by Jennie Garth
Pearl’s pretty much full-grown now and she’s about the size of a miniature horse. She’s still superyoung at heart and is, in many ways, still all puppy, even though she’s so giant. I think it’s fair to say that she’s pretty high-maintenance and has some settling in to do, which means that she’s definitely not quite ready to be left alone. In fact, in many ways Pearl’s kind of my fourth daughter—the challenging, exasperating, slobbery one. Not infrequently, after a long day with her, I feel like I could use a therapy session (or two).
Pearl’s my constant companion, not just because I like her company (which I sort of do), but because she would lose her mind if she were left home alone. So, whenever I go out to do errands, Pearl comes along.
I take Pearl with me everywhere so I can keep a close eye on her, so that I know she’s staying, to the degree that she can, on the relative straight and narrow. When she’s a little older—and so a bit more independent and more laid-back (please, God)—I’ll think about leaving her home alone.
But until then, it’s me and Pearl.
She likes riding in the car, but for some reason she won’t get into the car on her own, so I have to coax her to at least try; then, when she’s ready, I hunker down behind her and push/hoist her up and into the vehicle. And she’s massive! I always say, “Get your big butt up there, Pearl!” But she just looks at me with her dopey eyes and kind of sits back into my hands and makes the whole affair kind of pathetic.
And then off we go: I take her hiking with me, while shuttling the girls around, to the grocery store—she’s even been known to show up in some of the finer restaurants in town. Yes. You heard that right.
But let’s be clear about something: I never, ever play the celebrity card where Pearl is concerned. In fact, I pretty much never play that card at all. That’s just not my style. The truth is, I’m not a very good rule breaker; I always seem to get caught red-handed. And I’m lousy at doing the diva thing. And this isn’t about diva antics anyway; this is about doing what I have to do to keep Pearl alive and breathing.
This means that our Black Pearl is a registered “service” dog, having received her certificate and her official vest. She’s an “emotional” support dog, which means I get to take her with me everywhere, so I can provide her with emotional support.
Pearl—who does, by the way, occasionally wear a string of pearls, which look superglamorous against her black fur—isn’t very good at sitting still. Or if she does sit still, she’s still got to be busy. For example, one time, when I met a friend for drinks at a pretty popular restaurant, before I knew it she’d managed to almost chew the leg off one of the wooden chairs at the table next to us. I had no choice but to make mine a double, and I don’t think I’ve been back to that particular restaurant since—at least not with Pearl.
Pearl is giant, but she takes up the space of three dogs her size, particularly when she decides she’s going to sleep on my bed. I don’t know quite how to describe what it’s like to sleep with her, except to say that it’s hot and dog-breathy and yet utterly endearing and difficult to say no to. In this way, she’s definitely my baby: the one who gets away with murder.
Can’t live with her, can’t live without her—that’s my Pearl.
LICKING THE BOTTOM OF MY SHOE
I thought I could avoid it. I really did. But I can’t possibly write this book without writing about . . . dating. Right? But I want the record to show that I acknowledge that dating, for most of us, ranks right up there with having to go for the annual Pap smear or having to try on a bathing suit in February. It’s uncomfortable, awkward, and it can send us back to the couch and Netflix and potato chips faster than just about anything else.
I was married for so long that, once I recovered from the initial shock of finding myself single again, whenever anybody suggested that I might want to get out there and start dating, well, I would quite literally start hyperventilating.
I mean, what is this thing called dating? What does it mean to meet a strange man and have a drink or dinner or do whatever it is that people do when they go on dates? The whole idea of having to do what I had never actually done—ever in my whole life—just completely freaked me out.
The truth is, I had been the poster girl for old married lady for so long that my brain would just freeze when I even attempted to say the word date. I mean, come on: I married for the first time when I was twenty-two, and then for the second time when I was twenty-eight, which might not sound that young, but . . . wait! I was already a mother at twenty-five when I made my way down the aisle for the second time. So in married-lady years, I was old—like, ancient-dog-years married-lady old. I had been off the market so long that I had never actually been on the market. And I mean this sincerely. I had not had a date since I was a kid, and that doesn’t count, because I was a kid. I had no muscle memory for the dating thing, no reference point for it. But everyone around me persisted. “You’ve got to get back out there! You’ve got to get back on the horse!” I guess that’s one way of putting it. But here’s the thing: From my perspective, I had a pretty huge handicap when it came to entering the dating pool. I would never be able to go on a “date” on anything even remotely close to a level playing field, thanks to our friend the Internet.
Just think about it: A friend wants to set me up with a friend of a friend’s brother-in-law, and so I reasonably ask, “Okay, what’s he like?” I get a one-word response, like, “Nice,” or, “Hot.”
Whereas the guy in question, he gets to Google me. He gets to find out every last detail of my life, including all of those really crazy, juicy intimate things that aren’t even true. And images to accompany those facts! Images from when I was sixteen till now!
Despite this, let’s say I agree to meet Mr. Hot. We sit down to dinner, and before I can politely ask, “So, what do you do for a living?” Mr. Hot blurts out: “Is it true you coldcocked Shannen Doherty at the Emmys?” Of course not, but hello! Where on earth is the conversation supposed to go from there?
This is precisely why I’ve gone on the record as saying I’d rather lick the bottom of a dirty shoe than go on a date. The tabloids got one right!
But you know what? When I became single again, I was thirty-nine years old, and if I really wasn’t going to go on a date ever again, that meant I might end up roaming this planet for another, oh, forty or fifty years without getting close enough to a man to even smell him, and this would not be a good thing at all, because the truth of the matter is, I love the way men smell. I really, honest-to-God do. I love so many things about them, because I just love them. I just don’t understand them all that well.
To complicate things, I am one of those women who is unapologetically attracted to the bad boys. Wait a minute. . . . That’s not entirely true; let me clarify. I am attracted to men who look like they might be bad boys, but who are really total sweethearts under the scruffy, I-will-not-take-any-shit-from-anyone exterior. I want to find someone who will be incredibly good to me, but who looks like he might not be that great to me. Follow?
Immediately postsplit, I was ill prepared to face the dating abyss on my own, since I was going through serious doubt about whether I knew anything at all about men. In the end, I realized that I knew nothing at all, so I would have to rely on my friends to help me work my way into the land of dating. I would need to turn to someone who had been through what I was going through now, to talk to someone who had also been in a longish marriage, with kids—but who had also wound up divorced. So I turned to my friend Luke. He would know what this terrifying time was all about. Or at least he would be someone of the opposite sex whose big, strong shoulder I could comfortably and safely rest my weary head on, while he explained the world of “man” to me.
But before we even had the chance to get together and properly catch each other up, there we were, all over the rags. “Kelly and Dylan, Together at Last!” Or “Luke Perry and Jennie Garth—Dating!”
I hate to burst the torrid Kelly-and-Dylan fantasy you’re
about to lose yourself in, but what we were really doing at some no-name coffee shop looked something like this: Luke would be trying to boost my confidence, usually encouraging me that it might be wise to get out of my sweatpants and brush my hair, while lecturing me on needing to go after the right kind of guy. See, he has always been very disapproving of my choices . . . always. Which I’ve found endearing, because he holds me in very high regard and thinks I deserve the best. So . . . maybe . . . I should start listening to him?
We would talk about relationships and what one ought to look for in a partner and yada-yada . . . and while the tabloids were thinking they were onto something igniting between us, Luke would be texting his lovely, long-term partner, and I would shrug off all of his suggestions about eligible guys who might be worth a look, while I twirled my bed-heady, less-than-clean hair.
In the midst of all the hoopla about the possibility that Luke and I might be a little more than just good friends, I actually did dip my toe into the murky, dark dating pool, and so I felt compelled, being the shy yet open book that I am, to address the Luke rumors head-on. So when someone asked me whether I was dating Luke, I snorted and said, “I can’t date Luke. It would be too weird.” Of course, this appeared on the newsstands the very next day.
What I was trying to say was that Luke had been one of my closest friends for more than half my life, and that I didn’t want to even begin to jeopardize that friendship by ever giving anyone the impression that there was more than that between us. But it didn’t really come out like that, especially when I immediately followed up that “weird” comment with, “But we do have incredible chemistry.” I confused even myself with that one!
One of the things I had to face before I could get back out there and date was the fact that I had a very screwed-up sense of the love equation. I’m not talking about the kind of unconditional love I have for my children and which has already withstood the usual gamut of challenges—and which, as they all lurch through their teens, will be tested beyond belief. No, despite all of that, my love for them will last for all time.
I’m talking about the romantic kind, the kind I seem to have such a jinxed relationship with. I recently saw a shaman, and she suggested that instead of equating love with pain, which is what I used to do, I ought to work to equate love with power. Love equals power.
When someone with magical powers such as my shaman offers me insight like this, I try my best to take it, but it’s as though I’m hearing the words, but I just can’t understand them. She really might as well have been speaking a foreign language.
The whole concept of love and power confuses me. When I try to think about it, my brain freezes up in a way that really makes me question the future of my spotty memory.
But maybe that’s the point: Maybe I’m not supposed to think so hard about it; maybe I’m just not supposed to solve that particular riddle. Maybe that’s the whole point of it. Maybe the love equation just is, like infinity, or pi, or E = mc2, and no matter what is on either side of that equal sign, I know one thing: Love is supposed to feel good, damn good. Knowing that fills me with a pretty powerful feeling.
And then it happened. The getting-out-there-and-dating thing. It happened without my even being aware that it was happening. I was flying to New York to promote A Little Bit Country, and I was sitting up in first class, next to this really hunky DIY TV star, and I thought, Hey! I can fix him up with Corrine, who was sitting a few rows back. I kept trying to chat up Corrine and he kept trying to chat me up, and when we finally landed and were at the baggage carousel, he gallantly fetched our bags for us, and then he gave me a soul hug that nearly buried me and asked if he could call me. I was so stunned, I just said yes. And there I was all of a sudden, back in the dating game.
So I dated DIY guy for a few weeks, which offered me a much-needed distraction from the very public end to my marriage, and then there were a few more dates with a few more guys, but nothing significant, until . . . I met someone on Instagram.
A LITTLE TWITTER
I was beginning to get used to my single-mom status, and about a year into the split, I had dated a handful of guys. Though I now felt less nervous about going out on that dreaded first date, I still didn’t have much of a clue about what I ought to be looking for in a guy, what I needed in a romantic partner. I realized that thinking my way to a solution wasn’t the answer, so I decided to give it a rest. What I needed was a vacation. A real trip away from the girls, just for a few days, a trip where I could just be Jennie, solo, without worrying about anyone else. I needed a weekend off, a few days to lose myself in a crowd. So I went to Austin—to Austin City Limits, the music festival—with my good friend Stephanie. It felt so good to immerse myself in some great music and not worry about what was, or wasn’t, happening at home.
We were having a blast, and one day I posted a picture on Instagram, and a musician who was performing at the festival made a really sweet comment about it, so then I made a comment about his comment, and then we started communicating by Instagram and then Twitter. This was all so very “of the moment” of me, and it was fun and flirty, and I felt all groovy and with it and so #thisishowthekidsdo itthesedays. This musician was witty, warm, and about ten years younger than me, but we moved our conversation from Twitter and texting to the actual phone, and after lots of beautiful and intense conversations over several weeks, we finally decided we ought to meet, and so he came to LA.
It was strange and interesting, because we had been courting each other via social media, and then there we were, face-to-face, and so we started getting to know each other all over again, but this time in person, and it felt really warm and special.
I found myself crazy attracted to this guy, who was so very different from the “type” of guy I’m usually drawn to. He was warm and kind and communicative in a way that I found irresistible. Being around him woke me up on several levels. And like that, I found myself in possession of a beating heart, after months and months of flatlining.
What was this? I was drawn to this quirky guy who was not only about a decade younger than me, but he’d never been married himself, had no kids, had never dated an actor, and, on top of all that, he lived in another state. Oh, and he was a touring musician, so he was never in one place for very long.
From the beginning, the odds were stacked against us, but I got priceless, beautiful things from that intensely loving six-month relationship: I found out that I could not just love a man again, but I could fall in love and genuinely care about someone again and feel all that passion and desire—all the good stuff.
Plus, I found out that there’s a type of guy out there that I was really intrigued by: a man who wanted to be “all in” and who wanted an honest-to-God messy and complicated intimacy. This was both alluring and terrifying because . . .
Could I, the queen of keeping my cards tucked in my vest, respond in kind and really let someone get close?
I wasn’t at all sure. But I wanted to find out.
SINGLE WITH A CAPITAL “S”
My short but deep relationship with the sweet musician convinced me that I very much want to be “in the game,” and I want to learn how to love someone, and I want to be brave enough to let someone come in close and love me back, but . . .
First I needed to learn how to be single. I needed to learn how to be truly okay on my own, without a man there to give me a sense of security or a sense of being okay in the world. I had relied on that for so long that I didn’t really trust that I could be okay without it; I had been coupled up for so long that I had lost faith in my ability to be alone, and to be alone well.
Being single, I finally came to realize, is the only real way to get down to business and face your flaws and demons and all that dark and sticky stuff that we all must, at some point or another, turn and face head-on. At least that’s been true for me. I needed to be unattached to be able to figure out what went wrong when I was attached: how my expectations or my unmet needs or my fears or whatever got i
n the way of my being able to relate in the healthiest and most satisfying way possible, for both parties involved.
So I decided that, once I got over the shock of how sweet and meaningful and yet how brief my relationship with the musician had been, I would keep my eye out for a man who is kind and accountable and open and adventurous and dependable, and maybe he would look a little naughty, but first . . . I had to put the focus squarely on myself and begin to dismantle all the silly, unhealthy, and unhelpful notions I had about relationships and men.
This wasn’t easy at first. I mean, really being with yourself can be tedious as all hell. But once I got past the initial awful, itchy part, I found that I was relaxing into things. At last. I found that I was finally getting the breather I had needed for so very long. I had found the silver lining in being single. I had begun to find myself.
NEVER SAY NEVER
I’ve never been an open book, as you can tell by now. And in writing this book, I threw myself over the proverbial cliff and I just went for it. For months and months I dug in and wrote my head off. And though what I was writing about was often extremely humbling, more than a bit revealing, and always, mercifully, illuminating, I kept my head down and kept at it. And then one day it was done. I finished the first draft of my manuscript and sent it off to my publisher.
And then . . . I swear to God . . . it just happened. Within days of writing “the end,” I met someone. I met a man. A wonderful man. A grown-up man. A man who lives in the same state. A man who is lovely and luscious and funny and smart. And kind. He runs his own business and is superbusy, so he’s respectful and understanding about how extremely busy my own life is. Recently I started renovating a house and I agreed to have this undertaking filmed for HGTV, which means I get a reality show “do-over,” and this time it feels right. It feels good.