“You Can’t Complete Me—But I Can!: A Self-Love Story”

Hayley Kaplan graduated from Chico State with a Masters in Social Work, became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, and is the process of recovering from a lifetime of codependency. She learned through a series of painful attachments to half a dozen men in her life that “to desire love is perfectly normal and healthy, but healthy and normal gets lost when we go searching for external love as our primary source of identity, worth, or purpose.”

She tells her story in a brutally candid memoir, a thoughtful, sometimes humorous and even hopeful account of her progress when, as a married woman, she began an affair with a married man. “You Can’t Complete Me—But I Can!: A Self-Love Story” ($12.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) is a journey of humbling self-discovery. (Kaplan has also published a workbook with the same title, drawing on her professional training and using significant quotations from her memoir.)

Too often, she writes, when we want to express our “authentic selves” we learn instead to “grin and bury it,” so “when you’re desperate for love, you behave in desperate ways, and that tends to attract one-sided relationships.”

When she met “Dax” online in her twenties, he was “peace incarnate” after compulsive gambler “Chuck.” Yet “our communication styles … contradicted each other…. Waiting for Dax to complete a sentence was like waiting for a scab to heal…. I was a neurotic, multi-tasker who wanted to do things lickety-split, and it would take Dax longer than a minute to count to sixty.” So they got married.

Seven years later, after Kaplan had given Dax a back scratcher gag gift “for that seven year itch,” she and an acquaintance, “Leo,” became emotionally involved. Leo was married, and Kaplan was torn: “How do you hurt someone as kind and as loyal as Dax? You don’t. But then, how do you turn your back on a love as rare and true as my love for Leo? You don’t.”

There are painful but needful lessons ahead as what is buried is exposed, and what is exposed can, with help from others, bring some measure of completeness.