Page 2 of The True Love Experiment

“A tree house picnic?”

She is immediately repulsed. “Eating with spiders? Hard pass.”

“Surfing on the backs of turtles?”

“Deeply unethical.”

Guiltily, I wince over at her. Even my Jess-Fizzy banter well has run dry. “Okay. I got nothing.”

She studies me for a beat before saying, “Sloths. We’re going to a sloth sanctuary.”

I let out a gasp of jealousy and drum up some real energy to effuse over how amazing this trip will be, but Jess just reaches across the bar table and rests her hand over mine, quieting me. “Fizzy.”

I look down at my half-finished martini to avoid her concerned maternal gaze. Jess’s Mom Face has a way of immediately making me feel the need to handwrite an apology, no matter what I’ve just been caught doing.

“Jessica,” I mumble in response.

“What’s happening right now?”

“What do you mean?” I ask, knowing exactly what she means.

“The whole vibe.” She holds up her wineglass with her free hand. “I ordered wine from Choda Vineyards and you didn’t make a joke about short, chubby grapes.”

I grimace. I didn’t even catch it. “I admit that was a wasted opportunity.”

“The bartender has been staring at you since we got here and you haven’t AirDropped him your contact info.”

I shrug. “He has lines shaved into his eyebrow.”

As these words leave my lips, our eyes meet in shock. Jess’s voice is a dramatic whisper: “Are you actually being…?”

“Picky?” I finish in a gasp.

Her smile softens the worry lingering in her eyes. “There she is.”With one final squeeze to my fingers, she releases my hand, leaning back. “Rough day?”

“Just a lot of thinking,” I admit. “Or overthinking.”

“You saw Kim today, I take it?”

Kim, my therapist for the past ten months and the woman who I hope will help me crack the code to writing, dating, feeling like myself again. Kim, who hears all my angst about love and relationships and inspiration because I really, truly do not want to drop the depth of my stress in Jess’s lap (she and River are still relative newlyweds), or my sister Alice’s lap (she is pregnant and already fed up with her overprotective obstetrician husband), or my mother’s lap (she is already overly invested in my relationship status; I don’t want to send her to therapy, too).

In the past, when I’ve felt discontentment like this, I knew it would ebb with time. Life has ups and downs; happiness isn’t a constant or a given. But this feeling has lasted nearly a year. It’s a cynicism that now seems permanently carved into my outlook. I used to spend my life writing love stories and carrying the boundless optimism that my own love story would begin on the next page, but what if that optimism has left me for good? What if I’ve run out of pages?

“I did see Kim,” I say. “And she gave me homework.” I pull a little Moleskine notebook from my purse and wave it limply. For years, these colorful journals were my constant companions. I took one everywhere I went, writing book plots, snippets of funny conversations, images that would pop into my head at random times. I called them my idea notebooks and used to scribble things down twenty, thirty, forty times a day. These scribbles were my deepwell of ideas. For a few months after my romance brain came to a screeching halt in front of a thousand fresh college grads, I continued carrying one around in hopes inspiration would strike. But eventually, seeing it there in my purse stressed me out, so I left them in my home office, collecting dust with my laptop and desktop. “Kim told me I need to start carrying notebooks again,” I tell Jess. “That I’m ready for the gentle pressure of having one with me, and even writing a single sentence or drawing a doodle in it will help.”

She takes a second to absorb this. The phraseeven writing a single sentencehangs between us. “I knew you’d been in a slump,” she says, “but I don’t think I realized how bad it was.”

“Well, it doesn’t happen all at once. For a while, I wrote, but it wasn’t very good. And then I started to worry it was actually pretty terrible, and that made me think I’d lost my spark. And then thinking I’d lost my spark made me think maybe it was because I’d stopped believing in love.”

Her frown deepens, and I press on. “It isn’t like I woke up one day and thought, Wow, love is a lie.” I stab the olive in my drink, then use the toothpick to point in her direction. “Obviously you’re proof that it’s not. But at what point do I acknowledge that maybemylove life isn’t going to be what I think it is?”

“Fizz—”

“I think I might have aged out of the majors.”

“What?That is—” She blinks, her argument dying on her tongue. “Well, that is actually a very good metaphor.”

“It’s the classic chicken-and-egg dilemma: Has the writer’s block killed my romance boner, or has losing my romance boner killed my actual boner?”

---