This is a sponsored post.
Jo Piazza knows a truth or two about dating rituals – the kinds you’re afraid to admit you know about. Many of our relationships don’t begin with the first date or even the first smile. They don’t start with an introduction or even a vision of what our future lover might be like. Each new relationship usually begins with the decline and crash of the previous one.
Those most recent love disasters form the burning effigies we walk away from in confident slow motion as we head off into the sunrise of our imminent love sequel. We toss our hair and laugh defiantly at the wreckage in the rear view, striding into the next scenario with aplomb. Right?
Bullshit.
We act like complete slavering buffoons in either anger, disappointment, or righteous indignation (if fate has allowed us the benefit of being the breaker-upper). We cope with this by binge-eating in front of a rom-com, binge-fucking within gossip reach of our exes, or retreating to the monasteries of our own weird little hobbies and repeating the mantras of self-reliance we’d quickly trade for happy companionship.
This void is cuckoo time for the soul. We go out too much, check our text messages obsessively – we overcompensate for what we’ve just lost. In fact, if there’s one thing we do consistently, it’s overcompensate whenever love, or more commonly, infatuation, is involved.
This is where Jo Piazza’s Love Rehab: A Novel in 12 Steps starts.
Jo is a non-fiction writer, currently working on Bad Habits: The Secret Lives of Nuns. She took a vacation in Mexico and decided to flip the script and write a novel based on her and her friends’ encounters with their own love-borne insanity.
The woman herself.
It follows a couple friends whose journeys straddle the realities of both substance and emotional addictions. The insight here is that there really is no discernible difference in our brains between a substance high and an emotional one. They’re the same damn chemicals.
Love Rehab takes the reader though the travails of attempting to stay above water while we’re in fight-or-flight, free-for-all post-breakup mode. The constant crowdsourcing of supportive friends and strangers, the over-analysis of every mildly romantic encounter, and so on. Thank God for the enabler friends (usually the celebrity gossip-reader types) who feed you the crack rocks of their attention/opinions on the hottie who brushed your arm in casual conversation the other day. Woe to the eye-rolling pragmatists who start feigning productivity whenever you want to discuss that dimple you just noticed in your new lover’s smile. You know the game.
In spite of life’s improv-ish nature, we often try to follow certain scripts – even though they never really jive with the realities of uncertainty, possibility, and fate. That leaves us with nothing to guide us, nothing to rely on but the collective sense of humor we humans have developed to deal with this mess. If any of this applies to you, and you know it does, follow the link below and read Love Rehab.
Feel better about your crazy. It’s cathartic. It’s rehab.
Images via Jo Piazza and NY Daily News.
