You're the Cake, The Guy's the Frosting: How loving yourself unconditionally will attract the love you deserve

By Marcia Lite-Braus and Kara Abdala Nesbitt

You're the Cake: The Guy's the Frosting shares real stories of some painful, hysterical, and even frightening dating mistakes the author made as well as the hard-won lessons she learned before finding the most delicious "frosting" with her second husban

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marcia Lite-Braus, LPC, LLC
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781737777533

Marcia Lite-Braus

Marcia was born with a multi-flavored personality consisting of equal parts vulnerable and strong; intellectual and spiritual; fearful and courageous. She spent 13 years in between her first and second marriages making countless dating mistakes - all of which have informed her work with clients, and the entertaining lessons in her recent book You're The Cake, The Guy is The Frosting.Marcia has been a therapist for over 20 years. She counsels single adults to help them find the right partner and cope with being alone. More than anything else, she helps her clients put their past in the past, break unhealthy attachment issues, and raise self-esteem. She doesn't just talk the talk - she helps her clients walk the walk.Today, Marcia is very happy with her second husband of 14 years. They live in New Jersey and walk 5 to 10 miles daily.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION:

How Dating Almost Sent Me to the Psych Ward

Finally, I was in dating heaven (or so I thought) after years of highly frustrating, disappointing, and sometimes shocking relationships. I was dining at a fancy restaurant in Manhattan with a tall, good-looking, mustachioed man. Picture a Tom Selleck type. My date had been madly courting me for several months. Taking me on a fabulous three-day vacation at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. Showering me with gifts including a $3,500 designer purse. Surprising my son with a new television for his room. He was a successful business owner and a widower. Someone who knew his way around the world and within a relationship. Perfect, right? Just up until the moment when he dropped the bomb toward the end of that fancy dinner—my dreamboat was a criminal who was on the run as both the driver of a getaway car in a bank robbery and having shot an intruder at his bakery business!

As incredulous as this dating story is, this wasn’t my first encounter with a very, very wrong guy. What was wrong with me? Why did I keep attracting liars, man babies, cheaters, and swindlers? I almost titled this book How to Date and Not End Up in the Psych Ward, as I came close to going crazy during the thirteen years of desperate dating between my divorce and finding my second husband. As they say, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and getting the same results. And I didn’t make the same dating mistakes five or ten times. Oh no, I had to make the most unbelievable mistakes with guys until it felt like about 100 mistakes packed into a painful decade. I kept blaming a dismal dating pool and bad luck for the reasons I ended up with compulsive gamblers, cross-dressers, cheaters, and to top it off, the criminal at the dinner.

Finally, the bell went off—I had to stop blaming the men out there but start to accept it was the wrong me out there. I was assigning any man who came into my life the role of head chef in creating the relationship. I was so obsessed and anxious and neurotic about finding a guy to marry that I put up with everything from paying for a guy’s divorce to dealing with a shoplifter who landed himself in jail. The more frantic I became, the more I kept attracting guys who were as compulsive and neurotic as I was. Two sickies don’t make for a whole and healthy relationship!

This book is my story of some of the painful, hysterical, and even frightening dating mistakes I’ve made, along with the hard-won lessons I learned before I found the most delicious frosting with my second husband. It’s my gift to single women of any age to help them avoid the same mistakes I made and realize the most important ingredient in finding a successful relationship is having a secure and healthy relationship with themselves. We’re all products of our childhood and family experiences, but dating is not about finding someone to rescue you from past traumas or low self-esteem. The answer to a happy and successful life is not in another person. The answer is to love yourself unconditionally to attract the love you deserve.

As a trained therapist who’s been practicing for twenty years, I help my clients find the tools to manage difficult situations and relationships; make better decisions; manage feelings of anxiety, depression, shame, guilt, anger, grief, or loss; and learn healthier ways of thinking. We can only move forward with relationships and life when we put our past in the past, break unhealthy attachment patterns, and raise our self-esteem.

I share in this book my own personal struggles as an ambitious career woman, young first-time wife, and single mother who has faced the same issues many women do: lack of trust in myself, fear of being alone, and low self-esteem. I retrace my road to becoming the best Marcia I could be to attract the type of partner I wanted and deserved.

My wish with this book is for you to think of me as your relationship chef and to help you see that you are a richly layered confection who is just as beautiful with or without the frosting of a guy.

CHAPTER ONE

Why Do You Really Want a Guy?

As women, we’re indoctrinated