Chapter 50: Yaron

Three years passed. Vee’s childhood home was sold. A few weeks later, I saw a crew renovating it. It made me so sad that I never drove by her house again.

My private practice grew more than I had imagined. I became the hippie shrink Vee had envisioned. And it worked just as she had predicted.

I transitioned from individual therapy to couples counseling.

It kind of was forced upon me. My love story didn’t have a happy ending, but I could help other couples find theirs.

It proved to be the right choice. I was good at it. Great, actually.

For individual therapy, the focus was on working with a person alone. Patients could bare their souls and explore feelings and experiences without fear of judgment or misinterpretation. Everything we discussed within the confines of my decorated office remained confidential.

Couples counseling was an entirely different challenge. In this scenario, you had to work with two people who loved each other, who had invested a lot of time in their relationship, and who had hit a roadblock. Their lives were intertwined, and you had to guide them together toward a brighter future.

It wasn’t easy for couples to open up completely in front of their loved ones and confess feelings they had kept from their partners for multiple reasons that went from cheating to feeling neglected. So, I had to be creative, implement new techniques, and even develop a few of my own. Imagination was always one of my strongest assets.

Daniel created a webpage for me, and in a short time, it was filled with testimonials from couples I had helped find their way back into love.

Some of my colleagues started asking me to write papers about my methods. Before I knew it, I was being published in some of the most prestigious psychology magazines.

Professionally speaking, I was on cloud nine.

But my personal life was still in limbo. I barely dated and had no social life outside my small circle of friends. Daniel had found an amazing woman and had gotten married. You wouldn’t find a more mismatched couple, but when you saw them together all their differences seemed to vanish. They were madly in love with each other, and I was happy for them.

We held Daniel’s bachelor party at my place with just a few friends he had made in his future wife’s town.

It was a nerd bachelor party. No strippers or getting drunk. We played Dungeons & Dragons and watched sci-fi movies all night.

“Was it difficult, Daniel?”

“What?”

“Making the decision,” I clarified.

I knew his history with Georgina, his future wife, from the beginning. In fact, I was with him when he met her for the first time. It was me who pushed him to go and talk to her.

Daniel did it and got her number. And they fell madly in love with each other.

“The difficult part was accepting that Georgina was truly in love with me. You know how she looks. She could have any man she wanted,” he said.