about who’s choosing tablets over the gel capsules because they’re smaller and easier to swallow.
Later on, as we are narrowed down to a smaller field, a sense of trust is established. A few of us ask the Bachelor if he will come glasses shopping with us. Several different stores are visited and many pairs are tried on before we decide to go with a frame very similar to our existing one.
There is the date where we go to a café and just talk about our dads.
There is the date where we go to the Met to see some important Chinese brush-painting exhibit that was written up in the Times and then eat at a terrible restaurant on the Upper East Side.
And at last, when the show has brought us down to two candidates, the final deciding date puts each of us—yes, I am one of the finalists—in the most intimate situation of all: watching all of the previous seasons of The Bachelor together.
This is the date that is the most important. This is how we will find out what he really thinks, and who he really is.
Connie
I n the ’60s, when he was putting himself through graduate school, my father worked at Bellevue Hospital, where his job was to hold the heads of people receiving electroshock therapy. My dad was not in graduate school for anything related to medicine, psychology, hospitals, shock, or heads. He was getting his master’s in English. Fifty years later, if you tell him you’re going to therapy (something I would not recommend doing), he pictures you being strapped down by Nurse Ratched for the Cuckoo’s Nest special. That’s what he thinks all therapy is. Or maybe he pictures someone masquerading under the title “psychoanalyst” getting out of his chair to quietly grope you after he’s put you into a trance with garbage lies about your parents.
But this isn’t about my father. This is about me finding my way to therapy, way back in 2003, a couple of years after I had the spectacularly horrible split with Pete and every weakness that had been an ignorable little dripping faucet turned into a waterfall of low self-esteem, sadness, and anger. I paddled around in this muck for a year after we broke up, gradually getting worse, until I began to feel physically sick. My hands started tingling, I developed a numb patch on my cheek, and when I tried to type, my fingers were clumsy and missed the keys. I went on WebMD (THE RIGHT THING TO DO), where I found out that under no circumstances was I to believe anything other than the medically established true fact that I was dying of everything. In a panic, I ran to my primary care doctor at the time, Dr. Remy.
Dr. Remy was British, in his early fifties, with a chilly demeanor and more than a passing resemblance to William Hurt. I had a huge crush on him and would occasionally fantasize about an appointment with him touching my face and tracing the outline of my lips with his finger, and then gently kissing my forehead the way Mr. Darcy kisses Elizabeth in every decent adaptation of Pride and Prejudice .
Believe it or not, this never happened. However, his specialty was gastroenterology, and thus he believed the anus to be the oracle of health, the human equivalent of a dog’s nose. This meant that every time I went to see him, regardless of the reason—a cold, a sore throat—he would put his finger in my butt. So in a way, it was like we were dating.
This time, I told him about the numb spot and tingling hands and my bad typing. As usual, he put his finger in my butt. He asked me if anything unusual was going on in my life, and I said no, not really, except for the breakup with my live-in boyfriend of six years. Before I even finished the sentence, he snapped off his plastic gloves and tossed them into the medical waste disposal, which is doctor sign language for “This appointment is over (you idiot).”
“You know when you go through a breakup, it’s like going through a death,” he said in his frosty accent. “You’re depressed. Have you thought about
Later on, as we are narrowed down to a smaller field, a sense of trust is established. A few of us ask the Bachelor if he will come glasses shopping with us. Several different stores are visited and many pairs are tried on before we decide to go with a frame very similar to our existing one.
There is the date where we go to a café and just talk about our dads.
There is the date where we go to the Met to see some important Chinese brush-painting exhibit that was written up in the Times and then eat at a terrible restaurant on the Upper East Side.
And at last, when the show has brought us down to two candidates, the final deciding date puts each of us—yes, I am one of the finalists—in the most intimate situation of all: watching all of the previous seasons of The Bachelor together.
This is the date that is the most important. This is how we will find out what he really thinks, and who he really is.
Connie
I n the ’60s, when he was putting himself through graduate school, my father worked at Bellevue Hospital, where his job was to hold the heads of people receiving electroshock therapy. My dad was not in graduate school for anything related to medicine, psychology, hospitals, shock, or heads. He was getting his master’s in English. Fifty years later, if you tell him you’re going to therapy (something I would not recommend doing), he pictures you being strapped down by Nurse Ratched for the Cuckoo’s Nest special. That’s what he thinks all therapy is. Or maybe he pictures someone masquerading under the title “psychoanalyst” getting out of his chair to quietly grope you after he’s put you into a trance with garbage lies about your parents.
But this isn’t about my father. This is about me finding my way to therapy, way back in 2003, a couple of years after I had the spectacularly horrible split with Pete and every weakness that had been an ignorable little dripping faucet turned into a waterfall of low self-esteem, sadness, and anger. I paddled around in this muck for a year after we broke up, gradually getting worse, until I began to feel physically sick. My hands started tingling, I developed a numb patch on my cheek, and when I tried to type, my fingers were clumsy and missed the keys. I went on WebMD (THE RIGHT THING TO DO), where I found out that under no circumstances was I to believe anything other than the medically established true fact that I was dying of everything. In a panic, I ran to my primary care doctor at the time, Dr. Remy.
Dr. Remy was British, in his early fifties, with a chilly demeanor and more than a passing resemblance to William Hurt. I had a huge crush on him and would occasionally fantasize about an appointment with him touching my face and tracing the outline of my lips with his finger, and then gently kissing my forehead the way Mr. Darcy kisses Elizabeth in every decent adaptation of Pride and Prejudice .
Believe it or not, this never happened. However, his specialty was gastroenterology, and thus he believed the anus to be the oracle of health, the human equivalent of a dog’s nose. This meant that every time I went to see him, regardless of the reason—a cold, a sore throat—he would put his finger in my butt. So in a way, it was like we were dating.
This time, I told him about the numb spot and tingling hands and my bad typing. As usual, he put his finger in my butt. He asked me if anything unusual was going on in my life, and I said no, not really, except for the breakup with my live-in boyfriend of six years. Before I even finished the sentence, he snapped off his plastic gloves and tossed them into the medical waste disposal, which is doctor sign language for “This appointment is over (you idiot).”
“You know when you go through a breakup, it’s like going through a death,” he said in his frosty accent. “You’re depressed. Have you thought about
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