Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,76

in line behind us. “It’s so funny running into you here.” She turned to her right. “This is Luke.”

Luke, who was thirtyish and attractive like Keisha, smiled and shook my hand. Although we’d never met, I knew exactly who he was. I knew that Luke was the boyfriend who had recently cheated on Keisha and that she’d figured this out because he’d been unable to get an erection with her. Each time he cheated, the same thing happened. (“His guilt,” she once said, “is in his penis.”)

I also knew that Keisha was preparing to leave him. She’d come to understand what had drawn her to him in the first place and wanted to be more intentional about choosing a trustworthy partner. In our last session, she had said that she planned to break up with him this weekend. It was now Saturday. Had she decided to stay with him, I wondered, or was she going to break it off on Sunday so that she’d have the structure of Monday’s workday to help her stay the course? She’d told me that she wanted to tell Luke in a public place so that he wouldn’t make a scene and beg her to stay, which he’d done when she attempted the conversation at her apartment twice before. She didn’t want to cave again just because he said all the right things to convince her to change her mind.

In the yogurt line, Boyfriend was standing next to me expectantly, waiting to be introduced. I hadn’t yet explained to him that if I see therapy patients outside the office, in order to protect their privacy, I won’t acknowledge them if they don’t acknowledge me first. It could be upsetting, for instance, if I said hello to a patient and the person accompanying her asked, “Who’s that?,” leaving the patient in the awkward position of having to hedge or explain on the spot. What if I were to say hello to a patient who was with a coworker or boss or who was on a first date?

Even if patients said hello to me first, I didn’t introduce them to whomever I was with. That would also be breaking confidentiality—unless I were to lie when asked about how I know the patient.

So Boyfriend was looking at me, and Luke was looking at Boyfriend, and Keisha glanced at my hand, which Boyfriend was holding.

Unbeknownst to Boyfriend, I’d already run into a patient while he and I were together. A few days before, the husband in a couple I was seeing walked by us on the street. Without stopping, he said hi, I said hi back, and we both kept going in opposite directions.

“Who was that?” Boyfriend had asked then.

“Oh, just somebody I know through work,” I said casually. Never mind that I knew more about his sexual fantasies than I knew about Boyfriend’s.

At the yogurt place that Saturday night, I smiled at Keisha and Luke, then turned around to face the counter. The line was long, and Boyfriend took the hint and made small talk with me about yogurt flavors as I tried to tune out Luke’s voice while he excitedly discussed vacation plans with Keisha. He was trying to pin down dates, and Keisha was being cagey, and Luke asked if she’d rather go next month, and Keisha asked if they could talk about it later and changed the subject.

I cringed for both of them.

After Boyfriend and I got our yogurts, I led him to a far table by the exit and took a seat with my back to the rest of the crowded room so that Keisha and I could both have our space.

A few minutes later, Luke stormed past our table and out the door, Keisha trailing behind him. Through the glass walls, we could see Keisha making apologetic gestures to Luke and then Luke getting in his car and driving away, nearly running Keisha over.

Boyfriend seemed to be putting it all together. “So that’s how you know her.” He joked that dating a therapist was like dating a CIA agent.

I laughed and said that being a therapist sometimes felt more like having an affair with your entire caseload, past and present, simultaneously. We’re always pretending not to know the people we know most intimately.

But often it’s therapists who feel uncomfortable when our outside worlds collide. After all, we’ve seen our patients’ real lives. They haven’t seen ours. Outside of our offices, we’re like Z-list celebrities, meaning that hardly anyone knows who we are, but