“Don’t Call That Man” Newsletter!
Http://WWW.RhondaFindling.com
December 2006, Issue # 15
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IN THIS ISSUE
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1. Don’t Call Your Ex on the Holidays
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Christmas and New Years is the most dangerous time of the year in terms of trying not to call your ex. You may be haunted by memories of past holidays when you were together or when he was in your life. But that’s no excuse to "call that man!" If you give in now with the excuse "it's the holidays" it will wipe out all the hard work you've done all year long to "not call him". So what do you do when the urge to contact your "ex" is so overwhelming because of all the parties, songs and memories?
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2. Manhattan and Queens Support Groups
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here is currently an opening in the Manhattan and Queens psychotherapy/support groups. If you are interested in joining either of these groups, please contact me at rhondadctm@aol.com or leave me a message at (718) 459-3284.
Here is a description of the issues we address in both groups:
The Manhattan Group has both men and women members where you will have an opportunity to gain insight into the opinions of both sexes.
The Queens group is a woman’s group.
Rhonda Findling actively participates in both groups and offers feedback.
These are not drop in groups where someone can come by once or twice to check it out. All members must make at least a two-month commitment. A telephone interview with Rhonda Findling is required to become a group member.
Date and Time:
The Manhattan Group is held in Rhonda Findling's office at 32 Gramercy Park South. The group meets on Wednesday evenings from 7 PM until 8:30 PM.
The Queens Group is held in Forest Hills. The group meets on Tuesday evenings from 8 PM until 9:30 PM.
Fees:
Please check my website under the Support Groups link to find out about fees for the groups or you can contact me directly by emailing me at rhondaDCTM@aol.com or leaving a message at (718) 459-3284.
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3.
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Don’t Move (2005)
In this Italian romantic drama, Sergio Castellito plays a worldly married surgeon who finds himself drawn to a pretty hotel maid with major self-esteem issues played by Penelope Cruz. They have a love affair and he struggles with his ambivalence about whether or not to leave his wife for the Penelope Cruz character. I think Timoteo, Sergio Castellito’s character, should get the best Ambivalent Man character of the year award. This is a captivating movie that will keep you hooked until the very end.
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4. Message Board
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Even though the message board is now in a secured area of my website, I encourage everyone to continue utilizing the message boards to process feelings, ideas and experiences. Not only is posting a chance for you to write about what you are thinking about, or going through, but it is helpful for others who utilize the messages on the board for validation of their own experiences. Many people tell me that they feel less isolated when they read other people's experiences that they can identify with. Although I don't often have a chance to post, I do read each and every one of your messages.
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5. Featured Article: Ms. Eternal Bachelorette
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Brooke, an attractive thirty-nine-year-old attorney, came to see me because of her struggle with her newfound desire to become a mother. Brooke told me she had three long-term relationships with men in her life, but none of them materialized into a marriage. With a booming private law practice, Brooke had never given much thought or worry about having a family until recently. However her father’s death stirred feelings in her that she had never dealt with before. Brooke was an only child, so she had no nieces or nephew to bond with. A practical and proactive woman, she had begun worrying that if she didn’t do something about it soon, she would end up middle-aged with no children in her life. With a beautiful condo in Trump Towers, constant invitations to celebrity-attended cocktail parties, and a packed social calendar, she had always enjoyed her single life.
But lately she started to be concerned because she was turning forty and there were no prospects of a husband or her own family on the horizon. She was economically self-sufficient enough to consider adoption, but despite her fear of loneliness, she was even more afraid of losing her treasured autonomy. Brooke is an Eternal Bachelorette.
The Eternal Bachelorette is an autonomous, self-sufficient woman who enjoys being single. Despite her lifestyle, she’s open to the prospect of love and maybe a partner. However, she’s not holding her breath. And while waiting for her soul mate to come along, she enjoys life and lives it to the fullest. Often, she doesn’t want to “settle” when it comes to choosing a prospective husband. Despite her desire for romantic love, marriage is not a major priority for her. She takes responsibility for choices that may have contributed to her staying unmarried and doesn’t complain about how life has victimized her. She’s aware that her selectiveness in the men she has considered getting involved with has possibly caused her to have had less available men to pick from.
Signs of Ms. Eternal Bachelorette:
Ms. Eternal Bachelorettes are into the following:
There are three main types of EBs. Perhaps the best way to understand each type is to place them in a pop-culture context.
Bachelorette #1: The Carrie Bradshaw type (Sex and the City)
She enjoys socializing, meeting new men, and having relationships with men. She goes to great parties, meets interesting people, and enjoys her life. Settling down with one man is dull and boring compared to her exciting, glamorous lifestyle. Married women often envy her stimulating life with new people, her adventures, and her freedom to come and go as and with whom she pleases. She lives and works at what she wishes without having to account or compromise with anyone
Bachelorette #2: Samantha Jones type (Sex and the City)
She enjoys having affairs with men of all types. And she has no real interest in settling down. She is often impulsive and very focused on the here and now. She enjoys her sexual freedom and is not so concerned about long-term relationships. She doesn’t want to miss out on any romances or sensual experiences that life has to offer her. Despite her provocative lifestyle, she always manages to earn enough money to pay her bills with either a career or job.
Bachelorette #3: Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore Show):
Her independent, single life may be rich and rewarding, but in comparison to the Carrie and Samantha EBs, the Mary Richards style is less glamorous and exciting. Often, she is more absorbed with her career, studies, creativity, building a business, or athletics than her connection to men and romance. She relishes the freedom involved in coming and going as she please without any questions asked. She does not view living alone as a hindrance to her happiness, and she, in fact, enjoys having a life that runs just as she wishes.
The eternal bachelorette is becoming more of a popular living style due to the huge amount of women staying single. According to BusinessWeekly in October 2003, the Census Bureau reports that married couple households have slipped from nearly 80 percent in the 1950s to just 50.7 percent today. The proportion of women ages twenty-five to twenty-nine who have never married has tripled since 1970. Twice as many women choose to be single today as they did twenty years ago.
This sociological phenomenon is partly due to greater financial independence and sexual liberation. Many thanks to our feminist foremothers!!
As single women age, they often become increasingly successful and more economically self-sufficient. Their self-confidence often blossoms just from the emotional maturity gained through life experience. As a result, however, it often becomes more difficult for her to compromise and subordinate herself to a man and his lifestyle. This course of events then results in her staying single and taking on the lifestyle of an eternal bachelorette as opposed to when she was younger and more amenable to merging her life with a man.
Despite the alluring sexual freedom of Samantha Jones, which could be liberating and joyful, there’s also the opposite side of the coin to consider—she might be using sex as a form of acting out. Like some of the men I’ve written about in my other books, she relates to others primarily on a sexual level, causing her to cut herself off from her deeper feelings of love and attachment that could create a lot of anxiety for her. She may have been deeply emotionally injured as a little girl, and if she keeps all her connections with men on a sexual level, she feels that she’ll never get hurt like that again.
Also, lots of sexual freedom could represent for her a coping mechanism for stress. She could be using the pleasure and physical release of sex as a way to cope with overwhelming feelings and life in general. There’s nothing wrong with this type of lifestyle as long as she protects herself. However, this type of Eternal Bachelorette could burn out as she gets older or her beauty starts to fade, making it difficult to attract as many men, which may be just when her needs change and she begins to want something deeper and more permanent.
Some women are just very naturally independent and are therefore innate EBs. Other women, however, turn into EBs later on when they get tired of investing emotional energy into relationships with men. This type of EB may have wished for permanent bonding with a man, but her wishes may have never been fulfilled. As a result, she is no longer as enthusiastic about putting in the time and effort needed to deal with the anxiety or pain that may surface when trying to attain intimacy with a man.
Throughout the years, all three types of EBs may have been doing all the work to try and become as emotionally healthy as possible, making better and healthier choices by going for therapy or reading self-help books. Sometimes, even after the intrapsychic work, when she is no longer seduced or manipulate by ambivalent, emotionally disturbed, and/or unavailable men, this type may still not be able find the man she is looking for. So maybe it’s not all because of the woman’s poor choices in men or her issues about her inadequate father or her alcoholic/codependent mother or her need for an extreme makeover.
Some of the problem may be that there just aren’t enough good men to go around! Although this whole subject will be addressed more in a later chapter, I bring this to the forefront now because the frustration that occurs as a result of a lack of enough suitable and appropriate man can result in a woman recommitting to herself and her autonomous, single lifestyle, from which she does get a lot of gratification and reciprocity from work, family, friends, interests, building economic power, creativity etc. Thus she may turn into the Eternal Bachelorette not just as a way to survive, but as a way to thrive.
To validate my point, I cite New York–based psychoanalyst Dr. Janice Lieberman’s article “Issues in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Single Females Over Thirty”:
“Once women reach their late twenties and increasingly as they get older there is a scarcity of suitable men available to them. The shortage of heterosexual men capable of a long commitment like marriage to women over 30 seems to be a fact of reality that is commonly overlooked or even denied by society.”
Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Ethel Person also writes in her book Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion:
“Unlike men, women live in a scarcity economy: there simply aren’t enough men to go around. This problem is compounded by the fact that men often consider women less desirable as they grow older . . . . After a certain age women know their chances of finding love and sex are greatly reduced.”
I’ve included these last two powerful statements from two prominent, distinguished psychoanalysts to support my observations that women need to stop shouldering so much responsibility for the difficulty they may be having in finding a partner for marriage. It’s possible there’s only so much they can do about the situation and, therefore, should make the best of being an Eternal Bachelorette if need be, which may, in reality, be a viable and healthy alternative, as opposed to a lifestyle for a woman with severe intimacy issues.
Even with the accompanying glamour and stimulation of the Eternal Bachelorette lifestyle, there are practical problems she must often contend with, such as:
At some point the EB needs to acknowledge what she may not get or experience in life as a result of her choices. As a result of working through her feelings, she will then have the psychic space to make room for any new decisions on how to change or accept her life the way it is. In other words she may be able to find alternative ways to meet her needs.
The Grass Always Looks Greener
Bear in mind though that although she may have losses to grieve and contend with, there are also parts of her life she needs to be greatly appreciative of. In other words, regardless of the limitations of the EBs lifestyle, there are many married women who would give their eyeteeth to trade places with an EB. Many women who do have husbands are not happy with the men they snagged when they were younger and the dating pool was much more vast. Now that they are older and more mature they may regret their youthful selections.
In addition, many marriages do not work out. The divorce rate is presently 60 percent. But what’s even more disconcerting is that many divorced women face poverty. According to Demie Kurz, author of For Richer, For Poorer, an astonishing 39 percent of divorced women with children live in poverty. Twenty percent of divorced women receive some type of welfare income.
Some women who do have children are disappointed with the way their adult children treat them. Their children don’t call them or they just simply don’t have close relationships. These women often experience remorse for the amount of time and sacrifice they made to motherhood in light of the lack of reciprocity later on.
Another common complaint is that women who are married sometimes regret they didn’t develop their work life or creativity and instead devoted their lives to their husbands, perhaps supporting his career. They never laid the groundwork for their own work or the career they had a true passion or calling for, or they did and they took a long break to have children. They envy single women who have thriving, gratifying careers, who can earn their own money, and are accountable to no man for their success and accomplishments. These women sometimes have to put up with their husbands’ behavior, which at times may seem completely intolerable, but they are stuck in a situation due to children, financial dependence, or other entanglements. They don’t have the freedom to just pick up and leave the way an EB can.
Making Peace with Yourself Works!
In a few weekend workshops I ran for EBs, the women processed their feelings of deprivation and gratitude for the choices they made as a result of their EB lifestyle. After the women expressed their feelings in an environment in which they felt surrounded by empathic, supportive EBs, the following were some of the dramatic changes that occurred:
If you’ve decided that you do enjoy your life as an EB here are some ways to enhance and enrich the quality of life you already have.
Learn all you can about money: how to save, how to invest, how to save for your retirement, how to buy a home for yourself (condo or co-op). Watch the Suze Orman Show or read her books.
You don’t have to be isolated. You can have a wide circle of people to depend on and who will be there for you when you need them. Build your own family with people you are close and intimate with. Love is not necessarily gotten and expressed through a husband and your own biological children. Love can be given and received in all sorts of ways.
Watching children as they grow and change is a part of the life process and can be vital and healthy to take some part in. Strengthen your relationships with your nieces and nephews, if you are lucky enough to have them. Volunteer to feed motherless infants in orphanages or hospitals. Take in a foster child. Become a mentor or a Big Sister.
Use your time productively. Enhance your career. Follow you passions. Develop parts of you that up until now have been undiscovered. Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until she was in her sixties. As long as we are alive and breathing we always have an opportunity to grow and enhance ourselves.
Take Care of Yourself Physically
Since you are self-supporting, your health is of paramount importance—you have to depend on you. Eat right. Don’t take drugs. Try not to smoke or drink. Your body and immune system are precious commodities. The investment you make in your health now will affect your quality of life later on. As my Grandma Sally use to say, “When you have your health, you have everything.”
Rather than sitting around waiting for your future to happen, live it now! Decorate your apartment the way you want it now. Don’t wait until you get married to have the place of your dreams. Take trips, have adventures, explore things you’ve never dared to. Be grateful for your life just as it is. Be open to surprises. Your life can be as full as you make it.
Whatever Happened to Ms. Eternal Bachelorette Brooke?
I continued to work with Brooke regarding her deep yearnings for a child. She also attended one of my EB workshops. The reality that there were absolutely no children in her family, in addition to her excellent financial state, weighed heavily on her decision making.
After much research and deep soul searching, she decided that she would try to get pregnant through artificial insemination. If the pregnancy took, she felt that it was meant to be. If it didn’t take after a few tries, she decided she would adopt overseas, since her age was now preventing her from adopting domestically. She, in fact, did get pregnant on the first try. She is now the mother of a handsome healthy two-year-old boy. She has no regrets and is considering having a second child on her own again next year. Brooke is an Eternal Bachelorette who chose to make the best of her circumstances and reports she is living a very happy and full life.
* This Eternal Bachelorette is an excerpt from my book “The Dating Cure” (Adams Media, 2005)
Wishing everyone a great holiday season and a happy New Year!
Best,