When first asked how I felt about hosting a coed collection of singles at one of my Tough Love boot camps I instantly thought of the degree of difficulty in what lied ahead.
The conceit to Tough Love has always been that if the single women who signed up for it didn’t change their ways they would be relegated to a life of dysfunctional dating and unhealthy relationships. The fear of never meeting a match is very real for a lot of women the world over, and only when that fear is overcome can a woman be truly capable of loving someone else as much as she could love herself. It starts there. Men don’t usually grapple as much with that fear, or the issue of self-love. Men face a much graver threat…character assassination or character suicide.
If I approached the men I worked with this season with the, “if you don’t change your ways you could wind up alone forever” attitude they’d laugh their asses off and treat the experience as a joke. Look out for Mr. Peter Pan. But instead, when I pointed out the reality of the world we now live in and the fact that anyone’s reputation can be ruined with just one Vine, Instagram, tweet, text, update, Snapchat, WhatsApp, or whatever something clicked, and I think they realized they needed to wise up.
Entire careers are being ruined today in a mere swipe of a thumb. See Anthony Wiener. Character assassination has become a profession, much less a hobby, and even an art for some women, amateur photographers and wanna be paparazzi out there. Impulse control is a must, but the obsessive needs of others to share, tag and over expose everything and everyone around us puts whatever we're doing into a Cloud, and you could sink yourself now without ever even knowing it.
Just as quickly as careers crumble so do families, marriages and relationships. Now in an instant someone can be exposed for who they really are. And when it comes to dating, when a guy meets a girl he really likes, and is finally ready to settle down, it takes just one friend, family member, colleague, co-worker, customer, client, neighbor, classmate or teammate of hers to “drop a dime” and his chances are ruined in a flash. For those unfamiliar with the expression ‘drop a dime’', its a reference to back in the day. When someone called the cops to report a crime, they had to ‘drop a dime’ in a pay phone to tell someone about it.
Tough Love has always been about turning over a new leaf. It’s about new beginnings. It’s about putting the past in the past and charting a new course to a more promising future. Although I don’t stay super close to all the people who have passed through my boot camps, I’m proud to say that many of them have gone on to have very healthy, happy relationships that lead to marriage, family and much, much more. I’d like to say that no one has ever regressed or fell back into his or her old ways, but I don’t think that would be fair. What I can say is that everyone I’ve worked with has “seen the light “ so to speak and realizes that its possible for anyone to start anew. All of them have realized that they can turn over a new leaf. And that I am certainly proud of to say the least.