The Girl Who Wrote The Dating Manual

Prologue

I could hear them yelling from all the way down the hall.

I didn't think they knew that I could hear them, but I could. At the tender age of ten, I lay curled up in my bed, my legs drawn to my chest as I sobbed. Through the thin walls of the house, I could hear them screaming at each other; things that I didn't understand; words I was yet to know the meaning of. Taxes. Marriage counselling. Paycheck-to-paycheck. My dad's pleas as my mother threatened to leave him and take me with her.

This was a daily occurrence in the Sinclair household. My mom and dad would fight, she'd storm off to her room and cry for a few hours, I'd pretend I was asleep and couldn't hear anything, and the bickering would continue forever.

When I was five, I didn't know what this bickering was. Now, however, I was catching on. There was this girl in my class, Sara MacDonald, and her mom and dad split up when she was a few years old. She moved with her mom and hadn't seen her father in two years. I didn't want that. I adored my parents and didn't want to lose either of them. Despite their faults, I loved them to death.

But because of their continuous fighting, I could no longer read fairytales. How could I read about Prince Charmings and true love and sparks, when they didn't exist?

My mom and dad loved each other, but yet they screamed for hours at each other to the point where my mother would end up sobbing into the early hours of the morning, trapped in a loveless marriage that she couldn't escape from. I didn't know that at the age of ten, but I certainly do now.

So tell me, how can I love someone when that's what love is? I never want to feel that pain, never want to experience the tears and yelling and helplessness as everything around you crumbled to dust.

And that is why, on that cold, dark October night, I taught myself one imperative lesson I have carried with me through the years since.

I taught myself how not to love.