Free Jo Piazza by Love Rehab

twisting her pearls in between her fingers.
    “My parents want me to get married. I want to make them happy,” Prithi added.
    “I’m afraid of being alone,” Olivia said almost under her breath.
    The room grew even quieter on that beat. Being alone was something we all feared.
    Cameron broke the silence.
    “I’ve watched too many seasons of The Husband ,” she offered, getting a few laughs.
    The Husband was a television show that had become widely popular with women (and more than a few men; Dave, for one, was a fan) over the past decade. The show found a single guy, typically in his thirties, with a good job—like a pilot, a doctor, or the brother of someone famous—and brought in twenty-seven women, on average ten years younger and abundantly less successful than him, to catfight their way into his heart over the span of eight weeks before the Husband finally narrows it down to two ladies. They add alcohol and hilarity really ensues. Everyone awkwardly professes their love, even though in real life they’ve only known each other for maybe three weeks. He then whisks them both away on a terribly romantic tropical vacation where they have to pretend to get all angsty about spending the night with him, even though they know if they don’t do it they’re donesky. Then he dumps one and proposes marriage to the other. All in all, it has raised and lowered the bar for what we should expect from a man in the first two months of dating.
    “Let’s stop watching The Husband ,” I suggested. There were nods. We had made our second rule!
Rule 2: Reality dating shows are not reality.
Don’t drink that Kool-Aid.
    That seemed like as good a note as any to end the meeting on. I suggested we all stand in a circle and hold hands. I had printed out the serenity prayer on a piece of paper and passed it around. We all said it together and then erupted again in applause. Some lingered and had coffee and donuts. Annie showed Prithi to one of the spare rooms and I clucked after everyone, pleased at how well the meeting had gone and surprised again at how much lighter and happier I felt for sitting and talking about my problems and recognizing the same problems and patterns in other women. Finally, just as I said good-bye to the last guest and told her the meeting would be held at the same place, same time the following week, the phone rang. It was Joe. He wanted to hear all the details about the day, and I was eager to divulge what a success it had been. He said he would be over in a few hours to check on Annie, and I started thinking that maybe he would think Prithi was pretty. She did have a thing for doctors after all.
    I greeted Joe wearing sweats and no makeup. For some reason I didn’t feel like I needed to put on airs or try to impress him. He had instantly been relegated to the category of buddy. We sipped Diet Cokes in the backyard, watching Tito, the grandson of my grandmother’s longtime gardener and landscaper, Enrique, fight with a recalcitrant rosebush he was trying to relocate to the opposite side of the yard.
    “So meeting number one went well, it sounds like,” Joe said.
    “I think so,” I said eagerly. “Everyone was so excited to finally have a place to talk and share and open up. It was wonderful.”
    “Are you following the steps?” Joe asked.
    “The steps?” I drew a blank.
    “The twelve steps. That’s what AA and most of the As are based on at least. There are twelve steps to conquering addiction. First you admit you have a problem and that you need something extra in your life to help restore your sanity, then step two is to surrender yourself to a higher power.”
    “A higher power? That sounds like some cult-talk mumbo jumbo.”
    “It’s not like God or anything. Or it doesn’t have to be. What religion are you?”
    I recounted my family’s failed experiment at being Presbyterian.
    “OK, well, I grew up Catholic and we went to church every Sunday. After church we went to the local bar