Dirty Little Secrets

unknowingly slept and tried to calm myself. In truth, I was terrified. Would I ever be free of the grip of my addiction? Would I be able to stay committed to this man I loved, who loved me? That evening I understood in a deeper manner that I would always be that girl. Marriage would not release me from her. Being loved by a man would not shake her loose. She and I were one. I would need to consider how to live my life with her.

That night was an important turning point for me as a loose girl. It was the beginning of my movement toward true intimacy—perhaps not intimacy as our culture defines it, where a man and a woman fall in love and ride off into the sunset and all is forever right with the world—but movement toward intimacy, which is the greatest achievement for a loose girl.

Perhaps you have a daughter who you want to protect. Perhaps she has already begun heading down this path. Perhaps you are a therapist who regularly hears stories just like these from your clients. Or maybe you are the girl you see in these pages. You are the one seeking change. This chapter is indeed about change. Readers write me daily: “Tell me what to do. Tell me how to change.” To talk about change for a loose girl, we must first talk about not changing, because the bottom line is that it remains highly unlikely that you will stop feeling that urge to seek male attention when you are feeling low. As noted in the previous chapter, and like with any addiction, the first step is acceptance. Here, we examine the idea of acceptance more closely.

LOVING YOURSELF

Most of the women who spoke to me have been told at one time or another that they must love themselves before someone else will love them. Friends tell them. Therapists tell them. Their parents tell them, too. For a loose girl, though, it isn’t that simple. For most of us, loving ourselves is too complicated. We’ve screwed up too many times. We’ve pushed too many people away with our addictions. We’ve gotten pregnant, had abortions, put ourselves in situations where we were mistreated again and again. We are too miserable when we’re alone. Other people can love themselves first, but not us. When I asked a few of the women what they thought of when they heard “love yourself,” they grew silent. Mandy said she’d never really thought about what that would even entail. Carla said she guessed she was supposed to take spa days, or lavender baths, or have a candlelit dinner for one. We laughed, hearing how ridiculous that was.

Loving yourself is a lifelong process of acceptance for who you are. It is a process of acknowledging the ways you’ve screwed up, harmed yourself, done irreparable damage to relationships, and still seeing that you are a worthwhile human being. You won’t get there by taking a bath. Loving yourself is part of an endless movement toward intimacy. The women I interviewed who felt they were more in control of their loose girl than in the past all said something similar about accepting themselves as they were.

“You have to learn to be happy with who you are and the way God created you.”

“I don’t think anyone ever recovers from this, only manages.”

“I consider myself in the process of heading towards recovery.”

“I still have a difficult time being vulnerable and intimate but at least I am aware of it.”

Before we can have intimacy with anyone else, we must find a way to accept ourselves. But girls who have sex are not treated kindly in American culture. You are a slut. You don’t care about yourself. You don’t care about having real love. Otherwise, you wouldn’t stand before the mirror before you go out, trying to determine which skirt best shows off your legs. Or, if you aren’t a slut, you are the empowered girl discussed in chapter 3; you have sex because, by God, you can do whatever you want to do. You can go out in the evening and collect boys like fireflies in a jar. You don’t have to want love.

All these assumptions made about you sink into your sense of self. It is nearly impossible to keep out the voices of a culture that will not let girls define their sexual identity. And then, too, there are parents and friends and ex-boyfriends and boys at school—all of them make assumptions about who we are as sexual beings. Inevitably, we feel judged, defensive, hurt, and misunderstood.

So, before you can begin to have intimacy with yourself and others, before you can make choices for yourself that aren’t self-destructive, you must first embrace the part of you that needs. This is a hard one. Just hearing that feels wrong. Girls aren’t supposed to need. Our neediness is ugly. It pushes boys away. It’s the reason we are unlovable. These are the lies we believe—that girls should not crave anything. We shouldn’t have intense desires. Open any book called How to Make a Man Love You or some version of that title, and the number one rule is don’t be needy. Boys hate that, they all say.

Mandy, twenty-three years old, explains that her neediness feels like “an open sore.” She says, “Every time I start to like a boy it’s like I can’t control myself. I can’t act cool anymore. I call too much. I say too much. I know I make myself unattractive, and I hate it. Sometimes I wish I could just rip my neediness out of my body.” Mandy isn’t alone with this feeling. I hear this sense of repulsion regularly from girls when they talk about their neediness. I felt that way, too. The shame I had from my need in my teens and twenties was so intense, in fact, that it threw me back into yet another boy’s bed again and again. Shame about one’s need is one of the defining features of the loose girl.

However, when a girl acts needy with a boy, if she, like Mandy says, calls him again and again and he doesn’t call her back, leaves messages saying, “Why haven’t you called? Don’t you like me anymore?” then what she is really doing is trying to control him with her need. We girls do all sorts of things like this, don’t we? Some of us send too many emails and texts. Some hang on him in public, afraid he’ll look at someone else. Some break into his Facebook account to see if he’s talking with other girls. This kind of behavior among girls is almost considered normal.

A few weeks ago at a nail salon, I heard a woman breezily say to her friend, “I figured he was cheating on me again, so I broke into his email account to see if I was crazy.” (Honey, once you’ve broken into his email account, there’s nothing more to see about whether you’ve crossed over into crazy.) “Women,” the guys all say, rolling their eyes. And sure enough, girls call each other to talk about these actions, to get support for them. “Of course you had to break into his account! He was acting weird!” “Of course you called him again! He still hasn’t called you back! What does he expect you to do?”

But this isn’t normal behavior. When we engage in these sorts of behaviors, we have moved so far away from ourselves, from caring about ourselves, from being a friend to ourselves, that we are so completely out of control that we may as well be drinking until we puke or shooting our arms full of drugs. When a girl relentlessly pursues a guy to find out what he’s thinking, she is demanding that he make her feel better, that he feed a part of her that has nothing to do with him by calling her back and saying, “Of course I like you.” When she breaks into his accounts, she is suggesting that he can’t have a will of his own, that there is no way he would love her if she doesn’t control him into doing so. Who in their right mind likes that? Who finds that attractive? Nobody wants to be made responsible for another person’s feelings. You don’t have to be a boy to feel that way. Girls don’t want to have a boy’s desperation dumped on them either. The problem here is not the neediness itself. It’s making other people responsible for your needs. It’s acting on no one’s behalf, not even your own. It is acting without any compassion for him and his needs, or for you and your own.

Beneath all that chasing and pursuing and desperation, of course, there is a little girl, a girl who feels abandoned every time you don’t give her attention and try to make someone else—a boy—take care of her. There is a little girl who doesn’t believe for a moment that anyone would love her if she didn’t try to force them into it. Some of the women I spoke with had had experiences in therapy where the therapist had tried to help them find this girl and take care of her. Twenty-seven-year-old Carla described how useless that was:

The therapist had me close my eyes and try to visualize the part of me that felt needy as a small child. I did it too. She was in there, like in my stomach, or maybe my womb. She was probably about six or seven. The therapist had me like kiss her and hug her and stuff, and even though I did it, the whole time I was thinking how ridiculous it was. I mean, I could love this part of me all I want, but as a woman I was still going to want a man to love me.

Carla’s story exemplifies how many of the therapeutic approaches to help us stop