Jo Piazza by Love Rehab Page A

then added “too quick to fall in love.” Then I had a breakthrough. This was something I did with all my boyfriends leading up to Eric too. Eric was no anomaly.
    It went all the way back to Michael Macintyre in high school. I made a binder of what our wedding would look like and gave it to him before he went off to college a year before me. That was before cell phones, but even I knew the reason he never answered the phone in his dorm.
    I was a love pusher. I just wanted my boyfriends to like me so much that I never really considered whether I liked them. It just felt good to make someone like me.
    Surprised to find fifteen minutes up and just three things on my list, I reconvened the group.
    “I’ll go first.” I broke the ice. “I’m a needy love pusher. I make people tell me they love me before they’ve ever had a chance to fall in love with me.” This was met with nods of approval.
    “That’s all?” Katrina said.
    “It was only fifteen minutes, and I think that is actually quite a big revelation for me. I don’t think I ever realized it was something I did until just now. In my head I genuinely thought all ‘I love you’s came organically and that love just happened to me through a series of madcap moments the way it does in Reese Witherspoon movies, but if you look back through my catalog of boyfriends the ‘love issue’ always came up under duress instigated by me.”
    And that wasn’t all of it. “Since it was said under duress, I made them all feel trapped and eventually they grew to completely despise me.
    “The bigger problem,” I admitted, “is I don’t know if I actually loved them or just wanted to be in love.” I was starting to realize that there was a big difference. Everyone clapped, and Prithi put her arm around me when I sat down.
    Katrina looked like she approved before she stood in front of the group with two pages of her flaws.
    I crossed my arms. It wasn’t quite fair that she was so adept at this listicling since she had done this before and on a silent retreat no less, where she probably had days of peace and quiet and Swedish massage to come up with all her moral failings.
    Stella wrote down her moral failings, and Melinda, who was coming weekly as her translator, read them aloud.
    “I turn into a chameleon. I pretend to like what they like. If they like the Beatles, then I like the Beatles, even though I think ‘Here Comes the Sun’ is one of the worst songs ever written. If they like running, I pretend to like running. I act like I like sashimi when really I only like raw fish in rolls. I think that by becoming more like them they will like me.”
    We all nodded. Everyone did at least a little bit of that. While dating a Colombian in college I pretended to be completely into the fútbol (I even pronounced it like I imagined Gisele would: the Foooootbowl), when I couldn’t name a single position in the fútbol (soccer, damnit) besides the goalie.
    Cameron raised her hand.
    “I envy people in relationships.” We looked at her quizzically. Of course we all envied people in relationships. Somehow relationships became the be-all and end-all of what women strive for in their twenties and thirties. Even as we pretend we’re striving for something else, like a great career or that perfect ass or self-actualization through lots of yoga and meditation, we still sneak a peek at the left ring finger of every man we meet to see if he is worth spending our time talking to. We still hope and pray that every man we encounter is going to be the one who sweeps us off our feet and declares our dating days dead in the water.
    But Cameron had more to say. “I kind of hate them. And I don’t want to hate them, especially my friends. I want to look at my friends who are in relationships and be totally happy for them because they’ve achieved something that I want. If a friend of mine runs a marathon or climbs a mountain, I am proud of them. If they get a man to ask them to move in with