The Game of Desire

by Shannon Boodram

  The next day after our meetup, I got right back to it. I opened my email and sent out six different messages with a subject line comprised of those infamous four words:

  We need to talk.

  As mentioned, I never revealed the next steps of the program until it was time to execute them. This was especially important for this step, since people are prone to putting on a front if they suspect they’re being watched for good behavior. I made it clear in the email that the purpose of this call was constructive criticism, but it would be criticism all the same.

  FORTY-EIGHT HOURS AFTER I PRESSED SEND, COURTNEY HAD BEEN THE ONLY person to respond, which gave me déjà vu from the days of their Self-Summary Workbooks. But on the other hand, it made sense that the only person who was immediately open to—and excited about—the talk would be a bulldozer, ready to get in there and problem-solve.

  The next day, Courtney and I connected. Immediately I was reminded how great of a conversationalist she was. Whether we spoke about rent increases at her building or her family history, I was genuinely engaged.

  “Courtney, I admire that you know who you are and what you love. Your certainty is not something I would dare take away,” I said. “But what I would like to see you add to your skill set is finesse. Effective communication isn’t just about what you want to say, it’s also what you want to accomplish. And you do want to be a more effective communicator, right?”

  “I do,” she said, sounding suspicious.

  “What do you want your words and tone to say about you?” I asked.

  Courtney didn’t hesitate: “That I am a smart, strong and an independent woman. Also that I am very thoughtful, understanding and flexible as long as people don’t try to take advantage of that.”

  “You do realize you don’t come across as very gentle and understanding, though, right?”

  This time she did hesitate. “But I am, though. That’s actually the reason my ex was able to manipulate me into an abusive relationship for so long, because I kept trying to understand things from his side. When it comes to finding my life partner, I just want someone who is kind, understanding and genuinely wants to learn to love me. But again, I also don’t want to be taken advantage of.”

  I thought of how Courtney presented herself when we’d gone out: impeccable clothes, the highest of heels, black lipstick and crossed arms. I asked her the big question, “Is being blunt and appearing intimidating your way of avoiding another abusive relationship?”

  She went silent for a while. “I promised myself and everyone who loves me that I’d never go through a relationship like that again.”

  “But Courtney, did you ever consider that presenting yourself as a bulldozer isn’t very appealing to the understanding, flexible and reasonable people you want to attract? What it sounds like you’ve been attracting with this approach is men who either want to be overcome and are looking for a second mom, or men who want a challenge to overcome, the kind who find joy in conquering not collaborating.”

  We concluded the call by agreeing that it was time for Courtney to let go, of both the reins and of the past. She was not the same person that she was years ago when she was manipulated by her ex, so there was no need to move through the world leading with that fear. Understandably letting down her guard would take some time. Courtney had been bullied at every stage in her life and it wasn’t until she took on an extreme persona in the opposite direction that the pain seemed to stop, but unfortunately the loneliness had not. What she needed to find was a happy balance and I was happy to help her discover just that.

  After we hung up, I noticed that the others had still not emailed back. So I had to make like a substitute teacher and handpick volunteers. The next morning, I sent Pricilla a text to ask if she had received my email and if she was able to hop on a call. She informed me she was spending time with her son before he started up school, so she had been busy (hence no reply). Of course, that was understandable. I then hit up Stephanie, and she confirmed to connect that night at seven.

  Stephanie answered on the first ring, then we had a fascinating conversation about her job, since admittedly I wasn’t sure what she actually did. Through our chat Steph also reiterated how unfulfilled and out of place she felt there. In fact, she attributed a lot of her dissatisfaction with her life to not being in her true calling and overall, not being certain of her purpose.

  However, after listening to her describe her situation, it didn’t sound as hopeless as she made it seem—just like everything else in her life. I agreed that her current job didn’t sound like the exact right fit, but she loved what she went to grad school for, which in my eyes put her in the perfect position to discover her true calling. However, what good were my eyes to her? And that was the running theme with Stephanie; it didn’t matter how others looked at her, because she refused to adjust how she saw herself.

  “On that note, Steph, can I be honest with you? I was a little shocked when I heard what you took away from my call with Fred.”

  “I know. As soon as I finished talking, I thought, I didn’t even mention the biggest thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “He said I lack confidence.”

  “You do,” I confirmed.

  “I do,” she echoed.

  I explained that her lack of sureness about herself seemed to have made her highly susceptible to anyone who demonstrated high levels of confidence. Hence why she found herself in the arms of alpha bulldozers that made her question herself even more. It was a vicious cycle that could only end with her decisively pressing STOP.

  “You kept saying that your problem is mate selection and you’re half right, but you also have a responsibility to address your behaviors, provoked or not. You need to find your zone, Steph—that space where there is no uncertainty for you.”

  I told her about a childhood game that I still like to play with myself when I think about something or someone that’s bothering me, called Which One of These Things Doesn’t Belong. For example, as a contracted intimacy expert, I am constantly being added to new teams, productions, professional boards, etc. Often when I begin a new project, I come across one person that rubs me the wrong way. When this happens, I start asking myself questions: do I see them exhibit the same problematic nature with others, or just me? Do they seem like a happy person? Have I noted that they often make decisions they feel good about, or are they constantly highly critical? If in the end I see a pattern with their behavior, I depersonalize my experience with them, then try my best going forward to let slights go because I’m not out to fix things that aren’t in my garage. But if I notice that there is no pattern and their relationship with me is the anomaly, I change. I troubleshoot the way I’ve interacted with them and try to switch my approach. I asked Stephanie if we played this game with her life, what would be more out of place: her dissatisfaction with one particular thing, or her satisfaction with anything?

  We agreed that she was missing the courage within herself to say hell yes, Stephanie! I also emphasized that it was time for her to stop waiting for a man, a self-help book or a job to do that for her.

  “What kind of man do you think you’d find happiness with, Steph? Who brings out the best in you?”

  She paused for a bit. “Well, for starters, I need to be with someone who views the relationship as a very high priority because of my attachment style.”

  That kind of powerful self-insight is precisely why the Self-Summary Workbook is crucial. I was very proud to hear her say that.

  “We also have to be sexually compatible, have the same politics and he needs to be a strong leader. I don’t want to be with someone who can’t make a decision.”

  All right, that statement I was not thrilled with, especially in light of what we had just discussed. How could a bulldozer be her ideal when all this time that type had been her nightmare? It was clear she believed she needed a yang to balance her yin. But I believed she needed to find someone in the center of the Venn diagram just like I knew she wa
s. “Do you consider yourself a follower, a leader or someone who is comfortable in either position?”

  “Actually, I am really comfortable in either position,” she said, notably confident. “At work, for example, I’m the extrovert and the socializer. If I sense people need a leader, I have no issues stepping up. But if someone else wants to take that role on, or if an extrovert enters the room, I’m okay with letting them take over. I know that can be hard to believe.”

  It actually wasn’t. Stephanie was an outlier who didn’t follow the crowd. She studied industrial and labor relations at school because she was passionate about working on policies that were made in the interest of people, not profit. When I asked her to define what political differences she could not tolerate in a potential mate she said plainly, “Anyone who thinks that people who are poor are lazy, are not my kind of people.” Underneath the giant question mark she put on everything she did and said was a woman who understood what really mattered to her. That’s the woman I needed to bring to the forefront.

  We decided that on Stephanie’s list of qualities that she wanted in a man, “strong leadership skills” could stay, but “able to take instructions” also needed to be added. I noted that she and Maya had a very similar issue in relation to their aversion to leadership even though it played out in very different ways: while Maya was afraid to speak up for fear of making herself uncomfortable, Stephanie was afraid to own her ground, for fear that she’d be stepping on someone else’s.

  While I understood where both were coming from, neither of them had a thing to be afraid of: they were intelligent, striking, funny, insightful, compassionate, worldly and fiery. Their greatest mistake was believing that these parts of themselves should be kept a secret.

  The next day, when Maya and I connected, she launched into her usual bit: “I really don’t know what to expect from this call and that makes me very nervous.”

  “Really? I’ve been looking forward to chatting because aside from knowing that you hate capitalism, love teen movies and consider yourself very nervous all the time—I have a lot of blanks to fill in.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, okay, what else do you wanna know?”

  “Everything!”

  Maya was an only child of parents who owned a tattoo shop together. Her dad had a full bodysuit of tats and both of her parents were responsible for the eighteen that spanned from Maya’s shoulders to her knees. She had a great childhood and attended an arts-focused school in her early years but recalls her anxiety really stepping in when her parents began to put a lot of pressure on her to perform academically. She was only allowed one sleepover a month and remembered being grounded for most of her high school years because she didn’t get the right grades or disappointed them in some other area. When she turned eighteen her parents let up on her, but the foundation was set. In college she became extremely reclusive and developed insomnia. After that, her anxiety became so pervasive she was unable to go about basic daily routines. She spent hours on end alone in her dorm and although she had a lot of crushes, she had no romantic connections during that time.

  It seemed that Maya’s anxiety was formed in response to an immense pressure to perform exceptionally, at all times. This pressure was so severe that it seemed as though she truly believed it was safer not to try something at all, then to try and fail (e.g. with dating). Then again, anxiety doesn’t always have an obvious cause, but it does have very clear ramifications. Our nervous system has two distinct operating “platforms”—sympathetic and parasympathetic—and like Mac and PC computers, they can’t run at the same time. The sympathetic is responsible for our fight-flight-or-freeze response and our parasympathetic for the calm-and-connect response. In fight-flight-or-freeze, your brain prepares you to respond to crisis by dumping adrenaline into your system, increasing your heart rate, inducing mild hyperventilation, and tensing your muscles, which makes it near impossible to focus on—or connect with—others. In calm-and-connect you’re relaxed, your heart rate is normal, and you should be able to focus all your energy on one person or thing.

  “Which mode do you think you spend most of your time in?”

  “It depends. Around my friends I’m extremely outgoing, funny and relaxed. But if I’m in an unfamiliar or stressful environment I can go into panic mode easy and just close up all together. I’ve just come to accept it as a part of my life, which sucks.”

  As odd as this advice may sound, I suggested she stopped loathing her anxiety and instead, started appreciating it for what it was. Our fight-flight-or-freeze response is our bodies’ natural way of protecting us from harm. But just like some mamas, some bodies can super overdo it. The trick is in medication for some, exercise for others but I’ve also heard that talking to your anxiety as if it were a separate person, can work wonders: hey body, I get that you’re scared because you love me and you think I’m in danger—good looking out. But take a good look around, there’s nothing to be afraid of and furthermore this fear is making it hard for me to find and love myself. So, I’m going to take a second to let you get comfortable, but then we need to get back in there and be great, together.

  On the flip side, the communication that I observed that was not working for Maya, was the kind she did externally. Every meetup we had thus far, she verbally acknowledged and introduced her anxiety as if it was the annoying kid sister she couldn’t leave the house without.

  “You gotta stop speaking your nerves into existence,” I said. “I know in your mind it’s the elephant in the room because it weighs so heavy on you, but as you’ve heard people in the group say many times, they wouldn’t know you were nervous if you didn’t feel the need to call it out. Your intelligence, confidence in your opinions and wit are what people see when they interact with you, remind yourself of that often.”

  As you’ll recall, the biggest downfall of the Nervous Nelly is that their energy is contagious and thus, repulsive. So, Maya and I came up with a proposed solution: if she felt herself starting to get worked up, instead of announcing it, she needed to give herself a break. She could take a sip of water, ask someone else a question to take the heat off her—hell, she could break out into a dance—literally do anything except call her nerves by name.

  Now that we’d spoken about her fearful persona, I wanted to address some of the other impacts of it that I didn’t think she was aware of. “I haven’t done this with anyone else, but I’d like to read you word for word something I wrote about you based on what I noticed from your Self-Summary Workbook. Is that okay?”

  “Yeah, that would be fine.”

  * * *

  When I assessed Maya’s Big Five personality reading, I was genuinely intrigued, but in hindsight also not surprised. Maya scored high in conscientiousness, as she was both honest and organized, as well as neuroticism because she was fearful and anxious. But on everything else, she was just below room temperature. This made sense because I recognized that she was an open-minded person, but with her aggressive nerves at play, she was rarely open to new ideas. She wasn’t an extrovert, but she did demonstrate a confidence in social settings that a lot of introverts do not possess. And finally, because of her intensity and rigidity she erred on the disagreeable side, despite her deep desire to get along with others.

  * * *

  “I think I can see where all of that is coming from,” Maya said slowly.

  “How do you want to be perceived by others?”

  She went quiet for a bit then confidently declared, “Intelligent, passionate and funny.”

  I nodded. I saw all those things in her because we had developed a rapport, but I rarely saw all of those magical traits at work in the group setting. The other day Maya and I were alone waiting for her Uber when a man who looked like a spoken word performer walked by. Maya said, “Just a note, dating a poet is a hard no for me. Believe me, I went to school for creative writing and have heard enough people complain about their boring lives with creative line breaks and grammar to know I can never date one. I couldn�
�t care less about how eating croissants reminds someone of their ex.”

  I laughed and thought to myself, I wish the whole group could hear and see her now.

  “Speaking of others, you know, I’ve been really disappointed with myself that I haven’t been able to connect with one person in the group,” said Maya.

  This was one cross I would not let her bear alone. No one in the group had developed an outside relationship with another member, but that’s why it was important to remember what had brought this group together to begin with: everyone struggled to make intimate connections. And that’s why I instructed Maya to start approaching my experiment as her own experiment. “Use our meetups as the testing ground for intelligent, passionate and funny Maya! Practice the version of yourself that you want to be perceived as.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

  We ended our call on a much lighter note than it had begun and that was a victory in my books. One Nervous Nelly down, and one to go.

  A couple of days later, I connected with Deshawn. As expected, out the gate she sounded hella apprehensive, so I put down the big guns and began with gratitude.

  “Deshawn, I just wanna say thank you for your warmth and openness; you are the personification of a home-cooked meal. You have really been a bright spot throughout this whole process, and I know everyone is really rooting for you. But how have things been from your perspective?”