In October 2016, football player Earl Thomas was so excited about a scoring a touchdown that he expressed his joy by hugging a referee. In response, the referee flagged him. Many people felt this was an overreaction on the part of the referee, but was it? Did Thomas have a right to hug anyone in his exuberant moment?

This isn’t the only hugging incident in the media in recent months. Pop star Kesha had a hug refused by comedian Jerry Seinfeld who didn’t recognize her. According to CNN, “[Seinfeld] denied her three times and even stepped away from her when she tried to touch him.” In response, Seinfeld stated, “`I don't hug a total stranger. I have to meet someone, say hello. I gotta start somewhere.’” That seems like a more than reasonable position for anyone nonetheless a famous individual who has to deal with a lot of fans without appropriate boundaries.
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In my opinion, it’s very common for men to try to hug women without their consent. Recently Marco Rubio went to hug Ivanka Trump who stiffly refused his advances. Back during the preparation for debates for the 2016 Presidential election, Hillary Rodham Clinton actually practiced evading a hug from her stand-in for Donald Trump. The video of the rehearsal is actually quite funny. As amusing as the parody was, the reality behind it is not. A very high-power woman who has been one of our nation’s leaders was rehearsing an encounter with another now prominent politician. Part of that rehearsal was intentionally trying to make sure this man, one who has admitted on video to having sexually assaulted women, did not violate Clinton's boundaries by trying to hug her. Her aide got rather into the roleplaying and went a tad overboard creating the humor. Had he not been someone she was close to, this video wouldn’t be funny at all. However, the message behind it is powerful: Even women who are world leaders have to work hard to avoid being manhandled in hugs that they don’t want.
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It's not just women, though. James Comey admitted to trying to hide in the White House curtains to avoid encountering Donald Trump who then tried to hug Comey despite Comey making the first gesture towards a handshake only. Trump is someone who is very aware of the power of dictating physical boundaries with those around him. He shows this not only through his unwanted hugs but through his ridiculous handshake politics.

Hugging is a very strange thing in our culture. I grew up in a family where hugging was not a part of the family dynamics. I don’t remember my parents ever hugging me. When I was in high school, I joined a youth group where hugging was a part of the culture. We all hugged each other as a greeting just as most would say hello or goodbye. I discovered I really liked hugging my friends. As I have gone forward in life, I have raised my children in a home where hugging is a daily occurrence. Their parents hug them, and they hug each other. I am very comfortable with hugging among those I’m close to.

However, with strangers, I don’t always feel that comfort. Once I entered the dating world in my post-divorce life, I began experiencing what I dubbed as “the consolation hug.” After a date which was suboptimal, men would give me a hug after declining to have any further dates with me. To me, the consolation hug was unwanted and unwarranted. It felt like the men were implicitly saying to me, “I know I just hurt you, and I feel bad about it. However, I am not aware enough to think about how hugging you might feel to you. I’m just trying to console myself into thinking I’m a decent guy by hugging you to show there are no hard feelings. Whether you want to be hugged or not is irrelevant to my thought process. I just need to feel better about how I just treated you, and hugging you will make me feel better about myself.” I began loathing the consolation hug though I never got very good at evading it.

At one point I went to a Meetup where I ran into a man whom I had previous interactions with. He knew I was attracted to him, but he was not attracted to me. We were both clear on where things stood between us, and despite our history, we managed to have a great conversation together throughout the meal. When we walked out together, he very unexpectedly gave me what felt like another consolation hug. I fumed internally about that hug for quite a while, and then I finally sent an angry email to him very unjustly accusing him of doing something that was demeaning to me. He was understandably clueless as to why I was upset because he looked at that hug in a very different way than I did. He explained to me that he had been raised as a Southern gentleman, and the appropriate social custom was to shake men’s hands when saying goodbye and to hug women. He meant nothing beyond that.

When I took this new information about Southern social customs into consideration, I realized this man was right. Every single man who had given me a “consolation hug” was actually a Southerner. The men who did not were raised in the North. Suddenly a lot more made sense. Having lived in the South for 25 years now, though, I was clear that Southern culture very much dictates that women’s bodies are not their own. This social custom of hugging women without their consent was just one more sign of that mistreatment of women. It’s at the foundation of our rape culture. Men should not automatically have the right to hug women, yet in a culture that doesn’t respect women’s boundaries, a hug is seen as appropriate behavior for men towards women (but not towards other men). Once again, we’ve encountered a situation where we need the societal rule to be “yes means yes” rather than “no means no.” Unless people have indicated that it is ok to touch them, then it’s not ok to randomly hug them.

I recently went out to dinner with a man I had never met before. We spent a wonderful evening talking, and at the end he very respectfully asked me, “Do you hug?” These are just three simple words, but they raised my opinion of him even higher than it already was. It told me that he respected women and their boundaries. He knew that I might not want him touching me. However, I am a person who hugs when the situation feels right, and it definitely did feel right in this case. I walked away from this hug feeling appreciated rather than violated. It would be great if all hugs left people feeling the same way.

​©2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Love is where compassion prevails and kindness rules. ~my tea bag’s inspirational message this morning

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the Southwest Sexual Health Alliance’s presentation of Chris Donaghue, Ph.D., who lectured on concepts from his book Sex Outside the Lines: Authentic Sexuality in a Sexually Dysfunctional Culture and an upcoming book. While I have yet to put up a book review of Sex Outside the Lines, the short version of my opinion of it is that I both loved it and hated it. It’s a work that asks readers to stretch their minds and ideas, sometimes outside the realm of reality and into a utopic society.
 
One of the things that Donaghue is very good about acknowledging is his own privilege: He knows he is a good looking, intelligent, well-educated, white male. He also recognized during the talk that he’s been recently alerted to the thin privilege he experiences. While I think his awareness of the privilege of being a fit and attractive person is a good start, I feel several of his more popular ideas continue to play directly into the overwhelming prejudice in our society against those who are not thin.

My own experience in the dating world as an obese woman is one which very much demonstrates the attitudes and prejudices in our society towards those of larger size. In the four years since I opened myself up to dating again after my separation and divorce, I’ve had very little success through either Meetups or numerous dating websites. My experience is not unique; almost every overweight person I’ve met who has tried online dating has given up because of the discrimination they faced. I can immediately name you a handful of friends and acquaintances who haven’t been on a date in years because they are seen as undateable by most of the population because of their weight. It’s not due to a lack of openness or effort on their parts.

Despite their desires that I not do it, I often call people on the difference between preference and prejudice. One of the most common things I see on dating profiles is men stating, “I don’t date fat women. I know that sounds rude, but it’s just a preference of mine.” The reality is that it’s a prejudice, not a preference. When we judge others before we even interact with them solely based on their appearances, we are discriminating. I ask people who say or write these words to replace them with a racial minority. Would they say, “I don’t date black women. I know that sounds rude, but it’s just a preference of mine”? The reality is that most of the people I interact with are aware enough to understand that to say such a thing would be incredibly rude and prejudiced. However, to them, it’s ok to have that same prejudice against those who are overweight and excuse it as “just a preference.” To say that you are not attracted to all fat people is blatant discrimination against an entire population of people without knowing them as individuals. It’s judgmental, uncompassionate, and unloving.

While Donaghue laudably argues that people should expand their boundaries and date outside of their comfort zones, he simultaneously argues both in his book and at the presentation yesterday that people should date those whom they are attracted to. Unfortunately, to most men (and probably to most people, though I don’t have the experience outside of my heterosexual experiences to verify that) that translates into being immediately attracted to others’ physical appearance. In her fabulous senior thesis Can She Really 'Play that Game Too'?, Leah Fessler describes the dating experience at Middlebury College in 2015 with a focus on the difference between men and women when it came to the “hook up culture.” One of her assertions is that a majority of men refuse to consider being with a woman if she is not immediately physically attractive to them:

I suspect a wider study of American society would find a similar pattern.   

My own experience has confirmed Fessler’s theory and expanded upon it. When I first got on dating sites, I put up professional quality pictures. When I messaged men, 95% of them did not respond. However, in my most recent round of online dating, I put up a profile with no picture; I noted at the bottom that if men had read that far, I was happy to send them a link to my picture if they were a good match for me. This time around when I messaged men, 95% of them DID respond. What I discovered is that I am very attractive on paper. Men see a woman who is highly educated, open-minded, compassionate, not looking to trap them into a marriage with babies, sex-positive, and more. I’ve had dozens of well-matched men interested me, many of them asking me out, some even providing phone numbers so we can arrange the dates. However, the moment they request and see a picture, the same men disappear into the woodwork. Only a few have the decency to send a final “thanks but no thanks” note. The overwhelming majority of men I approach have interest in me as a person until they discover I’m overweight. Suddenly the same very attractive woman is no longer appealing. That is the very definition of fat prejudice.

I also believe based on my personal experience that sexual and romantic attraction is rooted in much more than just physical appearance. Two of the three men I’ve been in love with in this life were friends before they were love interests. I was not incredibly physically attracted to either of them when we first met. Sexual attraction can develop over time once one has gotten to know the other person better. More often than not, that hot sexual attraction leads to relationships that are doomed to be short-lived. It’s nothing more than hormones speaking. While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having relationships like that, it’s also not wrong to open oneself to relationships that might develop from mutual interests rather than hormones. Sexual chemistry and connection can be very successful in a relationship even when there’s no immediate physical pull towards that person if one opens oneself up to the possibility.

Thus, when Chris Donaghue advocates that people should date those whom we are attracted to with no qualifiers attached, he’s perpetuating social dating dysfunction. Donaghue is very aware that people are highly influenced by the media and advertising. Study after study has shown how deeply advertising and media can influence our subconscious minds, changing what we think we want and what we think we are attracted to. Magazines, advertisements, tv shows, movies: They all tell us we “should” be attracted to slim people who fit a certain profile. Most people aren’t consciously aware enough to realize how media is warping their attractions in the dating world. It takes very rare and very strong people to step outside of those cultural ideals and date people who are attractive on the inside when their appearance is outside of that approved by social media. Most people don’t even recognize that their “types” are actually rooted in dysfunction, not genuine attraction.

One of Donaghue’s ideas that I’ve seen shared in numerous places is, “Experience a lot of sex/sexuality so you truly understand it.” This quote was directed towards a person who wanted to become a sex therapist and wanted Donaghue’s advice about it, but a statement like this also becomes shaming for those who daily fight fat prejudice in our society and who, despite their efforts, can’t find dates nonetheless sexual partners. Likewise, stating as he does in Sex Outside the Lines that “Working on oneself while solo is easy and lazy, and is an actual avoidance of doing the real work” also is a very shaming statement for those who are not single by choice  (101). It’s far better that individuals work on themselves when single rather than sitting around and feeling sorry for themselves. Just because they aren’t in a romantic relationship does not mean they are not in relationship with others, and just because they are working on themselves while solo doesn’t mean they are lazy.

Last weekend, I went on a generally enjoyable date with a man I’d met online. We messaged for a few days, discovering that we had a tremendous amount in common, so we decided to meet for dinner on the following weekend to see what the chemistry was like in real life. Despite having seen full-length pictures of me in advance, this man declined the opportunity to pursue anything else with me after that dinner because after seeing me in person he decided I was too fat. This is the reality of dating in modern America for those who are overweight. We aren’t fighting against attractions and preferences. We’re up against outright prejudice.

© 2016 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

When I rejoined the dating world, I quickly learned the term sapiosexual: One who is attracted to intelligence. The term is an apt descriptor for me and almost always for the men who are attracted to me. We are among those who find people who use their brains to be some of the sexiest lovers in the world. We want partners who can talk smart to us before they talk sexy to us. After all, the brain is the sexiest organ in the body.

While reading How Not to Fall by Emily Foster, I found the perfect romance for a sapiosexual. The novel is a work of erotic fiction custom designed for a nerd, especially an intellectual who has a fondness for psychology. A far cry from so many romances which are written for the lowest common denominator, How Not to Fall seamlessly integrates psychological theories and knowledge into its text and often into the sexual foreplay of its very smart characters. Despite its intellectual content, Foster writes in a conversational tone that is accessible to all potential readers.

Building on a taboo relationship of a post-doctoral supervisor and an undergraduate student falling for each other, the book explores the month-long relationship that the two of them consummate once she has finished school and they can legitimately be together. Charles, a post-doctoral researcher, is the slightly older, more sexually experienced man who brings Annabelle, the recently graduated virgin, into a new phase of her sexuality. Aside from many vivid sex scenes, the book contains a lot of conversation, dancing scenes, and rock climbing scenes. Foster weaves all of these together in a coherent novel that feels like an excerpt from two people’s lives, not just a bunch of sex scenes thrown together surrounded by weak dialog to sell a book.​

Most important to Foster’s objectives for this romance, the relationship between Charles and Annabelle is one built on equality and respect. From the beginning, Charles refuses to cross a line where he would be taking advantage of Annabelle because of his position of academic power over her. Once they are able to freely enter into the relationship, Charles still insists on taking the relationship slowly so that Annabelle gets to have the best introduction to sexual activity he can possibly give her. Even before they enter into slightly more kinky activities, Charles makes sure he has full consent from Annabelle and verifies that she knows and remembers their safewords (a term not used in the book) so that she can always stop whatever they are doing if it no longer feels right to her. It’s a relationship built on mutual understanding, respect and trust.

From one of the earliest conversations in the book, I began to wonder if Foster had been sitting in on an event in my life. Word for word, Charles and Annabelle said almost the same words as I had exchanged with a previous love in my life. As the novel progressed, I again saw scenes from my own life unfolding on the pages in front of me. While the novel is a fantasy, it was clear to me that this was a work grounded in reality. Much of what happens during the novel could be a part of its readers' lives.

I was hoping How Not to Fall would be a romance I could share with my teenage daughter, but I think it is still a bit too explicit for her at this point in her life. In a few years, I plan to give it to her so she can have a better understanding of what romance could and probably should look like. I also will insist that she should use condoms, something that Charles and Annabelle do not do because she is on hormonal birth control. However, even with frequent STI testing, many people carry strains of HPV that they are unaware of because they aren’t tested for them. I’ve also had a partner whose one set of STI testing did not include Herpes Simplex 1 and 2 because his doctor’s office told him that he’d know if he had them, a very erroneous idea in regard to viruses that can lie dormant for a while before manifesting. Hormonal birth control offers no protection against STIs, and thus, it is in people’s best interest to use condoms when they are not in a permanent monogamous relationship.

I breezed through this sexy intellectual novel in only an afternoon, unable to put it down for very long. How Not to Fall is a fabulous read, and I’m anxiously awaiting its sequel which is due to be published in 2017. I’ve already recommended it to several feminist sapiosexual friends whom I know will enjoy it as much as I did.

© 2016 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Last weekend, I decided to watch The Giver, a movie based on the dystopian novel by Lois Lowry which I’ve somehow never managed to read. In the film, civilization is controlled by The Elders who protect the people from pain and suffering. However, the removal of the negative emotions has also caused a cascade that likewise eliminates positive feelings as well. Characters receive a daily injection to help suppress their natural emotions and to keep society stable. Starring well known actors such as Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep, the film utilizes black and white filmography with occasional color to powerfully illustrate the blandness of a world without emotion.

The viewer can understand the instinct to want to remove pain, especially when one selected young boy is learning about those things which cause pain and upheaval in society. The images of war that are shown as he begins to understand negativity are truly painful for someone who is sensitive (like me) to watch. Likewise, the extinction of elephants was a horrid scene for me to watch and contemplate since they are one of my beloved spirit animals. At the same time, the viewer gets to watch the young boy joyfully discovering music and dance, practices removed from society because they possess too much emotion intrinsic to their existence. Likewise, love no longer exists in this world. People merely tolerate and appreciate those in their assigned family units.

As I watched The Giver, I felt synchronicity at play again in my life. I recently spent a lot of time with a man who was afraid of emotional pain. As a result, he was unwilling to take risks that would create pleasure because he didn’t want to feel the pain that was an inevitable result of that risk taking. Mind you, I’m not a crazy adrenaline junkie. You won’t likely ever find me bungee jumping or climbing Mount Everest. However, I am willing to try new activities and enter into relationships with new people who might not seem perfect for me from the start. I know that there’s as much potential for pleasure as there is for pain, and that risk is worth it for me.

We see this most often in our relationships with others around us, especially the relationships that involve love. We know when we enter into any relationship, it will eventually end. Most romantic relationships end with a break up. Others dissolve upon death. When we add pets to our family, we know from the start that we will most likely outlive those pets, yet the joy and love pets bring to our families and our lives is more than worth the pain that their deaths impart. Furthermore, as part of being human, any relationship we enter is bound to have some pain in it. We don’t mean to hurt each other, but we do. It’s part of our personal growth experience.

Since my relationship with the man who was afraid of emotional pain ended, I’m left wondering how many around me are also afraid of emotional pain. I question how many people shut down their lives in an attempt to avoid negative experiences, yet in reality, they are only depriving themselves of pleasure as a result of not trying to feel anything at all. I suspect it’s far more people than I want to believe.

What my experience with this man boiled down to is that living without pain is not how I choose to live my life. There’s no question that life is filled with emotional, physical and spiritual pain. Yet I choose to move forward, leaning into that pain so that I can experience the pleasure that is on the other side of it. Sometimes it’s hard to judge if the pain is worth the pleasure because pain can be truly horrendous. Yet at the same time, pleasure can be just as overwhelmingly powerful if we allow it to be. As the lead character of The Giver says so accurately, “If you can’t feel, what’s the point?”

© 2016 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Recently Helen Mirren proclaimed, “It annoys me when I see men with an arm slung around their girlfriend’s shoulders. It’s like ownership. Of course, when you’re young, you want the guy to take your hand and look after you. But when I see girls being leaned on, I want to say, ‘tell him to get his damned arm off your shoulder.’” This statement has created quite a bit of discussion on the internet about whether or not a man’s arm around a woman’s shoulder is anti-feminist or sexist.

I really think this is an issue that is situation dependent. There are definitely men whose public displays of affection (PDA) are territorial. They’re making sure that all other men in the area understand that their women are their property and no other man should even glance at the “taken” women. In these cases, the men often don’t let the women step more than a few feet away from them. It is actually suffocating for the women, though I’ve known women who have happily gotten into relationships like this after having previously been in neglectful relationships with men who didn’t pay any attention to them. In those cases, the women think they’ve hit the jackpot with men who are interested in them not realizing that they are sacrificing their independence and their basic selves in relationships with possessive and overbearing men.

In other situations, though, a man’s arm around a woman is a beautiful thing. It’s a simple reminder to her that he’s there, and he’s got her back in a supportive way. He lets her move away when she needs to, and he doesn’t mind her talking to other men. For him, it’s not a possessive act but one rooted in love and affection. I personally love seeing couples like this where the physical connection between them merely reflects the deeper emotional connection between the two partners.

For me, one of the more painful parts of my relationship with my ex-husband was that he was not comfortable with PDA. He felt it was rude to other people to engage in affection in public, yet on a subconscious level, this was in part a story to cover up his own personal discomfort. When he was willing to touch me in public, it was often reluctantly and was generally limited to hugging or hand holding. Putting his arm around me was definitely beyond his comfort range. As a feminist woman whose love language is touch, I always was disappointed that the man in my life did not put his arm around me.

In the end, this is an issue that really boils down to the individual couple and what they want. Short of public sexual intercourse, we really shouldn’t be judging how others show (or don’t show) affection to each other. Our only focus should be on our own relationships. If Helen Mirren doesn’t want her male partner to put his arm around her, that is her choice. But it’s not her place or any of our places to judge others for how they interact with each other.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Many of us (if not most of us) reach a time in our lives when we have to decide to end a relationship with a romantic partner. But how do we know if we are making the right decision to terminate what we thought was a dream come true?

One way to approach the decision making is through creating a list. In this list, write down all of the characteristics of your dream partner and your dream relationship. You will have to be honest with yourself, or this exercise will not work. On the list, include information such as:

• What would your partner look like?
• How old would your partner be?
• How would your partner treat you?
• Would you share political views with your partner? If so, which ones?
• Would you share the same spiritual beliefs as your partner? If so, which ones?
• Would you and your partner have children? When? How many?
• How and where would you live?
• How would you eat?
• How would you spend and save your money?
• What would your sex life be like?
• What would romance look like in your relationship?
• What would your conversations be like?
• How would your partner speak to you in general?
• What would your social life be like?
• Where would you vacation with your partner?
• How would your family feel about your partner?
• How would your partner’s family feel about you?
• How would your partner support you when you are down?
• How would you support your partner in the relationship?
• What would your partner do for a living?
• How would your partner influence your career?
• [Any other things that are important to you in your life with a partner.]

After you've made this list, go back and check off all the things you are getting in your current relationship. From there, evaluate whether or not you are getting what you need to be happy in a relationship. If your Prince/ss Charming has blond hair and your current love has dark locks, that's not such a big deal. If you want sex weekly and your partner wants it monthly, that's a bigger issue. If a large percentage of these items that you want in a relationship are missing from your current relationship, then you are very likely not in a great relationship for you. It's time to move on.

If you are accepting something less than you want or deserve, it is likely because you are afraid to keep looking or because you don't realize you deserve better that what you have. I know from personal experience what it's like to settle. I realized I was settling for my ex-husband when I married him, but I did it anyway. And now, after four years of being single, I can attest that it is better to be single than to be in a relationship that is not meeting your needs. It is very hard to leave, but once you leave and do some healing work, life gets better much faster than you could imagine.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(This is a continuation of yesterday’s blog post about my college roommates.)

My second roommate (“A”) and I were good friends within a few weeks of meeting each other. We both shared a warped sense of humor that helped cement the bond. Though we were both introverts, she had a need to explore the world that I didn’t really share that point. She didn’t like going places alone, though, so she would often tell me, “Get ready. We’re leaving.” I’d ask where and she’d respond a movie, driving in the Hill Country, antiquing, or whatever she had already decided she wanted to do. I would tell her that I didn’t really want to go, and she would talk me into going with her anyway. In retrospect, I am glad A did because we went on some fun adventures that I would never have done otherwise. One night, A decided she was going to use sidewalk chalk and draw a cartoon figure of hers all over the campus sidewalks. She took me along as her lookout. That’s definitely not something I would have gotten up to otherwise!

At the end of the school year, A decided she wanted to move out of the dorms. I didn’t have a car, and so living off campus seemed daunting and inconvenient to me. I knew I only had one more year left, so I decided to stay on campus. By then, I had other friends in the dorm. One of them was losing her roommate as that woman moved off campus to live with her boyfriend, so the two of us decided to be roommates the following year.

During that second and final year of my undergraduate studies when we were no longer roommates, A and I would get together periodically to do fun activities. Things seemed off for a while between us, but I couldn’t figure out what was up. Towards the end of the school year, A finally came out as being gay. Suddenly so much about her and some of her behaviors made complete sense. My instinctive response was to be mad at her for not telling me sooner! However, I understand she was still figuring it all out herself. Once A came out, our friendship really didn’t change except that she was a much happier person now that she was able to truly be herself.

After I graduated and moved to Boston for nine months to work on my master’s degree, A and I stayed in touch via e-mail. She made plans to come to my wedding with her then-girlfriend, a woman whom I really liked. A and I watched with great amusement as one of my future brothers-in-law flirted with her girlfriend at the rehearsal dinner. At one point I asked A if we should be merciful and tell him that A and her girlfriend were a couple, but A told me, “No. I’m having way too much fun watching this!”

When I moved back to Austin in 1994, A and I continued to be friends through her final year of undergrad and beyond. When she would get together with my then-husband and me to do things, it was him who became the third wheel, not her. A and I were like the sisters neither of us had ever had. We often wouldn’t talk for weeks but then we would see each other multiple times within a short span. It was just how things worked with us. We could always pick right back up where we left off with things.

In 1998, four years after I got married and moved back to Austin, A took her turn to move to Boston for nine months. I helped her finish packing her apartment and took her to the airport with her cats. It turned out she couldn’t stand living in Boston, but while she was up there, she met a girlfriend who eventually became her life partner. When I went to visit A in Boston while I was doing dissertation research, I got to meet her partner, “J,” and liked her. When they moved back to Austin together, I was happy to have J as an additional friend though I never got to know her well.

Shortly after that, my firstborn daughter died. A called and offered to do whatever she could to help. Since she had previously worked at a photo developing store at the mall, I asked her to help me find someone whom I could trust to make enlargements of the very few photos I had of my daughter. She found someone she felt was trustworthy, and I took my negatives to him. He did a great job and was very compassionate toward us. I was incredibly grateful to A for that assistance. Her parents, whom I had met several times and been at their house outside the Dallas-Fort Worth area twice, also sent a bereavement card which really touched me.

Then, a few months later, everything changed. A and J decided to move to another state to pursue grad school and better jobs. I was sad to see them go, but I understood. However, a great silence ensued. Even before they moved, I didn’t get phone calls returned. Any attempt to make contact was thwarted. I had no idea what went wrong. Before the one year forwarding period ended, I sent a letter to her old address in hopes it would find her in the new state. In that letter, I offered apologies to her for anything I might have done and let her know I missed our friendship. More silence. As the internet blossomed, I tried to make contact with her through various social media sites, but I again was met with the stunning silence.

It took me over ten years beyond the last time I talked to her to finally let go. While she had been one of my closest friends for almost a decade, it was clear that A was unwilling to have me in her life any longer. The only possible understanding I had for why she might have cut off our relationship was if her new partner felt uncomfortable with the bizarre and close but definitely platonic relationship A and I shared. A and I both knew that there was no chance in hell of me dating a woman (or her dating a man), and we accepted that we were friends and nothing more. However, I could completely understand how a insecure partner might have been threatened by the close friendship we shared. Yet not knowing for sure was torture. This was someone for whom I had a platonic love and whom I wanted in my life no matter what the conditions were.

Oddly, it was my unrequited love for a man which actually helped me let go of A and the desperate desire to make contact with her again. That man and A reminded me of each other because of their incredibly warped but wonderful senses of humor. The friendship I had with each was similar in some odd ways. And when I finally accepted that I would never get over that man while I was still friends with him, I also reached a place of peace with no longer having A in my life either. I realized that after all that had happened in the intervening decade in my life, we might or might not have anything in common anymore. But most importantly, she had made a decision to cut me out of her life. While that hurt because I had no understanding of why it happened, I still had to respect her decision and let her go.

Today is A’s 42nd birthday. I still remember her every year and wish I could send her an email telling her to have a great day. If A were ever to show up in my life again, I would welcome her with open arms. But until the time when we meet again, if that ever happens, I have to be content with sending her good wishes in my heart. I hope that wherever she is and whomever she is with, that her life has turned out better than she ever dreamed it could.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

My graduating high school class had 51 young women in it. The school was small and Catholic; everyone knew everyone. I thought I wanted to go to a small liberal arts college, but when I visited The University of Texas at Austin as a senior in high school, I fell immediately in love. Sometimes you just know when you have found the right place.

As a National Merit Finalist, I got priority admission for the dorms at UT which always had waiting lists to get in. However, as a freshman, there was still limited availability. While I requested to be assigned to a female dorm, I was instead placed on a co-ed floor at Jester Center, a dorm that holds between 3200-3300 people. After a pre-K-12 school of less than 600, it was a massive living space that was rather intimidating for many reasons.

At that time, the only matching algorithm that UT Student Housing used was smoking or non. As you can imagine, that did not create good odds for ending up with a roommate who was a good match. I checked off non-smoking. My first roommate also checked off non-smoking even though she was a smoker because she did not want anyone smoking in the room. So right off the bat, the matching algorithm was a completely failure.

"H," my first roommate, was a from a small town outlying the Dallas-Fort Worth area. She had been at the top of her class at her small rural Texas school but she arrived totally unprepared for college. She was there to party. By contrast, I was there to get an education. H hit it off with a woman in an adjoining room. After H broke up with her steady boyfriend back home after learning that he was already sleeping around only a few weeks into their long distance relationship, H and the woman next door quickly made their way to Sixth Street with the explicit intention of getting laid. They managed to get drunk that night but somehow failed to procure willing men.

H rapidly became the roommate from hell. We were not a good match in any way. I was a morning person. She wanted to party all night. I had fairly Catholic values at that point; despite having been baptized just that summer as a born-again Christian, H's actions and values were questionable. She wanted to start smoking in the room; I refused to allow it since it was a designated non-smoking room. We had agreed to share various chores in the room, though it rapidly became clear that she was not going to do any of them, and she tore into me for asking her to do her part. Yet at the same time, she felt free to borrow my clothes when we hit a cold snap and she hadn’t brought her winter clothes down from home yet. Her only interest was herself and her needs. Once again, I had found myself living with a narcissist.

A male high school friend of hers and his roommate set up a secret competition: They were trying to see who could get her to have sex first. The friend was in our room one night giving her a backrub on her bed while I was studying on my bed. He announced, “This bra is in the way. I’ll just take it off.” My Catholic school girl self was mortified and completely unsure what to do. Were they not clear on the fact I was sitting right there? Was the proper etiquette to leave? Yet at the same time, it was my room, too, and I really didn’t want to walk across the street to the library to study. (I have no idea who actually won the competition but I’d be really surprised if one of those guys didn’t succeed by the end of the semester.)

Within a few weeks, H had decided that I was the worst roommate ever. She dragged her mattress into the woman next door’s dorm room and proceeded to live there. The smell of pot constantly waifed out of their room. H came in our formerly shared room periodically to get clothes and give me an evil eye. She was not happy that she had to live next door in order to smoke and party all the time.

After the school year was about six weeks old, another woman on the floor came knocking door to door to get information for something or another. She asked me where my roommate was, and I told her that H had moved next door because she hated me. The woman doing the survey went next door and talked to H. The next thing I knew, H was announcing to me that she and the survey woman had decided to swap roommates. I would be moving into the other woman’s room and she would be taking my space. I was given no option, but considering the current status of things, I figured it could not be much worse. We made the switch immediately, and then applied to Housing to make it official. Our resident assistant did a “counseling” session in which she tried to work out our differences which was rather amusing. Once we convinced her that there would be no positive resolution, she applied for and received the official permission to get us to switch rooms. We signed the paperwork, swapped keys officially, and moved on with our lives.

The woman I moved in with had also decided things couldn’t be any worse than what she’d experienced with her first roommate, so she was fine with me moving in. While she was a night owl and tv addict, we were able to be respectful of each other and make it work. Within a few weeks, we were great friends. Meanwhile, gossip on the floor was that H and the survey woman hated each other with a passion. I have to admit that I was amused at that given how the two of them had treated my new roommate and me. By the end of the semester, rumor had it that H was just leaving a bottle of Jim Beam on her nightstand. She left UT at the end of the semester to move back home and go to a UT branch school, but supposedly there was a notice in the dorm mailbox that she was officially on academic probation after her less than stellar performance in her first semester at UT.

Those first few weeks of college being partnered with someone I had almost nothing in common with were really rough, but the friendship I ended having with my second roommate was fabulous. Tomorrow’s blog post will talk more about that relationship.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

When I was in high school, one of the guys whom I hung out with had an inferiority complex around women and intelligence. Any time we took a standardized test, he would come to me and proudly boast his results. I would smile and congratulate him and try to shift the conversation. It never worked. He always forced the issue to a head by wanting to know what my score was on the same standardized test. Every time, without fail, my score was significantly higher even though I was almost two years younger than him and, heaven forbid, a female. He would always get a crushed and frustrated look on his face that once again, a girl had beaten him. Hence, I tried to avoid the topic of testing or grades whenever possible.

As I’ve grown up, I’ve found that there are still many men who are made uncomfortable by intelligent women. One of the quickest ways to scare off a large number of men on a dating site is to tell them that you are a woman with a Ph.D. Other female friends with doctorates have experienced the same. There are men out there who are sapiosexuals, and these are the men I tend to seek out. They are attracted to women who are intelligent and not afraid to show it. Likewise, I am drawn to intelligent men. I want someone who can keep up with me in conversation and discussion. Both of the men whom I have been in love with had doctorates. That’s not to say I wouldn’t date a guy without an advanced degree or even a college degree at all, but I find intelligence incredibly attractive, and I want a partner who feels the same.

Last night, I was watching The Bachelor in Paradise (and yes, you may question my intelligence for doing so!). The Bachelor franchise is my only “reality” television indulgence. This season, there is a man named Joe Bailey who was also on the last season of The Bachelorette. I had a hard time understanding why Kaitlyn Bristowe, the bachelorette, was so attracted to him. To me, he was playing up the stereotype of a Kentucky hillbilly, right down to bringing a bottle of moonshine along with him to give to Bristowe. She really seemed to adore him, or at least making out with him. On Bachelor in Paradise, though, Bailey has demonstrated some very narcissistic tendencies as he emotionally manipulated one woman to advance in the “game” aspect of the reality show. When one of the other men on the show, J.J. Lane, a man who tends to get himself in trouble almost every time he opens his mouth, confronted Bailey about having deceived the woman in question, a very disjointed and pointless argument ensued. Along the way, Bailey insulted Lane by saying he has a sister who is more intelligent than Lane.

Whoa. Really? It’s the year 2015 and a man is going to insult another man on national television by implying that being dumber than a woman is a terrible thing? Things like this shock me, though they really shouldn’t given the number of insecure men I’ve met in my life who have been intimidated by my intelligence. However, I would hope by now that our society would understand that men and women are equal. Clearly our nation doesn’t completely comprehend this concept as women are still blamed for being raped by men, women are seen as being at fault for unwanted pregnancies even though it takes two to tango, and wages for women lag significantly behind. The fact that anyone could still generally assume that all women are less intelligent than all men is really a sad but telling state of affairs.

I have often felt sorry for my poor kids for the educational standards in our family. Even though my kids will only be the third generation of our family to go to college, they’ve got a precedent of a lot of doctorates in the family. Among my ex-husband’s and my siblings and their partners as well as us, there are six Ph.D.s, two M.D.s, one D.O., one terminal master’s and one terminal bachelor’s degree. Three of the Ph.D.s and both of the M.D.s are women. The one thing that my kids will never doubt is that women and men are both intelligent. We may have different innate areas where we are stronger and fields of study that we prefer, but women are not stupid, and insulting women’s intelligence is never acceptable.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Every once in a while, a pop culture reference ends up being far more spiritual for me than I think its author(s) probably intended. Such was the case as I listened to “Locked Out of Heaven” in the car one day not too long ago. Its lyrics proclaim:

While there are some pretty hefty double entendres going on in that song, one could also take the song out of context and change the melody up a bit, and it would be a powerful love song that combines the spiritual with the sexual. 

Our culture has very dysfunctional approaches to dealing with sex and sexuality. Christianity has taught us for millenia that our bodies are a source of depravity rather than seeing them as beautiful works of God/dess which can bring us closer to the divine through sacred sex. As a result, many people prefer to hide the fact that they are sexual beings. Premarital sex is shunned in many sex education courses around the nation. Yet at the same time, premarital sexual activity is estimated at over 90% in our nation. Despite participating in sexual activity, however, American society is reluctant to open to the idea common in many Eastern religions that sex can be spiritual.

Most sex in our hookup culture is anything but sacred. Instead, sex is built on one night stands and finding the prettiest partner one can for quick, theoretically meaningless, sexual experiences. These encounters are not meant to be sacred at all. They’re not even supposed to create intimacy. They merely meet a biological and emotional need to have sex. Many women and men don’t actually enjoy this new popular hookup approach to dating promoted by sites such as Tinder, but there’s no denying that it is having shockwaves on the rest of our culture as more and more people feel that one night stands based on physical appearance are what dating and/or sex is meant to be about.

I suspect in future years, many other healers and I will be working with many of these former hookup participants when they come to realize that they feel terribly empty and alone. Casual sex will have not filled their needs emotionally or spiritually. Some will go to the opposite extreme and turn to a born-again Christian approach of denying the flesh to attempt to find peace. Optimistically, the majority will realize that sex can and often should be more meaningful than the way they used it in their younger years. Once they’ve settled into relationships, hopefully they will be able to find a different kind of sex that can be truly life-changing.

So what makes some sex sacred? Intimacy is definitely part of it. There is no way to experience God (or tantric energy or whatever higher experience/power you’d like to find) through sex unless one is willing to be intimate with one’s partner. That means not just sharing bodies but sharing emotions, desires, and souls. It involves stripping away of all barriers just as clothing is shed before sex. It requires that participants be truly naked and present on all levels for their partners. Without this openness and connection, trying to find the sacred in sex can be very difficult if not impossible. While sacred sex is thoretically possible to do within the framework of casual sex, it’s far less likely than in an a serious established relationship where partners are sharing more than just their bodies with each other. My guess is that rarely if ever actually happens in hookup situations.

Metaphysical energy contributes significantly this powerful connection. On an energetic level, sexual activity allows partners’ second and fourth chakras in particular to connect and share energy. If partners have not done the healing work they need to do as individuals, they may not be able to healthily open their chakras to each other during sexual acts which will limit (but not prevent) the exchange of spiritual energy between them. The less burdens one is carrying, the easier it is to shed the ego and find the holy.

Intent is also a huge element of sacred sex. Wanting to connect to a higher power during sex is one of the first steps. From there, the more one opens oneself to intimacy, connection, energy, and emotion with one’s partner, the more likely one is to find that elusive sacred sex that American culture writes off as mythical.

As Marianne Williamson writes in Enchanted Love: The Mystical Power of Enchanted Relationships, “When two hearts join in ecstasy and rapture, an army of light ascends and the world is brought closer to heaven. Literally. The beloved’s hand on us, like a baby’s hand, holds a power that is straight from God. Heaven is, in metaphysical terms, the experience of our oneness.” Or in the words of Bruno Mars, “'Cause your sex takes me to paradise...'Cause you make me feel like I've been locked out of heaven.”

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I frequently see blog posts singing the praises of being single. They often have a tone to them that if one spends enough time being single, one will learn to embrace it and love it. I don’t believe that’s always true.

I started dating my ex-husband when I was 14 years 8 months and a sophomore in high school. We were married right before I turned 20. For all practical purposes, until we separated four years ago, I had been in a relationship for the entirety of my adult life. While we dated long distance when we were in college before we married, there was still a commitment and there were frequent phone calls and emails. I lived with roommates in college and housemates in my first year of grad school, so I’d never really lived on my own as an adult either. Throughout my adult life, I’ve had many people express dismay to me about how I would regret not having that "alone time" as an adult in my twenties. Despite their arrogant and self-certain proclamations, it turns out they were wrong about me.

The reality of it all after three years of living on my own part-time (and living with my kids the other 50% of the time) is that I don’t really like being single and living alone. I am the type of person who prefers to be in a relationship. While the time to focus on just me and not on a relationship with a partner has been beneficial, the experience of being single and living alone as an adult is completely overrated for me. That doesn’t mean it’s not perfect for someone else. When we separated, my ex-husband was *very* excited to have his own house and his own living space without a partner to share it with. In his ideal scenario at that time, he wanted a romantic interest who didn’t want to actually live with him. We’re pretty much opposites in this regard.

My time alone has taught me that the truism is right that it is far better to be single than to be in a toxic relationship. I spent far too much of my metaphysical energy shielding against my ex-husband’s negativity when we lived together. Yet despite being grateful to no longer need to face that problem, there are other things I miss about living with a partner. Even though I am an introvert, I like having someone around whom I can talk to and bounce ideas off of. I enjoy eating with someone else rather than alone. I like cooking for my partner. I hate being the only mature adult in the house who can take care of problems that erupt. I’ve learned that I can deal with the roaches when they need to be relocated from the house even though I don’t like doing it. I’ve learned I can’t fix the garage door on my own when it decides to quit working (thank heavens for repair people!).

On a deeper level, I have always known that I am a self-sufficient person. I've always been self-confident about whom I am. I've never believed that I needed a man to make me a good person or even an acceptable person in society's eyes. The dysfuctional situation I grew up in as a child taught me quickly how to take care of myself, physically and emotionally, so I didn't need this alone time as an adult to learn those things, though I can understand why many people do. 


I am grateful that I didn’t end up in a relationship right after my marriage ended so that I could do a great deal of deep healing that most people never give themselves the time and opportunity to do. As a result, the partner whom I am looking for now is completely different than the one I thought I wanted four years ago. Yet despite the assertions of many others on the internet and in real life, the time I have spent alone has not taught me to love being single. It’s helped me confirm that I am a partnering type of person.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

One of the quickest ways to piss me off is to tell me directly or indirectly that my pain is not real. I’ve spent the past 12+ years living in chronic pain. I don’t function in the world in the way most people can because of that pain and the associated disabilities that come along with it. No part of my life has been untouched because of what I have endured. Yet despite knowing I am a much happier and better person now than I was 12 years ago, I wouldn’t wish the hell I’ve been through on anyone; the only exception to that is when someone tells me that my pain doesn’t exist. Then I would like those people to spend a month in my body. I would bet you anything that when they came out of my body after having spent a month literally walking (or unable to walk at all on some days) in my shoes, they would be singing a very different tune.

Today, I managed to let someone push this button of mine yet again. In a discussion about the overprescription of antidepressants in our society on Facebook, I put up a links to blog post I had written that talks about Lyme patients being erroneously misdiagnosed as depressed and put on antidepressants rather than the physicians actually looking for the real problem. I also linked another post I had written about how depression is sometimes caused by issues beyond brain chemistry but that most Western doctors are ignorant of those other causes. One of the people involved in the discussion, clearly not my lifelong friend, immediately responded that chronic Lyme does not exist and there’s no scientific proof that it does. Wow. You mean like this recently released study from a researcher at Northeastern University talking about the biological mechanism through which borrelia burgdorferi survives the standard antibiotic doses recommended by the CDC? That kind of evidence?

This is the point at which I hit the block button on Facebook. I have a zero tolerance policy for people who will directly attack me or my life. If you want to believe differently than I do, that’s your choice, but don’t tell me directly and rudely that my diagnosis doesn’t exist and that the pain I’m in isn’t real. What was most stupefying to me was that this person stated that she has a mental illness that requires antidepressants. I would bet that at some point at her life she has been told that she just needs to pull herself up by her bootstraps and she’ll be fine. Mental illnesses are still not accepted by our society, and they are poorly understood. However, that doesn’t give this woman the right to turn around and tell others their diseases don’t exist either. Compassion to all who are suffering is appropriate even if you don’t agree with their diagnosis or choice of medical treatment.

The cyberbullying that our culture continues to foster in this regard is amazing. So many people believe that they are anonymous on the internet. They don’t have a problem spewing hateful words and demeaning obscenities at total strangers. Somehow the internet creates a situation that causes people to forget their basic manners. Most of the time strangers are polite to each other in public, but the internet removes that civility and results in a great deal of anger and pain.

Last week on The Bachelorette: The Men Tell All, host Chris Harrison and bachelorette Kaitlyn Bristowe addressed the problem of cyberbullying. Bristowe has made choices that not everyone agrees with this season, and she has been the recipient of a lot of vitriolic criticism as a result. During the show last week, Harrison read some of the worst of the tweets that Bristowe has received including death threats. As he read the tweets (with the usernames blacked out to protect the not-so-innocent), Bristowe’s eyes filled with tears. A great number of the comments on Twitter at that point were in support of The Bachelorette’s decision to address cyberbullying. However, many were not. Even some people whom I usually find to be fairly level-headed and rational disparaged the decision to discuss this topic. I read quite a few attacks on Harrison for “torturing” Bristowe by reading those comments out loud. From what I can tell of Harrison, he is a genuinely nice guy who did not pull this discussion about cyberbullying out of thin air. I’m positive he had Bristowe’s consent before he started especially based on the quiet comments he made to her as they went to commercial break. Bristowe’s genuine tear-filled response was important for America to see even if (or especially because) it makes us uncomfortable. Those users on the internet whom the cyberbullies are attacking have real feelings and real emotions. The tears and pain are real, too. The mere fact that so many people bristled against this discussion shows how desperately it is needed. If television stars and societal leaders aren’t willing to speak up against this kind of bullying behavior, change will be much slower in bringing about its end.

I’ve mentioned before that I left online dating, tired of the rude behavior and horrid comments about overweight women. What was clear to me in the world of online dating and again today on Facebook is that cyberbullying is real. Compassion is sorely lacking on the internet. Our world is full of so many wonderful reasons for living, and the internet brings about so much positive change in the world in ways that couldn’t have happened before its existence. It is long past time for that change to include an end to discriminatory words, hateful posts, and demeaning responses. We can be better than this as a society.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

On Friday, I ran in Whole Foods to grab a few last minute items for my son’s birthday party this weekend. I was limited on time because of my appointment schedule, but I knew that if I didn’t get distracted, I could make it through the store with time to spare because my list was short. When I got to the checkout stands, all of them had short lines. I was torn between two, and of course, I chose the one that ended up being a far longer wait and far more frustrating for me.

A woman in front of me in line was buying all organic food. She was buying natural dog food, too. Yet despite the importance she obviously places on healthy eating, she also was wearing chemical perfume. This kind of logic drives me nuts because perfume is a horribly toxic substance that is in no way in line with organic eating. Perfume also still makes me sick if I'm around it too long. Thus, I stayed as far away from her as I could while waiting. She was wearing a cute rayon spaghetti strap top which showed off her tattoos quite well. I wouldn’t say that she was skinny; she was probably a size 10 or 12, but it was a very firm, very toned 10 or 12. I would guess she was in her late 20s. Her skin was nicely tanned as well.

The appearance of this woman was clearly too much for the cashier to handle as he began flirting with her in a less than subtle manner. She apologized for forgetting her reusable bags (no judgment on my part there… I’ve done that far more than once), but he assured her it was perfectly fine. She said she could bag the groceries since there was no available bagger at that point. He definitively protested that she didn’t need to do the bagging because he would do it for her because he was so good at it after all his experience. He kept making joking comments to her while SLOWLY scanning and bagging her groceries. Meanwhile, I was watching the clock tick by while I stood there wanting to get away from the perfume, the flirting, and the store in general.

Finally, he finished helping her, and she went on her way. No phone numbers were exchanged. He said hi to me before he started scanning my groceries. I walked to the end of the conveyer belt where I stood with my fabric bags ready to load my groceries. I had to tell him twice-- very loudly-- that I had fabric bags before I got his attention. He said, “Ok” and went back to scanning the groceries but didn’t bother to turn on the conveyer belt switch for me. So I turned on the conveyer belt from the bagging end and started bagging my 20 or so groceries. Midway through, the cashier half-heartedly thanked me for bagging. Never did he offer to me to do it for me. I paid, he said thank you, and I left. If it hadn't been for the way he treated the previous customer, I probably wouldn't have thought anything much of our interaction. However, the way I felt walking away from his lane was something that no customer should feel: that they were treated lesser than the customer in front of them based on their physical appearance. 

As I walked out of the store, I noticed no one was in line at the customer service counter where a female employee was working. I stopped and told her, “Please remind the cashiers that flirting outrageously with customers and then treating the next customers in line as less than them doesn’t feel good for the other customers.” She looked at me, obviously surprised by what I had said but she said, “I agree with you totally. Do you mind telling me which cashier you are referring to?” I handed her my receipt so she could figure out who had been “helping” me check out. When she found the name, she looked at me again, rolled her eyes, and nodded her head yes. Without words, she was able to convey to me that this wasn’t just me having this experience. Either other customers had complained about this cashier or she herself had experienced problematic behavior from this cashier.

All of us deserve equal treatment in public forums such as grocery stores. Flirting with a customer may happen on occasion, though I suspect that this cashier uses flirting as his default behavior toward any woman who is young enough and/or pretty enough to meet his personal standards. Yet this is not always appropriate, especially when it’s clear the attention isn’t returned by the recipient of the flirtation. When other customers receive treatment that is far obviously different than what the “prized” customers receive, the societal myths of beauty and acceptability continue to be promoted in subtle ways. All of us deserve to be treated equitably in public forums such as grocery stores where all of our dollars are just as valuable as others’.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

In this season’s most controversial issue on The Bachelorette, Kaitlyn Bristowe made an alcohol-induced decision to have sex with contestant Nick Viall. This was not a major surprise to the audience who had been watching Bristowe drool over Viall since he first joined the season during episode 4; the two looked ready to consummate their relationship from the start. The morning after the magical event, Bristowe began lamenting her decision nothing how guilty she felt. She realized that it was probably not a good decision on her part even if it was one made in passion. However, had Bristowe made the same decision outside of the show, I doubt she would have felt so much remorse. Her guilt was primarily arising from the fact that she was still dating many other men at the same time as she had sex with Nick; she felt guilty for having betrayed them by giving Nick special privileges. This guilt was rooted in a societally based belief system that sexual behavior should be monogamous.

All of us draw on social mores when it comes to our interpersonal behavior. In regards to sexual behavior, the rules become more complicated and more emotionally difficult. We are sexual beings from the time of our birth. Our families, our religions, and our society at large begin piling expectations, judgments, experiences and often abuse onto our experience of sexuality. These ideas and ideals about sexuality and sexual behavior become our sexual baggage before we have even begun to engage in intimate sexual relationships.

Some children are fortunate: they are raised in homes where bodies and sexuality are seen as normal, healthy parts of human life. Unfortunately, that is not the most common experience for most of us. We grow up in cultures and in families that shame sexuality and bodies. We’re taught at a young age that touching ourselves beyond necessary washing is sinful and something to be avoided. Many religious groups preach that masturbation is a terrible sin. Likewise, premarital sexuality or any sexual act outside of heterosexual married love is condemned. Children and teens hear this often growing up. It may not be on a daily basis and it may not be explicit, but these messages are made clear to us as children.

The damage of these messages we receive about sexuality as youth is greatly understated in our society. I’d argue that any religion that tries to dictate sexual behavior in its members is venturing into territory where it has potential to do a great deal of psychological harm. However, religions are allowed to define the appropriate sexual behavior of their members though most would judge that to be something a cult would do if the idea was taken out of context. These moral dictates of often conservative religions end up being very damaging for many of their members even once they begin to participate in sanctioned sexually intimate relationships.

Much of this damage doesn’t end up being discussed in our society. Sexual baggage is loaded with shame, and most of us shove it under our metaphorical rugs. We don’t want others to know our dirty secrets. We blame ourselves for having done things that our religions preach against even if we don’t agree with the religious perspective. We don’t have an objective view about our own sexuality because of the baggage we carry. When we get into relationships with others, even if they are heterosexual marriages blessed by our churches, we still bring our sexual baggage with us into the relationships. We’ve been told all our lives that our bodies and our sexuality is wrong, but now that we have a piece of paper and a blessing from a clergy member, suddenly we are supposed to be able to have healthy sexual relationships with our religiously sanctioned partners. Yet all that sexual shame we carry doesn’t magically go away during the marriage ceremony. It joins us on the honeymoon and beyond, one of the unwanted parts of our psychological dowries.

I speak from experience on this: I saw sexual baggage create major rifts in my former relationship for almost the entirety of the 22 years I was with my ex-husband. Midway through the relationship, I began to realize how much baggage I had, and I began working on it myself without the luxury of a therapist or coach to guide me. I made tremendous progress on my own, and when I began working on the issues with a therapist in later years, I found even more healing. The problem arose when my sexual healing enormously outpaced my ex-husband’s. Once we were in very different places with regard to our sexual baggage, our sexual relationship began to shatter, slowly but surely, ultimately contributing to the demise of our relationship.

The problem with sexual baggage is that it is so insidious. We are ashamed of it, and we hide it away deeply in our bodies. We avoid talking about it for fear that we will receive more judgment from those we turn to for help. Healing sexual traumas and burdens is not an easy path. However, once one is able to let go of that sexual baggage, one can find great happiness and pleasure in ways one never previously dreamed possible. Through Green Heart Guidance, I help clients release some of this sexual trauma, however and whenever they accumulated it. I work from a place of compassion having been a victim of sexual abuse and sexual harassment and someone who was raised in a conservative church that preached against natural sexual behavior. I know how hard it is to heal these wounds. I work from a place of non-judgment, encouraging clients to be themselves no matter whom that is. To promote healing, I often use energetic flower remedies, essential oils and crystals to help clients release the energy of sexual trauma that creates this baggage. When that stored energy is released, it can be much easier to work through the damage of the sexual traumas most of us have, and from there, healing is much closer than we ever believed possible. The work I do with clients can’t undo the past, but it can make for a much brighter future.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

As adults, almost all of us can identify a friend or acquaintance whom we would dub “a flirt.” They are the people who are constantly saying or doing things that are slightly inappropriate in a way they use to attract the sex they prefer for romantic partners. When I was in college, one of the guys in my crowd was a confirmed flirt even when he was in a committed monogamous relationship. He made women fall for him through his carefully constructed use of language. After we had graduated and moved on, I saw him again at a wedding that we were both in. He came up to me and said, “Hey, beautiful! How are you doing?” As he said it, I saw him notice my husband out of the corner of his eye. The peppy, flirtatious upbeat comments he was making were much less so by the end of the sentence because he knew it was inappropriate for him to flirt with a married woman in that way. While that might not stop some flirts, this guy did have some boundaries.

While people who are overtly flirtatious are easy to identify, those who are subtly flirtatious are much harder to understand and identify for many of us. We know who these people are: They are the people who attract others of the sex of their preference without trying. If the person in question is a heterosexual woman, she is the type who may not be stunningly beautiful or have an amazing personality, but she still has men throwing themselves at her for reasons that seem to evade our understanding. Likewise, there are guys who are “chick magnets.” Women can’t seem to get enough of them, yet these guys aren’t actually doing anything remarkable to attract their fan clubs. So why does this happen?

What I’ve discovered since opening to my metaphysicial abilities is that there is such a thing as an energetic flirt or a second chakra flirt. These are the people who aren’t doing anything obvious but still seem to attract more than their fair share of attention from potential romantic partners. The reason that they attract so many potential sexual partners is because of the energy they are putting out from their second or sacral chakra, and if one is sensitive to it, one can quickly feel and recognize that energy when around these people. Our second chakras are located in our pelvis, and they are, amongst other things, the seat of our sexuality and relationships with others. When a person has an imbalance in their sexual energy, it results in this “energetic flirt” type of person.

My first intimate experience with men with challenges involving their sacral chakras was the man I fell in unrequited love with. He is by no means an overt flirt: He never said or did anything that I could have ever interpreted as hitting on me. Yet at the same time, there was always an underlying sexual tension between us, one that wasn’t there in any other relationships with men whom I’d known previously. Because I had not come into my metaphysical gifts fully at that point, I didn’t realize that the energy I was feeling between us was not intentional on his part. Instead, because of issues he wasn’t aware of, he threw out sexual energy from his second chakra creating a sexual atmosphere without meaning to. For a woman like me who is an intuitive empath and is overly sensitive to others’ energy, there was no difference between him being an overt flirt and an energetic flirt. I fell for him in part because of his sexual energy that I was experiencing because of his poor energetic boundaries. I later found out that there were many other women who had the same reaction to him because of the energy he puts out. It wasn’t just me.

My unrequited love for this energetically flirty man was a painful experience, but it clearly taught me that when I feel that energy coming off of a man, I need to put my shields up and/or avoid him completely. There is nothing but trouble ahead if I am not careful. The next man I met who put out this sexual energy was someone whom I knew logically was not interested in me: he had published a narrow-minded rant on the web about fat people, so clearly he was not going to be attracted to me. At the same time, he was sending me a very sexual energy. The more I learned about him, the more I understood that he, too, had issues with his second chakra that he was unaware of which greatly impact his sexual and social lives. Since these experiences, I’ve encountered other men with this same issue, and I always head in the other direction. It’s not a healthy experience that I wish to partake in.

The underlying pattern that my mentor told me was there and that I have found to be true is that these energetic flirts often have been sexually abused, either in this lifetime or in previous ones. Not everyone who has been sexually abused will have issues with their second chakras putting out flirtatious energy. However, those who do put out flirtatious energy have almost always experienced sexual trauma. Their sexual boundaries were violated and broken down because of the abuse, and they don't realize that they have energetic boundary issues as a result. Most are unaware of the connection between their history of sexual abuse and all of the sexual partners they attract as well as the larger issue of difficultly in their sacral chakras. It’s only those who want to examine and work on this issue that will be able to see the pattern and then be able to heal it.

Healing sexual trauma is a difficult journey because it involves working through deep pain that we’ve often intentionally shoved away rather than processing it, but the results when one confronts the hidden issues in one’s lives and body can be dramatic. It is possible to heal damaged chakras, restore them to a positive place, and create better boundaries in one’s life so that one attracts healthier romantic partners. Changing one’s energetic flirtatiousness is entirely possible if one commits to doing so and then follows through with some powerful personal, spiritual, and emotional work.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

"The cruelest kind of love, the one that almost kills its victims... it's called unrequited love."  ~The Holiday

For most of my life, I thought unrequited love was basically a crush felt by one person that was not returned by the recipient of his/her/hir affections. I believed it was a schoolgirl emotion, a foolish notion of an immature person who could not understand that the other person didn’t care in the same way. That was until unrequited love happened to me.

What I learned in a very painful way as a 30-something year old adult with a Ph.D. was that unrequited love is a merciless emotion, one that has nothing to do with logic or maturity. It didn’t matter how much my rational mind knew and understood that the object of my affection didn’t see me as a potential love interest. My heart would not relent.

In my case, the man whom I fell deeply in love with was someone whom I had shared a platonic relationship with for several years. We got along incredibly well. He made me laugh in a way that no one else has ever been able to. Because we were both married (until we both weren’t), I previously never thought of him as a potential romantic partner. At one point not long after I originally met him, I was playing a “how small is Austin” game with a friend who knew of him through a friend of hers. The friend asked if he was good looking based on the comments of her friend. I told her I hadn’t ever thought about it. That just wasn’t the way our relationship was.

I remember the day when everything shifted. Nothing particular happened that instigated the change. I just looked at him and realized, “Oh, crap. I’ve got a crush on him.” However, I knew that crushes come and go and are a normal part of the human experience. I figured if I ignored it, the crush would go away. Except it didn’t. The crush got stronger and stronger until it reached the point of being physically painful. This was nothing like any other crush I had experienced. Even after talking to the man in question and verifying that there was no chance of anything romantic ever happening between us, the unrequited love would not let go. My brain understood completely. My heart just stubbornly refused to give up.

Five months after talking to the object of my affection when I was still unable to shed my feelings for him, I went to a healer to help me with the crush I could not get over. The healer, who is also an empath, bluntly told me, “You’re in love with him.” It took me another 24 hours to accept what I had been told. I realized that the healer was quite right. It wasn’t just a crush. This horribly painful emotion I was feeling was unrequited love. All my previous ideas about unrequited love were shattered as I came to realize that unrequited love isn’t a misguided crush. It is truly love, and it is devastatingly miserable to experience. 

It took me almost two years to work through all of the pain of unrequited love using a large number of modalities to assist in the healing. I was not happy about having this experience; resentful is a far better description of my emotional state during a large part of it. I often questioned why I had to go through it all. When I originally Googled "unrequited love," I found almost nothing of use to help me understand why it was happening or how to heal it. What I eventually discovered was that this emotional difficulty paralleled many other traumas I had experienced in this life and past lives. There was a pattern my soul has experienced, and this one experience helped open the doors to all of the other traumas and allowed me to slowly and painfully work through them all. I had not previously found healing in any of those areas, so in retrospect, my experience with unrequited love gave me a great opportunity for growth and change. I wish it had not been so emotionally tortuous, but in retrospect, I am grateful for all I learned and healed through this experience of unrequited love.

As often happens in life, the man I loved so deeply and I went in different ways. The other day I ran into him for the first time in ages. It was odd to see him again after so much time has passed, yet I was grateful for how much has changed within me since we last met. As with any other trauma, I wished I hadn’t had to experience such deep pain through unrequited love, but I am grateful for all the growth the undesired emotion brought to my life.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Before Lieutenant Commander Worf’s marriage to Lieutenant Commander Jadzia Dax on Deep Space Nine, the leading men undergo a four day Klingon equivalent of a bachelor party, the path to Kal’hayh. In true Klingon tradition, the ritual includes many trials to prepare the groom for marriage. After Worf breaks the news that they are about to begin a four day fast, Captain Sisko inquires:

Sisko: What are the other five trials?
Worf: Blood, sacrifice, pain, anguish, and death.
Doctor Bashir: Sounds like a marriage alright!

I’d beg to differ that all of marriage is as tortuous as that, but the process of divorcing certainly is painful. It’s a very difficult step. The majority of people getting married don’t think that they will want to get divorced in the future. Most of us believe we’ve found our happily ever afters, never expecting that one day we will be viewing our spouses with a “What was I thinking?” mentality.

In a recent post on LinkedIn, someone commented that having kids doesn’t impact the decision to divorce or the process very much. I very much disagree with that statement. Having kids definitely changed how we approached the divorce as much of what we did was in their best interest. My ex and I made decisions that we definitely would not have made if we didn’t have kids.

To start with, my ex-husband and I were separated but still living together for 15 months before he was able to move out. Only our closest friends knew about this. There were financial considerations involved that were related to the kids, and we weren’t sure when we would have the resources for him to be able to move out. It was definitely less than ideal, but as the house we were living in is big enough, it was manageable. We each had our own rooms. When I was “on duty” with the kids, he’d leave the house and go to work or a coffee shop or the movies. When he was “on duty” with the kids, I’d lock myself in my room and turn on the tv, pretending I wasn’t in the same building. We told the kids that we were no longer spending time together to help us fight less (true!). They could understand this, especially when we put it in the context of someone in their classrooms who was really annoying and whom they didn’t want to sit at a table with since they didn’t like that person very much. They understood that just staying away from someone you don’t get along with can be a very good solution.

After that initial in-house separation time had passed and we reached the point where he was going to be moving out, we went public with the separation, shocking many people who’d had their eyes closed to the reality of our relationship for a long time. The kids were not surprised as they knew we were in marriage therapy and were very unhappy. Our goal when my ex moved out was that he would find a rental within the neighborhood of our then-mutual house which I would be staying in. I wanted it to be on the same side of the major street in our neighborhood. What we ended up finding through word of mouth before it even went on the market was a house nine doors down from my house. The kids were able to easily walk back and forth between our two places for the two years that he lived there. I can’t tell you how much that helped the kids, knowing they could always go see the other parent by walking down the street. The arrangement eased a great deal of their stress about their parents divorcing. It was also incredibly convenient as we got used to the intricacies of the kids going back and forth between houses and forgetting homework, musical instruments, and most often, shoes! However, I can guarantee you that my ex would not have rented in that location if it weren’t for the kids. He would have picked something closer to his work and further from me.

As we worked through our divorce agreements, the kids were a HUGE part of the discussions. We had to figure out custody, medical agreements, finances, vacations, clothing, college, interactions with future romantic partners, visitation rights for grandparents, and more. We were able to do most of that with little strife as we agree 99% of the time about what is best for the kids. The finances were much trickier than the rest, but in general, the kids were a huge consideration in all of the negotiations.

Because there were kids involved, my ex and I were a lot more cautious about how we moved forward. We agreed that we would wait one year after he moved out to make certain that divorce was the right thing. However, after four months of him being in his rental, we both knew without a doubt that it was Over. Neither of us needed the full year to come to that conclusion. We let the kids know then that the marriage was definitely over though the legal divorce would be a while longer for financial reasons. Since they’d had four months of us living separately, they had realized how much better life was with two happy but separate parents. None of us questioned that it was for the best at that point. We all found the 60 day “cooling off” period required by Texas law after filing for divorce to be highly amusing as we’d already been separated for over three years at that point!

After two years and right before our divorce officially became final last summer, my ex-husband bought a new house of his own. Again, the kids completely determined which area of town he bought in. Our oldest kids had two high schools in the area they wanted to attend, and either was a possibility. When it became clear that one high school was the winner, my ex found a house that was districted to that high school. His new house is 3 miles and 8 minutes from my house. Again, this is not likely where he would have bought if the kids weren’t part of the consideration, but he loves the house and has several co-workers who live in the same neighborhood. We both appreciate that even though we have some distance between us, we’re still in the same basic area of town. Texas law says that parents can move up to two counties away from each other, but my ex and I both agreed to change that and limited our agreement to the four county area immediately surrounding Austin. Even then, neither of us has any desire to live more than about 15-30 minutes from the other while the kids are still in school because we don’t want the extra driving.

I have actually reached a point where I am considering leaving the Austin area, but because of the kids, I won’t be doing it for at least another six years. I’ve already told the kids that if I haven’t met someone who is tied to the Austin area, after they graduate from high school, I may be moving to another part of the country. I hate hot weather, I hate mountain juniper (aka cedar allergies), and I don’t have anyone besides my kids tying me to the Austin area. Because of the nature of my work, I can easily move to another side of the country without losing many clients. For now, though, I am staying here to be with my kids.

Finally, the biggest issue influenced by divorcing with kids is the constant communication. We truly co-parent; it’s not a fluffy meaningless term as it is in some divorces. We each have the kids about half of the time, but we both play a huge role in making all decisions for the kids. That means that it is rare that a day goes by that we don’t text each other, and we talk to each other several times per week. Even when he was on vacation with the kids recently, I texted him several times and talked to him twice about the health of the kids. This is what’s in the best interest of the children. As anyone who has gone through a breakup can tell you, it’s much harder to get over someone you deeply loved when you have to be around them or talking to them constantly. Our individual healing processes probably would have been faster if we hadn’t had to communicate so often. However, because it is in the best interest of the kids, we do talk frequently about them and their needs and scheduling for their lives. I can guarantee you that this would not be the case if the kids were not involved!

I can definitely see how in a case where parents aren’t focused on their children’s best interests that having kids might not affect the divorce in any way. I’ve seen some nasty divorces where the best interests of the kids really aren’t taken into consideration. I feel deeply for those kids, especially those whose parents end up using them as pawns in a power play situation. However, in the case of my divorce, that wasn’t an issue. We viewed our kids as very important people whose needs were a vital part of the divorce negotiations.

As we have moved forward after the decree was signed, my ex and I are truly co-parenting and working to make sure our kids’ needs are met the best we can. The relationship my ex-husband and I continue have is determined by what we do for our kids. We both agreed strongly that as much as possible, our kids shouldn’t have to pay for the fact that their parents divorced. Instead, we’ve worked hard to make sure that their quality of life has actually improved in many ways because of the divorce. As a result, the kids showed almost no stress or strife in the process of us divorcing. They’ve felt secure and loved by both parents through it all.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Last Friday was another powerful day of healing in my world, both personally and globally. The spiritual work I have been doing on myself reached another major turning point as my healers and I released one of the deeper traumas from my childhood. As it released, I saw that the emotions from that incident tied back to traumas in another life hundreds of years ago; the past life experience involved the same soul who also hurt me in this life and many others as well.

After the trauma released from my body, I was told symbolically that this was the last thing that was blocking me from finding unconditional and spiritual love in this lifetime. In the past few years, we’ve pulled out many other energetic blocks related to other people who’ve harmed me and related to beliefs I have previously held. At one point we even had to clear away the soul of a female ancestor who lived in the 19th century in Tennessee. She had been sexually abused by four or five different men in her life, and so she held the false belief that all men are dangerous. She was trying to protect me by keeping men away from me, something I definitely didn’t appreciate even if she was doing it with the best of intentions! My mentor and I helped her crossed over, leaving me happily without my unwanted guardian.

I’ve been working for a long time to reach this point; I was starting to wonder if I would ever reach it. So the news brought me great joy. I left that healing appointment feeling pretty happy and headed to my next appointment. Before it started, I had a few minutes to check to see if my kids had emailed or texted me. They had not, but I noticed an email from a friend who said, “Just saw the SCOTUS decision! :)” I knew that could only be good news, and Googling confirmed that the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of same-sex marriages. Tears began misting in my eyes, but I had to move on to my appointment. Afterward, though, when I got a chance to read some of the articles about the announcement, more tears came streaming down my face.

I don’t have any friends or family members who were waiting to get legally married in Texas. Many couples I know have already gone to Canada or other states to legalize their unions. However, for me, this was a victory that I had been waiting for for a long time. It says a great deal that our society is finally open-minded enough to accept that same-sex marriage will not bring about the end of the world. There’s still a great deal of progress to be made in terms of ending discrimination against those who aren’t cisgendered or heterosexual. However, this is a big and public step forward.

One part of the announcement seriously disturbed me, though. The Supreme Court decision was a 5-4 victory, a very narrow margin. Still, a victory is a victory. What bothered me most was that conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, the only African American on the court at this time, voted against same-sex marriage. Given his conservative voting record, this isn’t a surprise. Yet looking at his personal life, it is. Clarence Thomas married his second wife, Virginia Lamp, in 1987. They are considered an interracial couple as she is of Caucasian descent. Yet it was only twenty years earlier in 1967 that interracial marriage became legal in Thomas’ home state of Georgia thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision of Loving v. Virginia. Less than fifty years later, Thomas is now on the side of the privileged, those who can marry whomever they want, and he voted against letting all citizens have the right to marry their partners. To me, that was a bitter pill to swallow.

While I rejoiced on Friday with many others in the rest of the nation, the fight is far from over in Texas. Certain politicians seem to have a distorted belief that the SCOTUS decision of Obergefell v. Hodges is not the last word. Texas Governor Greg Abbott immediately issued a statement allowing state agencies to refuse to issue same sex marriage licenses on the basis of religious freedom, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has also encouraged county clerks not to issue same-sex licenses. The only county in the Austin area to begin immediately issuing licenses on Friday to same-sex couples was Travis, the liberal bastion of Texas. Other local counties are twiddling their thumbs, blaming a need to update software, and “investigating” what the Supreme Court ruling actually means for their offices. I don’t have great hopes that all county offices in Texas will be offering same-sex couples their now legal right to obtain a marriage license by the end of July. I suspect it is going to take more federal action to make it happen. In my mind, I keep seeing the military involvement  in 1957 that was necessary to enforce the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that desegregated schools.

Despite these new hurdles, I am grateful that both the nation and I have moved forward in a major way when it comes to liberating love. I hope that when the time is right, all of us will be able to find the partners we seek and will be able to decide if and when we choose to get married unhampered by the prejudiced "religious" beliefs of others.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I'm pleased to announce that I have started the Spiritual, Single and Social Meetup. 

The Spiritual, Single and Social Meetup is an open-minded gathering in Austin, Texas, where we support each other without judgment in understanding our experiences in life. We view being single as a time in our lives when we can focus on growing and healing as individuals. For the purposes of this group we define these terms to mean the following: 

Spiritual: We all hold a belief in a higher power greater than ourselves. All traditions and belief systems are welcome as long as they are open to others having different beliefs. We work together to find common ground for our spiritual beliefs to help improve our individual lives and the world. 

Single: We are single (never married), separated, or divorced. We are not in committed relationships with anyone at this time. Those from all parts of the sexual, gender, and orientation spectrums are welcome. This group is aimed towards those who are in the 30-50 year age range. 

Social: While we might work hard on our personal growth, we’re not opposed to serious relaxation either! We meet for a variety of purposes and activities including but not limited to meals, book groups, discussion sessions, meditation sessions, hikes, and games nights. 

As a courtesy to those in the group who are sensitive to fragrances, please refrain from wearing synthetic perfumes, colognes, and aftershaves. Essential oil based scents are fine in moderation. 

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I’ve had several people ask about what Chris Harrison said at the book signing I attended last week on May 20, 2015 at the Arboretum Barnes and Noble in Austin. Since I’d typed up a very long email for my Bachelor/ette watching buddy in New York the day after the event, I’ve reworked that e-mail into a ridiculously long blog post. Please take into account that I was not taking notes or recording anything during the evening, so this is my memory of what was said. While I wrote it down within 24 hours of the event, I’m sure this is not perfect. I am positive that much of the content is not in the actual order it was presented. However, if I misquoted or misremembered something, the error is mine, and I apologize to those who were posing the questions and to Chris Harrison who was answering them. I have interjected some of my personal observations; these are mine alone. Harrison speaks with a great sense of humor and jokes around quite a bit which gave the evening a very light-hearted feel. I don’t know that I can easily convey his humor, but I will try to make it clear when he was obviously joking with the audience.

As he began speaking about his new book, The Perfect Letter, Chris Harrison seemed nervous to me, something I found surprising for a man who is certainly no stranger to public limelight. After a few minutes, though, he found his rhythm, and by the time he moved on to the question and answer section of the evening about ten minutes later, he was totally at ease and enjoying the evening.

Chris Harrison said that the character of Leigh in his book is based on no one woman; she is a conglomeration of a lot of women in his life including some of the bachelorettes. The love triangle in the book was inspired partially by Andi Dorfman because he feels like she truly loved two different men, and he feels like we have the capacity to love more than one person at once. He didn't endorse polyamory or explore ideas along those lines, but it felt like Harrison was one step away from being able to expand onto that concept. 

Harrison said that the lead male character of Jake in the novel was NOT named after Jake Pavelka. He just thought that Jake made a good Texas country boy name.

When explaining why he chose to write a romance, he said people want him to write a Bachelor tell-all which he could definitely do because he has stories that would make heads spin. However, Harrison doesn't want to burn bridges until the show is over and even then he's not sure he wants to do it. He also doesn't want to write a dating book because he doesn't feel like an expert on that. Harrison said he's divorced, so that definitely means he doesn't have it all figured out. He also said at one point he is NOT a matchmaker. He really identified more as a show's producer than as the host as he was speaking.

Returning to the topic of the romance novel, he said his now ex-wife was a big Nicholas Sparks fan, and so he's read The Bible (aka The Notebook) and others of Sparks’ works. Harrison has spent time socializing and talking with Sparks as well. He really was inspired by Sparks and his great books. Chris Harrison did not like 50 Shades of Grey and described those as "sex scenes, not love scenes"; he wanted to write something tamer but yet more adventurous than Sparks in the romance/sex department. When he was writing love scenes, he'd send them to a few trusted females and ask them for suggestions and opinions. He said he promised he wasn't sexting them! The women would send back their opinions including issues around various word choices. Harrison wanted it to be clear that he had not written the love scenes in a vacuum.

He said that he was raised in Dallas and had an uncle in Austin, so he often visited here as a child. (His cousin Daniel walked in a few minutes after Harrison began speaking and Harrison pointed him out; Harrison also paused and said "Oh, hey Karen" at one point to another woman who was there.) He used to go hunting and fishing in the Hill Country, the setting for his novel. Harrison definitely identifies as a Texas boy. He always liked Austin because it's just different than the rest of Texas. He said he's always known his first book would be set here.  

With regard to future books, Harrison said he plans to write future books that will be set in the places he's been blessed to travel with The Bachelor. His sense of gratitude around his blessings and what his work on The Bachelor/ette has allowed him to experience was really palpable. He comes across as a truly nice guy who understands how blessed his life has been. He also said that he had a wonderful marriage when he was recounting the list of his blessings.

Harrison wants a movie version of The Perfect Letter and told the audience to start thinking about who should be cast.

As the evening’s question and answer section began, a woman asked, “Have you begun dating again?” Harrison jokingly said something along the lines of, “Thanks for jumping right in with my personal life!” but then he went on to say yes, he has started dating. I thought this was public knowledge, but I guess not everyone is up-to-date or this woman wanted a more specific answer as to a current woman in his life. However, Chris Harrison said that in the words of someone he knows, he is “tragically undateable” because of his schedule. I think most of the women in the audience disagreed! I would suspect the median age of the audience was 40 (Harrison is 42), and the range of ages of most of the women was 15 to 55. There were only a few men there: a couple of teen boys who must have been brought by their mother and a few husbands. I think the only single guy there was an employee at the store. As I enjoyed the people watching opportunity, I was thinking to myself, “The single guys of Austin don’t realize what a prime opportunity they missed here… a captive audience of women who are fans of romance and love!” Anyway, Chris Harrison joked that he had he had a window of about three months in the fall when he might be able to date, but between traveling to Mexico in June to film The Bachelor in Paradise and then moving to Connecticut to film Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in September, plus his book tour and all the other travel The Bachelor requires, he just doesn’t have a life conducive to dating.

With regard to this season of The Bachelorette, Harrison said it was a knock-down fight about Britt versus Kaitlyn amongst all those involved. Harrison reminded the audience that 10 years ago they'd done the two bachelors thing which included Byron Velvick; then Harrison then launched into a brief side remark about how Velvick is down the road in San Antonio, and Harrison had recently talked to him. Returning to the issue of having two bachelorettes at the start of this season, Harrison said that the producers swore they’d never do again. He said that during the meeting when Mike Fleiss decided to do the two bachelorettes, he reminded Fleiss of the vow and was duly ignored. Harrison said it shows how much power he doesn't have as a producer!

Someone queried something about the length of the first episode this season; because the audience members were not using microphones and Harrison wasn’t repeating their questions, I didn’t hear the exact inquiry. He said that this cocktail party this week was basically two in one and so it lasted way too long. He explained how first they were having a cocktail party for the men to decide on the women; the second party was for Kaitlyn to decide on the first 15 men. Harrison said there was nothing sexy about it by the end. He said normally the sun is coming up, but it was full on breakfast time by the time they got done the first week of this season. He said they didn't get home until 8-9 in the morning. Harrison also described a bit what was going on behind the scenes during that extra-long cocktail party. He said that the "control room" is in the three car detached garage. They've got a couch in there, and he and another producer often crash on it. He said he used to try to stay awake all night, but no more. Now some poor kid has to fearfully poke him and whisper, "Mr. Harrison?" to try to get him to wake up. As a tag-on question to this one, someone asked if the night is open bar. Harrison confirmed that the contestants can have anything they want all night long in regards to alcohol.

An audience member asked who should play Harrison in a movie about his life. Another audience member joked it should be Matthew McConnaughey, an Austin local and favorite. Chris Harrison then started talking about his relationship with McConnaughey; they were involved in two triathlons together. I think he called McConnaughey an interesting guy. When Harrison got back to the actual question, he jokingly suggested Denzel Washington would be great. Someone else in the audience suggested Paul Rudd, and Chris Harrison didn't seem to know what to make of that.

A woman asked what they needed to do to get Chris Harrison to show up at their Bachelor watching party in Fort Worth. He said bbq and Shiner Bock are pretty good lures. He said that he loves LA and there is great food there, but nothing to compare to the Tex-Mex and BBQ in Texas.

Someone asked if the contestants ever eat the food that just sits in front of them on plates. Harrison laughed and said he gets that question a lot, and yes, they eat some, but that watching people eat is really boring. He said once the contestants have eaten, there are usually a lot of leftovers so he just eats those. :) He views a lot of the show through the lens of a producer and what will draw in an audience. In regards to editing and things we don’t see, Harrison said that the contestants do discuss movies and politics and "normal" things, too, but it's really boring watching two people discuss a movie they've recently seen.

Someone asked if Harrison preferred The Bachelor or The Bachelorette, and he said the former. He said that was where it all started, so The Bachelor is kind of his baby. He also said women make better tv because of, no offense meant, the drama they create when living together whereas guys work it out or slug it out and then five minutes later will be drinking a beer together.

Chris Harrison said that super-drunk contestant Ryan on Monday was actually bad tv. The producers want stories when they cast people, things that they can draw out across the season. Ryan was just pathetic, and it was over before it began. In contrast, he said Kelsey was gold. She had the amazingly tragic (or in her words, amazing) story, but the way things turned out on screen was the kind of thing that one can't predict but that producers are utterly grateful for.

Someone asked how much say the contestants have in casting, and he said virtually none. He said that the show does casting calls and actually keep files. Harrison was extremely complimentary of the casting department, though I don’t remember the names he mentioned. Sometimes the casting staff will call someone three years later to see if someone is still single because they think that person would be good for whomever is the current star. Harrison said that they have 30 women up until that very night of the first cocktail party, and that it is a battle between producers as to which 25 make it on the show. Each producer may have visited ten of the women at their homes, and so they'll have bias towards whom they really want on the show.

Though it’s been mentioned many times before, someone suggested Harrison should be the next bachelor. He said that he would make a terrible bachelor because he's not the type of guy to take off his shirt in a hot tub with 25 women. He said that you have to be willing to put it all out there, and he's not that kind of person. Harrison said it's why they turn down some great people, because they just don't have the right personality to do it.

Another audience member asked if the producers know how "crazy" the contestants are before signing them on, and he said no. He said that something we need to face as a society is that most of us are crazy. He said if they locked the doors, 50% of the people in the room, if not more, would turn out to be crazy. It's just a fact of life.

Harrison referred to the “women,” not the “girls,” throughout his presentation which I appreciated a lot.

The next questioner asked if Ashley S. from last season would be in Mexico for The Bachelor in Paradise. He responded, "God, I hope so! If she's not going, I'm not going either." He said Ashley is really great and is on the joke until she's not. He said that he's heard (wink, wink) that she's supposed to be there, but with her you never know until she actually shows up. She might forget or go to Mesa Verde. 

Someone asked about the legacy issue: it seems like you have to have been on the show to be on the show. Chris Harrison said that this was partially just the battle of getting an audience. If they announce that Susan, an accountant from NY, is the next bachelorette, no one cares one way or the other, but if they announce it's Britt, people will say, "OMG. I hate her so much. She's so fake." He said that even if people hate the person they choose, that's good, because they care and are engaged and will watch. It's half the battle. [I actually disagree with Harrison on that idea. I disliked Juan Pablo so much that I refused to watch his season. It turns out I was right! However, Harrison is probably right that most fans won’t tune out just because they don’t like the star of the show.]

Another questioner asked if the producers would consider doing an all-star season of The Bachelor or Bachelorette. Harrison felt that was unlikely because it would detract from the success of the established show and what it is. He said the closest they came was with Jesse Palmer who made his Bachelor appearance into a sports casting career (whereas Chris Harrison had made his sportscaster career into The Bachelor). Harrison said that he has a lot of athletes who do approach him about wanting to be on the show, but what they want is to date 25 women at once. When he clarifies that they have to fall in love with and marry one, suddenly the athletes aren't interested any more.

According to Harrison, it is now ok for celebrities to “come out” as liking Bachelor now since they’re established. He named Jennifer Aniston and several others. Someone asked what Chris Harrison things about Jimmy Kimmel’s predictions, and Chris said he loves them. He also related that Jimmy Kimmel does not want spoilers. Chris Harrison also thought Jimmy Kimmel was awesome last season because Kimmel got to be Harrison’s alter ego and say all the things he wishes he could say.

A woman asked asked how they pick the date locations. I thought she meant more the activities on the dates, but Harrison interpreted the question to mean the locations in a global sense. He says that they now get approached by tourism boards from around the world. The countries can spend $100K for a short 30 second commercial in the US that no one will watch, or they can spend the same amount on the show and get a two hour high-def sexy commercial for their country. Harrison said that they went to Ireland this season, and that when you watch it, you'll believe it never rains in Ireland because of how they are editing it, but he assured the audience that it very much does rain in Ireland. He said they make Ireland look really sexy. So the producers respond to offers now as to how they select travel locations. However, Trista gives him all kinds of trouble still about how her exotic trip was to Seattle.

Harrison said that he brings his kids on a lot of the trips, and the family is lucky that the kids' teachers agree that travel is one of the best ways to learn. His son is 13 and in 7th grade; his daughter is 11. He said they've traveled more in their lives than he did in the first 30 years of his. Harrison said that when the show goes to the various foreign destinations, they hire locals to work on the show, and he usually befriends one of the locals and gets them to show him the town so he can see it in as non-touristy of a way possible. He said he has lots of down time on the trips, and he takes advantage of it to see what he can.

Someone asked him if he ever clues in the bachelor/ette about problems going on with the contestants or if he just keeps quiet. Harrison said that he's learned as a parent and as the host that if he tells someone not to do something, they'll do it. If he tells his kids not to touch something, the first thing they’ll try to do is grab it. So while he might probe around and try to convince a contestant to talk to him about what they see in the (troublesome) person, he knows that it's part of the bachelor/ette’s life experience to figure it out. He also said there's no accounting for that spark that happens between people when it sometimes makes no sense to an outsider.

Someone asked about the minority casting issue with regard to the show: the fact that minorities are severely underrepresented. I thought Harrison answered this well. He said that it was a problem that they'd created and that they need to fix. He said that it's a problem across Hollywood. Harrison said that it is also reflected in casting calls: minorities don't see themselves on television, so they don't think they can be. When The Bachelor/ette holds the open calls, they only have 5-10% minority turnout, a far cry from the representative portion of the population. From there, the applicants have to pass through a series of hurdles including interviews and a blood test, so that process ends up screening out more people. He said they'd like to have a minority bachelor/ette, but they don't want to just pick a token minority who won't be a good star. Harrison said that a lot of people wanted Marquel to be the bachelor, but there was no way because Marquel had major issues with women and didn't get along with them very well. Harrison thought that was the main qualification for the job! So the producers are looking for the right person, but that person hasn't shown up yet.

At some point during the evening, Harrison mentioned that he said he is still friends with a bunch of the show participants, especially older cast members who are more his age. Throughout his various answers, he'd talk about the people he's still in touch with including Trista and Brad Womack who lives in Austin. He said he got Ashley S. to work a benefit with him in L.A. recently. He does a lot of charity events, especially golf ones from what he mentioned. Harrison also said he was going out to dinner with Brad Womack. When someone asked him where, he jokingly said, "Oh, you know. KFC." I thought that was a great way to diffuse a potentially invasive question with humor.

Someone said something about Juan Pablo (again, hard to understand due to the lack of audience microphones), and Harrison replied, "Ah, my buddy Juan Pablo. Surprisingly, I haven't talked to him lately." Harrison said that three weeks into the show, he knew the season was over and they should pack up and go home. He said that Juan Pablo is a control freak who couldn't let go and experience it. He said that Sean had to go through the experience of letting go andKaitlyn did, too. He said they have to learn the lesson that the more you cling, the less control you end up having.

He said Catherine and Sean really are in love. He said as far as he knew as of earlier that day, Chris and Whitney were still together, though if someone had heard otherwise, it would be news to him. Chris Harrison was glad that Dancing with the Stars was over so that they could leave L.A., go back to Iowa, and start living life.

Harrison said that most audience members can't grasp the stress of the show. They think they wouldn't become a crying mess like so many people on the show, but Chris Harrison said it's totally different when you're there because you don't have your cell to call your mom, you can't do your normal stress relief activities, and you get faced to actually force your raw emotion, and the emotion is RAW. He said it's really hard.  

Someone asked him if he had opinions about people who post spoilers. Harrison said that back in the day when they started The Bachelor, the internet wasn't what it is now with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, etc. Now it is an issue. When they hold dates in public, people will see, and they will post. They try to embrace it as much as they can by inviting people to certain dates. Harrison said that the bottom line is that there are mean people out there, and mean people suck. He said that if those people put half as much effort into not sucking instead of waking up each morning and asking "How can I make the world suck today?", then life would be so much better. He doesn't like the spoilers that ruin the final episode, but they can't stop them completely because if two people know things in the modern age, it's not a secret any more.

A young woman who didn’t fit the stereotypical look for bachelorettes jokingly asked why he hadn't replied to her tweet asking to be the bachelorette. Harrison tactfully avoided a direct reply and said that she had a leg up towards becoming a bachelorette because she was from Texas and everyone knows that Texas is the hotbed of controversy half the time.

During the entire evening, the only question I didn't appreciate how Chris Harrison answered was when a man asked when they would do a show with some "normal people.” There was a murmur rumbling through the audience as though some couldn't believe he asked that; I’m not sure if it was his poor phrasing or the idea in the first place that caused the widespread dismay. The audience member quickly clarified, “Like the geeks, the nerds, the people who don't look as great with their shirts off.” There was more chattering and murmuring at that point, and someone near him must have said something to him (but he was behind the bookcase I was leaning against so I couldn’t see the people involved), so he proclaimed at that point, "No, no. I'm married! I'm just asking." Chris Harrison responded curtly that tv is a visual medium, and that when they do the radio version of the show, they'll consider it. Despite the personal questions earlier in the evening, this was the only time I felt like Harrison got bristly with a questioner. The topic clearly generated some deep feelings in him. Whether those feelings are because he agrees with the audience member about wanting some more average people on the show or if it’s because he feels persecuted by fans about this topic on a regular basis, I couldn’t tell. Either way, it was obvious that this was a topic Harrison didn’t want to have to approach.

As the final question, an audience member asked him how he has stayed grounded and if he has a strong faith that makes him the way he is. Harrison said that he comes from a strong family with seven grandkids (including him as the youngest) and 13 great-grandkids. He said that his 99 year old grandmother is the matriarch of the family and is still alive and kicking. He said she's a very strong woman. Harrison briefly mentioned his grandfather but I didn't quite hear what he said (due to the store’s staff talking really loudly near me). He said that when his book came out earlier this week, he realized that he wasn't curing cancer or anything, but his family didn't take much note. (I heard a lot of deep pain in these comments. Like many of us, Harrison jokes about his family’s response, but things like this can be very difficult. I understand that one from a lot of personal experience!)

Harrison followed up by saying he does believe in God, but he really skirted away from the discussion of spirituality for some reason. I can understand how working on a show with a highly Christian-based contestant population, he might want to keep his personal beliefs private if they don’t align, or he might just be the kind of person who prefers not to talk about his spiritual beliefs.

From there, Harrison did say that there is one thing he can't tolerate, and it's lying. He tells every group of contestants that if they are lying, and some of them are, possibly about a boyfriend or girlfriend back home, some about being there for the wrong reasons, then he will find them out. He reminds them that he has a bigger podium than they do, and he will not put up with it. He will call them out on it, and they will regret it. So just don't lie to him. Harrison said Ryan was a great example on the season premiere of someone who was there for the wrong reasons, but he didn't have to call Ryan out on it because Ryan did such a great job on his own. Based on these comments, I took it as a huge compliment when Harrisontweeted that he liked the honesty in the book review I wrote about The Perfect Letter.

As I mentioned previously, I really enjoyed the evening and getting to learn more about Harrison, his book, and The Bachelor/ette. I felt like I walked away with a better understanding of many topics I was curious about.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I admit that if it weren’t for Chris Harrison’s connection to The Bachelor/ette, I wouldn’t have put his first novel on my reading list. In fact, if I hadn’t gone tothe book signing last week, I probably would not have bought the novel at all. Instead I would just have waited to borrow it from the local library once it finally became available there in digital format. Yet in spite of those facts, I’m grateful I did purchase The Perfect Letter because the book captivated me fairly quickly: I ended up reading it all on one rainy book-reading type of Saturday, not wanting to put it down to deal with any of the pesky necessities of life that arose. Harrison’s writing style is highly descriptive and emotionally gripping. While the story is one that describes lives lived outside of the ordinary, the realism of the relationships between the characters makes the novel seem almost possible. Harrison definitely did not write a book that was just a superficial romance but instead gets deeply involved with the emotions and psychological flaws of his characters. I was impressed with how often Harrison chose words that reflect the impact of our emotions onour bodies such as the “stone of guilt around her neck had become a weight so permanent it left her crippled“ or the “sudden feeling of grief squeezed her, took her breath away” (130, 201).

When I bought this book, I worried that this might be the stereotypical romance novel: the gorgeous woman with the perfect life including the Harvard degree, the amazing career and the dream New York apartment dates the perfect but boring man and wants something more. Yet as I read the first love scene, such as it was, I felt that internal pang that occurs when I read something that feels all too real in relation to what I have experienced in my life. This “perfect” relationship of Leigh Merrill with Joseph Middlebury was anything but. From only a few pages into the novel, Joseph appears to use Leigh for the attention she can give him and the ways in which she can meet his needs. Her desires take a backseat in the relationship. While there was love in the relationship between Leigh and Joseph, there also were a lot of deep and problematic issues as well. When Leigh talks about Joseph to others, she becomes immediately defensive in that way so many of us are prone to do when we know there is truth in what others are saying to us yet we don’t want to see the reality.

Enter Jake Rhodes, a former boyfriend with whom Leigh experienced a tragedy ten years ago in the Hill Country of central Texas. When Leigh returns to the Austin area as a big city editor and keynote speaker for a writer’s conference, she and Jake reconnect out of a need to find closure with regard to their past. Jake is the opposite of Joseph in so many ways: he doesn’t have an amazing career, but he is a romantic and his love for Leigh is unconditional. Harrison slowly unfolds the story of what happened to the two when they were teens, a combination of their love story and their tragic past. As Leigh and Jake reunite after their ten year separation, their love and their passion is still as strong as ever despite the wounds that have hurt them. When a new challenge arises in their lives (aside from the obvious one of Leigh’s serious romantic involvement with Joseph), the two have to decide how to handle both their past and the future.

For having such a great verbal grasp on the fine details that can color a book, some of the situations in the book became clichéd. In trying to set the scene firmly in the Austin area, Harrison mentions bats and bluebonnets far more often than necessary. He also repeatedly sings the praises of Guero’s (Bill Clinton ate there!) though many locals will tell you that it’s overhyped nowadays. In addition, the not-so-trivial detail of birth control and sexually transmitted disease prevention falls by the wayside (just as it does on The Bachelor/ette). While I know many romance novels ignore such practicalities because they feel it takes away from the passion of the moment, in a novel with as many details as this one, the absence felt glaring to me especially as two teenagers seemingly engage repeatedly in unprotected sex with no consequences. Despite these small issues, the book is an overall strong effort that is well worth reading.

At the book signing I attended, Chris Harrison was clear that he wants this book to be made into a film; he asked the audience to start thinking about who should play the leads. I can easily see this novel being turned into a movie filmed in the Texas Hill Country and attracting an audience of men and women alike because of some of the high-paced action it contains along side the romance. I also look forward to Harrison’s future works, and I will definitely be picking them up when they release!

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Tonight, ABC will be premiering the 11thseason of The Bachelorette, and yes, I will be watching along with my Bachelorette buddy in New York. However, I’ve still got one more post in me about the last season of The Bachelor with Prince Farming (Chris Soules) that I’d like to put out there. In episode 5, Chris took contestant Carly (who lists mascara and a curling iron up there with God in a list of things she can't live without) with him to see a self-proclaimed love guru named Tziporah for their first one-on-one date. This definitely was an interesting choice for a first date and not an adventure that most would have chosen. However, in contrast to the superficial nature of most of the dates on The Bachelor, I was actually really floored by the beginning of the session which I thought was amazingly deep and productive.

The love guru session was one which forced those participating to open up to each other in deep and meaningful ways. However, as Chris notes in his blog post, “I knew from the moment that I walked in and saw Tziporah that things were about to get weird.” That is because in our culture, anything associated with the metaphysical, many Eastern cultures, or even anything slightly outside the mainstream is immediately and unfortunately branded as “weird.” Our modern American culture has taught us to be closed-minded about anything out of our ordinary reality. A healthier attitude upon entering this situation might have been, “Wow. This looks really different than what I’m used to. I wonder what I can learn from this new experience.” Just as the various dates on The Bachelor/ette which involve jumping off of buildings or scaling high cliffs are seen as challenges to do something intimidating, different, and scary, so too could all new experiences be seen as something challenging to experience. However, the immediate reaction in this case of Chris and many others was to immediately brand this opportunity as “weird.”

The session with Tziporah began innocently enough with deep breathing exercises; these are used to ground and center oneself. It’s a great way to bring one's self into the present moment and to focus on the events at hand. However, even that was too far out of an experience for Chris as he claimed in his blog post about the session that he was ready to “pass out” from just breathing! Then, in the edited portions we saw, the love guru began having Carly and Chris engage in exercises to strengthen their intimacy and their non-verbal communication. As I watched the session play out, I definitely thought it would be a very awkward date to have on national television, but if I guy I already knew and had feelings for were to suggest a date like the beginning of this one, it would actually increase my admiration for him. The goals of this session were to build a deeper relationship that wasn’t just built on physical and sexual chemistry, though those still played a large part of the relationship building. A man seeking to connect on these deeper levels isn’t just looking for a one-night stand in a lot of cases: He wants his romantic relationships to be part of his personal growth.

I did agree with the rest of the nation that the date became very awkward at the end as shown in the third video of the segments linked below (click through the first to get to the second and third). At that point, the love guru transformed into a sex guru, and she was asking the couple to do things that were completely inappropriate for an early date on national television. However, for an already established couple looking to expand their relationship, the things she was suggesting were likely helpful. The context and timing was just completely wrong.

I wish the contestants on the show and the nation at large had been more open to a relationship being developed on physical, emotional, sexual, and spiritual/energetic levels. Too often, the relationships on these dating shows are built on superficial sexual chemistry; it’s why they are doomed to failure fairly rapidly after the show ends. That’s not an uncommon reality in the dating world from what I’ve been able to assess, too: Physical appearances are what matter the most. When our society begins to open its collective mind to the idea that relationships need to be built on deep intimacy and spiritual connections, our dating world will change radically, and society will look radically different.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Absence from whom we love is worse than death, and frustrates hope severer than despair. ~William Cowper

In episode 9, season 2 of The Carrie Diaries, Carrie and her boyfriend Sebastian briefly enter into a long distance relationship. Carrie’s boss Larissa (who has just declared her love for her engagement ring to be greater than her love for her fiancé) discusses long distance relationships with her:

For better and for worse, my life has included four school years and a summer of a long distance relationship mostly during college with my then boyfriend/fiancé whom I eventually married and divorced. I spent years dealing with the negative comments about long distance relationships from others similar to the conversation quoted above. It was truly discouraging to have to deal with the negativity. I was told over and over again that long distance relationships never work. Some of my ex’s family made it very clear they didn’t want us to continue dating long distance because it was not “appropriate” for people as young as we were. Almost everyone else had a story to warn us about: the cheating, the growing apart, the difficulties in making it work, etc. No one seemed to have anything positive, helpful, or encouraging to say about long distance relationships.

The general population has some good points on this one. Long distance relationships are hard. There’s no question about that. If a couple isn’t meant to be, a long distance relationship where you no longer have physical or sexual interactions occurring regularly will cause relationships that are only built on physical chemistry to implode really quickly. The reality, though, is that the vast majority of those relationships would have ended eventually. The trial of the distance simply speeds up the breakup. My first college roommate was dating her high school boyfriend long distance for the first few weeks of school. She went home to visit one weekend and found condoms in the glovebox in his truck; she was on the pill so they no longer used condoms. That was the end of what was already a very unhealthy relationship that wouldn’t have lasted for long anyway. The physical distance just helped bring about a swifter end.

For me, the reality of the long distance relationship wasn’t what I’d expected. It was hard and painful, but it was doable. Neither of us was tempted to cheat, and our growth really continued along a similar pattern at that point in our lives. We were two bright, intelligent and communicative people. We turned to letter writing and eventually email to fill the distance. Phones existed, though the amount we spent on long distance bills (especially for the two years they were at higher in-state rates) was unbelievable. I often wonder how different things would have been for us in today’s day and age of cell phones with unlimited long distance and texting for $25 a month!

The bigger problem for us with long distance was something that I didn't see then but which actually was a huge red flag that would play out later in our relationship. Hindsight is always much closer to 20/20 than the present moment! The problem was that my ex actually didn’t mind the distance between us. He liked having a girlfriend who only stopped by once a month. He got all of the perks of a romantic relationship but far less responsibility or the feeling of being tied down. The space between us was actually an asset that never bothered him much. For me, however, it was devastating to be apart from him so much. I hated that I was always the third of fifth wheel in the group of friends I hung out with because my boyfriend was in another city or state. In retrospect, I realize that the long distance relationship actually may have kept us together rather than breaking us apart like it did for many others. The freedom my ex got during those long distance years was exactly what he needed even though it was horrid for me. Twenty years later when we ended our marriage, he was actually very excited about having his own place again whereas I was initially not happy about the idea of living alone. For all the horror stories and warnings people felt all too free to give us about long distance relationships, no one warned us that it might help keep us together when we might have been better breaking up!

Long distance relationships are hard. If there was another option, I wouldn’t advise people to choose the long distance except for short time periods or extreme circumstances. However, couples have been engaging long distance relationships for millenia: Military personnel and their spouses are a prime example. The bottom line is that long distance relationships are just not fun. The hot passion of reunions is fabulous, but the price to pay for it is just not enough to compensate for the pains of absence. A long distance relationship will help a couple discover the weaknesses of their relationship at a much faster pace than they would otherwise discover those issues. But when you take into account how many relationships break up over the course of a lifetime, both before and after marriage, a relationship ending during a time of long distance is not that much of a surprise. Long distance relationships just get a bad reputation for the wrong reasons.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

There's something depressing about a young couple helplessly in love. Their state is so perfect, it must be doomed. They project such qualities on their lover that only disappointment can follow. ~Roger Ebert

A few months ago, I watched Jerry Maguire with my older kids. When the movie was first released in 1996 when I was 22 and a relative newlywed, I thought it was funny and romantic. This time around, my perspective was very different. Instead of seeing Jerry and Dorothy as a great couple, I saw them as two very damaged individuals who were making a big mistake in entering a relationship with each other. The movie’s (possibly) most romantic moment, shown below in a video clip, is when Jerry declares his love to Dorothy by telling her, “You complete me.”

Our culture is attached to this very distorted idea that we can complete someone else. Romantic relationships are supposed to help us find our other half, or in joking terms, our better half. We are supposed to find the magical person who helps us become better than we already are. Without them, we are incomplete. Unfortunately, creating this kind of unrealistic expectation lays the groundwork for dysfunctional relationships. We expect our significant others to be miracle workers who will magically improve us while we simultaneously are able to fulfill everything they need to be better people, too. As our astounding relationship grows, it becomes the epitome of perfection. We are the perfect couple because we complete each other.

And yet somehow this amazing relationship often ends up in divorce court. It turns out we don’t actually complete each other. What we often do is that we bring our individual flaws into a relationship where we can continue to grow in combination as each of us play off of the others’ weaknesses and strengths. We manage to pick partners whose family relationships and life experiences will complement our own so that we can continue to learn the lessons we are meant to learn in this life. Eventually, we realize that our dream partners aren’t whom we thought they were. They are not the ones to complete us.

So how do we find the person who actually completes us? We look inside. The only person who can make us whole is our own selves. We are the ones who can love ourselves. We can grow. We can change. We can become whomever we want to be (within realistic expectations, of course. There’s no chance of me becoming an NBA player any time soon). Rather than looking for someone else to fix us, it is up to each of us to do our own work. That work can and often does involve our romantic partners. We can grow and learn with each other. However, it’s when we expect our partners to fill in the holes within us that we enter the world of dysfunction. If we can’t be something we want to be, we can’t expect someone else to be it for us. Some people even shove this unhealthy expectation onto their children when their partners fail to complete their unrealistic dreams.

If I had to make a guess on Dorothy and Jerry’s romance, I’d say that they are likely to be in marriage therapy within a few years and divorced soon after. They both are individuals bringing in mountains of baggage and expecting that the other will somehow make all those issues suddenly disappear in their “completeness” as a couple. In reality, they are setting themselves up for heartbreak: When the novelty of the relationship wears off, they will instead find themselves even more broken and incomplete than before.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC