Free It's Not Okay: Turning Heartbreak into Happily Never After by Andi Dorfman Page A

some fresh air.
    Enter Number Twenty-Six, who had come upstairs and conveniently found me there alone (not planned or anything wink, wink, cough, cough). He asked me how I was doing before moving behind me and placing his hands upon my shoulders as he gently massaged the knots that had made their home there. His massage turned into a full embrace. With the warmth of his arms wrapped around my bare shoulders and the spectacular view of downtown Los Angeles, I thought to myself, “Kiss me dammit, kiss me!” Though my back was turned toward him and I was bitching about how pissed I was, hardly an invitation, I wasn’t exactly telling him to get off me either. But he didn’t make a move. Silent moments ticked away until his time was up. The night was over and he had bombed, majorly. The next day I would have another solo date with Number Twenty-Four and as a reward for not bombing, he would score the coveted first kiss.
    A few nights later, I arrived at the mansion in a sequined black dress with quite the revealing neckline, which I was instructed to not spill on because Selena Gomez would be wearing the dress the following week (no big deal). It was elimination night and thus I had to converse with each of the men to determine who wasn’t there for “the right reasons” or who was just not right for me. Conversation after conversation, I found myself becoming more and more anxious to have time with Number Twenty-Six, in anticipation of whether or not he’d kiss me or bomb again. With about eight conversations down, I took a break to freshen up in the upstairs bathroom (aka brush my teeth and pop in a Listerine strip) before making my way to the spiral staircase where Twenty-Six stood at the bottom with two glasses of champagne. He asked if I wanted to go outside “to talk privately” and guided me out to the front of the house. We took a seat on the stoop and began flirting and bantering back and forth, just as we’d been doing for days. And then, he nervously asked me to dance. Totally cheesy, totally predictable, but whatever it took for him to kiss me was fine by me. No less than ten seconds into our musicless dance, it happened. There in front of the mansion where I had met him just days ago, where he didn’t know it but he’d made me believe in love at first sight, we had our very first kiss. It was nothing short of magical. A fire had been ignited and nothing or nobody was going to be strong enough to put us out. Ahhh, those were the days . . .
    And now, about ten months later, in an ironic twist, the same man I fell in love with at first sight has me drowning in wine-filled tears and scarfing down sesame chicken (and popcorn). Ugh, if only I was Olivia Pope. I can picture her pointing her finger at me and scolding me, “Girl, what were you thinking!” And she’d be right. But I wasn’t thinking, I was feeling. Isn’t that what we all do as we fall in love? Check our mind at the door and let our heart blindly lead the way? I should have known it was too good to be true. All of it. How quickly we fell in love, how fast our relationship moved, how perfect everything felt.
    It’s impossible in these early days not to reminisce about the past, especially the good times. Why is it that when we feel pain, our brains automatically forget about the bad times that brought us to this point? Because just like love is blind, so is heartbreak. By blindly reminiscing about the good times in our relationship, we make ourselves feel even worse than we already do. We make ourselves feel guilty as we think of the things we could have done differently and what we should have done but didn’t. But you shouldn’t ponder on the could haves because the reality is, if they should have, they would have, but they didn’t. For now, you have to force yourself to be what you’ve been taught your whole life not to be . . . a pessimist. The fond memories can be remembered later, when you’ve gotten past the point of no