I have been told this lie my whole life by women, even after I got married:

“I just want to be by myself for a while.”

This lie has always been told to me by very attractive women who have just gotten divorced or broken up from a serious relationship, and never, not once, have any of these women been by themselves for a while. Typically they are with someone within just a week or two.

I imagine that on the surface, they mean what they are saying. I say “on the surface” because deep down, they know they are full of shit. Deep down they know they will be with someone soon, because no one who is married or in a serious relationship wants to be alone for a while, or even for the next five minutes. If they wanted to be alone, they would have been alone the whole time.

At some middle-depth level, this statement is really this: “I don’t want to be with you.”

This lie and similar ones, like, “It’s not you, it’s me,” (it’s you, or she would want to be with you), or “I just want to be friends,” (which is almost never even remotely true), or “I don’t think we want the same things,” (which was spoken with great irony to me by a girlfriend who later became a lesbian, proving we both wanted the exact same thing, to be with a lesbian woman), are part of the pointless thrust and parry of courtship, and one of the reasons I am so very glad to be in a healthy marriage.

Sidebar: a woman once told me, “I just can’t be in a co-dependant relationship right now,” then proceeded to marry and divorce two more times in the next ten years.

I know I am asking for a lot more courage than almost all of you are capable of mustering, but people, please, at least once in your miserable little lives tell someone the truth, that you are thinking only of yourself.