key party.)
I inform our nanny, Michelle, that “if my wife left me, I would ask you out on a date, because I think you are stunning.”
She laughs. Nervously.
“I think that makes you uncomfortable, so I won’t mention it again. It was just on my mind.”
Now I’ve made my own skin crawl. I feel like I should just buy a trench coat and start lurking around subway platforms. Blanton says he doesn’t believe sex talk in the workplace counts as sexual harassment—it’s tight-assed society’s fault if people can’t handle the truth—but my nanny confession just feels like pure abuse of power.
All this lasciviousness might be more palatable if I were a single man. In fact, I have a theory: I think Blanton devised Radical Honesty partly as a way to pick up women. It’s a brilliant strategy. The antithesis of mind games. Transparent mating.
And according to Blanton, it’s effective. He tells me about a woman he once met on a Paris subway and asked out for tea. When they sat down, he said, “I didn’t really want any tea; I was just trying to figure out a way to delay you so I could talk to you for a while, because I want to go to bed with you.” They went to bed together. Or another seduction technique of his: “Wanna fuck?”
“That works?” I asked.
“Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s the creation of possibility.”
I lied today. A retired man from New Hampshire—a friend of a friend—wrote some poems and sent them to me. His wife just died, and he’s taken up poetry. He just wanted someone in publishing to read his work. A professional opinion.
I read them. I didn’t like them much, but I wrote to him that I thought they were very good.
So I e-mail Blanton for the first time since our meeting and confess what I did. I write, “ His wife just died, he doesn’t have friends. He’s kind of pathetic. I read his stuff, or skimmed it actually. I didn’t like it. I thought it was boring and badly written. So I e-mailed a lie. I said I really like the poems and hope they get published. He wrote me back so excited and how it made his week and how he was about to give up on them but my e-mail gave him the stamina to keep trying .”
I ask Blanton whether I made a mistake.
He responds curtly. I need to come to his eight-day workshop to “ even begin to get what [Radical Honesty] is about .” He says we need to meet in person.
Meet in person? Did he toss down so many bourbons I vanished from his memory? I tell him we did meet.
Blanton writes back testily that he remembers. But I still need to take a workshop (price tag: $2,800). His only advice on my quandary: “ Send the man the e-mail you sent me about lying to him and ask him to call you when he gets it . . . and see what you learn .”
Show him the e-mail? Are you kidding? What a hard-core bastard.
In his book,
Radical Honesty,
Blanton advises us to start sentences with the words “I resent you for” or “I appreciate you for.” So I write him back.
I resent you for being so different in these e-mails than you were when we met. You were friendly and engaging and encouraging when we met. Now you seem to have turned judgmental and tough. I resent you for giving me the advice to break that old man’s heart by telling him that his poems suck .
Blanton responds quickly. First, he doesn’t like that I expressed my resentment by e-mail. I should have come to see him. “ What you don’t seem to get yet, A.J., is that the reason for expressing resentment directly and in person is so that you can experience in your body the sensations that occur when you express the resentment, while at the same time being in the presence of the person you resent, and so you can stay with them until the sensations arise and recede and then get back to neutral—which is what forgiveness is .”
Second, he tells me that telling the old man the truth would be compassionate, showing the “ authentic caring underneath your usual
I inform our nanny, Michelle, that “if my wife left me, I would ask you out on a date, because I think you are stunning.”
She laughs. Nervously.
“I think that makes you uncomfortable, so I won’t mention it again. It was just on my mind.”
Now I’ve made my own skin crawl. I feel like I should just buy a trench coat and start lurking around subway platforms. Blanton says he doesn’t believe sex talk in the workplace counts as sexual harassment—it’s tight-assed society’s fault if people can’t handle the truth—but my nanny confession just feels like pure abuse of power.
All this lasciviousness might be more palatable if I were a single man. In fact, I have a theory: I think Blanton devised Radical Honesty partly as a way to pick up women. It’s a brilliant strategy. The antithesis of mind games. Transparent mating.
And according to Blanton, it’s effective. He tells me about a woman he once met on a Paris subway and asked out for tea. When they sat down, he said, “I didn’t really want any tea; I was just trying to figure out a way to delay you so I could talk to you for a while, because I want to go to bed with you.” They went to bed together. Or another seduction technique of his: “Wanna fuck?”
“That works?” I asked.
“Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s the creation of possibility.”
I lied today. A retired man from New Hampshire—a friend of a friend—wrote some poems and sent them to me. His wife just died, and he’s taken up poetry. He just wanted someone in publishing to read his work. A professional opinion.
I read them. I didn’t like them much, but I wrote to him that I thought they were very good.
So I e-mail Blanton for the first time since our meeting and confess what I did. I write, “ His wife just died, he doesn’t have friends. He’s kind of pathetic. I read his stuff, or skimmed it actually. I didn’t like it. I thought it was boring and badly written. So I e-mailed a lie. I said I really like the poems and hope they get published. He wrote me back so excited and how it made his week and how he was about to give up on them but my e-mail gave him the stamina to keep trying .”
I ask Blanton whether I made a mistake.
He responds curtly. I need to come to his eight-day workshop to “ even begin to get what [Radical Honesty] is about .” He says we need to meet in person.
Meet in person? Did he toss down so many bourbons I vanished from his memory? I tell him we did meet.
Blanton writes back testily that he remembers. But I still need to take a workshop (price tag: $2,800). His only advice on my quandary: “ Send the man the e-mail you sent me about lying to him and ask him to call you when he gets it . . . and see what you learn .”
Show him the e-mail? Are you kidding? What a hard-core bastard.
In his book,
Radical Honesty,
Blanton advises us to start sentences with the words “I resent you for” or “I appreciate you for.” So I write him back.
I resent you for being so different in these e-mails than you were when we met. You were friendly and engaging and encouraging when we met. Now you seem to have turned judgmental and tough. I resent you for giving me the advice to break that old man’s heart by telling him that his poems suck .
Blanton responds quickly. First, he doesn’t like that I expressed my resentment by e-mail. I should have come to see him. “ What you don’t seem to get yet, A.J., is that the reason for expressing resentment directly and in person is so that you can experience in your body the sensations that occur when you express the resentment, while at the same time being in the presence of the person you resent, and so you can stay with them until the sensations arise and recede and then get back to neutral—which is what forgiveness is .”
Second, he tells me that telling the old man the truth would be compassionate, showing the “ authentic caring underneath your usual
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