"Love is an equation: a me and a you derives a we" - Richard Fish, Ally McBeal

One of the shows I'm currently watching from start to finish via Netflix is Ally McBeal. I used to watch this show with my mom as a youngster and I was interested in watching it again as an adult. If you've never seen it, it's hysterical. It is about a woman, Ally, in her late twenties who comes to work at the same law firm as her now married, but once long time love, Billy. As the seasons go on, the drama ensues as we watch Ally date different men, Billy's wife comes to work at the firm with them, and we see how her cases force her to reflect on her life. We see her therapy sessions and the therapy sessions of her co-workers who are all in some way certifiably crazy. In the unisex bathroom at the office, choreographed dances to Barry White songs, acrobatics, and girl fights are the norm. Despite the hysterics and the quirkiness of the characters, the over-arching theme of each episode is Ally's quest for love. I'm always curious to see how I feel when I decide to turn off the TV and go to sleep after watching several episodes. Since I usually watch the show when the man is at work or I'm just sleeping at home by myself that night, it makes me miss him. It makes me thankful that I have him, even if he isn't there that minute, but knowing he's out there comforts me. I feel relieved in knowing that I'm not "out there" looking, searching, and hoping like Ally.

It made me think about how I used to feel years ago after watching episodes of Grey's Anatomy. I would let the DVR at home in New Jersey record all of the episodes so I could watch eight in a row on my breaks from school. I thought about this one particular time sophomore year when I was dating this guy. He had already moved away and our long distance relationship was really hard. These days I don't usually go more than 24 hours without seeing the man, I don't know how I went weeks back then. Anyway, I can remember sitting in the basement, turning off the TV, and feeling like I don't express to him enough how I feel about him. Grey's Anatomy is intense and it was during the crazy MerDer times of back and forth, up and down, and just woah ("Pick me, choose me, LOVE ME"). I would turn off the TV feeling the same intense feelings as the characters but I rarely acted upon them. However this one time I called him. I told him that sometimes I don't feel like I adequately tell him all of the lovey dovey feelings that I have for him. He really didn't understand because he said that he felt very loved but he appreciated hearing it nonetheless.

Fast-foward to now, I realized that perhaps I really didn't feel those things for him, which is why I had a hard time saying them. I also think that I'm just easily caught up in the moment and the emotions of a great show, kudos to Grey's for inspiring such intense reactions from me. I know I loved him, he was my first BIG love and I don't want to take away from that but perhaps it's possible that the overly expressive words didn't come out of my mouth because he was not the love of my life. Maybe you're only supposed to show, feel, and express love the way they do on TV and in movies one time. I couldn't be sure what the answer was but I went home this weekend and was coincidentally faced with the relationship in another way...

My parents are painting all of the walls in our house over again and so my mom is cleaning out and packing everything with the assumption that the house will finally sell this spring. She asked me to go through my "boyfriend boxes" and pack them away. I only have two old boyfriend boxes and they get easier and even a little bit more ridiculous to go through with each year that passes. I was able to get rid of a lot of memorabilia that I was never able to before but I still read through most of the emails I saved, letters and cards we wrote to each other, and pictures. I stopped and asked my mom, "How did I manage to find two guys that were so overly expressive in their feelings for me and our relationship? What's that about?" We speculated that it was mainly the age at which I dated these guys, "when they're young, they fall hard and fast," she said. I was equally as shocked to read what I had written to them and about them. I had no reason to feel like I didn't express my feelings because I really did, more than I do now. I think in my current relationship, we express it differently and dare I say, more maturely. We are not a couple who is afraid to say those three words multiple times a day but there's an older, wiser, more cautious approach we take.

As we get older, as in the general population, it gets harder to so freely express our emotions as it was when we were younger because we know now that things don't always work out. New relationships that were once all exciting and thrilling are now part excitement but also part fear and expectation. I have this strange notion in my head that I have to be somewhat more fully formed before I can choose a mate for life and I was reminded by my parents this weekend that that is quite ridiculous. I think of my age as a factor in how I couldn't possibly choose a mate now but after going through those boyfriend boxes from high school and college, I realize how much older and wiser I really am now. I knew what I was doing then and I have to trust that I know what I'm doing now.

It felt right to be with those guys and when it wasn't right anymore, I made little hesitation in ending the relationships. The break-up was usually ignited by an incident that forced me to re-evaluate and ultimately decide to end things but what happens when those incidents stop happening? Or what happens when incidents occur that we successfully work through and termination isn't even on the radar screen? I think for some time I was waiting for that incident to happen with this current relationship, feeling like it can't just be that good, I couldn't possibly have met the right one right now....

As Sassarella's dad says, "All you need to know is...do you want this person in your life and is this person someone you can't imagine being without." I've answered those questions and I think I confused sleeping next to each other every night, spending time with our families, and considering each other in the life plans as really putting my all into the relationship but it's not. I never understood this before and maybe some of you reading this haven't yet either, but to really put my all into this I have to do away with the fear, the uncertainty, and the excuses for why it's not possible that I may have met my match. If I have fear, then how can I be fully and freely in this? If it's meant to stick then it can only be made better by my full attention and intentions. If it's not, then...well, let's not even go there.

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, 

while loving someone deeply gives you courage. - Lao Tzu

This won't happen overnight. I'm way too analytical to completely disregard my over-analyzing brain but now that I'm aware of it, I can actively pay attention to situations where I might shy away from or be cautious and choose not to be. I believe the only factors holding me back are my fear in every aspect of my life of making a mistake and the fact that I haven't quite let go of how my life was supposed to go. I'm a type-A perfectionist who doesn't make mistakes, that's just the way it goes but I gotta take risks and trust that the risks are the right risks to take...ya know, since I don't make mistakes and all. And well, I don't think anyone can say that life is turning out just as they planned, (even though I had it written down, broken down by year, and such), I guess I have to start accepting that it's just not how it goes.

Sassarella Says...here's to us!

It's a girl thing.

On the most recent episode of Lena Dunham's show, Girls, her character Hannah spends the entire episode with a very attractive doctor. They don't know each other very well at all, in fact they had just met, but she spends the next day or two at his apartment. They drink wine, they cook dinner, they play ping pong, and have lots of sex. Although about twenty years her senior, he makes her feel comfortable, asks her questions about her life, but dodges any questions relating to his own story. He tells her that he's separated from his wife, who now lives in San Diego, but not much more than that.

The episode ends with Hannah getting out of the shower, sitting on his bed, and confiding to him about how she feels lonely sometimes. It was as if the feeling just hit her in that moment and a rush of emotions poured out of her. Once she composed herself she looked up to see his freaked out face staring back at her and she was hit with the second realization of the hour, that they are actually strangers. She calls him out for making her feel one way but reacting quite oppositely when she lets her guard down but ultimately she spends the night, gets up the next morning to an empty apartment, leaves, and we are left assuming that she will not see him again. (We'll have to watch next week to know for sure but that's just my guess). 

As the credits rolled, by boyfriend commented, "That would never happen in real life, especially to her." My first instinct was to defend Lena Dunham because lord knows what I might look like onscreen...they say the camera adds ten pounds! However I refrained and focused more on the first part of the comment. I responded very calmly and sincerely, "I related to that entire episode." He was confused and quiet but asked me how. 

I was that girl, and still could be that girl if I didn't have him, who sometimes thought that anything was just crazy and random enough that it might work out. Here she meets a guy on the street and spends a weekend with him, who's to say that it wasn't meant to be? As for me, in college and as recently as a year ago, we lived through my dating madness where I existed on a fine line between lonely desperation, hopeful romanticism/optimism, and bitter jadedness. I fell somewhere in between all three, expressing and feeling bits and pieces of each emotional state. I overlooked minor warning signs on first dates that I would never overlook today for the sake wanting something to work out. Sometimes I claimed to just do things or date people for the stories (which there were many) but let's call a spade a spade, I wanted a boyfriend. Not to mention the fact that I always dated men a bit older than myself, like Hannah. During that time I rarely hesitated when asked to...oh I don't know...jump in the Potomac River in February wearing nothing but a bra and undies. Sure it made for a great story and an experience I'll have forever but in terms of a happy ending with the guy? Not so much. He was emotionally closed off but I looked past this, which he made easy to do, by always keeping me on my toes. We crashed fancy parties, went to nice dinners, and jumped into rivers so it was easy to forget that I actually hardly knew the real him.

I think a lot of women experience this same sentiment, especially in their twenties when life just seems oh so possible of anything! We're told that "it will happen when we least expect it" so why shouldn't we have hope that meeting a random guy at a coffee shop and spending a weekend naked playing ping pong with him will ever work out? If I had seen this episode years ago or if I wasn't lying next to my committed boyfriend, I probably would've been in tears watching the closing scenes. I felt like she wrote that episode about me. Anyway, it was somewhere around this way less detailed part of my explanation with my boyfriend that I saw his face was still quite puzzled and I simply said, "well there's a reason why it's called Girls, not Boys." He concurred and we ended the discussion there. 

I didn't bother to go into this amount of detail with him because I was pretty certain that by the end of any explanation I would be left with one reason for him, "it's a girl thing." Our highs and lows are so extreme in our twenties that when we're on a high with a guy, we grab on and try really hard not to let go because we know how low the low really is. The low means sappy songs, old episodes of One Tree Hill, and five more pounds around the waist. It's miserable, trust me I know. So we let ourselves get swept away in the hope that it might just work out this one time....because really, you only need it to work out once so why not now? We are naïve and blinded by our own spontaneity but looking back I really would not have it any other way. Sure I was les misérable a lot but I had a lot of fun too. And I think pretty importantly, I really know that I'm happy now because I can tell the difference from a time when I was faking it.

Sassarella Says...there's nothing wrong with having hope that the craziest of situations might work out. The problem arises when you've got no hope left. Hang in there, mAh LaDiEZ. 

Sign of the Whale's Bathroom

There's something fabulous yet very strange about living in the same city in which you went to college. I frequent many of the same hang-outs but I experience them so differently today than I did last year two years ago, or even three...four..five...yikes...five and a half, almost six years ago as a freshman.

Just a week or so ago I was at Sign of the Whale (a bar) to celebrate a friend's 26th birthday. I went to the bathroom by myself...which let's start there, when did you ever go to the bathroom, ladies, by yourself in college? Never. It happened in this instance partly because these days I'm normally largely outnumbered by men in group outings but I didn't even think to ask any of the other girls there. This might sound like I'm digressing but please refer to the title of this post before you judge.

Anyway, it was a slow Wednesday night so I had the bathroom to myself. I did my biz and while washing my hands and looking at myself in the mirror, I suddenly started to crack up in laughter. For whatever reason this one time in all the times that I've used that bathroom in the last year and a half, my brain instantly flashed to the outrageous amount of memories I have in and around that space.

While out at a bar, all of the action supposedly happens out on the dance floor or standing at the bar but for women, especially young women, a lot goes down in the bathroom too. For starters, we often discuss the action occurring at the bar or on the dance floor, one person peeing while the other one was holding the door closed. My brain flashed to the beyond numerous times that Meghan and I chatted in the bathroom about the dumb dudes hitting on us that Oscar then shamelessly tortured and reminded us of all night. Or the time Lauren visited and the bathroom was more of an escape route from the absurdity that is "The Whale," just needed a little break if you will. And then I thought about the night Allie won the Snooki hair contest and she, Maggie, and I cracked up in the bathroom because we shared a piece of gum. Or the time I went pee with my mom and sister on graduation weekend after we all did zingers. Insanity. I could picture everything from the outfits we wore, the shoes I was in, the clutch I used, the jewelry, the hair, the make-up, the complete college look. We always got dressed up. I could see the exchanging of t.p. from under one stall to another, and hear the crazy conversations, the exchanges with the bathroom attendant, and above all, I could remember the laughter.

 Me: "It's called G.T.L. Night"

Mags: "What is that? Should I know what that means? 

I'm just along for the ride, people."

In another how many years from now I'll think about the times I've had in that bathroom more recently and feel the same nostalgia. The most vivid memories now-a-days are sharing happy tears with Brittany over Lena Dunham winning the Emmy, discussing the latest Sunday Funday drama, or even making out with someone in there so no one else would see......yup, that happened. Anyway, the whole experience that Wednesday night was hysterical and completely ridiculous but made me think and whatever makes me think deserves a post.

Sassarella Says...every now and then, I miss college.