by Trish Ryan
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, as we sipped wine at our favorite Italian restaurant and celebrated how wonderful it was to be us, Tim rhapsodized about how amazed he was to find me, how lucky he felt to be with someone who shared his values, who agreed on what was important in life. “Especially,” he concluded, “since I can’t see myself getting married for at least another four years.”
A piece of pasta lodged in my throat and I coughed until my ribs hurt, my eyes filling with tears. I’d been dreaming of the engagement ring I hoped might be under the Christmas tree that winter. “Why?” I asked, lower lip trembling.
“I don’t know,” he said casually. He seemed oblivious to my shock. “I’m still figuring out what I want to do with my life. Maybe I’ll travel, maybe I’ll move . . . maybe I’ll go to law school.”
Law school? Tim had never—not once, even in passing—mentioned this before. He never asked me about my cases, or if I thought Law Review had been worth the time and effort. We made it through entire episodes of Law & Order without discussing litigation strategy or wondering how a real judge would rule.
“So, you might want to go to law school,” I repeated slowly, feeling my stomach churn. “What would that mean for us—what would we do?”
“We’d do what we’ve been doing,” he responded, looking confused by my reaction. “What’s wrong with that?”
“You mean date perpetually?” I asked. By this point I was struggling—and failing—to hide my alarm. “You want to spend the next four years dragging our stuff back and forth between our two apartments, rather than building any sort of a life together?”
“Well,” he replied, hesitant for the first time all evening. “I mean, it doesn’t have to be like that. We could each have a drawer in the other’s apartments . . . and even room in the closet.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was devastated, but—in light of my new training—desperately trying not to be. I excused myself to the ladies’ room to pull myself together.
“I have given everything I see all the meaning it has for me,” I reminded myself sternly in the mirror. I repeated mantras from the Course: “Instead of disappointment, I can choose to see love. Instead of rejection, I can choose to see love. This situation is perfect!” I insisted, hoping to convince myself, “it’s a divine opportunity for me to learn!” I dabbed my eyes with cool water and took a deep breath, then headed back to our table. I’d reined in my emotions, but nothing inside me had changed. I was still disappointed, rejected, wondering how to handle the bull that had just wandered uninvited into my fantasy china shop. Thinking of Jayme’s words, I prayed for the universe to unite us with our highest good.
A few nights later, I called Tim to check in about our plans for the weekend.
“Hello?” he answered.
“Hi,” I said softly, hoping to bridge the gap that had grown between us. “It’s me . . .”
“Laurie?”
Tim, apparently, was building bridges in other directions.
AFTER TIM AND I broke up, I kicked myself for all the things I’d done wrong. Turning to the Course, I focused on our universal oneness, and spent hours trying to overcome my fear-based ego responses that would have me judge my brother. Yet try as I might, I couldn’t see Tim through the judgment-free eyes Jayme promised. And despite my new spiritual awareness that everything other than love was an illusion, my hurt felt awfully real.
I became a regular at new age bookstores, amassing a vast library on alternative spirituality and metaphysics, trying to speed up my enlightenment and attract the life I wanted. I read volumes about the power of my intention, the importance of reciting affirmations of what I wanted to draw into my life, and the universal principles of abundance that were mine to tap into so long as I kept my thinking positive. On the surface, I was still just another single girl in a little black dress on Saturday night—the only difference being that when a guy wandered over to buy me a drink, I talked about God and metaphysics rather than tennis and my 401(k) plan. But on the inside, I felt like something must be happening, like all this effort had to be getting me closer to the top of this spiritual mountain I was climbing. But I couldn’t understand why the results weren’t better.
I cycled through another round of bad first dates (each of whom I’ll call Bob just to keep things simple). Bob #1 was a handsome emergency room doctor. We went mini golfing and he inquired several times about the regularity of my bowel movements. I met Bob #2 at the dog park; he took me out to dinner and told me how he was studying to be a psychoanalyst. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said politely between courses, “I need to go to the men’s room.” Halfway across the room, he turned and came back to our table, an accusing look in his eye. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do here,” he said angrily. “I’m attracted to you, and I have to pee, so now I have to go and touch myself. What the hell do you expect of me?” This was followed by several evenings with Bob #3, a long-haired painter with low self-esteem who drove slowly by my apartment building for weeks after we broke up. I struggled to see these guys—the Bobs—through the eyes of love, rather than fear. But each time I fizzled out at the last moment, realizing the horrible, frustrating, unspiritual truth that yes, I did want to get married, and no, I didn’t want a husband with weird obsessions about bodily functions—his or mine—or an inclination to stalk me.
“The problem isn’t that you keep meeting the wrong men,” I heard Jayme tell someone in one of her lectures. “It’s that you keep giving them your number!” Touché, I thought. But I had no idea how to prescreen these guys who kept wandering into my life. I believed Jayme’s unspoken point, though: that if this wasn’t working, the problem must be me. I redoubled my efforts to live a life of “true” love, free from the boundaries of “form.” Not because this was what I wanted, mind you, but because I thought it was my only option; I thought it was the truth.
Chapter Five
Stars, No Stripes
One weekend I attended a seminar on some vague topic like “The Essence of Spiritual Living,” where a fellow seeker named Jed asked my astrological sign. I was pretty sure he wasn’t trying to pick me up; this was just the kind of small talk one made at these types of gatherings.
“I’m a Capricorn,” I told him, “but I don’t believe in that stuff—Capricorns are supposed to be studious, boring, and conservative, and that’s not me at all.”
“What’s your rising sign?” he persisted. “That’s what tells me who you are.” He explained the impact of my rising sign—the sign on the horizon at the moment of my birth—on the rest of my astrological picture. Determined by consulting various charts, my rising sign described the type of Capricorn I would be, how I would manifest my “Capricorn personality.”
Noting that my rising sign was Leo, Jed looked at me and said, “You’re that Capricorn goat, which means you can climb to heights other people could never reach. It takes you a long time, though, because every ten minutes you turn around and yell, ‘Hey everybody! Look at me!’”
It was the most accurate—albeit embarrassing—description of my inner workings I’d ever heard. It explained why I’d worked for months as a child perfecting my baton-twirling technique so that I could march in the front of our town parade; how I’d won multiple public speaking awards but couldn’t get through a solo chemistry experiment; and why I’d lost interest in law school as soon as I realized that most people don’t like lawyers nearly as much in real life as they like them on TV. Without an audience—cheering me on, giving me pointers, acknowledging that who I was and what I did had value (even if only because I did something inherently silly better than anyone else they knew)—I lacked the will to apply myself, or even care what the outcome or benefit might be.
Inspired by this spot-on assessment, I went back to the bookstore (the “spirituality” aisle was practically my church, at this point) and bought an ephemeris—a book charting the movement of the planets through the past, present, and future—and immersed myself in signs and forecasts. I
found an astrological interpretation guide that explained the personalities of everyone I knew, and a book of rituals for seeking the beneficial energy of each planet. It felt like I’d found my key to unlock the mysteries of the universe. The planets were orderly, explainable, predictable. This was a spirituality one could plan around.
“When’s your birthday?” I asked my colleague Evan one morning at work. “Where were you born? What time?”
“April 17, 1968,” he replied skeptically. “Washington DC. Six-fifty-two p.m. Why? Who wants to know?”
“Ah—you’re an Aries,” I exclaimed knowingly, “with Scorpio rising—that explains why you’re so stubborn!” Evan went on with his work, pretending to ignore me and my odd metaphysical outburst. I was about to tease him, to ask if his girlfriend of the month knew what she was getting into. Suddenly, though, I stopped. He’s more sensitive about that than I thought. I wasn’t sure where this awareness came from.
That night, when I asked my friend Jenny about her birthday, the same thing happened: She’s just playing along, I realized. She’s afraid of conflict and doesn’t want to upset me. This made no sense at all; Jenny was perhaps the most confident person I knew. If she thought this zodiac stuff was silly, why wouldn’t she just tell me?
Over the next few weeks, I discovered something astounding: my new understanding of astrology, remedial though it was, opened up a whole realm of personal, private information about people, things I never would have known on my own. People’s birthdays told me how they thought, what bothered them, what motivated them to do certain things. It was as if I had access to secret files on them, an internal database providing whatever information I wanted. If the Course was my spiritual foundation, astrology became my Palm Pilot—the structure by which I organized my days and friends and choices.
“You might not want to go camping this weekend,” I warned my sister one day. “Mercury is in retrograde—that’s when accidents happen.”
“Sure I’ll come to New York,” I told Kristen a few weeks later. “This weekend has awesome planetary alignment—who knows who we might meet?”
I discovered that I got along great with Cancer women like my new roommate Celia (so easygoing!), yet found the men a tad wimpy for my taste.
Naturally, I charted the astrological parameters of my ideal man. I lingered over his chart with such careful attention that I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he materialized, fully formed, right off the page. He would be an earth sign—Capricorn, Taurus, Virgo—grounded and secure, unthreatened by the exuberant personality of my attention-loving Capricorn-Leo self. I vowed to never, under any circumstances, date another Sagittarius (they struggle so with monogamy), or a water sign that might try to quench my fire. Soon, it seemed like the most normal thing in the world for me to turn down a dinner invitation from a handsome man because he was born in early December. Why bother? I thought. It will only lead to heartache.
A FEW WEEKS later, I bought a fishbowl at a garage sale and set it up in the living room. Celia came home, saw it, and gasped in horror: “Water!” she exclaimed. “It’s activating our childbearing corner!” I had no idea what she meant, but as two single women with nary a date on our calendars, activating our childbearing corner seemed like something to avoid.
After relocating the bowl to a bookshelf across the room, Celia spent the next two hours teaching me the finer points of feng shui, an ancient Chinese system of arranging one’s belongings to ensure good fortune.
“The goal of feng shui,” she said, “is to maximize the flow of auspicious chi energy to the important areas of our lives—work, family, health, wealth—while minimizing pernicious chi that cuts off success and happiness.” I was struck by the notion of an unseen battle between good and evil forces waging all around us, and I loved the idea that the key to victory was good interior design.
I rearranged my furniture with a vengeance, determined to cut off the pernicious edges and corners keeping me from the life of my dreams. I scoured Celia’s guidebooks, focusing on their prescriptions for love. I used a compass to locate my romance corner (this was tricky at first, as there were two opposing schools of feng shui, with two different opinions as to which corner applied), ultimately deciding that the key to my romantic success was a thin sliver of wall between my window and closet. I blanketed that little sliver with all the items of love it could hold: nine rose quartz crystals to activate the earth energy, pink flowers to bring romance to bloom, lit candles to ensure great passion, a carving of lovebirds to symbolize lifelong partnership. My room now looked a bit like a Chinese restaurant, but as I surveyed my handiwork, I could almost feel my synchronicity with the benevolent flow of the universe. Certain I had my spiritual bases covered, I commanded the universe to bring me a man.
Surprisingly (or not), it worked. Both Celia and I attracted far more men than we had before; indeed we each had numerous potential suitors seeking to avail themselves of our charms. But what we didn’t account for, in our enthusiastic embrace of these spiritual practices, was the lack of quality control.
I responded to the advances of a minister named Drew, a rugged blond with a razor-sharp sense of humor. On the surface, he was everything I wanted—fun, athletic, spiritually inclined. He was immersed in the juxtaposition of politics and religion, two of my passions, and—most important—he had a great last name that went well with either Trish or Patricia. Before we’d even had our first date, I told my friends about how well feng shui’ing worked, sketching out furniture arrangements for their apartments on happy hour cocktail napkins.
“Do you like Ethiopian food?” Drew asked as we strolled toward the restaurant on our first date. “You must. I know you will. Don’t worry, it’s spectacular. You’ll love it.”
It was a gorgeous summer evening, and as we walked along our conversation turned to the common first date topic of the awkward nature of dating and love.
“I’ve wrestled with dating lately,” he shared. “It seems so much more complicated than it used to be.” I laughed, ready to agree how much higher the stakes seemed now that we’d crossed into our late twenties and were searching for marriage partners.
As we reached the restaurant, he continued, “Ever since I started fantasizing about men, it seems like everything is different.” Then he requested a table for two outside, as if we were normal people on a normal date rather than two strangers in the midst of an unexpected disclosure of bisexual inclinations.
Drew ordered for both of us, and then segued into a tale of his recent trip to Mexico as a relief worker. I forced his male-fantasy revelation to the back of my mind, and went along with his story of struggle in the Mexican harvest fields, trying to convince myself that I must have misheard; he couldn’t possibly have said what I thought he had said.
The food arrived: a massive platter of unidentified meat and brown sauce on top of spongy bread. Drew scooped the thick mixture into his mouth with his hands and returned to the topic of his budding bisexuality. He raved about his counselor on the relief trip: how he’d dreamed of cuddling with him, how exciting it was when they got to share the same tent.
“This shouldn’t have any impact on us,” he paused to assure me. “I’m mostly into women. And for the most part, I’m monogamous.”
I stuffed pile after pile of the meat mixture into my mouth, praying for one of the passing cars to make a sudden swerve and crash into the restaurant to end this conversation. I flashed back to what had been, until that night, my ringer story for “worst date ever”—dinner with a Philadelphia writer who told me in graphic detail about his brother’s job at a salmon farm, which required him to fondle fish until they ejaculated. Sitting there with a plateful of unidentifiable food while Drew worked his way out of the closet, I wondered why I hadn’t given the Philly guy more of a chance.
Trying to bring us back to some form of common ground, I asked Drew about God. It seemed like fair game, given his occupation, and I lobbed him an easy question about the role of miraculous interve
ntion in the lives of the Mexicans he was so worried about.
“God?” he repeated. “Oh, I don’t believe in God.”
As it turned out, the most embarrassing part of my date with Drew was not his assumption that I’d be comfortable with his budding bisexuality, or even what happened to my gastro-intestinal system as that spongy bread expanded inside me until I thought I might explode. Rather, it was the fact that when he asked if we could get together again the following week, I said, “Sure.”
A few weeks later, Drew broke up with me. He decided that it couldn’t work out between us because he didn’t think I was passionate enough about the most important things in his life: politics and spirituality. I was a lawyer, with a growing assortment of esoteric spiritual practices, being dumped by a bisexual atheist because I wasn’t sufficiently interested in politics or spiritual matters. In my quest for a husband with a good last name, I’d dropped my standards to an all-time low—and ended up flattened by a man I neither liked nor respected.
Celia fared almost as badly. She met a beautiful boy who played the trombone. A musician, she thought, how romantic! We soon discovered, however, that Celia’s “Jazz Man” was a third-chair volunteer in his community marching band. He had smoked so much pot in college that he had no recollection of four entire years of his life, and his big dream, at the age of twenty-six, was to repeat college in its entirety so that he could further his trombone studies and join the swim team.