Author: Mark E. Scott

“Well, clearly you didn’t satisfy her needs.”

Her delivery was deadpan. She was serious, at least as far as I could tell from my side of the Zoom call. I’d just finished describing the events leading to my most recent breakup, in great detail, none of which were intended to damn me as someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t satisfy the needs of a love interest. I needed more insight into how I became the bad guy.

“Um, what do you mean about not satisfying her needs?” As inconspicuously as possible, I peered into the computer screen in a vain attempt to judge her facial expressions.

She leaned back, ever so slightly, and delivered the answer as if it was self-evident which, I suppose, it should have been. “Well, if you’d been satisfying her needs, you’d still be together, wouldn’t you?”

I wondered, for the nth time, why I was in therapy. Wasn’t it her job to make me feel better about myself? Certainly, that’s what my last guy, Therapist Jim, would have done. Well, most likely. For sure, he would have thrown some emotional balm my way before using the truth to cut me off at the knees. Perhaps Therapist Jane didn’t have the time for emotional balm, or maybe wasn’t packing any in her therapist’s bag of tricks.

I continued my attempt to discern her facial expressions.

Is that a smirk?

I couldn’t be sure. The pixel count on my cheap screen was too small to recognize subtle facial movements. Indeed, as far as I could tell, thus far she’d maintained a convincing poker face, and we were already thirty-five minutes into the session.

“So, you’re saying it was all my fault?” I was pouting.

Therapist Jane leaned forward toward the screen. Yup, definitely a smirk. “No. I’m not saying that at all.”

Yes, you were.

“Okay—let me ask you this—were you thinking about breaking up with her?”

Sounded like a trick question. I trod carefully. “Well…no. Why do you ask?”

She sighed, clearly exasperated with her idiot patient. “Okay, if you weren’t looking for a way out of the relationship, then we can assume your needs were being met, right? People who are happy in a relationship generally don’t look for ways to escape the relationship. Capiche?”

I saw her point, and it occurred to me the fact I’m really good at staying in stale, dysfunctional relationships wasn’t necessarily a positive thing. Certainly, being emotionally clueless helps enable that particular superpower. But the truth of her observation struck me like a beam of sunlight through a cloudy sky. Was this the reason my friend Bob was eternally in therapy? To receive the beam of light? If so, it was no wonder he was always running off to an appointment.

“Capiche. But what am I supposed to do with this information?” I was out of sorts. I hated the idea there was someone in the world, someone with whom I was in love, whose needs I’d left wanting. Was this the first time I had done such a thing? Or was this all the time? Was I a serial non-satisfier of needs?

There was the smirk again. She answered my question with the smirk. “Well—and this is just off the top of my head—maybe try being more cognizant of your partners needs?” She paused. “But I’m not here to tell you how to live your life.”

Not here to tell me how to live my life? Was I missing some not-so-well-hidden sarcasm? “Well, um, not to be disrespectful, but I kinda thought that’s what you’re supposed to do, you know…tell me how to run my life. Clearly, I’ve got a pretty big blind spot. I mean, what if I, you know, tried to be more cognizant of her needs but still fail to meet those needs? And by ‘her’ I mean some woman in the future, some woman who may or may not exist.”

There followed a pregnant pause, during which Therapist Jane attempted to read my expression, or was perhaps trading stocks online. I couldn’t really see, so it could have been either. I chose to believe it was stocks, mostly because she was doing a lot of typing and I didn’t want the typing to be about me. Finally, she spoke.

“Listen, I don’t want to state the obvious, but maybe the simple answer is that you try harder.”

I was starting to believe I was dealing with a jilted woman. I was starting to believe that Therapist Jane had a chip on her shoulder. I again peered into the screen, but I wasn’t looking at her face. I was looking for any signs my new therapist was, or had been, in a failed relationship. I came up empty. I spied no dirty t-shirts or ravaged marriage licenses. So, in my head, it was possible she was getting over someone, which meant it was possible I wasn’t as awful as she believed. Was I just a convenient whipping boy on whom she could inflict her failed-love frustrations?

On the other hand, maybe she just considered me a moron, one with whom she was growing tired.

She interrupted my musings with a sigh. “Then again, maybe you could never satisfy her needs, no matter what you tried. Sometimes, things don’t work out.” Her voice turned wistful. “Sometimes, things just aren’t meant to be.”

Her unexpected turn from the practical to the metaphysical threw me, but I understood where she was coming from. My read on her cliché about things not meant to be was that it was time for me to stop banging my head into a wall, searching for answers that didn’t exist. Maybe no amount of therapy was going to fix the problem I was trying to fix. On the bright side, I found the idea of my own helplessness strangely comforting. Maybe now I could let go.

I thanked Therapist Jane and cancelled the rest of my appointments.