Page 40 of Most Likely to Match
There’s a feeling of emotional whiplash that comes with going from the therapist to the therapied.
“Dean,” Melinda prompts. She has light brown skin and thick-framed, cream-coloured glasses, they give her a wide-eyed look that is surprisingly disarming. It gives her an open look, making it easier to confide in her.
“Yeah.” The thumbnail sized reflection of me in our video chat flushes. Therapy really only works when there’s buy-in from the patient, and I amnotbought in.
“Do you think your feeling, your need, to be claimed by Chloecould be stemming from a place of— or perhaps, an attempt at— healing?”
I shrug. “I mean, yeah.”
The blue sky outside my window acts as a ticker tape of distraction, always catching my eye. My brain is still half-focused on the Core Cupid client I spoke to today. The man had never been on a second date. He’d admitted, tearfully, to never having had sex.
Chloe has said that men like him aren’t common for matchmakers, but not uncommon, either. When I told him that fact didn’t make him any less worthy of finding love, he didn’t look like he believed me, but maybe that he wanted to.
There’s another Downtown Toronto District BIA event tonight. One that Chloe and Nick have texted me about. I’m too embarrassed to commit to an appearance yet, not after storming out of the diner this weekend.
“Would it heal you?” Melinda asks. “To have Chloe announce to the world that you are in, for all intents and purposes, a relationship?”
I frown. First at the question, then at the emotional churn in my gut, bubbling up into my chest, a resounding, effervescentno.
Melinda, the professional that she is, already knows my answer. “Why do you need her to claim you?” she asks gently.
I scrub my hands over my face, groan into my palms. God, I hate it when she’s right. “Because,” I say, tired, with myself, with therapy, with fucking feelings. “It would make me feel like I was— I am— good enough.”
She nods. “Is that something that Chloe can bestow upon you?” she asks again, like it’s a question she does not already know the answer to.
“No,” I say finally. “And it’s probably not fair of me to put that responsibility on her, either.”
Melinda nods. She lets me take a few breaths, my gaze on my bedroom window, the blue sky, the tops of the trees nearby. “Chloe was voted Most Likely to Succeed in high school. Something, you said, she seems to take very seriously.”
I nod slowly. She has a point, and I am merely at her whim until we get to it.
“What were you voted as?”
I laugh without humour. “I wasn’t.”
“Do you think she wants this to succeed? This thing between the two of you?”
I sigh. As mad as I let myself be with her, I can’t deny that Chloe is doing her best to make up for our past. “Yes,” I say. “Probably.”
“Maybe,” she says quietly, “instead of focusing on how she can claim you, you can focus on whether you also want it to succeed. And then,” she continues before I can argue that, of course, I want it to succeed. “Maybe that’s where we find the answer to whether or not you are good enough. That answer almost always lies within us, Dean. Not in other people’s opinions.”
7
CHLOE
From a sales perspective, Core Cupid’s new onboarding process is far more efficient than it used to be. After filling out the first survey, clients meet virtually with Dean for a complimentary thirty-minute session. As a therapist, Dean can’t technically call himself a “dating coach,” though the profession exists outside the therapeutic context. Something about how that’s not actually a designation, but more of a specialization that he can claim. For those thirty minutes, Dean is not technically their therapist, which means he can share— after they’ve signed a waiver— suggestions and notes with me about their talk to help me hone the client’s details for the algorithm.
Clients come to me for our one-on-one interview with a better idea of why they’re there, and I have a better idea of what they want, too. From there, if they want to see Dean again, they’re free to become his patient, though, of course, he can no longer share information with my business.
But it’s win-win-win: for me, for him, and hopefully for the client, too.
From an interpersonal perspective, the new onboarding process doesn’t require Dean to beinthe office. Like at all. He can meet withclients virtually from his childhood bedroom. He can send me his notes via email. And he never needs to be in the meeting with the client and me. In fact, he’d prefer not to be there to ensure the client feels “wholly capable of expressing themselves” to me or whatever he said in his email when I asked him if he’d be around anytime soon.
He has a key. He knows the security code. He has no reasonnotto be here.
Except, if he considersmea reason.
“Do you still want to come for dinner on Sunday, honey?” Mom asks. From her volume, despite her proximity to me on this bench outside my favorite Spadina dumpling spot, this is not the first time she asked the question.
