I cried like a toddler when he dumped me.

Dr. Lowen says he couldn’t do anything else.

Brett was the love I missed when I lived under a rock for half my teenage years.   He was my age but younger by categories.   I didn’t care.

Manhattan was our playground.  We were like tourists on a honeymoon.

Like children, Dr. Lowen says.

I did not think as far as marriage.  I never had a vision of my wedding and walking down the aisle.

You didn’t want to see that your father was missing.

I told myself that I was more adventurous than that.  In the back of my mind I thought it would go something like that song, Some Enchanted Evening.  I would see a stranger across a crowded room and somehow I would know.   He is the one.

Dr. Lowen asks, did that ever happen?

No.

With Brett and me, it was a kind of spring fever, being in love with each other, being in love with love and the whole wonderful world.

Everything changed when he started talking about the future.  His parents would be inconsolable if he didn’t marry someone of his own religion/race.   His sister had already broken their hearts by suddenly marrying a stranger/inferior whom she met on a vacation in the Caribbean.

He still lived at home.  I never met his folks, but they had their radar on him and knew about Brett and me.  They pressured him to break it off.   I wasn’t going to fight it.

But it still hurt when it happened.

Dr. Lowen says your pride was hurt.

But I understand.

You had to face the painful fact that Brett was not his own man.  He was a prince charming, but you wanted a king.

That’s why, in spite of the tears, you gave him up so easily.