"This Thing Called Love" - provocative essay from Glasgow's Sunday Herald

 

Isn't that 50s illustration scary? Reminds me how vindicated I felt, and relieved, when I saw gnarly portraits of love and coupledom as a kid. Like in "Klute," which my mother took me to see at the drive-in when I was maybe 7. Sure it was disturbing. Inappropriate. It also strangely opened up a richer world of relating. Including erotic. Something screamingly absent from this starched illustration. But I digress.

Recently, a Scottish journalist, Teddy Jamieson, contacted me about an essay on love he was composing. It was to appear on Valentine's Day in the Glasgow Sunday Herald magazine. He said he'd been intrigued by my book, Love Junkie, and that he thought maybe I could contribute some of the darker colors to his portrait. A week later, we spoke. What he used from our conversation is in parts distorted. Yet this is what often happens when one collaborates on creative projects. It's an opportunity to let go, get Zen about the flow of ideas, imagination. The creative commons. Sampling. I think Teddy is a helluva writer. A probing interviewer. His essay on the color white which was previously published in the Sunday Herald left me breathless. I am eager to hear your thoughts on his whole vision of love as reflected in this essay. Or whatever sparks you, or makes your heart leap, or sink. Or pulse brightly in recognition. After all, Jamieson includes delectable Don Draper, the ultimate cynic of love. When I get some comments, I'll respond to the misrepresentations of my quotes, in service of maintaining clarity about my position as a love junkie -- which is neither victim, nor sex-negative. Au contraire. Enjoy! As we continue the ongoing dialogue about love, sex, romance, relationships -- what constitutes health and what toxicity, and what, perhaps, straddles those lines and vacillates betwixt and between. Happy post-V-Day! I hope it was a beautiful one for all of you. RRxo

[NOTE:  In order to read the article, simply click on the page you desire and a bigger, readable size screen will pop up.]

Letting Go of the Fairytale: Happy Valentine's Day!

 

A true princess yearns eternally (mother hunger). Waits for love and stays faithful despite receiving little or no nurturing (deprivation). Suffers for love (masochism). Insists on multiple feathered mattresses (entitlement). Puts exaggerated stock in her locks (addiction to haircare, vanity, the externals). Remains always a princess, never a queen (arrested development). Fantasizes the same dream of Your Princely Arms swooping her up (obsessive, addicted to fantasy -- easier when one is always dressed in a flowy gown). Pines for love, yet is either never or rarely satisfied (masochism, plus victimhood, plus dramaqueen). Gets deeply hooked when presented with challenge and rejection (seriously fucked up, overly driven to fix, and prolly PTSD -- Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome - like so many of us due to our childhoods. Not to mention the cultural messages! How are we to be both sexy bad girl and marriageable good girl? As Kelly McDaniel states so eloquently in her must-read Ready To Heal: Women Facing Love, Sex and Relationship Addiction, this results in a cultural double bind. Which results in self-hatred. What's a girl to do?)

 

Ah, Andrew Lang. I fed on your pretty-colored fairy books as a child. I devoured your tomes. Traced the romantic illustrations. Dreamed of locking myself away in a tower, pricking my finger with a thorn so blood would spill onto snow and prove my love, enduring pestilence and plagues for my man. You know -- the one in disco-shiny armor that still showed off his muscled limbs, the one thundering on horseback, toward me! To rescue the broken one, the girl incomplete without a knight, a prince, a king.

Since I grew up in a chaotic household, where my mother was crazy and self-medicated with alcohol and my father was not in the picture -- I retreated into books. Specifically fairytales. On one occasion, I strode into my mother's bedroom where she had lain all day, hungover, depressed, though it was already dinner time -- and presented her with a list of chores I should be assigned. "To build character," I said, steely-eyed as only a 'tween can be. She laughed, then sank back into the twisted bedclothes. "Get out," she said. "I don't feel like being a mother." 

So I plucked my ideals and honed my morals from fairytales. This has gotten me into trouble all my life.

Imagine my pleasure when I was invited to talk specifically about this one aspect of a love junkie's journey. How childhood fairytales exacerbated an already vulnerable psychic and chemical condition, one created out of parental chaos, attachment disorder, lack of rules and boundaries, absence of love, trauma.

Upon return from the East Coast, where I participated at Sex Week At Yale (will cover in a separate blog post!), I spoke with lovely Kim Iverson out of Austin, Texas, about Letting Go of the Fairytale. Turns out her radio show producer, the way cool Casey Acevedo, is a self-proclaimed princess who's struck out when it comes to love. I tried to set her straight in a quick 7-minute interview. Here's the link! Check it out. I'd love to know your response.

Letting Go of the Fairytale -- on "Your Time With Kim" radio show

If you are so inclined, post comments here, and/or on the radio show's blog. Consider it a virtual Valentine -- if not to me, then to all the girls and women out there struggling with their own ideas of love, romance, and their beautiful yearning hearts. Love yourself. That is the best Valentine of all.

Rachel
xo

[Let me make clear:  I am an ardent fan of fairytales. The real ones. The harsher the better. Bring on Grimm. Check out Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment for illumination on how these potent archetypal stories can help and heal a young psyche still unable to articulate dangerous emotions. It just so happens in my case these stories brewed together with other elements to provide a problematic, unrealistic storyline. That narrative, the story I told myself for years, is the one that needed to be changed. And which I did, in part, in Love Junkie:  A Memoir. Stay tuned for more talk about the transformational power of writing memoir. And of narrative therapy, as invented by David White.]

Break The Love Junkie Habit! CalStateLA pre-Valentine's presentation

 

This past Monday, I had the pleasure and privelege to read and discuss Love Junkie for a packed house at CalStateLA's groovy Student Union. Rhonda Mitchell, a way cool and super-talented former writing student of mine from Mediabistro's 12-Week Novelist Bootcamp before Writers On Fire was born, invited me.  The event was part of their ongoing Cup of Culture series at the Cross Cultural Center. 

We thought maybe there'd be 10-20 students dropping in between classes. Mostly writers. Instead, it was standing room only and they sold out of books. The students' palpable hunger for straight talk about love and sex, romance and relationships from an older adult perspective was beyond inspiring. "Tell us what 'Sex and the City' doesn't talk about," they said. To illustrate how love junkieness can take root in childhood, I read a bit from the Blue Flame chapter, then a section about the boy with the longest eyelashes in the world, my six-year-old crush. Fielded questions about relationships. Addiction. Attachment. Students opened up with amazing courage. Some cried as they shared about being involved with people who didn't treat them right and yet they couldn't stop going back. I also read from the Phuket section. It's so important to let go of judgment, shame. What better way than sharing such a story. One girl told me afterwards that she was so inspired she was going to start a blog about relationships. No longer would she waste all her time chasing phantom love. 

Here's what Rhonda said the students wrote in their evaluations:

1) I learned the true definition of a love junkie
2) I learned that you should love yourself first
3) I learned that love can turn into an obsession
4) I learned about the complexity of relationships and love
5) I learned that love can be addictive

They rated their interest in this event as “high.” They thought the length of the event was “just right.” They also rated you as “excellent. They would make no changes to the event.

Glad I didn't know they were evaluating me as I was presenting!

Days later, I am even more inspired and certain that colleges and other young adults would benefit from this frank discussion of love addiction. What a perfect way to prepare for returning to the Yale University campus tomorrow for SWAY, Sex Week At Yale http://www.sexweekatyale.com/schedule/ -- a weeklong exploration of intimacy, relationships, sex and love featuring everyone from transgendered sex workers to cultural anthropologist and love expert Dr. Helen Fisher. I'm honored to have a chance to bring honest talk about love and sex and romance addiction to people who're young enough to wake up and change the course of their lives. It will be my first time returning to the Yale campus after graduating a quarter century ago.

As I wrote in student book inscriptions, here is a virtual Valentine for us all:  

Remember to love yourself first.

Rachel

xo

On the anniversary of my mother's death

Jane's high school portrait

Windsor School

Today marks the anniversary of my mother's death by suicide, over 30 years ago. I pay tribute to her and continue to honor her memory by doing my best to embrace life and live fully, slaying demons along the rocky, sparkly-glorious way. Let there be hope for all those suffering, all those considering ending their own lives now or in the past. I hope you choose life. Go where the love is.

 

Jane on Commando, jumping

10 years before I was born

About my mother's high school portrait:  Windsor School. All girls. Bostonian blueblood prep. She was so full of promise. Troubled, yes. Also a crack photographer, killer field hockey player, a graceful equestrian, and played Creon -- interestingly, andrognynously -- in the school production of Antigone. I still miss you, Ma.

And so ends another holiday season, which for me -- and I know for many other people who suffered or suffer difficult family relationships, history, or have none -- brings pain. We have made it through. We have triumphed. Let the rest of the year be about celebrating life.

Call me Rachel Resnickova. Czech translation of Love Junkie from Jota arrived yesterday. Positively psychedelic!

Gifts: A beautiful new review from The Barcelona Review

Meat stand in Morocco 

http://www.barcelonareview.com/rev/69.html
Talk about gifts. What a thoughtful, generous review from one of my all-time favorite online magazines, The Barcelona Review. Check it out, and then if you're interested, click on the link to an old story of mine, "The Meat-Eaters of Marrakesh." You just might recognize one of the characters/settings/relationships in the memoir. Only it's unleashed and heightened the way fiction allows. In the review of Love Junkie, Jill Adams says, "This book matters." Wow!
Merry merry! Whether you celebrate Xmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia or Festivus (the holiday for the rest of us) -- tear it up! RRxo
Stay tuned for groovy pics and write-up of the recent wild and woolly Hustler/Hollywood event. For now, as a seasonal teaser and my gift to you all who have been so supportive and inspiring, enjoy this snap from the last minutes of the Hustler/Hollywood event. Yes, Jesus came. Clearly he is a love junkie, too.

Jesus has my back. And one of the guest's backs, too.

Also her formidable scarlet nails.

Ever Fallen In Love With Someone You Shouldn't Have?

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