F*ck Love: One Shrink's Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship Read online

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  Contents

  Introduction: Love, the Most F*cked Feeling of Them All

  Chapter 1: F*ck Charisma

  Five Reasons Good People Can’t Find Good Partners

  Chapter 2: F*ck Beauty

  Ten Questions to Which the Answer Is Always No

  Chapter 3: F*ck Chemistry

  Should I Go on a Date with This Person I’m Interested In?

  Chapter 4: F*ck Communication

  Five Ways to Prevent Yourself from Getting Worn-Out by Internet Dating

  Chapter 5: F*ck a Sense of Humor

  Five Ways to Tell If a Relationship Has Staying Power

  Chapter 6: F*ck Good Family

  Should My Partner and I Break Up?

  Chapter 7: F*ck Intelligence

  Five Things to Consider before Deciding to Get a Divorce

  Chapter 8: F*ck Wealth

  Should My Partner and I Have a Baby?

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Index

  Dedications

  Both Bennetts: To Mona, wife and mother, co-creator of the truth behind this book and anchor of our lives for over forty years/-ever.

  MB: To Peter Bleiberg, my brother-in-law and better-than-brother.

  SB: To the man who wrote more wise words about love—romantic, brotherly, spiritual, and every kind of love in between—than almost anyone else in history. Prince, this book is dedicated 2 U.

  Introduction:

  Love, the Most F*cked Feeling of Them All

  Much print has been dedicated to the subject of romantic relationships—why they’re so hard to find, so difficult to maintain, so easily analogized to planets and pets—but the major source of trouble isn’t that complicated. Too many people choose their partners based on excitement, lust, attraction, neediness . . . on feelings. Not surprisingly, as the authors of the book F*ck Feelings, we see that as a major problem.

  While we’ve previously covered all manner of relationships, from voluntary (friendships, romantic partnerships) to involuntary (coworkers, neighbors, family, family, a thousand times family), this book is about searching for, maintaining, and surviving lasting romantic relationships.

  Despite the (catchy, profane) title, F*ck Love isn’t a manifesto that praises arranged marriages and claims that, due to her romcom filmography, Nancy Meyers is the Great Satan; it’s a practical guide to finding someone whom you won’t feel crazy about just until the honeymoon is over, in a partnership you can feel good about for life. This book teaches you how to do a pragmatic assessment of what you’re into—or really what you need—so you don’t obsess over whether he’s into you and waste time on guys or gals who are easily described by airport bestsellers.

  We don’t tell you to reject love entirely, but to combine it with good management and a businesslike methodology. Put them together and you’ve got a fighting chance of either finding a good partner or at least not fucking up your life. This book might not help you find the person of your dreams, but it will provide you with the road map to avoiding the kind of nightmare relationships that probably caused you to buy books like this in the first place.

  Before we can Sherpa you on your journey to the summit of Mt. Monogamy, however, let’s break down exactly what we mean by a management/business approach, whom it’s designed to guide, how it’s best used, and, if used correctly, the kind of relationship you can expect to find at the end.

  Our Approach: See Yourself as a Romance Recruiter

  Our term of choice for significant other—whether we’re referring to a boyfriend, husband, old lady in a common-law relationship—is “partner,” not just because it’s a good catchall, but because we believe that strong partnership is at the core of any solid relationship. Our hearts, pop songs, and Oprahs may tell us that relationships exist to end loneliness or find eternal love, but our minds, bank accounts, and books we’re reading at this second know that the real point of finding a mate is to have a good partner with whom you can build a good life.

  That’s why we encourage you to stop seeing your search as the quest for a soul mate or for marital contentment and start looking at yourself as a corporate headhunter out to find someone with whom you can run the business of life better than you can do it on your own.

  That doesn’t mean we think you should wind up with a partner you can work with but don’t really like, or that love doesn’t figure anywhere into the equation, and that discussions about who will take out the garbage will require you to write four TPS reports. Love and trust are important, but love doesn’t last if your partner can’t be relied on to do his portion of the work, make smart decisions, or keep promises, and if he doesn’t share your long-term goals, whether they be having kids or training show ferrets.

  The stakes for keeping a marriage and business afloat are both sky-high; if you can’t work with your partner to survive financial problems, stagnancy, and the sometimes-crippling annoyance caused by the other guy’s weaknesses and obnoxious habits, you risk the pain of bankruptcy, divorce, or personal ruin.

  That’s why investing in a long-term partnership/relationship is about the most dangerous thing you will ever do in your life—base jumping and relying on Boston’s MBTA during a snowy winter included—and the business recruitment approach is the best way to screen out and avoid people who are bound to damage your life and break your heart, regardless of how desirable and exciting they seem in the short term.

  So, you can love someone deeply, but if you can also work well together with that someone as a partner, you’re much more apt to like each other after ten or twenty years. Which means, as hard as it may be for our romantically skewed minds to believe at first, the wish list of the human heart and of your average Head of Human Resources are remarkably similar.

  This book isn’t aimed just at people looking for a relationship, a.k.a. embarking on a hiring, but also at those who are having issues in relationships and marriages. Our approach works for anyone—married or single, gay or straight, dating around or considering settling down—who’s looking for help finding, keeping, or improving a stable relationship.

  Even if you’re unsure about ever wanting a marriage or a lasting commitment, this book is still useful; good relationships are good relationships, whether they’re romantic, close friendships, office based, or sex-centric temporary couplings. Knowing how to find good relationships in general and avoid the many, many ones that aren’t is a skill you need to learn and practice all your life. Becoming relationship savvy isn’t just necessary in order to find a relationship that lasts—especially since marriage isn’t the right goal for everyone (see p. xxi)—but so you can protect yourself from unnecessary pain, complications, and legal action.

  The most important thing you have to do in finding a good relationship is to screen out the bad ones that you’re drawn to, so if you learn quickly from early heartbreaks and are naturally drawn to solid people, you don’t need this book. If, however, like so many people, you find yourself drawn repeatedly into the same bad relationships, then our approach will help you figure out what you want that you just can’t and shouldn’t have and get more rational and methodical about screenin
g.

  No matter who you are or what kind of relationship you’re in or seeking, success depends on your ability to recognize good character strengths when you see them, realize how vital they are to the long-term success of any relationship, and recruit them into your life.

  The Start of Your Search and the Basic Makeup of Our Map

  Since you’re going to be looking at your search or relationship through a business lens, begin by thinking seriously about your priorities and needs and, after considering what you can reasonably expect from a partner or prospect, put together a job description for your co-CEO of Marriage Inc. First, figure out the requirements of the job itself, from how much time you require (how many hours per week she’ll have to put in), to what duties she’ll be required to perform (from sharing in the pet-walking and dish-doing), to what special skills she’ll need to possess (from spider-killing to baby-having).

  Then, you need to determine what qualities a candidate should possess—the personal and character traits someone needs to qualify—and that’s where this book first comes in.

  Each chapter of this book is dedicated to exploring one of the most common traits that people claim to look for when searching for a partner: charisma, beauty, chemistry, communication, a sense of humor, a good family, intelligence, and wealth. Chapter by chapter, we break down how these traits can positively and negatively affect one’s search, whether you’re looking for that quality or living with it yourself. We also show how these traits contribute to a strong partnership by exploring their impact on three basic relationship stages—looking for people, dating them, and living with or marrying them.

  Using examples inspired by the relationship problems that Dr. Bennett hears in his practice and/or that our readers submit to our advice blog, fxckfeelings.com, we show how each stage poses its own risks and rewards as you ask yourself, repeatedly, whether someone with a certain trait measures up to your requirements. If you decide a relationship is worthwhile despite unavoidable drawbacks, we also help you manage whatever is difficult and unlikely to change.

  We identify red flags associated with each trait; this being a businesslike search, you have to do at least as much due diligence as your average HR department, minus the urine tests and with the possibility of eventually meeting the parents. Like any HR department, you must search efficiently or waste your resources, so you learn to drop candidates quickly once you know they aren’t good enough.

  Do your research by talking to his friends and relatives, not just about him as a person, but how he treated prior girlfriends (see table below for complete investigative techniques). Then immediately lose the résumé or phone number of a candidate if your research shows that his charisma often lets him get away with bad spending habits, or beauty blinds people to his brushes with the law, or he’s a great communicator who often uses his skills to try to talk his way out of a problem with drugs or alcohol so severe that it can be perceived without a cup of pee.

  At the end of each chapter, we identify five major elements that every solid relationship needs—mutual attraction, mutual respect, shared effort, common interests, and common goals—and describe the potentially positive and negative impact of that chapter’s trait on each of those elements. That gives you a scorecard for rating these traits in candidates with the most potential.

  We also provide you with a funny/serious lady-magazine-style quiz in each chapter, along with humorous sidebars that explain the art of apology (p. 100) and explore whether such romantic clichés as “the heart wants what it wants” (p. 196) or “there’s someone for everyone” (p. 50) are “Truth, or Bullshit?” (“bullshit” and “bullshit unless you’re totally unhygienic” respectively, which you’ll just have to read to understand).

  Once you’ve found likely candidates for an entry-level position, we recommend putting them through certain character-revealing tests to see if they’re ready for management, such as helping you babysit your hell-spawn nephew or working with you to survive the aftermath of your shared experiment with gas-station sushi. Only then will you know whether you’ve met your goal and found someone who isn’t just a good worker, but whom you work well with and, hopefully, you can get to take your business to the next level.

  Getting into the Basics of “Good Detective Work”

  In this book we repeatedly advocate doing “good detective work,” mostly when giving advice about how to determine whether a partner is reliable or a questionable behavior is likely to be habitual. While it may sound as if we’re asking you to gather DNA samples or explain how time is a flat circle, we’re actually just advising you to look at someone’s history to determine whether he or she has a track record of bad behavior and its management.

  That’s because, if there’s one thing that Dr. Bennett has learned from his many patients suffering in bad partnerships, it’s that most relationships are what they are, most relationship problems arise from who people are, and most times they can’t be fixed but could have been avoided if people had been more careful and thoughtful in the first place. Looking back at what is worst about a bad relationship, people almost always identify obvious red flags that should have warned them off but which they chose to ignore because they believed in the power of love (or therapy) to conquer all. Instead, therapy was merely conquering their deductible and their marriages were still doomed.

  So, yes, some people can technically change, but so can a two-party political system, and if Dr. Bennett’s experience or American history can teach us anything, it’s that somebody who has a long history of cheating is as likely to stay faithful to you as is the United States to elect a Green Party president.

  Here then are the behaviors that frequently deserve detective work, along with the places to do your investigation and the results to look for. None of this should involve excessive snooping or shady behavior because the kind of evidence you’re looking for is rarely hidden: e.g., if you’re worried that your special someone is bad with money, her creditors will make their presence and validation for your concern known.

  Ultimately, all you’re doing is a simple background check, because if somebody has a criminal relationship record, then you owe it to yourself to end things before the flat circle of romantic failures becomes truly infinite.

  Suspected Behavior

  Where to Investigate

  Hope to Find

  Dread to Find

  Infidelity

  Facebook, but also through not-creepy conversations with her friends and family. If you’re really suspicious, you can snoop around her cell phone, but if you cross the line from investigator to stalker, then you might want to cross the line from dating back to single.

  No evidence or good reason to think she is, wants to, is likely to, etc., and that you were probably just being paranoid after she “forced you” to sit with her and watch all those Lifetime movies.

  A YouTube clip of her being confronted by an ex on Maury, a dick pic gallery on her cell phone, friends and family whose stories could make up a multivolume oral history on cheating, etc. Upon being confronted, however, she insists she never meant it or will never do it again (while simultaneously being texted the image of a human penis).

  Flakiness

  Start with your own calendar to see which events he was late for or forgot entirely, then compare notes with his nearest and dearest. Maybe give him small tests of reliability—assignments to pick up a shirt at the dry cleaner or make dinner plans with friends—and see if he follows through or holds a steady flaking pattern.

  He’s normally reliable but going through a rough patch due to a transition at work or a noisy upstairs neighbor or daylight saving time. Or, if he does have a tendency to flake, he’s aware of it, not defensive about it, and has learned some tricks to help him remember to get the most important stuff done on time.

  He insists he’s got it together, but it’s the credit-card or cable or power companies that lose his payments, although the debt collectors obviously don’t want to hear the truth. It�
�s also not his fault that he hasn’t kept a job longer than six months, and he wasn’t lying when he told you he got that thing done, even though he hasn’t and never will.

  Inability to say no or to prioritize requests

  Check out his schedule, tracking how he spends his time and money, because if he’s giving whole evenings to his needy and awful aunt while you only got to see him for a ten-minute lunch break that week, then you’re seeing solid evidence of poor prioritizing.

  After you ask him, without anger, to consider a better approach to time management, he’s able to see the benefits to sometimes saying no and finds his own good reasons for saying no to unreasonable demands.

  He treats your concerns as if you’re unreasonably needy (unlike his wretched aunt who needs him to come over and inventory her sports bras) and insensitive to his needs. Of course, when you tell him you want to break up, you become the squeakiest wheel, so he gives you the most attention . . . until the crisis abates.

  Financial irresponsibility

  Any available financial documents, or just look casually at her mail for anything marked “Final Notice.” Ask about whether she keeps a budget or has a rainy-day fund or even an old jar filled with loose change and extra shirt buttons.

  She admits to having accrued some debt but has since learned to monitor her spending and is working on making herself a reasonable budget, even if sticking to it during sample-sale season is often hopeless.

  She says she has it totally under control since she pays out maxed cards by signing up for new cards and maxing them out, and also, whenever she gets too deep in the hole, she just emails this guy in Russia for a new identity (although she won’t tell you her real name until you’ve been together for six months) (and you’ve lent her $5,000).