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  Later that same week I spilled hot coffee on one of those little German ladies.

  Bottom line: I lasted four months and didn’t even make it to Christmas. I was going to school and trying to get homework done, and my glamorous waitressing days did not feel like my destiny. Plus, between bus fare and getting my uniform cleaned, I ended up losing money overall.

  When I told my mother I couldn’t do the retirement home job anymore, she was so disappointed in me. “You are not a quitter!” she said. “I did not raise a quitter.”

  All I could say was, “Maybe you did.”

  But I needed a job. My parents generously paid for my college, but that was it. I didn’t have an allowance. (Poor me!) I did manage to patch together a handful of acting jobs that would cover me for a month or so at a time. Training videos, radio commercials. I did a health insurance training video for nurses and doctors in which I played a young woman who was being told she has cancer. The director was so impassioned, so intent on me finding the arc of my story. It was, to this day, the most dramatic work I’ve ever done.

  But waiting tables, in some ways, still goes down as the hardest. Certainly the most thankless. Which is probably why I generally avoid going to restaurants. I’d much prefer ordering delivery or—my latest obsession—ordering through Postmates. That way, no one has to struggle to focus while I spell out what I want in my taco salad.

  Unqualified Advice: Should You Move for the Guy?

  So many of the questions that come into the Unqualified podcast involve women asking for permission to be leaders in their own lives. They want to make a decision about their career that doesn’t take a romantic partner into account, or they want to make a choice based on love that is independent of their career, or their friends and family. Should I stay with the guy my friends don’t like? Should I take the job that would take me away from my boyfriend?

  A lot of those questions touch specifically on moving for a man. I understand the dilemma here. Making the decision to uproot your life in order to be with a guy can feel counter to what we were taught as young girls—to be independent, to make a life for yourself and not rely on a man. But feminism is about being empowered to choose the life you want, and if being with the man you love is what will make you happy, then there’s nothing wrong with that. So, like I said, I see the dilemma.

  Also, I should point out, I have personal experience with this. I’ve been down this road. If I’m very honest with myself, my ex-husband was a huge influence on my decision to move to LA. After graduation, I got a plane ticket to London and a temporary job at an ad agency that my dad helped me find through a connection. I had previously worked as a receptionist in an office my father ran, and it was one of the best jobs of my life. I loved it—probably in large part because my dad was the boss—so I was all set to work in the mailroom of a British agency and move in with a dear friend who’d relocated to London a year earlier for art school. I was going to start a life across the pond, but then I went to an audition for a horror film, Lovers Lane, in order to make a little extra cash. I got the role of a cheerleader who gets gutted. The movie was filming in Seattle, so I was a local hire. There were four professional actors on the film, and Ben was one of them. He was hot and had an agent and lived in LA, and we flirted a lot. But the whole time, I was very aware that I was the day player and not the big star, which was made even more clear to me every day when I had to change into my cheerleading outfit in the bathroom.

  This sounds arrogant, I know, but after a few days of filming I definitely felt like, Man, if these four actors that are younger than I am can live in LA and have agents and acting careers and travel to Seattle and stay in hotels and have trailers on set, maybe I can, too. Performing with them gave me a lot of confidence, because I could keep up. So yes, I certainly had an optimistic sense of, If they can do it maybe I should give it a whirl. But there’s no question that I also felt dizzily enamored of the young hot actor who was giving me attention.

  The shoot took about twenty-one days, and shortly after it was over, I decided to give LA a try. It was a combination of wondering about Ben (we didn’t date during filming, but we did flirt and make out) and also worrying that if I didn’t give Hollywood a year, I might regret it. I had nothing to lose, so I figured, All right, if a year from now I’m miserable, I’ll pick up and move to London.

  My story is different than some of our callers’, I know, because I wasn’t moving only for the guy. There was a career element, too. And I was lucky because my parents supported my decision. In fact, they were thrilled. When I first told them that I wasn’t going to pursue acting after graduation they were bummed because they really wanted me to follow my dream. But I was trying to be practical—I didn’t think acting was going to work for me. I didn’t know if I was good enough. In the end, though, my parents really encouraged my decision to move to LA. So much so that my mom gave me miles to take a trip to Hollywood before moving, and I stayed with my cousin’s friend while I met with the manager who is still my manager today.

  All this to say, I did move to LA to be an actress, but there’s no question that Ben was part of the equation. Had I not met him, I might be living in London right now. It would provide me so many opportunities to use my cockney accent—I’m still waiting for my big Oscar-baiting period role—but thank God things didn’t go that way. So while it’s probably crazy to move to a new city just because the hunky guy you’ve been crushing on for three weeks lives there, things sometimes do work out.

  Which, now that I think about it, isn’t helpful advice at all and is totally self-involved unless you, dear reader, are also wondering if you should move to LA to be near your slasher-movie crush.

  If you have a stable career that you love in the city of your dreams and the only argument for moving is that a guy will be there, there’s certainly a good case to be made for staying put. I’m just trying to say that I understand why someone would consider uprooting for love. I did it for far less than love. More like lust.

  As you read my advice here, I understand that my story may seem more like a cautionary tale than words of encouragement, considering I subsequently married and then divorced this person. But thanks to LA I have my career and my son, so I’m doing okay.

  The lesson from all this, I think, is that there’s nothing wrong with moving to be near the one you love. If that person makes you happy, and you can have your own life in the city where you two can be together, I say go for it. And if it doesn’t feel right and you’re only considering moving because you think you “should,” then don’t.

  And if you’re trying to cast a modern-day Eliza Doolittle, call me.

  The Wedding Hoopla

  I’m not really into weddings.

  It’s not that I don’t believe in marriage, obviously. In fact, while I take issue with the whole wedding-planning rigamarole, I do get swept up in the emotion of the event when I’m a guest. But the dramatic production of getting engaged and the over-the-top ceremony with hundreds of people, it all strikes me as antithetical to the end goal, which is to celebrate the union of the bride and groom.

  I’ve had two weddings—the first was in Tahiti and the second was in Bali. (In both cases, my parents ended up semi-forcing us to do a later celebration in Washington for our family and friends, both of which turned into the weddings I was trying to avoid.) I realize as I write this that I sound like a stereotypical celebrity—“Oh, I’m soooooooo uninterested in weddings, so I just ran off and got married at a little resort in Bali where we did a soul-cleansing ritual before we offered our firstborn to that little old man from Eat Pray Love”—but I do think there’s a good, or at least understandable, reason why so many people in the public eye have extremely small weddings. As an actress, you get more days than most people in which it feels like you are celebrating yourself. Whether it’s a premiere or a photo shoot or a talk show appearance, all those feel like, Okay, this day is all about me. And som
etimes it’s awesome and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes you want privacy, or for someone to not appear in your personal space every time a hair falls out of place. I know how lucky I am to have all that, and I certainly don’t begrudge the people whose job it is to make sure that my hair is as it should be when we’re taping an episode of Mom, but not having all that can feel special, too.

  Now that I think about it, maybe my aversion to a big to-do has nothing to do with fame, because I’ve never been a wedding person. Kate, my neighbor friend, had a wedding book in third grade. It had the dress and the flowers and the whole shebang, but I had no interest. Wedding talk didn’t make me angry or anything, I just didn’t care about it. I’ve never been great with party planning or interested in making a fuss about giant celebrations and making everything look perfect, which is probably related to why my house looks as insane as it does, with an outdated kitchen and living room walls covered in stuffed elk heads. So nothing about the hoopla of weddings appealed to me.

  It’s not just the fuss. The modern rituals of weddings—the big surprise proposal, the bridal party, the show of it all— they make me uncomfortable.

  I know. I’m a buzzkill. But a lot of women question those outdated rituals, right? How can you not? Both Ben and Chris asked my father if it was okay to propose to me, and in both cases my dad said that while of course he thought it was very considerate of them to ask, it was “unnecessary because it is completely my daughter’s choice.” I thought that was pretty cool of him.

  Who came up with the idea that an engagement should be some elaborate high-pressure surprise where you are essentially trapping a person? I don’t know where along the way we became a culture that mandates “you must conceive of some crazy trickery that will later be deemed romantic.” It’s fun for the surpriser, but not the surprisee. And then there’s some poor woman who’s like, “Holy shit, should I be doing this? Well, I can’t say no now that he’s created a scavenger hunt leading me to a ring on a chain around my dog’s neck, who then barked three times and my whole family—in from out of town!—jumped out from behind the couch to start the celebrations before I’ve even answered so . . . Okay! Yes! I do!”

  The first time Ben proposed to me we were on our way to lunch with our friend Alex. We walked into an antique-watch store that also had a lot of jewelry. Ben looked at the wedding rings and said, “Which one do you like?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m hungry. I want to go eat Mexican food.”

  “Just look,” he said.

  So I pointed to a vintage ring with a Victorian look and said, “I don’t know, this one is kind of cool.”

  “I’d like to purchase this,” Ben told the jeweler of the ring before getting down on one knee.

  I think my exact words were: “No no no no no, this is not how this is happening.” Alex was there, and we were on our way to eat burritos. I didn’t even know if I wanted to marry Ben at all, but I certainly didn’t want to commit in that moment with Alex and the jeweler watching. So he didn’t buy the ring, and we left and ate burritos during a palpably tense meal.

  Six or seven months later, Ben and I had a dinner reservation at the restaurant at the Mondrian Hotel and, over drinks, he said, “Why don’t we stay the night?” It turned out he had booked a room and covered the bed in rose petals and when we got upstairs he got down on one knee and said all the nice things you might imagine for a marriage proposal. That’s when I said yes.

  I remember thinking in that moment that I didn’t want to tell my parents. In retrospect, I should have examined that more.

  The evening was supposed to be romantic, and I’m sure for most women it would have been. But I can’t be alone in thinking there is an element of blindsiding to these moments. God forbid you’re proposed to in a stadium on the jumbotron, at which point you will be the most hated person in the arena—and eventually the world, when the clip goes viral—if you say, “I don’t know.”

  Once you accept a marriage proposal, the engagement takes over your life. It’s all you talk about with your friends and your fiancé and your parents—and that’s not me being negative, that’s just fact. Then there’s the whole bridesmaid thing of ranking your friends, which we’ve gotten into already but I’ll repeat, it’s weird. Plus the frantic energy of that moment three hours before the ceremony when the makeup artist can’t be found and there’s a crazy hubbub as everyone scrambles to find a replacement. Some people just get off on the drama.

  All of that is why I always say a honeymoon is essential. There’s a December twenty-sixth feeling to the day after your wedding, so you’ve got to have something to look forward to when you wake up that morning. The celebration that required all your attention for the last year is over, and that can be a letdown, even when you’ve griped your way through the whole thing.

  I sound like such a grump. I do love everything that a wedding stands for. I have an entire podcast about relationships! I just think the wedding buildup is an especially trying time. It’s a scenario in which people show their cards. Sometimes they step up to the plate in ways you wouldn’t expect, and sometimes they let you down in ways you didn’t anticipate.

  • • •

  An admission: when it comes to getting wrapped up in the wedding hoopla, I’m not totally innocent. I’ve had my moments.

  Before I had two of my own—four, if you count the big celebrations I had at my parents’ insistence—the first wedding I remember being a part of was my brother’s wedding to his first wife. Their wedding was a big to-do and, probably out of obligation, the bride asked me to be in the bridal party. You know how that goes—I was at the end of the line of bridesmaids, the new sister-in-law who the bride didn’t know that well and probably didn’t really like. We wore these plain, almost Amish-looking pale pink dresses, which were incredibly unsexy. But that was fine, I didn’t really care about how I looked—no one was looking at me—and I remember dancing a ton and having a great time and my brother being furious at me because I’d been late to the ceremony. But being a little late for the wedding was nothing, because I’d already cemented my place in the story of their nuptials at the rehearsal dinner.

  I was twenty, and I was drunk. And so, the night before the wedding, I stood up and announced that I was ready to give the bride and groom a present: a monologue from the Carson McCullers play The Member of the Wedding. I can’t believe my parents let me do this. I shudder to think of it—the little sister who thinks she’s an actress delivering a dramatic reading from the point of view of a twelve-year-old girl who wants to be a part of her brother’s wedding but also doesn’t want to lose him. How pretentious is that?! I performed that monologue in front of nearly one hundred people and I can only imagine what my ex-sister-in-law must have been thinking. I literally prefaced it with “Ding ding ding, I want to give you both a gift!”

  My brother and I have never spoken about this moment. I can’t imagine he has anything complimentary to say about it, though he’s been kind enough to avoid mocking me and he didn’t even get back at me, despite the two weddings at which he could have.

  Shortly before getting engaged, Ben and I traveled to Tahiti, where we took an amazing island tour led by a local named Mako. When we were planning our wedding, I suggested inviting just our closest friends and family, having Mako take us all to the Tahitian islands, and doing a swimsuit wedding. Ben was cool with it. My parents, not as much.

  “What do you mean?” my mom asked. “You’re having a fourteen-person wedding in Tahiti? And that’s it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So, what, it’s just going to be us and your friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I can’t invite any of my friends?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Well, fine, we’ll come,” she said. (I was paying for everything.) “But we’re going to have a big party for you afterward.”

  It wouldn�
�t have been practical to invite a huge crowd to Tahiti. There was a lot of getting in and out of boats, which was not an activity for a grandmother. I knew this was not the event my parents had imagined for their daughter, but in the end the wedding was just what I wanted. We spent the morning feeding stingrays and drinking beer on a boat with Mako and his ukulele-playing nephew. Then we went to the island where Mako’s family lived. They made us fresh tuna with coconut milk and it was a collection of the people I treasured most, all salty and in our swimsuits and lightly buzzed. The night before the wedding, I came up with an idea I’m still proud of, and split the guests into two groups—one was tasked with coming up with an original dance, the other an original song. They blew it out of the water. It was an amazing wedding from start to finish and at the end of the night I was grinning from ear to ear, wearing my flower crown, and looking around at everyone’s slightly burned cheeks. I felt like I had escaped the wedding mayhem I wanted nothing to do with. But then I spent the next two and a half years in a marriage that wasn’t right for me. So there you go.

  In an effort to smooth over the whole fourteen-person Tahitian affair with my parents, who had spent more than twenty-five years thinking they’d throw their daughter a big wedding, I agreed to let my mom host a party in Washington. It became a source of contention pretty quickly—I had 10 friends there and my parents had 180 and my mom bristled at any friends I suggested adding. But my parents were generous and footed the bill. It ended up being an especially crazy night for me because our families were completely dramatic about everything and my friends all did ecstasy and it was a little bit miserable, I hate to say. So that sort of reaffirmed my aversion to big weddings. I just don’t understand going to all this trouble and spending all this money to have a big celebration and then being miserable and stressed throughout the whole thing.