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he won’t even notice! We might be convinced we look like Quasimodo on a bad day, but guys don’t zero in on the flaws we see. They see you as more beautiful and less flawed than you do.
    One day I was wearing a Spanx under my outfit and my skirt flew up a little bit. Mauricio said, “What is that you’re wearing underneath?”
    I said, “Oh, those are running shorts, I just wanted to make sure if the wind came up no one would see what they’re not supposed to see!” I wasn’t going to tell him I was wearing this newfangled kind of girdle because I needed it to suck all my chub in!
    Even if you’re not putting yourself down, you still have to be aware of what you’re saying and the effect it has. Simply put, you do not want to bore a guy. Don’t tell him every gruesome detail about shopping for shoes today. And don’t provide a blow-by-blow story of what happened when one girlfriend said something to another, and then so-and-so said that, and now so-and-so’s not talking to the other one, blah, blah, blah. I actually did this the other night; I started filling Mauricio in on a whole night of shooting Real Housewives . For a while he was like, “Oh really?” and, “Oh my God, what happened then?” But after about five minutes I knew he was about to start snoring, so I said to myself, Cut!
    You can only go on about the mundane details for a couple of minutes before you’ve lost them. It’s hard, girls, I know. One night my husband and I were out to dinner with some other couples and one of the wives said to me, “Oh, I love that lip gloss!”
    I responded, “Oh! This is Trish McEvoy. It’s called Irresistible. Isn’t it great? Yeah, it does sparkle more than the others…” and so on and so on about the lip gloss, but then all of a sudden I thought, What am I doing? If I had to sit through ten minutes of a man talking about his cologne I would say, “I’m leaving the table now!”
    So even though I really do love lip gloss and I could talk about makeup all night (and also about how they just discontinued this other one I like!), I don’t want to overdo it in front of my husband. It’s something I prefer to save for lunch alone with my girlfriends.
    Otherwise, it’s like speaking Urdu to them for hours. They just don’t get what we’re talking about because it’s not in their vocabulary.
    There are plenty of things to talk about that he will be interested in—because you have all sorts of interests besides him in that busy life of yours, right? You want to make it clear that you’re intelligent and have some depth. Maybe you can discuss spiritual topics, as long as you can do so without sounding like Shirley MacLaine. Or current events. Art, literature, music, culture.
    Mauricio and I, of course, spend a lot of time discussing the kids and the house and family matters, and we talk to each other about our work too. I even try to talk about sports with my husband, which is amazing because I couldn’t care less about sports! Believe me! I read the sports pages in the newspaper sometimes, and Mauricio is pleasantly surprised when I happen to know about so-and-so who got traded to the Lakers. Ha! I like to ask my husband about golf too, because he loves the game and he always goes into a whole story about it. I don’t know a birdie from a bogie from an eagle, but it makes Mauricio happy to talk about it!
    I also believe it’s important to pay attention to what’s going on in the world so you can have intelligent discussions about it. I had my baby when I was nineteen and I didn’t go to college. That’s something that always bothered me, so I try to educate myself by reading as much as I can. If I hear about something and I don’t know what it is, I do my research.
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First Love
    By the time I met my first boyfriend I had absorbed some—but not all—of the love lessons I was exposed to growing up. I was thirteen—though I lied and said I was fourteen—and the boy was C. Thomas Howell, the