Marrying Up Read Online Free

obsessive-compulsive tendencies including but not limited to a fear of free-falling anvils and severe stove-checkitis?’ That would be fine with me, if you want. And maybe you could also mention that I’m cute and not currently seeing anyone.”
    He smiled broadly. “Is it really any wonder why?”
    Even my own shrink didn’t think I was relationship material.
    “Careful…” I told him. “I know you have a son, and I know he’s single. You don’t want me looking him up now, do you?”
    “He doesn’t go for pretend-crazy, Holly. He prefers the realthing,” he said without skipping a beat. “And if you want me to use you as a case study, you’re going to have to give me a little more than just garden-variety phobias and general wishy-washiness. Not if it’s going to be a page-turner.”
    “I’m sorry my misery bores you, Doctor M.”
    “Not always. Have you had any more poodle fantasies lately?”
    “Huh?”
    “Oh…sorry,” he said, flipping back through his pad. “That was my eleven o’clock.”
    Nice. How could I beat that?
    “I do have a recurring nightmare about Phil Collins. I think it might be sexual. Does that help?”
    “Not so much, no.”
    “Well, I’ll see what I can do.”
    Dr. David Martindale is a very well-respected and widely published psychologist on the self-help circuit, and I was lucky to count myself among his patients. Still, I wasn’t so sure it was going to work out between us. The butterflies were gone, so to speak.
    Yeah, yeah, so I’m a therapy junkie. I’ve been to twelve different psychologists and psychiatrists over the past five years and I’ll make no apologies for it. I see the entire mental health profession as a sort of sanity buffet from which I can pick and choose what I like and pass over the rest. The breadth of my phobias and anxieties demands a holistic approach.
    Hmmm…
    Okay. So maybe I’m making it sound a little worse than it actually is. I am in fact quite a normal person. A normal person who simply has no luck with men, feels underappreciated at work and whose self-esteem just so happens to be in free fall at the moment. That’s the problem, I guess. I figure if I keep digging a little deeper, I’ll find something fascinating behind my averageness. Something less mundane than thetruth, which is that growing up being relentlessly teased by my three older brothers and for the most part ignored by my beaten-down parents has turned me into one of those self-deprecating panicky types looking for love and appreciation in all the wrong places.
    I know it may seem self-indulgent on the surface, since I don’t have any real problems to speak of, but therapy has changed my life. It has helped me learn who I am—privately quirky, a little bit dark, but ultimately hopeful—and imparted to me the gift of self-awareness. You see, monitoring my own thoughts and feelings saves me from the thing I fear the most: Limping through life like a mindless automaton. The woman in the gray flannel suit. The lovesick puppy dog. The enthusiastic imbiber of cyanide-spiked Kool-Aid.
    The problem, I’m beginning to realize, is that all this heightened consciousness comes at a price. When you finally start to see yourself as the universe sees you—one of roughly six billion ants living beneath a perpetually upraised foot—desperation and apathy cannot be far behind. So, to take the sting off the inexorable march to the grave, I sometimes enlist the services of other ants with medical prefixes to help me turn my frown upside down.
    I’m currently involved with two therapists. They don’t know about each other, but I’m thinking of telling Berenice about Doctor M., just to spice things up. Since she sees all psychiatrists and even most psychologists as pill-pushing whores in cahoots with evil pharmaceutical conglomerates, it’ll give her some incentive to come up with something a little more inspired than Saint-John’s-wort and a bubble bath, those panaceas of the