In my experience, there is a moment in every relationship when a woman hands the man she is sleeping with a self-help book and says “Read it, or else.” This is often met with a blank look. So she elaborates: “It’s like Where’s Waldo, honey. Only in this game, you find yourself.” At this point he’ll either skulk off, book in hand, to lick his wounded ego and find comfort in the tough love words of Dr. Phil, or he might throw it at you. I’m not sure which is worse.
The last time I reached this particular milestone my relationship was tanking and I didn’t want to believe it. I would spend hours on Friday nights huddled in the self-help section of Barnes & Noble reading Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff in Love and Co-Dependent No More while my actor boyfriend performed in small theatres off off off off off Broadway. I was trying, desperately, to find a way to blame myself for a relationship that was on life-support. If I could fix me, I thought, then it would all be fine. Finally, I booked an Amtrak reservation to visit my aunt in upstate New York and we took a “break." Before I left I bought two copies of Dr. Phil’s Relationship Rescue, left one on the kitchen counter for my boyfriend (homework), and boarded the train with the second and a red pen. It was around Cold Spring while taking the "Defining the Problem" self-help tests in Chapter 2 that it dawned on me that my relationship was toast. My test scores were so low even Dr. Phil couldn’t find anything worth saving.
I had diligently read Chapter 1 full of hope that Dr. Phil might help me help myself. With my red pen I had underlined such sentences as: “your relationship is in trouble because you set it up that way.” This seemed promising, fixable. By the time I got to the tests, however, tears were streaming down my face and I was hiding behind my book, my red pen doing all the talking as I answered Dr. Phil’s true-false questions and did his fill-in-the-blank sentences. Then, I tallied up my results to find my score was so low it rated at the bottom of the “seriously troubled/emotional divorce” section. I couldn’t believe I was scoring that low. “No one had ever given me a failing grade, Dr. Phil," I muttered and got out my blue pen and started talking myself through the questions trying to find a positive spin, or moment, that might make something True which I had earlier marked as False. In short, I started cheating on my own self-help test. But try as I might I couldn’t get my score high enough to reach even the “troubled with hope” section.
Back home my boyfriend never cracked his book. I soon moved out and three states away started reading When Things Fall Apart. Sometimes I glance through my old tear-stained copy of Relationship Rescue to look at my answers to Dr. Phil’s questions. My heart breaks for that girl who was so desperate for help she’d look anywhere.
