relationships, fidelity, & faithfulness

Step 1: Acquaint yourself with fidelity. Get to know the sucker. Here's how:

I want you to find 12 examples of faithfulness by the end of the week. Peer nosily into the lives of your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers, annoying celebrities such as Regis Philbin, books, movies, magazines, TV sitcoms, MTV, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Law and Order, Discovery Channel, Charlie Rose, or whatever the hell crazy offbeat thing it is you watch, blogs, random strangers, romance novels, fast food workers, dry cleaning proprietors and everybody else you run across, looking intently for signs of faithfulness.

You will be shocked. It turns out that fidelity and faithfulness are rampant in the universe, unchecked and uncontrolled and not only is nobody doing anything about this shocking turn of affairs, very frequently they're not even mentioning it! How's that for a cover-up. It's an invisible menace to society and I want you to root it out and stare at it.

At the end of one week, write down all 12 examples of faithfulness you've been instructed to find. Then stare at them. Then throw away the paper and go 'oh okay.'

This is going to make you uncomfortable. This is why we gave you a bail-out option earlier. Faithfulness and faithful people can be a creepy subject to many of us and although that doesn't seem logical and hardly anyone wants it to be - there you have it. It often is.

Your reaction to the faithful people you find will give you a map as to what's been going on in your life. You could discover all kinds of things. You could find 12 examples of faithfulness and think to yourself - 'yeah, but those people don't count, they're boring!' Or they're all already married and so you never even think about them. Or you might discover that faithful boyfriends seem sexless to you and you've never really been attracted to sexlessness. Or you could discover that faithful women seem well...normal or something and you've never been attracted to normal women because they're all boring and shit and can't really understand and relate to you, plus they want kids and money and a suburban lifestyle and....You might discover that you are saying to yourself 'that's exactly the kind of man that is never attracted to me!' You might find yourself thinking 'yeah well but those women are out of my league.' You might find that some of them are religious and religious people make you uncomfortable. You might find that some of them are introverted and thoughtful and introverted, thoughtful people make you nervous.

You might find that some of them are excessively cheery and that gets on your nerves or that they're invisible type people and the thought of being invisible seems kind of suffocating. You might feel they are uptight or moralistic whereas you want to be relaxed and morally casual. They might be passionate and that's kind of scary. They might be unpassionate and that's scary too. You might discover that some of them have been married a really really long time and you never realized it but the thought of being married to one person for a really really long time seems like a terrible fate.

You might find that romantic movies where people are all loyal and faithful and shit make you squirm and want to say cynical things. You might find that people who talk about being faithful in magazines come off as all holier-than-thou. You might discover that you just fucking never really noticed these people before.

Remember how I described faithful people as weird? This is how it's relevant to you. On some level, your mind and body instinctively think these people are weird or you would have hooked up with one by now and kept at it. They just don't seem normal, or like what you're expecting. Maybe they did once, but somehow life experience has shoved them out of your view.

Particularly if one of your parents cheated and you became aware of it at some point, it becomes very hard to escape the underlying conclusion that this is what normal people do. So if you really want one of these abnormal people, you're going to need to reroute your neurons so that they pay attention to an entirely different sub-category of person. Faithfulness is like cheating, if you pay a lot of attention to it, it becomes all flattered and attracted to you and wants to start hanging out. If this is indeed what you want - you are going to need to pay all kinds of flattering attention to the phenomenon of people who don't cheat.

Spend at least a month looking at every single example of faithfulness you can dig up. Include foreign cultures and ancient aborigines, people who speak French, short people, ugly people, models, people who own cats, Communist Chinese - include all kinds of categories you don't normally consider to be actual people at all. Just keep looking and looking until your brain gets used to the idea that this phenomenon actually exists.

Step 2: Decide if you could actually live with or be in a relationship with one of these kinds of people.

It may be that none of the particular faithful people you find seems all that attractive or that they're plenty attractive but would never be available to someone like you. This can get kind of depressing. Doesn't always happen but sometimes it does. No matter. We have a plan for dealing with this. It is:

Step 3: Develop a detailed image of your ideal lover, mate, boyfriend, girlfriend, longtime companion, spouse, whatever it is you're secretly hoping to find.

If no one that you run across who fits into the faithfulness category really fits the bill - so much the better. You need to develop your own vision anyway or things will get slightly messed up. You can mix and match traits from existing faithful people or play the maverick and imagine one that seems quite different from the examples you find.

Spend some serious time fantasizing about what you'd really really like. Develop some kind of idea about what faithfulness in your life would look like. Not exactly just the absence of cheating but the nuts and bolts, how it would play out. Maybe, embarrassingly enough, you have this idea that a real relationship revolves mainly around the ability to talk to each other and that all this glorious, deeply bonding talking somehow short-circuits the cheating impulse. That's how you think it's supposed to work anyway, which is just...well, it's certainly not how your parents did it; it's certainly not what your friends aspire to; it's not how the people on TV do it, and it's obviously kind of a stupid idea. Good! This is what we want.

Maybe you think the ideal non-cheating partner is actually more like your best friend than a regular, you know, wife or something. Maybe you want a man that's like a woman. Maybe you want a fantastically good-looking son of a bitch who nevertheless is undyingly loyal to you. Whatever. Believe me, these things are possible. In my relentless Intensive Personal Research into all things relationship-related, I've not only gone out with some of these people - I've been not cheated on by them!

Spend at least a month cogitating deeply on the subject of that Ideal Person You'll Never Find. Take it seriously and pretend it's really hard work to daydream about sex with someone fantastic who never has sex with anyone else but you. Furrow your brow while you're at work Thinking Deeply on Relationships so that people will think you're worried about getting laid off or the rising cost of health insurance or something. You don't have to write this fantasy down. What you do have to do is rehearse it so often that this mythical person who doesn't exist becomes an embedded part of your...memory bank. It becomes an idea that has all sorts of feelings attached to it. Something you want really badly. A comfort in times of trouble. An ideal, a vision. A weird feeling you have as to the nature of your romantic destiny.

What you want to do is convince yourself that somehow you've just always had this feeling that eventually you'd end up with someone....who fits your ideal description. We want to get this fantasy to the point where it seems so real that you really do half believe it's always been there and that you've always been drawn to it in spite of some excursions down detours and side paths. That somehow you've always known what you want. We are talking fantasy here and mystical vision.

If you are unfamiliar with mystical vision because you are not that kind of person and mystical visions seem kind of painful because they're incredibly different from reality...well, you are right. They are kind of painful. Addictively, poignantly, sweetly painful. You can develop a real taste for this thing but you just have to practice it until the addiction takes hold. Listen to your favorite music while fantasizing like an idiot who really believes something like this could happen, or employ any other strategy that will allow you to get all unrealistic. Getting all unrealistic is the whole point and you have to decide whether you are willing to do that. We went through a very tedious process of elminating reality and we did it for a reason. It's a necessary part of the process.

Okay. Once you've done that and driven yourself just slightly crazy in the process, it's time for our next step.

Step 4: Back to crushing reality.

Now that we have a vision, we take a deep sad breath and say to ourselves. I do not have this. We face this very squarely. We do not pretend that we are dating someone that fits the bill or that it's right around the corner, or that any moment now, or that you could get this person if you wanted to, you just haven't gotten around to it. None of that stuff. No excuses. You do not have your ideal person in your life.

If you try to convince yourself that you are okay, things are on track, or that you have this person in fantasy and that's good enough, your brain will absolutely not be motivated to find someone resembling this ideal for you. We need to face up to romantic failure or your subconscious will have absolutely no idea that there's any need for any actual real people in your life. In fact, it will throw them out because it's already full of the lies you've told it about things being okay. They're not really. So be as surgically clean about it as you can and gently, but firmly and precisely, inform your subconscious that things are not okay.

Write this down. I do not have my ideal person in my life.

Very good. Let that sit for a day or two before moving on to step 5.

Step 5: Grumpiness and depression.

It's very depressing and irritating not to have something that you really really want. It's discouraging. It's sad. It's lonely. It's embarrassing. It's stupid. And so on.

So allow yourself to get grumpy and depressed.

Do not analyze your grumpy depression or you will accidentally build neurons that explain why you need to be grumpy and depressed. Very important. Left to your own devices, this is exactly what you will be so tempted to do. You will want very much to rehearse depression so that you can build a warchest of neurons dedicated to the proposition that you will never achieve your dream and that you must vigorously protect yourself from the horrible phenomenon of cheating by constantly seeking it out and making it happen at your behest. This undoubtedly seems like a stupid way for your brain to run your life but if you look very closely at everyone's stupid lives, you will realize that this is exactly what it will do unless you make it do something else.

So skip the analyzing, thinking depression and just go to wordless heavy, discouraged sighing. Spend a little time on this. Try to arrange to be grumpy, depressed and discouraged for at least 3 or 4 solid weeks, off and on. You need to give it some time or your subconscious Attraction Cells will not realize there is anything going on. They are a little slow on the uptake usually, so we have to wait awhile for the message to get through.

Eventually, they will notice and the subsconscious Attraction Cells will say to themselves, my goodness _________ (your name here) is grumpy, depressed, romantically discouraged and sad. And then they will say to themselves 'well I guess we need to rearrange ourselves so that (your name here) is not grumpy, depressed and sad anymore. I wonder how we do that.'

This will puzzle them for a period of time, so be prepared for that. In fact now is a good time to point out that this magical plan, while guaranteed to work, takes for-fucking-ever to come fruition. I'm not kidding. Like a really long time. Way too long. So long you will completely forget that you once embarked upon a magical plan. Way too long can range anywhere from about 3 months to until you are 86. I recommend not waiting until you are 86, but some people have accidentally followed this magical plan and connected with the person of their dreams when they are really really old. You can reduce the time by following the magical plan on purpose rather than accidentally, but there is still a time factor. That's why we are going ahead and getting grumpy and depressed now.

(The average actual length of time in my experience is about 2-3 years. Go ahead and say "Yikes!" now. This is a long-term life investment. It's easy in that you don't really have to do anything. In fact, it is very much like investing money in some damn mutual fund or something and then later, after awhile, you have more money than you did before for no apparent reason except that time has passed and your investment has grown in value even though you didn't do anything to it. You are basically going to make an upfront investment in thinking and then you are going to screw around being alive and then later for no apparent reason you will have a mate. But you need to follow the steps.)

Wallow in grumpiness and depression, indulging in it until it feels kind of comforting and familiar. We need to enjoy ourselves in this phase, feeling all victimized and resigned, or whatever other depressed kind of emotions are our very most favorite because soon we will have to

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