Walt and I are giving a talk one evening when I meet a woman who is interested in exploring a coaching relationship.  She’s impressed by the way Walt and I interact as a couple, our obvious love and respect for one another, and she wants “a look under the hood” so she can create a similar dynamic in her own romantic relationship.

“I’ve got this boyfriend who’s really crazy about me,” she says. “He’s a Jamaican gentleman, and Jamaicans, they like their women big.”  She spreads her arms wide, as if to invite my attention to her gargantuan rump. “This is a guy who buys me sheer negligees and begs me to wear them.  You should see how crazy he acts when he spots me in them.”

I wait for her to get to her problem.

“Here’s the thing,” she finally says, then launches into her story. Her boyfriend is involved with another woman. Lately, each time they finish their love making session, his phone rings on the nightstand.  Instead of ignoring it, like any sensible human being would, he takes the call, jumps out of bed, and continues the conversation in the other room.  Naked, she lies there listening to the voice of the other woman through the wall.  Minutes later, he’s out the door.  Without so much as an excuse from him, or a word of protest from her. She’s not asking him any questions.  She’s not calling it what it is. She’s not using it as an opportunity to define their arrangement.  “I’d like you,” she says, smiling as if none of this bothers her, “to give me some pointers so I can win him over.”

If you’ve followed my blog, or heard me speak, you’ll understand why such a request might send me straight into orbit.

Once upon a time I was an aimless girl who twisted herself into a little pretzel to win over a man. I believed that without a man I would end up destitute. I believed that, if left to my own devices, I would make some horrible mistake and screw up my life.  I believed that I didn’t have what it took to create a viable life on my own. I was taught to ignore my instincts and my own needs in order to steady a rocking boat, to turn myself inside out to please someone else. My goal was to ingratiate myself with a surrogate Daddy, someone who would handle everything, so I could avoid risk and responsibility.

I learned the hard way that, when we deny the truth of who we are and what we want and what we feel, we end up absolutely screwed.

“A cheating, rude dude doesn’t sound like the greatest catch,” I tell the woman. She’s a middle-aged insurance executive with her own home, not some fucked up twenty-year-old wondering what comes next. “Can I ask you why you would want a guy like that in the first place?”

“Look at me,” she says, spinning around on her axis. “Who else would want this?”

She’s not smiling anymore. I’ve bumped into something.  She can no longer hide the pain. I can see it in her eyes.

See, here’s the mistake a lot of us make.  We think that it’s easier to get what we need from others because we can’t imagine getting it from ourselves. Putting up with outrageous crap, pretending it doesn’t affect us, are just symptoms of our deeper issues: our sense of inadequacy, of not being enough, that feeling of guilt or shame or inferiority, a clear lack of self-acceptance, self-trust, and self-love.

This is just some of the stuff lurking behind the nice girl complex.

Secretly we fear that without a lover, or a spouse, or children, we have no function, identity or worth. If we people please, we don’t have to face what’s missing in us.  We don’t have to formulate a game plan; take action, or risk; experience failure, then get up again; because that sort of shit looks like work.

She’s deluded herself into believing that it’s easier to smile bigger, to look perkier, to perform like a trained seal, than it is to drag her sorry ass to the gym day after day, week, after week, month after month, in order to earn a body she can be proud of.  (Replace your fix for the problem you don’t want to admit.) Until she can say, Look Mother Fucker, I want me, who the hell cares what you think. I tell her so.

The woman didn’t sign up for coaching. That was over two years ago.  Last week I saw her at the gym.  She had just hired a personal trainer.  And she was sweating like a bitch.