How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life

by Heather Havrilesky

A few things that will make your alone time more buoyant: Inspiring music. A clean space. Regular, vigorous exercise. Great books. A nice bath. A wide range of beverages in the fridge. Friendly pets. Engrossing home projects. Your setting matters! I’m not that into decorating, but you have to put a little energy into your surroundings when you live alone.

The world has told you lies about how small you are. You will look back on this time and say, “I had it all, but I didn’t even know it. I was at the center, I could breathe in happiness, I could swim to the moon. I had everything I needed.”

So here’s what we have to do: We have to be self-protective but still vulnerable. Does that sound impossible? Sometimes it is. But here’s how it works: You don’t put yourself in situations where you’re going to cycle through bluster and neediness. That means you really can’t hook up with random men. Even if you never let down your guard in those situations, they still hurt you. They fuck with your sense of yourself. They lead you to believe you’re only good for sex, and you can’t EVER settle for feeling that way. You have to protect yourself from yourself, too. You can open your heart and tell the truth to your trusted friends. That’s good for you. But don’t tell yourself that you’re confident enough to share yourself with just anyone. Don’t open up to people who don’t understand and accept you yet. Wait until you feel completely comfortable.

It’s time to take better care of yourself, to embrace and support yourself more, to remind yourself what you truly care about, and to make better judgments about who is worthy of the full, glorious light of weirdness you will someday shine on the world, far and wide.

It’s okay to be an oversensitive freak. Oversensitive freaks tend to overreact. They tend to spin in circles. But they are some of the most loyal, interesting, intense people around, and they just get better as they age. Welcome to the tribe!

You aren’t alone. This isn’t the end of the world, not even close. When you look back on the Days Before Herpes, you’ll say, “I was more careless, but not nearly as happy back then. I take care of myself now, and I’m more protective of my heart, and my life is so much better.” You feel ashamed now, but that shame isn’t going to stick around for long. You’re going to learn how to roll your eyes at other people’s judgment.

See how it works? You dig me, you put in effort, you aren’t remotely tepid, we can relate to each other, and you make me feel like the things that are patently fucked about me are actually thrilling and vital and they somehow matter. (And I know you’re exciting, and I love your juicy booty, but that’s not the point.)

So here’s where we land: You need to tell tepid to fuck right off, Kanye-style. If you vow right now that the second you see tepid, you’re going to back up and say, “No fucking thanks,” and move on without looking back, then your self-esteem will immediately bounce back from years of abuse. That means retiring the soliloquy about how great you are. That means no more badgering. Replace the badgering with a rap. Write it down, file it away, move the fuck on.

And remember about Kanye? Remember your badgering? When you suspect that a guy doesn’t like you? You talk too much. Instead of talking so much, you should be saying, “Fuck you AND your Hampton house.” Yes, your first priority should be to keep an open mind, to listen, to observe men with a clear, uncluttered perspective. Your second priority should be to never, ever waste a minute of your time on a guy who’s tepid.

I’m saying is, here we are in a fucked-up world. And even when you find your species, you still are sometimes just a piece of ass to the best of them. Not even because they’re incredibly sexist—maybe they’re just pragmatic, or ambivalent in this case. They don’t happen to love you, is all. They don’t think you’re a math genius or a historian. They think that when you talk, you’re wasting their time a little. That doesn’t mean they’re bad. Sure, you want those guys and their futons and their best friend, Sean, to go fuck themselves, but that doesn’t mean they’re evil. But once they don’t love you, who the fuck cares about them? Were those dudes in the bar sexist for not being into me, or did they just think I was sort of bossy and repellent? Who the fuck cares?

That doesn’t mean your odds are bad! You will find love. Believe me. But in order to find it, I think you have to prepare yourself for a life alone and be at peace with that. It’s a real tightrope walk. I get it. But you won’t tell tepid to fuck off if you don’t believe in your heart that you will rock it out one way or another.

In order to tell tepid to fuck off once and for all, you MUST recognize that life among those who don’t appreciate or understand you is bullshit. You don’t want to live that way. You don’t want to be badgery and lonely while you’re with someone. You’d rather be alone.

What will make ALONE look good to you? You have to work on that. Because single life needs to look really, really good. You have to believe in it if you’re going to hold out for that rare guy who makes you feel like all of your ideas start rapidly expanding and approaching infinity when you talk to him. You need to have a vision of life alone, stretching into the future, and you need to think about how to make that vision rich and full and pretty....

And then you go out into the world with an open heart, and you let people into your life, and you listen, and you embrace them for who they are. You make new friends. You do new things that make you feel more like the strong single woman who owns the world that’s in your vision. And you don’t sleep with anyone until things are much warmer than lukewarm. And you accept that if things are lukewarm after that, you will be forced to kick a motherfucker to the curb, but with kindness, with forgiveness.

me. This mean, mean planet still rewards those who can see the depth and beauty of what they carry around inside of themselves. This indifferent landscape will rise up and give you love if you share what you have inside, if you dare to believe in your potential even as people tell you it’s a mirage, if you ignore the ones who are allergic to free-flowing, emotional discourse from you. They are everywhere, and they don’t matter. God bless them. Come on their Hampton blouse, and move on.

You don’t need a housekeeper. You need a partner.

I’ve also felt like someone’s parent before. I know how you feel, and it sucks. You feel responsible for holding this grown adult together. But it can also feel good, in a weird way. It’s satisfying to be needed that much, especially if you’ve never been needed before. It can bring out all of your nurturing instincts, whether you’re a man or a woman. If you walk in the door and there’s someone there, happy to see you, cooking you dinner, thrilled to hear about your day? That can be pretty satisfying. Some of us have never had that. And if he gives you a lot of credit for being someone who knows how to go out into the real world and bring home the bacon? Well, it’s hard not to take pride in that.

When I was in my late twenties, I had what I thought was a really great boyfriend who in reality wasn’t bringing much to the table and couldn’t face the real world. We were stuck in a bubble together. He was childlike. He could be great company sometimes, but he wasn’t a great partner yet. He needed to grow up.

bear. I never wanted to say good-bye. He understood me. It was so comfortable and comforting! He really loved me—and, again, HE NEEDED ME. But you know what we both needed? To break our co-dependent bond and face ourselves. That wasn’t going to happen when we were together. So he was a casualty of my youth. And I didn’t find someone who was the same intellectual match for me for years after that. I fell in love, but I didn’t feel that comforted and loved again until I met my husband.

Because he grabbed your body violently, in public, and laughed in your face while he was doing it. “See how small you feel? See how little you mean to me?” He’s attracted to you and can’t stand the power you wield over him, so he has to make you feel demeaned and pathetic. That dynamic is as old as time, and it’s one of the most frightening things a woman can face.

You had power over him, so he wanted to erase you. Acts of malice stay with the body. They are not easily forgotten.

It’s malignant and purposefully demeaning. I suspect that most women reading this know exactly what that energy feels like. We’ve been there. It’s different.

So this is what I’d advise: three or four dates of rolling with it—not to lure a hapless motherfucker into some elaborate trap, but to protect yourself from feeling like a beggar.

When you know what you want, you have to keep your heart and your eyes wide open. You have to be willing to fall in love, but you also have to be willing to step back and say, “No way, this is not a good choice for me,” before it’s too late. If you’re walking around lamenting all the noncommittal guys, that’s going to distract you from the fact that you still get to choose.

What do you want from your life? Who do you want to be in ten years? What are your strengths and your flaws? You have to know the answers to these questions. When you do, you will be able to say to your date, “I am a regular, flawed person. I’m not here to close the deal at all costs. If there’s something that feels wrong, that’s okay. That tells us we’re not a match.” Easy come, easy go. Letting the wrong ones show their true stripes is just as important as letting the right ones show their true strengths.

borrow a little of that single-guy apathy, and make a rational assessment of what you see. Slow down and tolerate the meaningless patter. Hold your own space and honor yourself and don’t let that space shrink or collapse in the company of indifference. Don’t ask indifference to love you. Indifference can go fuck itself. This is your life, and it’s going to be big and bright and beautiful.

The issue on the table is honesty, not sex. If the lack of sex in your relationship poses a serious threat to your marriage, you should sit down with your wife and tell her that. You should ask to see a couples therapist together. You should say that you need her to commit to some concrete plan for changing things between you,

Your challenge in this situation is to show up and make yourself vulnerable, not to disappear and force her into an inherently vulnerable position. Your challenge is to resist the urge to avenge your wife’s lack of desire (by fucking other women). Even though you’ve gone to elaborate lengths to make this form of punishment appear harmless and logical, on some level this is about you feeling hurt and neglected and powerless to change it.

When you feel hurt and vulnerable and you’re willing to talk openly about it? That’s an opportunity for your marriage to grow into something more beautiful than it was before.

Right now, you are keeping a big part of who you are hidden. As long as you’re lying, you can’t have a good marriage. More lying won’t fix that.

Here’s the thing: Being nice is worthless if you’re just going to feel resentful about it in the end. You might as well just be outspoken and state your needs from the outset. Because as much as people resent assertive women, they resent disingenuous, overly friendly, secretly furious women even more. Maybe you need to ask yourself, “How secretly furious am I?” I can certainly understand why you’d feel so angry. By simply showing up and being a woman, you’re asked to satisfy an incredibly tangled and contradictory set of demands. You are supposed to be assertive but not too assertive. You are supposed to speak your mind but only on subjects about which everyone already agrees. You are supposed to toe the party line while

Trust me, I’ve been there. So this is what I want you to accept, first and foremost: You are a nice person, and you’re also full of anger. You’re a walking tangle of contradictions. That’s okay. Most of us are like that. Women, most of all. How could we not be? People want us to be sexy warriors who roll over and play dead on command. They want us to be flirty burlesque dancers in burkas, aggressive conquistadors with cookies in the oven, Dorothy Parker meets Dorothy Gale, Sandra Bernhard meets Sandra Dee, Kristen Stewart meets Martha Stewart.

Experiments in asking for exactly what you want will go badly. Do it anyway. Do it and expect people to react badly. Because you’re sensitive, you won’t like this. Think about how they feel, and try to empathize. Think about how you might soften your message. Watch how other people do it. I know it sounds like a management technique, but good communicators usually start with something positive, then move to the negative gently: “I love this about you, but I have to draw the line here.” “I know you’re trying your best, but this is wh...

I used to admire people who could hang with anything. Now the women I admire the most are women who never pretend to be different than they are. Women like that express their anger. They admit when they’re down. They don’t beat themselves up over their bad moods. They allow themselves to be grumpy sometimes. They grant themselves the right to be grouchy, or to say nothing, or to decline your offer without a lengthy explanation.

Fuck that. Let’s be mortal. Let’s not be sexy warrior princesses or burlesque dancers in burkas or conquistadors with cookies in the oven. How many years do we have to wait just to speak our minds? Let’s be flinty and unreasonable instead. Let’s tell the truth, without a smile. Let’s let our words drop, one by one, without explanation, without apology,

You only recognize interest when it has a faintly predatory intensity to it. What you need to know is that a lot of women find this intensity hugely unappealing. Some of us can feel this energy from across a football field. The narcissistic swagger of a cheater, with its undercurrents of anger and insecurity, is pretty unmistakable.

I bring this up because I think this is part of your puzzle. You don’t have compassion for other women, because you don’t have compassion for yourself. You’re angry at yourself, so you take that anger out on other people. You’re also very competitive, so when a guy gives you attention, you feel like you’re “winning” somehow. We all grow up believing that only one of us can win—one beautiful princess at the ball, among all the goofy sidekicks and maiden aunts. So every time we’re at a party, or a dinner, or a club, we organize the scene based on the same notion: Either we are the one who sparkles and thrills, or we’re some dog in the corner. We’re either the girl in the kitchen alcove, giggling and flirting, or the sad ignored girlfriend in the blurry background. We’re either the white-hot sexy girl making out in the car or the sniffling loser girlfriend waiting around at home for her boyfriend to come back. This isn’t really winning. It’s hurting yourself and hurting other women in one blow. It’s serving your ass on a platter not to a prince but to a predator. It’s feeding into everything sick and wrong about the blindest, least soulful dimensions of our culture. When you soak up the attentions of some smarmy creep, you’re throwing away your compassion and your power and you’re empowering that creep to pick a “winner.” He’s the one who determines which girl is superior and which girl is a sucker and which girl isn’t worthy of his predatory gaze.

They would never in a million years let some dipshit with bad intentions offer them a false sense of superiority and intrigue just for being a shiny distraction from his girlfriend. And anyway, strong, empowered women are kryptonite to a guy like Aaron. You think he digs you because you’re extra-sexy? He digs you because you’re drawn in by his bullshit.

The first thing you need to know—understand, believe, breathe in—is that there is nothing wrong with you. There. Is. Nothing. Wrong. With. You. The guys who hurt you, the guys who don’t want to date you: These people are irrelevant. They are not your mother. They are not your father or your sister or your best friend. Compared to your parents, your friends, they are nothing—flies in the room, cockroaches in the cupboard. Nothing. Fixating on them is like fixating on marrying George Clooney. They are irrelevant.

Meanwhile, those guys—like so many—were probably just allergic to emotion or seriousness of purpose or vulnerability. I’m not being a dick about it; ask any man and he’ll back me up. Maybe they simply weren’t mature enough to handle you or anyone else.

Guys assume that other guys are indifferent unless they have explicit proof otherwise. So should you. Instead of digging into the reasons for this state of affairs, instead treating it as your personal fucking responsibility to root out the problem and eradicate it, instead of redoubling your efforts to be more lovable and better, always approaching some infinite ideal of the whip-smart but easygoing professional with a body like a fuck doll, you need to take a good look at yourself and accept what you see. When it comes to love, at least, you must try to stop being or seeming “better.” You need to accept exactly who you are and stop wishing it would change, that you’d be more palatable to the masses. “I am a reasonably good-looking woman with a tendency to cry at the drop of a hat.” “I am opinionated and impatient, and I have a bad habit of fixating on stuff I don’t understand.” “I am bored by most people, and I wish I had the money and the space to own llamas.”

Why did I believe these things about myself? Because I often went out with men who liked me because I was semi-attractive and smart and funny. I often attracted these men by pouring on the charm, appearing nonchalant, appearing devil-may-care. My goal was to mask the fact that I was an extremely emotional, thoughtful, moody, obnoxious, demanding anchovy. These boyfriends wanted to make it work because they wanted a semi-attractive, smart, funny girlfriend, not because they wanted ME.

As long as you aim to please men, you don’t. The second you decide to please yourself, guess what? Everybody wants a slice of that action. I’ll never forget, right after I vowed to stop settling for mediocre, half-interested men (even if it meant becoming a dog lady, which suddenly seemed sort of appealing), I went to this wedding and I was mobbed by guys. I could finally see clearly that half of them just wanted to sleep with me and weren’t looking for anything serious. The other half was deluded into thinking I was super-fun and easygoing around the clock (um, no), and that seemed like a great kind of a girlfriend to have. Maybe one of them was actually into me, but he was wrong in thinking that we’d be good together. I

I was curious but detached until I could get more information. I wanted to fall in love with someone. That was my goal, and I wasn’t shy about saying so. But I needed to see a real hunger for anchovies, to the point where nothing else would do.

And when you finally find the right person for you, it will feel effortless. It will feel right. It won’t be perfect, but it will still be worlds apart from these other relationships you’ve had. But you know what? You won’t be surprised. Because once you build your own religion around gratitude and pride in who you are, at your best and at your worst, you’ll feel better than you ever have before. It will only seem natural for people to want to be closer to you.

Go watch Living Out Loud or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. Read Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. Read The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. Read Mating by Norman Rush. Being raw means connecting to other people’s trials and noticing how we all have to find our own answers; we all have to learn how to show up and breathe without grasping for something to deliver us from our own pain. When you resist your own rawness and pain, you only create more pain for yourself.

Painting someone as weak or pathetic for feeling hurt or overwhelmed or heartbroken is inexcusable. It’s antihuman. This world is filled with people who think feeling less, being indifferent, makes you strong. Don’t believe that. Be one of the smart, thoughtful people who stands up for sensitive people. When you stand up for sensitive, hurt people, you’re also standing up for vulnerability and authenticity and true love.

think your challenge is to reinvent your whole life so that it looks beautiful whether or not it has a man in it. If you start dating right now, I think you’re going to feel traumatized. You need to be stronger and healthier and happier before you date again. You’re sitting around asking, “How do I do this?” as if finding another man is the logical next step. Your therapists are saying, “DO IT! GO FOR IT!” and I think that points to a central misconception of where you are and what you need.

The path from here is all about you and you alone: the things that bring you happiness and make you feel strong and independent. What are those things?

Where do you turn when no one is picking up the phone? How do you take care of yourself? What makes you feel like you’re on the right track? What makes you forget about your ex and dating and men in general? Let’s try this: If I told you that you would never, ever fall in love again, what kind of a plan would you make to ensure your own happiness moving forward? What would you work toward? What would you do more of? I bet that you’d have to give up on some big dreams that you care about a lot. But I also bet that giving up some of those things might add up to a weird kind of freedom. Maybe you’d cut your hair short and save up for a house. Maybe you’d start riding horses or writing poetry or growing sunflowers or taking dance lessons or baking pies.