Eat, Pray, Love

this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my en-
ergy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.
I do not relay these facts about myself with pride, but this is how it’s always been.
Some time after I’d left my husband, I was at a party and a guy I barely knew said to me,
“You know, you seem like a completely different person, now that you’re with this new boy-
friend. You used to look like your husband, but now you look like David. You even dress like
him and talk like him. You know how some people look like their dogs? I think maybe you al-
ways look like your men.”
Dear God, I could use a little break from this cycle, to give myself some space to discover
what I look like and talk like when I’m not trying to merge with someone. And also, let’s be
honest—it might be a generous public service for me to leave intimacy alone for a while.
When I scan back on my romantic record, it doesn’t look so good. It’s been one catastrophe
after another. How many more different types of men can I keep trying to love, and continue
to fail? Think of it this way—if you’d had ten serious traffic accidents in a row, wouldn’t they
eventually take your driver’s license away? Wouldn’t you kind of want them to?
There’s a final reason I’m hesitant to get involved with someone else. I still happen to be
in love with David, and I don’t think that’s fair to the next guy. I don’t even know if David and I
are totally broken up yet. We were still hanging around each other a lot before I left for Italy,
though we hadn’t slept together in a long time. But we were still admitting that we both har-
bored hopes that maybe someday...
I don’t know.
This much I do know—I’m exhausted by the cumulative consequences of a lifetime of
hasty choices and chaotic passions. By the time I left for Italy, my body and my spirit were de-
pleted. I felt like the soil on some desperate sharecropper’s farm, sorely overworked and
needing a fallow season. So that’s why I’ve quit.
Believe me, I am conscious of the irony of going to Italy in pursuit of pleasure during a
period of self-imposed celibacy. But I do think abstinence is the right thing for me at the mo-
ment. I was especially sure of it the night I could hear my upstairs neighbor (a very pretty Itali-
an girl with an amazing collection of high-heeled boots) having the longest, loudest, flesh-
smackingest, bed-thumpingest, back-breakingest session of lovemaking I’d ever heard, in the
company of the latest lucky visitor to her apartment. This slam-dance went on for well over an
hour, complete with hyperventilating sound effects and wild animal calls. I lay there only one
floor below them, alone and tired in my bed, and all I could think was, That sounds like an aw-
ful lot of work...
Of course sometimes I really do become overcome with lust. I walk past an average of
about a dozen Italian men a day whom I could easily imagine in my bed. Or in theirs. Or