about a seventeen-hour travel day.