Falling for Me by Anna David

Author:Anna David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER EIGHT

Behavior Modification

There is a catch to achieving single bliss. You have to work like a son of a bitch.

—Sex and the Single Girl

Some of Helen’s suggestions sound deceptively simple. Take, for instance, her straightforward three-word sentence, “Smiles are sexy.”

You can’t say it’s not true. But who really works on something like this? One January day when I’m wondering if perhaps some people—say, Mother Teresa or Wayne Dyer or the woman who wrote The Secret—have beatific smiles on their faces all the time, a friend mentions that he’d started paying attention to the way people look on the streets of New York. “You wouldn’t believe how dour everyone is,” he’d said, showing me what he meant by grimacing and deadening his eyes.

“That’s so depressing,” I’d said.

“Depressing but true.”

“Is that how I look walking down the street?”

“Probably. I’ve never seen someone who doesn’t.”

This motivates me to look up information about smiling, which is how I learn that a Duchenne smile involves contraction of the zygomatic major muscle and the orbicularis oculi muscle; from what I understand, it just means smiling with your eyes as well as your mouth. The telltale sign that you’re doing it is, alas, when your crow’s feet show.

Since I’ve learned this year that no change is too small to end up making a major difference in how I feel, I commit to embarking on Project Duchenne Smile by grinning at everyone I pass while walking the four blocks from the gym to my apartment. I feel good about myself when I return after these jaunts, if not remarkably different. But then something odd happens. I start to notice, even when I’m just in my apartment alone, that my mouth usually tends to be clenched in a frown. I also see it whenever I pass a mirror. I try to figure out if this is the way my mouth is formed or if it’s a reflection of my standard mood and think about how babies often have permanent grins on their faces. Even though a smiling baby can just mean that the baby is passing gas, I wonder why that has to change. Does growing up and becoming self-reliant shape all of our smiles into frowns? Do only foolish young people who don’t know any better grin all the time?

I decide to amp up my efforts, smiling at everyone I can wherever I’m walking. And the more I do it, the better I understand that this practice is regarded with a great deal of suspicion in Manhattan. Most people passing me immediately look away, as if a brief but happy interaction with a stranger is too much for them to handle. Straight-looking men are the quickest to react this way, while pretty girls, interestingly enough, always gaze back. But their glance is usually followed by a distrustful look, as if I’m a lesbian trying to hit on them or am about to ask if they have a minute for the environment. The one exception: women walking with adorable

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