No: you, too, can follow my seven-step program to learn if your ostensibly amorous boyfriend is—as you suspect—merely pretending to love you.

 

STEP 1. Ask him. Or trap him. Like I did, after my first night at his apartment, when the object of my adoration emailed me, “I had such a wonderful evening with you—Love, Herb.” I didn’t waste a second; I shot him back an email that gushed, “OMG—you love me? I love you, too!” Never mind that he never quite said that. I had him now. 

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STEP 2. Ask him why. How do you know he meant it when he said he loved you? After all, you did kind of force his hand. And you know, deep down, you’re not really lovable. So it’s essential that you ask this follow-up: “Why do you love me?” Then, prepare to push through his resistance.

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When, at the tender age of forty-seven, I posed the “why” question to my seemingly besotted new beau, he tried to brush it off. He asked with a chuckle: “Oh, shall I count the ways?” Then, moving on from the Elizabeth Barrett Browning reference to a gentle poke at my family’s personalized birthday-poem custom, he followed up: “Do you want the forty-seven reasons why? In sonnet form, limerick, or ballad?” 

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Don’t treat these as rhetorical questions; the correct answer is “Any format, but yes. That’s exactly what I want.” He may deflect, as mine did, with “I can’t break it down; I love you for your gestalt” or “it’s just how you make me feel.” When you tell him that’s a cop-out, your philosopher man-friend may protest: “If I list the reasons, I am going to inevitably exclude an important quality or include a transient one, and then you won’t trust that my love is real or lasting.”

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Now he’s just being difficult. You have three choices: 

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(a) pout, 

(b) nag, or 

(c) mock. 

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Option (c) can be particularly effective. “Such an intellectual,” you can say, “with a vocabulary to rival Webster’s, and suddenly you’re at a loss for words?”

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He will, trust me, eventually relent. Maybe he will tell you, to conjure up a completely random hypothetical, that he loves your softness, your curves, your intuition, your smarts, your humor, and your generosity. Now ask him if softness is a euphemism for flab. Ask, if he loves your various curves so much, does that mean he won’t love you anymore if you eventually morph into one huge, round ball—in brief, a uni-curve? 

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And ask how come he didn’t mention your endearing insecurity. 

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STEP 3. Interrogate him about his past love life. Your gallant knight may say, as mine did, that he’s forgotten. He may say it’s not important. Ignore that. You need to know where you stand.

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When, after your expert prodding, your intended, like mine, gradually recalls each of the women he slept with, or wanted to sleep with, over the past sixty years and the two to whom he unsuccessfully proposed marriage before wedding the mother of his children, let him see you silently sob beside him. And when he says, “But that’s ancient history; you’re the only one I love,” tell him you and he know that’s only temporary. Say, “Clearly, you had many loves of your life. I was only one pearl in a very long and probably continuing strand.” Then ask him for just a little more information about those other pearls.

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STEP 4. Master the Valentines’ Day dance. Let’s say your new romantic attachment, a devout and anti-Hallmark Jew, never made a thing of Saint Valentine’s Day. When your first February together rolls around, he makes plans to meet a woman friend on the 14th whom he knows from the food kitchen where he volunteers—a bouncy young Korean-American gallery owner who weighs approximately 92 pounds in her designer clothes and strappy heels and claims to be lonesome right now for her faraway boyfriend. And let’s say your heart’s desire realizes, in time to cancel, that he may have committed a wee faux pas when agreeing to this get-together, and asks if you had something else in mind for February 14. Rise to the occasion; say, as I did, “No, of course not, Honey Bunches of Oats[1]; have a great time!” Then shovel up, all by yourself, the fifteen and three-quarter inches of snow that deluge your driveway and walkway that night, paint a vividly tearful portrait of your misery for Fuck-Face Dearest the next morning, and remind him of his cluelessness and your martyrdom every Montag unt Donnerstag—every Monday and Thursday—from then on. You can be sure your one-and-only will reward you each February 14 from then on with a completely spontaneous and heartfelt expression of love.

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STEP 5. Marry him. But don’t rest on your laurels. He could have married you for all sorts of reasons. Did you forget that he proposed to three women before you? You’re probably just one more passing fancy.

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STEP 6. Ask him if he wants to die before or after you. If he says before, tell him how selfish he is, to want to leave you a heartbroken widow. If he says afterwards, then, accuse him of being eager to cast you off and move on. “Will you sit out the shiva week at least,” you can request, “before you choose from the parade of casserole-laden women lined up outside our front door?”

 

Now: if you have thoroughly and meticulously completed Steps 1-6—every f-ing jot and tittle, as I did—and your husband still has not fled to Timbuktu, then you can be certain of three things.

 

(a) You are a dolt.

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(b) He is a saint. 

 

And:

 

(c) He really, really loves you.

 

But, knowing you, you will still have trouble taking in point (c). So you have no choice but to proceed to…

 

STEP 7. Therapy. Preferably for a very long time. Tell your shrink you don’t feel worthy of your husband’s love. Maybe she will tell you that your low expectations and self-esteem may have helped you keep the lid on the scary temper of some domineering and angry men who populated your childhood and younger adulthood but that they are not exactly useful coping mechanisms anymore. 

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Or check in with your friends and siblings. Maybe they will say, “Hello? Are you deaf and blind? Do you see the way that man looks at you or hear how he talks about you?” 

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Admit that yes, you may be a little nearsighted and hearing-impaired. 

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Also “softer” and more uni-curved than ever before.

 

But, just to be sure, ask them each to give you the forty-seven—no, now sixty or sixty-five—reasons why this amazing man might actually love you.

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And then, maybe—just maybe—step off that mishuganeh circular staircase of perseveration, sit back, and enjoy your happily ever after. For whatever microseconds remain before one of you leaves the other with casseroles in lieu of a spouse. 

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[1] I know, I know. But would "Okey dokey, Pokey Schmokey" have been any better?