Catherine Townsend's Blog, page 3
March 18, 2013
The Love Detective TV Show
Anyone out there in the NYC area who has an issue that they would like The Love Detective to resolve, and is willing to be filmed for a short segment on show about love, please get in touch. Whether you want to get back in touch with the one that got away, get answers about cheating or learn how to figure out red flags on a first date, I can help you find answers. This isn’t about cheesy set-ups or jumping out of bushes; it’s about getting to the truth and giving people a positive sense of closure. Email me on catherinetownsend@hotmail.com for more information, and feel free to pass this along! Cheers, Cat
Diamonds are forever. Most relationships are a lot shorter.
I investigated the often inverse relationship between celeb relationship longevity and bling for The Curse of Neil Lane. My take? Some people seem to think that having a massive rock makes a statement about the seriousness of the relationship. But size doesn’t count…at least when it comes to rings.
March 14, 2013
NYPD Cannibal Cop: A Female Perspective
‘I know S&M is popular with Fifty Shades of Grey, but this seemed different,’ she said. ‘The girl on the front page was dead.’
March 5, 2013
The Love Detective: Staging a Love Intervention, Part One
I get a ton of letters from people whose friends/loved ones/colleagues are dating losers and scammers. They ask me how to bitch-slap them into reality using logical arguments. Here’s the thing: You usually can’t. You need a soft touch approach AND hard evidence. Evolution has hard-wired women to love bad boys, and people in love are high on dopamine and temporarily insane.
Take Tamara Ecclestone, the daughter of pocket-sized Formula One magnate Bernie Ecclestone. She just got engaged to Jay Rutland, a guy she’s known for a month. Her new love is a former stockbroker who got kicked out of the FSA for insider trading: That’s right, he was too shady to be a banker. Pretty scary stuff. He also dealt coke to that chick from Eastenders.
Tamara may be a billionaire, but this isn’t the first time she’s ignored some serious red flags. One ex cheated on her; another blackmailed her. I’m sure her friends and family have suggested that maybe, just maybe, she should slow down this time.
This won’t work. It will probably only make her want to ‘prove her point’. To illustrate how delusional ‘fantasy love’ can make us, let’s replace her current beau with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Both men like to flash money around, both have vague occupations that allow them to sleep all day (currently Rutland is ‘International Playboy’ on Twitter and a ‘broker consultant’), and both are into love at first sight. Here’s how that would play out:
ME: Tamara, you’re dating Dracula. The guys drinks blood and has to feed on people to survive. Seriously, this isn’t going to end well.
TAMARA: I’ve never felt this way before! He’s my soulmate.
ME: I get it, but he’s killed a lot of people and turned them into monsters. Doesn’t that scare you?
TAMARA: He was totally honest with me about his past. Everyone deserves a second chance.
ME: Okay, but he just ate your best friend. Like, last night.
TAMARA: He crossed oceans of time to find me!
ME: If he’s that focused, can’t he get a real job?
Doing a love intervention is like telling someone they are bad in bed–you have to subtly redirect them without embarrassment. Otherwise, you will just piss them off and make them feel horrible. Then you back it up with hard evidence. Stay tuned for tomorrow: My tips on How to Stage a Love Intervention.
March 2, 2013
February 27, 2013
First Date Red Flag #1: The Man Who Masturbated
*Illustrated with a super-cute hamster 
It was even more shocking because our date had started out so normally. We went for Italian food, shared a plate of tiramisu and retired to an intimate bar for dessert wine. To get some privacy, we settled into a back-room sofa beside a roaring fire. Then he leaned in, I steadied myself for our first kiss – and that’s when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it.
Somehow, while we were chatting, he had unbuttoned his trousers and released his member, which he was enthusiastically stroking like a pet hamster. “Do you want to touch it?” he asked, in the same conversational tone he’d used to ask what my dad did for a living. I grabbed my coat and bolted.
He called several times and left apologetic messages, saying that he’d always had a thing for sex in public places and thought I would be “up for it”. I deleted his number. Our mutual friend kept calling to ask why I hadn’t “clicked” with P (or, as my girlfriends nicknamed him, The Flasher), and told me that he’d really liked me. So I had to wonder: if that was the case, what the hell had this guy been thinking?
Maybe it was partly my fault. It’s known that I’m hardly a shrinking violet in the bedroom: I’ve dated men with foot fetishes, tried anal sex and braved candlewax burns. I’ve even indulged an ex-boyfriend’s alfresco sex obsession before – though our back-alley trysts were more 9.5 seconds than 9 1/2 Weeks.
But generally, I think that first-time sex with someone I like should be relatively straightforward. We’re probably already nervous about seeing each other’s naked bits, so it would be great if boys could wait until at least date four before breaking out the leather gimp mask.
Occasionally, I’ve done outrageous things in first-time sex, but the kinky behaviour has been discussed at length first, not sprung on me by some guy dry-humping a sofa.
In most cases, even with open-minded girls, trust takes time to build. For women, there is also the safety issue to consider, which is why I’m a huge fan of well-vetted sex parties for acting out fantasies. That way, I can be reassured that someone in the room knows the surname of the guy hog-tying me to the bedposts.
Most of my girlfriends have horror stories, whether it’s Amy’s mild-mannered doctor with the torture closet, or the guy who casually told me before the appetisers that he wanted to shave off my pubic hair. “I once had guy open a drawer and pull out a bunch of sex toys he had used with his ex-girlfriend. It was our second date,” Victoria told me. “That was just wrong.”
Most of these guys seemed nice and normal, but because they were too pushy too soon, they will for ever be defined by funny nicknames. Which brings me back to The Flasher. He texted a few days ago to say that he hoped we could be friends, then invited me to the movies as a peace offering. It’s a nice gesture, but I’m not exactly keen to hang out in a dark location with him. Or to share popcorn; I know a bit too much about where his hands have been.
February 20, 2013
Mail Online: I Grew up in America’s most violent small town
An X-Files episode where Mulder and Scully are faced with a biological element that melts human skin is called ‘The Pine Bluff Variant’ after the Pine Bluff Arsenal.
When a reporter visited the town recently to do a police ride-along, acting Police Chief Jeff Hubanks said that ‘the little old white lady with the kitten on her lap is perfectly safe in this town’. He seemed to infer that crime was confined to drug dealers and rough areas.
But violence in Pine Bluff isn’t limited to the wrong side of the tracks. These days the town’s nickname is ‘Crime Bluff’, and the last time I drove through I saw a boarded-up Main Street that looked like the zombie apocalypse had already happened.
The historic Pines Hotel is crumbling, and the Saenger Theater is closed. The Pines Mall where I hung out as a kid is a hive of gang activity, and most of the major retailers have shut their doors. Burnt-out cars and trash are everywhere.
It wasn’t always this way. My parents lived in and around Pine Bluff their entire lives, and described teen years that were a mix of Norman Rockwell and Happy Days. They did their best to shelter me from the spiraling crime rates, and in many ways my childhood was idyllic. I grew up in a beautiful house with a yard filled with giant Magnolia trees.
Dad was a very successful CEO, while mom taught biology at the high school. I have many happy memories of early days at Trinity Episcopal Day School, where I thrived in the small classes and gifted and talented programs.
I remember summers biking to my grandma’s house, swimming at the Country Club or Eden Park, drinking frosted Cokes at Derwood’s ice cream stand and hanging out at the then brand-new mall. Pine Bluff built a Convention Center and Arts and Science Center. Back then, we had hope.
But there was a dark side, and by the time I got to junior high school I lived in a pretty much constant state of unease. My parents built a four-foot wall around our entire house, but we still had one dog stolen and another pet poisoned by neighbors.
I grew up knowing the difference between Crips and Bloods graffiti tags, and my junior high school had photo IDs to keep gang members out—soon afterward, they installed metal detectors.
I saw fights and drug deals on an almost daily basis, and was stabbed with a metal hair pick in the girl’s bathroom because I looked at someone ‘funny’
The school was a huge circle with grey walls, and I was told that the one-way hall design was based on an overcrowded prison. I saw fights and drug deals on an almost daily basis, and was stabbed with a metal hair pick in the girl’s bathroom because I looked at someone ‘funny’.
When my mom and dad separated, I moved with her 600 miles away to Georgia. In our new town, a guy getting DUI on his riding lawnmower was big crime news.
A few years later, Dad sold his business and moved away to a safer area. Almost all of my childhood classmate’s families are gone now: Some couldn’t sell their homes due to a dead real estate market, so they boarded them up and left town.
The last holdout was my grandma, who didn’t want to leave her church. But after hiding in her dark bedroom in terror while watching her next-door neighbor’s home being invaded at gunpoint, she relocated near my dad.
The sad part is, I know that my story isn’t unique. Pine Bluff has the worst PR, but versions of this story are being played out all along the Delta region. This area, which covers parts of Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, is one of the poorest in the country.
The childhood home I adored has been listed for months at a price that is comparable to what we sold it for more than 20 years ago – and there still no takers
Extreme poverty is a combination of several factors: People in the area traditionally worked on farms, but increased mechanization meant those jobs vanished. Most of the city’s largest employers have gone: At one point, The Pine Bluff Arsenal stored 12 per cent of the US Army’s original chemical weapons stockpile, but most of them have been destroyed.
The educational system is completely failing. And the people in charge of the city seem unwilling to accept how bad things have gotten. According to US News and World Report, the high school has a less than 30 per cent literacy rate. Even if the job situation improves, no one wants their children to be educated in a Lord of the Flies environment.
Articles about high crime rate don’t often address something that no one wants to talk about: The town’s long history of racial tension. After desegregation in the 1960s, some (predominantly white) families responded by creating private schools. For as long as I can remember, the city’s problems have been framed as black vs. white issue—but the color that really mattered was green. When the economy dies, the town soon follows.
After the jobs started going away, the schools closed and those who could get better jobs and opportunities went elsewhere and took a big chunk of the city’s tax base with them. Many who were left behind became stuck in a permanent recession.
A few of my old die-hard friends have stayed with them. Some hope that the new mayor will turn things around. The city is trying to change its image: I found a ‘Positively Pine Bluff’ promotional video on YouTube that appears to be narrated by Morgan Freeman. But with universally negative comments like ‘If you believe this video [you're] on crack’ it appears that they they have a long road ahead of them.
In permanent recession: After the jobs started going away, the schools closed and those who could get better jobs and opportunities went elsewhere and took a big chunk of the city’s tax base with them
Others are less optimistic. ‘It’s dead,’ a childhood friend told me. ‘Drive around. Or don’t, actually, because parts of it are worse than Baghdad.’
The last stop on my drive down memory lane was the most depressing. The childhood home I adored has been listed for months at a price that is comparable to what we sold it for more than 20 years ago ($124,900) and there still no takers. It’s being sold ‘as is’, and the beautiful wall my dad built appears to be crumbling.
I thought about knocking on the door, but I decided that I would rather hold onto my happy memories than risk seeing the house now. They say you can never go home again. Sadly, in this case I would never want to.
February 15, 2013
After V-day spent with Jack Daniels, Jose Cuervo and Captain Morgan…
February 14, 2013
Women of LA
Just in time for Valentine’s Day…so funny, so sad and so true! xx
