Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,7

private. Though statisticians have attempted to quantify the number of people in therapy, their results are thought to be skewed because many people who go to therapy choose not to admit it.

But those underreported numbers are still high. In any given year, some thirty million American adults are sitting on clinicians’ couches, and the United States isn’t even the world leader in therapy. (Fun fact: the countries with the most therapists per capita are, in descending order, Argentina, Austria, Australia, France, Canada, Switzerland, Iceland, and the United States.)

Given that I’m a therapist, you’d think that the morning after the Boyfriend Incident, it might occur to me to see a therapist myself. I work in a suite of a dozen therapists, my building is full of therapists, and I’ve belonged to several consultation groups in which therapists discuss their cases together, so I’m well versed in the therapy world.

But as I lie paralyzed in the fetal position, that’s not the call I make.

“He’s trash!” my oldest friend, Allison, says after I tell her the story from my bed before my son wakes up. “Good riddance! What kind of person does that—not just to you, but to your kid?”

“Right!” I agree. “Who does this?” We spend about twenty minutes bashing Boyfriend. During an initial burst of pain, people tend to lash out either at others or at themselves, to turn the anger outward or inward. Allison and I are choosing outward, baby! She’s in the Midwest, commuting to work, two hours ahead of me here on the West Coast, and she gets right to the point.

“You know what you should do?” she says.

“What?” I feel like I’ve been stabbed in the heart, and I’ll do anything to stop the pain.

“You should go sleep with somebody! Go sleep with somebody and forget about the Kid Hater.” I instantly love Boyfriend’s new name: the Kid Hater. “Clearly he wasn’t the person you thought he was. Go take your mind off of him.”

Married for twenty years to her college sweetheart, Allison has no idea how to give guidance to single people.

“It might help you bounce back faster, like falling off a bike and then getting right back on,” she continues. “And don’t roll your eyes.”

Allison knows me well. I’m rolling my red, stinging eyes.

“Okay, I’ll go sleep with someone,” I squeak out, knowing she’s trying to make me laugh. But then I’m sobbing again. I feel like a sixteen-year-old going through her first breakup, and I can’t believe I’m having this reaction in my forties.

“Oh, hon,” Allison says, her voice like a hug. “I’m here, and you’ll get through this.”

“I know,” I say, except that in a strange way, I don’t. There’s a popular saying, a paraphrase of a Robert Frost poem: “The only way out is through.” The only way to get to the other side of the tunnel is to go through it, not around it. But I can’t even picture the entrance right now.

After Allison parks her car and promises to call at her first break, I look at the clock: 6:30 a.m. I call my friend Jen, who’s a therapist with a practice across town. She picks up on the first ring and I hear her husband in the background asking who it is. Jen whispers, “I think it’s Lori?” She must have seen the caller ID, but I’m crying so hard I haven’t even said hello yet. If it weren’t for caller ID, she’d think I was some sicko prank-calling.

I catch my breath and tell her what happened. She listens attentively. She keeps saying that she can’t believe it. We also spend twenty minutes trashing Boyfriend, and then I hear her daughter enter the room and say that she needs to get to school early for swim practice.

“I’ll call you at lunch,” Jen says. “But in the meantime, I don’t know that this is the end of the story. Something’s screwy. Unless he’s a sociopath, it doesn’t jibe at all with what I saw for the past two years.”

“Exactly,” I say. “Which means he’s a sociopath.”

I hear her take a sip of water and put the glass down.

“In that case,” she says, swallowing, “I have a great guy for you—one who’s not a kid hater.” She also likes Boyfriend’s new name. “In a few weeks, when you’re ready, I want to introduce you.”

I almost smile at the preposterousness of this. What I really need just hours into this breakup is for somebody to sit with me in my pain, but