The End of Seeking External Validation
“We had so much fun, but we were so toxic. So now I’m back on Tinder.”
I exhale — somewhere between a sigh and a calming, yogic breath — and look across the twinkly-light-lit patio at the friend whose Tarot I’m currently reading. Her attention is split between me, the cards, and her shiny iPhone where, I have no doubt, the next swipe awaits.
Her cards point blatantly to an unhappy partnership built on beer foam and combustive chemistry, and a woman who definitely knows better, but misses the chaos.
She was a seeker of love, truly and deeply craving it. My heart broke for her.
And I wanted to smack her.
Instead, I inhale and ask:
“Have you considered a man cleanse?”
I’ve made many poor, man-adjacent decisions. The Aussie I took off with into the night (and woods) in Whistler after knowing him for all of 30 seconds. The neurotic neighbor with whom I had an ill-advised fling. The friend I spent years on a merry-go-round with, never quite getting anywhere. The photographer-slash-dealer I remained smitten with through most of my early twenties.
The list goes on.
And on.
And on again.
Finally, as the summer of 2017 hazed its way toward fall, it clicked:
I 👏 Was 👏 Not 👏 Making 👏 Good 👏 Choices 👏
They were adventurous, fun, self-destructive, explosive, interesting choices. Choices full of stories, one-liners, and essays-to-be. They were the decisions that composed the “me-making” years of my twenties. But they weren’t getting me any closer to finding love. Or being happy. Or knowing what I actually wanted.
My solution: If you can’t make good decisions, you don’t get to make any decisions.
No dating. Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Happn — deleted. No pining. Stalking on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter? Strictly prohibited. No lurking in bars, spending too much on cocktails, hoping for a Serendipity-level connection.
Love was on hold until further notice.
“Ha. I’ve been on a man cleanse for like, the past three months.”
Beside my love-seeking friend, another pal grins endearingly from where she’s curled up on a threadbare recliner. I have a second, intense urge to reach across the table and just… smack.
But instead, another less-fun, calming inhale and exhale:
“It’s not something that happens to you. You make the choice. Cut out men. Dating. Love. Sex. All of it. Focus on yourself. Figure out what you actually want.”
You make the choice.
Focus on yourself.
Figure out what you actually want.
Welcome to the self-love revolution.
When I started the man cleanse, I had none of these goals in mind. I knew I was making reckless, silly choices and acting shocked when relationships, dates, flings — whatever — didn’t work out. Then, I was turning around to make the exact same decisions as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It was destructive idiocy at its finest, and I was no longer there for it.
Once I removed the dating apps, stopped sending “let’s go out tonight 👯” texts to my girlfriends, and deliberately avoided flirting and making eye contact with men in public spaces, I realized I had a lot more time.
And energy.
And space.
Like… a lot, a lot.
I stayed in more; I was hungover less. I read in the dusty reading nook I had been so proud to create the summer prior. I wrote a short film. I spent time with female friends and not solely focused on cultivating male attention. I saw movies. I brought people together and created content that said something. I sought counsel in the forms of therapy and yakking to my pals. I did things like check in on my breathing and noticing how it felt to occupy my body moment-to-moment.
I journaled; oh, how I journaled!
I spent time with and on myself. I started to figure out who she was, especially when it came to men:
Someone who wanted to be Enough.
To feel Enough. Desired. Chased, and won. To be heard and felt and loved.
But, as I figured this out, a sense of deep, dark ickiness hit me. I was ashamed to want these things. I felt needy for having needs.
It’s been an uncomfortable journey of learning to ask and — even harder — receive. Over time, I’ve adjusted to the presence of Need. I’ve meet Need for tea that stretched into happy-hour half-price wine. Need has been present with me and, the more I’ve allowed it in, the more I’ve been able to see it:
We are all seeking wholeness. And we are all looking in the wrong place.
This is the word used in Tarot to describe the friends, strangers, and lovers coming to us, the Oracles, for advice. They are the questioners, peering into the divinatory abyss for guidance, answers, and wisdom.
And the question(s) this Oracle receives most often?
Love. Sex. Butterflies. Bumble. Breakups. My querents come to the cards for answers to these questions. They seek fullness from their partnerships and validation from their lovers. I read their fortunes while listening to their pulse: amienough, amienough, amienough.
We have allowed the search for love to consume us.
Wait.
Let me be more specific: We have allowed the search for external, romantic, monogamous-partnership-driven love to consume us. We’ve equated it with success and fulfillment. “We are taught that marriage makes us whole,” as Kelly Tatham writes in “Being Single Is the Default.” We have #couplegoals and #baecations. We absorb fairytales and rom-coms and shiny Pinterest boards. We put the search for this love at the forefront of our thoughts and minds and beings and hope that it will fill us once we find it.
I believe love to be transformative and revealing and radiant. I’ve been told it floods the body with enough oxytocin, dopamine, and adrenaline to light up the brain like a Twilight vampire in July.
But I know there is no secret to love. No spell to find it. No incantation to hold it. No charm to release it.
There are no hidden secrets in Tarot. The cards do not have the answer you seek, nor does the person — present or anticipated — at the end of your search.
There were two “cheat days” on my cleanse.
The first: fumbling. Late. The front seat of a pick-up with a boy I found completely intoxicating for about five hours. Then I woke up. Shook off my first-ever-film-festival-and-also-champagne euphoria. Realized he reminded me, precisely, of the ex who had sent me spiraling into the cleanse in the first place.
The second cheat day was a very close call with The Ex himself.
While our flirtatious lunches and texts never progressed further — something for which I was grateful when I later discovered he was seriously seeing someone else — being near him pulled me right back into the poor-decision-making, late-night-texting, enoughness-spiral.
My learned behaviors of:
were intoxicating.
Of course they were. Because making poor decisions is easy. Like my leopard-print lounge pants, these patterns were worn into comfort. They did not serve me or bring me happiness — actually, they’re bad for me — they felt good.
But I was over instant gratification. With feeling good versus feeling full.
I was no longer interested in pursuing love the way I learned to.
So, from the Doritos-binge-mid-juice-fast aftermath of my cheat-days, I slunk my bloated, not-yet-sated self back onto the cleanse to figure out how to shift the behaviors I had around seeking love.
In a recent reading, I was asked: Tell me about myself.
I nearly fell out of my chair — partly due to the strong IPA-and-empty-stomach combo I was rocking at the time, but mostly because, in the two decades I’ve been practicing Tarot, no one has ever asked me to do this. No one has ever readily asked me to gaze inward.
In my other readings, the ones about boys and breakups and Bumble-dates-to-be, everyone sits down to look out. I’m asked about the thems and theys of your lives. Do they love me? Will they propose? Are they The One?
You, my dear querents, do not come to me to evaluate how this relationships serves you — or how you serve it. You do not sit down ready to confront areas that are being constricted or exacerbated by this person you have invited into your life. You do not seem to see yourself at all in your own search for love.
The great irony of this is: the answer is always within.
For every question posed that looks out, the cards will pull you in. Whether it be gentle or rough, with chartreuse meadows or towers broken by lightning, the Tarot guides us back to the only place we have true authority.
The only place that matters, really. The only place we need to look: ourselves.
I am no longer on the man cleanse. I called it quits in the spring of 2018.
Why? Easy: I fell in love.
Now. This is not where I inform you, in a masterclass plot twist, that the most amazing benefit of the man cleanse is getting to dance your glass-slipper-shoe’d feet onto a magic carpet and into the sunset with your soulmate.
That’s crap.
Let me reassure you, and be clear: I fell for the wrong person. Again. I had an adventure. Collected stories. Wrote an essay. Made more me-making decisions and had some laughs.
I did a lot of the same things I did pre-cleanse, to be honest.
But this time, I trusted the choice I was making. I had faith in my ability to be vulnerable without sacrificing my voice. To be open without being trampled. To love without giving anything away. I had seen who I was, in all her beauty and all her ugly, and I loved her. Irrevocably and unconditionally.
Though my sense of enoughness was not fully formed at the moment love struck me, it grew. Steadily.
Parallel to the relationship, not because of it.
I continued my inner-work. I meditated and yoga’d and worked with a coach. I had great chats with woke and waking womxn. I went on some eye-opening trips. I reinforced it all with podcasts and books. I treated myself — oh, how I treated myself.
And then, one day, I felt it:
Enough.
I was whole and fully present in myself. I always had been, really. But I needed to see it. Feel it. Soak myself in it, for a while.
Allow me to leave you with a reading, unasked for, but offered.
Three statements. Three cards. Three, the magic number.
Firstly:
If you have to ask an Oracle, something isn’t working.
Evaluate for yourself where the question comes from. Why it is being spoken. Why you’ve brought it here, to me, to any fortune-teller.
Then:
Look inward for wholeness.
It’s there, waiting patiently with a big ol’ glass of wine.
And finally:
Have you considered a man cleanse?
The End of Seeking External Validation
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