Jo Piazza by Love Rehab

the nail on the head. Social media didn’t create our neuroses or unhealthy obsessions. Let’s face it; women have been driving themselves crazy over men since Adam taunted Eve about how she shouldn’t eat the apple because the apple would make her chubby. Eve ate the damn thing out of spite and became man’s scapegoat number one for all eternity.
    Still, social media did allow our too, too complex lady brains to go into hyperdrive, facilitating the cycle of addiction to romantic love.
    “No more social media,” I said with conviction. “Let’s just spend some time offline and see how that works out for us.”
    Everyone nodded in agreement.
    We had our fourth rule!
Rule 4: Never mix social media and relationships,
until he puts a ring on it … then maybe.
    Then I proposed an activity that Joe had suggested to help us figure out our behavior patterns. We needed to create a moral inventory. It was the fourth of the proper twelve steps.
    “What’s a moral inventory?” Jordana asked.
    “I’ve done that one before,” Katrina said, sitting up with excitement after lying prone on the floor with two quartz crystals balanced precariously on her cheekbones to alleviate tension in her gallbladder. “I did it when I went to a silent retreat in Bern. It’s where you make a list of all the things you do that keep you from achieving your best self.”
    “That one sounds fun,” Jordana said, the room nodding in agreement.
    It was a nice simple step to begin with. How hard could it be to write down what was wrong with you? It seemed much harder to write down all the things that were right, and we were already on such a roll after the weekly progress reports. I grabbed a stack of sketch pads that I used to sketch out ideas for work and a handful of pencils, figuring people would want to erase as they went along. I told everyone we would devote fifteen minutes to making our lists and then reconvene to read them and talk about them.
    Five minutes in I realized this was much harder than it seemed. What did I do wrong in my relationships that made them all end badly? Of course, all relationships end badly until, hopefully, the one that never ends at all. What had I particularly done with Eric? Right off the bat I think that I might have come on too strong. Cameron and I definitely had that in common. Only two months into our relationship I had three glasses of wine and babbled “I love you” as we were having sex. Eric ignored me. The next morning I defensively brought it up.
    “You know, when I said I loved you last night, I didn’t mean it. Everyone says things like that during sex.”
    “I know,” he said without batting an eye over the Sports section of the New York Times .
    “But what did you think when I said it?” I pushed.
    “I thought, man, I’m about to come.” He smiled and tweaked my boob, a habit that hurt more than tickled but that I had come to find endearing.
    “Did you think ‘I love you too’?” I wasn’t prepared to let it go.
    “I thought I was about to come,” he said, pulling me into his lap and making that statement a reality then and there.
    I kept on like that, slipping “accidental” “love you”s into conversations where I could claim deniability later and then bickering over them in the morning, until finally one day he relented and submitted to a “love ya too” (emphasis strongly on the ya , as if by leaving off two letters the entire meaning of the phrase could be inexorably altered), after which point I proceeded to tack on an “I love you” to every phone conversation and before we parted, until it became pretty commonplace and he simply accepted that it was something we were now saying and doing. After a while I suppose I had forgotten how it all started and come to believe that he was a willing participant in the lovefest. And after that I simply shifted the narrative of how we fell in love in my head.
    I wrote down “needy” on my list followed by “pushy.” And