Jessica Massa - The Gaggle: How the Guys You Know Will Help You Find the Love You Want

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To the women of my Millennial Generation:

may the worldand the guys in our gagglebe worthy of us.

There is a big, looming, inescapable problem with your love life. Butsurpriseits not that you are single.

The problem begins with the fact that you are a young woman, living in the modern world. Statistics show that you and the rest of the women of your generation are mere minutes away from taking over the planet (no need to be humble here!). At this very moment, countless articles, books, news stories, and TV shows are singing your praises.

True to form, you are in the process of getting this whole L.I.F.E. thing under control. Acing your education? Check. Building strong, lasting relationships with your family and friends? Check. Scoring the winning run for your kickball team? Check. Becoming a star employee at work? Check. Mastering that risottoand taking care of the pots, pans, and dishes that same night? Check and double check.

Of course, you are not Little Miss Perfect. No one is suggesting that you have it all together, all the time. You still have your moments of insecurity, mornings where you go heavy on the snooze button, and days where you disappoint your boss and forget to call your mom. But truth be told, Martha Stewartstyle perfection creeps you out a little anyway, and besides, youre doing the best you can. In fact, by and large, you are thriving, in your unique way, as part of one of the most empowered and successful generations of women ever to live.

No big deal or anything. * brush your shoulders off *

But back to that problem.

While your professional life, social life, and home life might generally feel like they are all on the right track, there tends to be one other life that anxiously tugs at the worries and uncertainties that lie just beneath your confident surface. This would be your love life.

By day, you are the very picture of the infallible modern woman. But by night (and maybe during your lunch hour), you find yourself biting your nails and obsessing over some guys Facebook status. You rewrite four versions of the same casual email to your cute new co-worker. You strive for physical perfection, silently comparing yourself to your super-skinny friend who always seems to have men falling all over her. You feel nauseous when your mother (and grandmother and mentor and older sister and smug married friend...) asks who youre dating. And while you are mulling over your new Match.com photo, your phone buzzes with a vague check-in from a guy youve maybe-sort-of been hanging out with, leading you to end the evening sitting around a table of empty cocktails with your girlfriends, wild-eyed, phone in hand, crazily begging each and every one of them to explain, What does this text message meeeean???

Obviously, you dont want to be this neurotic girl. And so, ever the proactive and logical modern woman, you want a solution. You want to fix your love life.

And lucky youit turns out that in this day and age, everyone is eager to help fix the single girls love life. Whether you embrace the world of online dating or hit up the beauty counter at your mall or tune into the never-ending parade of dating experts who have flooded bookstores, magazine racks, blog rolls, and TV shows, you can rest assured that you will never lack for resources and experts who insist that they know the best way to help you master your whole dating problem.

Because clearly you have a problem, right? Youre single! Something must be wrong with you...

You are constantly inundated with advice about how to fix your love life. But even so, you cant help but notice that it doesnt seem to be working . Why havent you found love yet? Why arent you having more fun? Should you be lowering your standards? Are you going for the wrong guys? And when you meet the right guys, are you messing it all up somehow?

Lest you feel alone in all this, allow me to get personal for a moment. I was finally struck by the scope of this problem over the course of one random night at my apartment in Brooklyn.

The epiphany came courtesy of my childhood best friend, room mate, and now business partner, Rebecca Wiegand (but always Becky to me). We have known each other since we were twelve years old, and ever since then she has been one of the most empowered, can-do women in my life.

Becky has always been a definition go-getter, especially when it comes to men. But on that fateful night, she came home from a cocktail party and suddenly began unloading an overwhelming host of romantic doubts and insecurities to me. Despite our years of close friendship, I was shocked. If anyone had seemed immune to romantic anxiety, it had been If Hes Not Into Me, Then Hes an Idiot Becky.

Her first question Why arent guys asking me out?! quickly turned into a spiraling cascade of neuroses. Why wasnt she in a relationship? Why hadnt that dude texted her back? Why hadnt she been on a date in forever? In her exact words, what the fuck was up with her love life?!

Determined to pinpoint her problem, Becky began trying to analyze her flaws. Was she too strong? Too needy? Too assertive? Too passive? Too ambitious? Too attracted to the wrong guys? Was she painfully unappealing in some glaring, deal-breaking way, and simply no one had the heart to break the news to her?

As I listened, I was not only taken aback that my uber-confident friend was having these troubling thoughts, but I was also dismayed to find that, as a then-twenty-six-year-old woman whose love life had been all over the map, some part of me, deep down inside, could relate. I typically err on the side of positivity, and I generally like myselfquite a bit, actually. But watching Becky unleash her fears, I felt every one of my own insecurities rise to the surface and threaten my self-worth.

But I forced myself to pull it together. My best friend was upset, and I was supposed to make her feel better. I was going to have to talk her through this.

As I thought about Beckys love life and looked for some silver linings, a realization hit me. My own love life might have looked dire to me, with its lack of dates, formal suitors, and legitimate tales to tell my mother so that she could sleep at night. But I was sure that Beckys love life was full of ambiguous-but-promising connections. I had been hearing about them in bits and pieces from her every day. A Gchat conversation with a soccer teammate here, an ex-boyfriend who still came around there, not to mention that coworker who was always sending her funny texts, and then there was that random make-out session with some guy at a Halloween party...

In reality, Beckys love life couldnt have been further from the clich of the lonely single girl sitting on her couch, waiting for the phone to ring. And by analyzing her love life instead of my own, I had given myself an opportunity to lift the veil of my own personal pressures and standards and insecurities, and see the truth: for a girl who wasnt dating anyone, Becky certainly had a busy calendar and a complex network of peopleand guysin her life. And amazingly enough, Becky pointed out that she could say the same for me.

We paused our pity party just long enough to ask ourselves: was it possible that we were simply thinking about our love lives the wrong way?

Yes! It turned out that our perspective was outdated. This was our problem. And in fact, it was our only problem.