Bah and Humbug

Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years: The Bermuda Triangle for Addicts

The hardest holiday for a love addict is Valentine’s Day: It’s like New Year’s Eve mashed up with St. Patrick’s Day would be to an alcoholic. But Christmas is pretty tough, too. There are so many expectations around the holidays, so much idealized nostalgesia, so many perfectly lit commercials of perfectly beautiful couples exchanging perfectly chosen gifts in front of perfectly flickering fireplaces. Single people get extra lonely. They pine.

Speaking of pine… fuck fireplaces. I live in LA. It was 75 degrees today, and we don’t need any more carbon particulates in our air.

Back to loneliness. People get extra lonely at this time of year because they have their noses rubbed daily in these fantasy images - images created by a copywriter, staged by a set decorator, and brought to life by a couple of shallow narcissists who spend their days mostly worried that they’ll never work again. (Like I said, I live in LA.) Or, in the case of the image above, by an AI art generator.

We are, as they say in the rooms of recovery, comparing our insides to other people’s outsides. And they’re not even real people.

I get that it makes the singletons feel left out, though, and sometimes they come to me for relationship advice, because after all, I write about relationships. “They” being mostly women, and mostly women over 40. (Again, I live in LA. Over 40 = invisible.) However I am probably the worst person to come to, because I don’t buy the basic premise that you need to be in a relationship to be happy. That a relationship will somehow fix you. A relationship will not fix you, because you aren’t broken. It’s the premise that’s broken.

Don’t think I’m against love and romance. I love love and romance. Often to excess. But I have no illusions that is it magic elixir, and a lot of greedy people are selling magic elixirs to a lot of lonely people. In my experience, romantic love is closer to elixir of heroin (a popular cough syrup in the 19th Century, by the way): the initial high is great, the withdrawal at the end is bloody awful, and a long stretch in the middle is a maintenance phase that falls somewhere between pleasantly numb and barely tolerable. If your experience has been more positive than that, I salute you. I also think you are the exception and not the rule. You’ve seen the divorce statistics same as I have. All the social science data shows that for everything from blood pressure to depression, marriage is good for men and bad for women. And still women seem to be the ones most hotly pursuing it.

Romance is a multi-billion-dollar industry: $4.95 billion was spent in 2022 on dating apps, plus about another $3 billion in books, seminars, meet-ups, matchmakers, life coaches…. Did you know I could make $5/minute giving advice to the lovelorn online? I’d just as soon be a telephone psychic. Both have about as much validity.

What I can give you is advice on things to do that give you some of the same happy hormones you expect from a relationship. There are plenty of other places to find them, and none has a sign with the words “adult” or “shoppe” out front.

The addict brain craves dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin. Either we don’t manufacture enough on our own, or we’re just greedy. I pick the former, although I’ve been accused of the latter. “Well, you just want to do everything fun, don’t you?” glowered a Midwestern woman watching me attempt the trapeze at age 52. The answer is yes, yes I do. But fun doesn’t always mean self-destructive… and I barely even injured myself on the trapeze.

You want dopamine? Learn something new. Novelty is a great activator of dopamine. To really bump it up, try something new that is challenging and maybe has a touch of danger attached. Scuba diving saved my ass; you can’t drink, drug, or check your phone while you’re underwater, and it’s beautiful down there.

Diving also gives me a ton of serotonin, what with the weightlessness and the natural beauty and all. But you could also immerse yourself in an IMAX nature film, or get a massage, or listen to beautiful music. There’s some pretty good chorales showing off at this time of year. Great art, majestic landscapes… anything that produces awe produces serotonin.

For oxytocin I always go to dogs. Love ‘em. You want to put Instagram to good use?Try funny pet videos; it’ll make your day. My sister is all about the children - she’s honorary Bubbie to half the kids in the neighborhood. One of the most reliable ways to produce oxytocin is to be of service to others, and this time of year makes it particularly easy to do that. I don’t know about you, but I always find it easier to be of service when someone just tells what to do. “Here’s a list of Christmas wishes from needy families. Which one do you want to buy?” “We’re serving turkey dinners at the Mission downtown. Meet you at 6:30.”

I could add that volunteering is a great way to meet new people (like potential romantic partners, hint hint) but like I said, I’m the relationship lady who is not selling the secret to finding a relationship. We both know I would be earning a lot more money if I was.