Step
4: Tell the Love Clerks a little bit about yourself.
You have warmed
up with a little depression, a little pleading, a little despair,
a little shameless begging for help. Now have you tell the Love Clerks
about your particular situation.
Of course, normally
this is the hardest part. It's like introducing yourself in front
of a group or writing a personal ad. This time it's going to be easy,
though, because you are going to write an anti-personal ad!
Instead of telling
the Love Clerks how you are a great guy, a single, successful working
professional who owns a house, has a great car, a wonderful cat, enjoys
outdoor activities, likes dining out, is a good cook, and a great
conversationalist you are going to tell the Love Clerks that you are
a lonely, unsuccessful, materialistic, unfulfilled, antagonistic,
overbearing control freak who hogs the conversation and is desperately
fucking scared of Other People particularly ones that might really
like you. This is going to be fun!
Instead of telling
the Love Clerks that you are a classy lady who is beautiful and kind
with a zest for life and a great figure, you are going to tell the
Love Clerks that you are incredibly fucking insecure about your looks,
critical, desperate, horny, overemotional, hypocritical, false, and
way too into your dog whom you dress up in silly outfits and hold
up to the mirror while squeaking in a high-pitched voice 'does mommy
love you? yes, mommy does!', an activity which only underscores your
pitiful inability to interact with actual people in a meaningful way.
This is what the Love Clerks want to hear!
Sit down by yourself
and with the Love Clerks as an eager audience (remember they don't
really want to do their real work anyway, it's boring!) have a heart
to heart conversation with them in your fax about what's wrong with
you and why you couldn't possibly attract True Love if anyone
knew what you were really like. Here's your chance to vent about yourself,
gripe about being stuck with you and just generally cuddle up with
the Love Clerks and confide. Put your elbows on your knees and confess.
Ruminate. Get thoughtful about your flaws and your fears. Explain
what's really bugging you.
Admit that you
fart during sex and you don't think that's your best feature. Reveal
a little about your past history with relationships and how it's completely
fucked you up. List your unattractive qualities. Boldly declare
that you are short, fat, bald, and ugly and not too surprisingly,
incredibly insecure around women. Tell a little story about how shy
you are and how you completely dork things up when you are around
someone you like. Get into some hidden worries about not being able
to get along with people.
Confess that although
you know that theoretically in a relationship you ought to love, appreciate
and support the other person a lot of times you really don't and even
when you want to, you don't know how, and it comes out wrong. Explain
that you are too career-oriented or are afraid you don't have
enough time or are too clingy or too independent, too abrasive or
your self-esteem is too low. Admit that although you want love, you
don't really like either people or relationships, which you see as
possibly posing somewhat of a problem. Earnestly claim that you have
'issues' that will never be solved. Talk about the things that are
so wrong with you that you are scared to even fucking think about
them, let alone bring them to a relationship.
Pretend the
Love Clerks are therapists and can't escape for an hour while
you blab thoughtfully on about how you put up a big defense of confidence
because actually you are incredibly sensitive and every fucking thing
hurts your feelings and you are pretty sure you could never ever trust
anyone with that. Pretend that the Love Clerks couldn't possibly be
bored or embarrassed by or mocking of anything that has to do with
the real you and that they have nothing but time to listen to your
petty worries and big insecurities.
Fears and Flaws
- your keys to Love Fax success! Dive into 'em.
If you can't think
of any fears or flaws, you have deeper problems than prettyfedup.com
can address, but don't worry be cool, just say 'I don't know what's
wrong with me, but something must be because I don't have True Love
in my life right now, help me, Love Clerks, help!'
Now is not the
time to lean on the idea that just because you don't have True Love
doesn't mean there is something wrong with you - it doesn't, but that's
irrelevant, you are human and there are bound to be lots of things
wrong with you! Of course, normally this might be hard, straining
your brain to think of your flaws but fortunately, we made it easy
for you by getting you all depressed beforehand! We are nothing
if not clever at this website. A nice gloomy mood can punch a useful
hole in even the highest self-esteem. Which is what we want.
Why you want
to do this:
Reason #1:
These are the things you want the Love Clerks to match you up on.
Sure, in real
life, you may be patient, kind, intelligent, and well-liked. You may
have plenty of virtues. Maybe you're even fucking perfect. If so,
what the fuck do you need True Love for? You don't - you can
just run around the world being perfect and everybody will be happy.
It's the not-perfect that needs love. How the fuck are the Love
Clerks going to match you up with anybody if you are nothing but a
bundle of good fucking qualities that don't need a damn thing
to make them any fucking better than they already fucking are?
It's your bad
qualities that need love. Those are the suckers that need to be
slathered with affection, given soothing foot massages, and taken
out to dinner and told how pretty they are. It's like your own personal
dark side of the moon, the side that's always shivering in the cold,
dark realms of hiddenness and not-so-goodness. That side wants
to cavort in the sunshine too! It doesn't like always being left
out.
There is no fucking
advantage in having someone love you for the virtues that anyone can
see. That's like overwatering the lush side of the lawn! Not only
that, but if you attract someone on the basis of some hideous good
quality like patience and understanding, you are going to have to
spent the rest of the fucking relationship being patient and understanding!
What a drag! That's tiring. And it's not relaxing.
Furthermore, your
bad qualities are going to restlessly sense that they are going to
have to stay locked in the back closet and that's going to make them
mad. They'll start agitatedly pressing against the bars of their prison,
milling about and talking revolt. Before you know it, they'll be banging
their tin cups against the bars and raising a hullabaloo, making you
nervous as you try to explain to your beloved what all the noise in
the background is. Suddenly you will be forced to quell an uprising
of your bad qualities. And just when you think it's safe to turn
your back on them, they'll energetically tunnel their way out of their
cells, pop up from underground and start brandishing AK-47s at your
relationship!
This happens all
the fucking time. You think things are going along well and you've
got things under control when suddenly your bad qualities pop out
in your relationship, get in the face of your significant other and
suddenly pull a suicide bombing mission! And then there you are, once
again, trying to pull your mutilated love life out from the ruins
of a car bombing. Avoid this. Get your cards on the table with
the Love Clerks at the outset.
Because what you
actually want is someone who actually loves you because you're
short, fat, bald, and ugly. You want someone who thinks short is so
fucking cute, it's adorable. That fat is cuddly. That there's no more
appealing sight than staring down at your thinning hair. That ugliness
and the insecurity it brings are exactly what make them feel safe
and secure and loving toward you. Someone who doesn't like those good-looking
guys who make them nervous and bring out their own fears. Someone
who feels needed and appreciated by someone exactly like you!
Ugly people not
only mate, they often mate extremely happily, perhaps with another
ugly person. God knows the world is full of them. In fact, ugly people
are often destined for a cornucopia of delirious fucking love bliss
once they meet their match. You may be one of them! If you
are deficient in external ugliness, perhaps you have some deep-rooted
ugliness on the inside that you can take advantage of in finding love
heaven. You lucky fucking dog you!
It's the unhappiness
and the misery and the dark side that pay off the most deeply in love
attachments. Let's hope you have at least a little. If you don't,
get cracking and develop some! Get some goddamn fucking character
for chrissake.
Now that I have
pumped you up and given you a little rah-rah for the dark side of
your moon, the Love Clerks are meanwhile quietly working in the background.
If you have been not only reading the website, but mentally working
on your love fax and feeling your way toward your dark side and putting
it down for the Love Clerks to digest, they are now putting their
experience, intuition and talent to work.
They are thinking
about your oversensitivity and your cheesy taste in movies and your
hatred of getting your picture taken and your false cheeriness and
they are mulling over exactly what you need. They are thinking deeply
about your defensiveness and your scars and your suspicion of women
and your lack of trust and they are busy matching you up with someone
who will consider all these things not only perfectly fucking natural
but the only right way to live. Someone who will be so fucking relieved
they are not forced to live with someone who never gets oversensitive
or who goes to all the fucking trouble to develop good taste, who
is smart enough to be defensive and scarred because after all the
world does that to you and what kind of a moron would you be if you
couldn't relate to their own fucking scarredness and defensivness.
And so on. This is a good fucking deal for you!
I can't emphasize
it enough. You want the Love Clerks to match you up on the basis of
the bad qualities in you, the ones that need all the fucking love.
Thank god you didn't write some ridiculous personal ad sounding tooting
your own horn type thing in your Love Fax or you'd be doomed. Thank
god you have prettyfedup.com to guide you! You have just dodged a
major fucking bullet and boy is that going to pay off for you in the
long run. You rule!
And - as if Reason
#1 wasn't enough to convince you to put your bad qualities and fears
in your Love Fax, there's a Reason #2!
Reason #2:
It makes your bad qualities the Love Clerks' problem - and not yours!
This is another
major advantage for you. What happens when you are busy trying to find
love on your own merits is that you have to devote effort not only to
finding love but also to hiding all the unattractive qualities in yourself
that you know will make it impossible for you to earn it. Both of these
things are full-time jobs and you will turn into a nervous wreck moonlighting
this way. You will get so fucking exhausted with the simultaneous searching
and hiding that you will begin to wonder if it's really fucking worth
it. It's not.
This is why people
often find love when they're not looking. Having quit the job of looking
they no longer have to invest themselves in the hiding. This allows
them to naturally advertise the bad qualities that will allow them to
be matched up. Having neglected to hide themselves, suitable people
can find them. It's just incredibly fucking logical that love can't
fucking find you if you're hiding!
This is also why
people will reject other people that truly, desperately, and sincerely
love them for their good qualities. Because people don't want to
be loved for their good qualities. They don't want to be loved for
the wonderful person they truly are - they want to be loved for the
terrible person they truly are! It's the satisfying transformation
of terribleness into wonderfulness that happens when exposed to the
True Love's perceptions that makes love such a goddamn fucking high
when it finally hits. Your bad qualities will dance around in delirious
freedom, tossing daisies at the admiring crowd and generally gorging
themselves on delight after years of deprivation. They fucking love
that shit and so will you!
Now this business
of rejecting people who love you for your good qualities once you turn
your hiddenness over to the Love Clerks - it can happen. Because you
may very well start accidentally advertising your good qualities more
thoroughly once you are not so taken up with hiding the bad ones. All
kinds of fucking people may fall in love with you - without the aid
of the Love Clerks. Don't worry about it. You may be tempted - you may
say 'oh my god, this fucking Love Fax shit is working, what the hell
is going on?' until you start actually dating the ones who love you
for your good qualities and find yourself tremendously disappointed
that they are not the One. Be cool, don't panic, there are side effects
to Love Fax Magic, you can handle them.
Just go nonchalantly
into the world. Let's analyze why you can safely do this, once you've
sent in your Love Fax. You have turned your bad qualities over to the
Love Clerks to figure out how to match you up. That's a worry off your
back. And you can go out into the world and act normally, no stress,
because hey, you engaged in full disclosure with the Love Clerks - if
they can't fucking match you up, it's obviously their fault, not yours!
You gave them the straight dope. You warned them.
No one expects
you to start blithely leading with your bad qualities and advertising
them like a motherfucker just because you disclosed them to the
Love Clerks. No, no, no, that's hard work. It's up to the Love Clerks
to find the One with X-ray vision who can see right into you and ferret
out those delicious bad qualities they have been longing for. On the
other hand, it isn't like you have to get your guts in a knot trying
to keep them some big secret that only your True Love can have access
to. They're not some big fucking secret. You know about them. The Love
Clerks know about them, the Universe knows about them, it's not like
your cover is suddenly fucking blown. They leak out here and there occasionally.
No big fucking deal. It's the Love Clerks problem anyway.
And if you accidentally
find yourself in a relationship after the Love Fax exercise and some
bad qualities start sproinging around trying to get attention -
well, that's not really your problem either. They're going to come out
in the right relationship anyway and collect the admiration they deserve,
so they leak out a little here and there before you actually planned
- no biggie. It's going to happen. Not a federal case. You don't have
to make some big dramatic announcement about it. It's cool and so are
you. You can just say 'yeah, listen, sorry I left, it's just that I
get freaked out when you get all emotional cuz I feel like I want make
everything better right away which basically isn't going to happen because
I have no fucking idea what to do when you are upset. I have no idea
what will help and basically I just want to get the hell out and not
deal with it until you feel better. I'm not the greatest emotional support
in the world but I do hope...I do want you to feel better. I hope I
didn't make things too much worse.' Or something equally lame. And the
other person will deal with it.
And the One, the
One you are waiting for, will actually find that the most supportive
fucking thing anyone's ever said to them and just unbearably sweet and
they will love you to fucking death because you're such a nerd and can't
handle it when they get upset. It will show them that You Truly Care.
And that will feel pretty good. And this will completely fucking save
you from the dreaded Moment of Self-Disclosure in which your
bad qualities force you to say something portentous in a confessional
moment like 'The thing is my first husband cheated on me and I have
a lot of issues with that. I have a lot of unresolved, you know,
anger and stuff. I tend to be kind of controlling and completely untrusting
of, you know, men.' Followed by nervous laugh.
Or 'Yeah, well,
I went to a boys' school, a military boys' school, so since I was at
boarding school and everything, I never really learned about you know,
relating to people, I was just more....you know, it was like my parents
just kind of shoved me to the side or something and didn't want
to deal with me. So I'm like...I haven't actually had a lot of relationships
before this.' Trailing into a somber look.
This can be an excruciating
moment. The moment when you announce your fatal flaw. That you are the
kind of person people cheat on because you're a controlling fuckng bitch.
The unbearable weirdness of going to a boys' school and the equally
tormenting Lack Of Experience and I am Very Behind Everyone Else feeling.
The Unbearable Weirdness of You moment. You want to avoid this
moment.
On the other hand,
you want to fucking get it over with, because you want your fucking
weirdness announced because you know it's going to get you fucking rejected
in the end. You have experienced it before, you are expecting it again.
And you want to get it out there so the other shoe will just go ahead
and fucking drop for chrissakes and not hang there in the air, torturing
you, goddammit, just go ahead and fucking reject me now!
And so you announce
your bad qualities with a mixture of bravado and fear, sending the mixed
message 'go ahead and fucking reject me bitch i know you're going to,
oh please for god's sake, don't, please do not doom me forever to this
life of intolerable loneliness.' And so on.
This is not the
end of the world. But god your life gets a fuck of a lot easier once
you turn this shit over to the Love Clerks. Spend your Unbearable
Weirdness of You moment with the Love Clerks. Let them take care
of it. Let them know that it needs to be handled. Instruct them 'Just
make it come out whenever it needs to come out and also please please
please make sure it comes out with the right person. And also the right
time. Please. Thank you. Please.'
And it will. It
will come out at the right time with the right person in the right amount.
It will come out under the pressure of deep love feelings and not deep
'i fucking hate rejection' feelings. Because it's not your problem.
It's theirs.
You will go around
accidentally being yourself, having faith in the Love Clerks, and it
will come out. This moment of self-revelation is too tough a decision
for you to make. Not all by yourself. No, you don't want that. Too
much responsibility. Too forced. Too nerve-wracking. No, give your fucking
bad qualities to the Love Clerks so they can match you up with someone
with entrancing eyes that throw you into the kind of delusional love
spell that make you say softly 'I was raped when I was fifteen' without
it sounding the least bit unnatural or even intensely painful. Because
it won't be. Because it will come out when it's supposed to - when you
are all wrapped up in soft fluffy love pillows that will protect you
from the harshness of your own dark side of the moon. The Love Clerks
or even Lady Love herself will decide when it should come out. God fucking
bless them!
Maybe you don't
have anything as dramatic as rape to confess - but you've got something.
Give it the Love Clerks and get it out of your hair! Get down
with your Bad Self and give it to the Love Clerks!
Meanwhile, while
we have been babbling on about Love Clerks and Dreaded Self-Disclosures
we have been secretly aligning your Brain around two important facts:
a) You are not perfect. b) You want to be.
Both are equally
true. Both are equally important. When your Brain gets into an argument
with itself over which is more important it naturally tries to kill
either the not-perfectness or the wanting to be perfectness. This
fucks you up.
Same deal with the
a) you are not lovable. b) you want to be loved.
But now your Brain
doesn't have to kill either side! God, it feels peaceful now. And while
it is rolling around in contented harmony with itself, we are going
to dart in and finish the Love Fax with Step #5!
prettyfedup.com