Break the Cycle of Bad Relationships for Good and Attract Real Love that Lasts.
Based on the author’s real-life experiences, Rolled in Glitter is not just another book that simply lists all the relationship Do’s and Don’ts. Rather, it shows you as up close and personal as possible – the living, breathing true-life triumphs of the do’s, as well as the real-life repercussions of the don’ts.
Within its pages are poignant examples – some sad, some funny, some tragic – of what happens when you don’t take control in a clear conscious way of the decisions you’re making in regard to your relationships.
It’s written in a memoir meets spiritual self-growth style, in order to teach you how to make the decisions that will turn you towards what you truly want in life and away from the things, people, and situations you don’t – like the pointless, time-wasting, emotionally-draining, even abusive relationships you’ve experienced in the past.
Break the Cycle of Bad Relationships for Good and Attract Real Love that Lasts.
Based on the author’s real-life experiences, Rolled in Glitter is not just another book that simply lists all the relationship Do’s and Don’ts. Rather, it shows you as up close and personal as possible – the living, breathing true-life triumphs of the do’s, as well as the real-life repercussions of the don’ts.
Within its pages are poignant examples – some sad, some funny, some tragic – of what happens when you don’t take control in a clear conscious way of the decisions you’re making in regard to your relationships.
It’s written in a memoir meets spiritual self-growth style, in order to teach you how to make the decisions that will turn you towards what you truly want in life and away from the things, people, and situations you don’t – like the pointless, time-wasting, emotionally-draining, even abusive relationships you’ve experienced in the past.
April 2008

I knew the night was going to be a disaster even before it began.
It was a Saturday night in early January, and I had a date scheduled with some random guy I met at my favorite bar the week before.
Our new favorite spot, a casual outdoorsy place near the beach, was usually packed with members of the yacht industry who flocked to South Florida during the winter season in droves.
My best friend Bella and I met men from countries all over the world there: Australia, New Zealand, England, and Ireland to name just a few. Richard, my date for that Saturday, could be described as boyishly handsome thanks to his tousled blond hair, tall, lean frame, and mischievous blue eyes. But it was his amazing South African accent, and his stories of growing up in “Jo-burg” that prompted me to give him my number. South Africa was #1 on my bucket list at the time.
“We can talk about it more over din-ah next week. What do you say?” he asked with that slow, disarming smile of his. How could I say no to that?
The day before our date, I was sitting at my desk in downtown Miami facing yet another hard deadline, when my cell buzzed from under a pile of three-inch thick folders. Fumbling for the phone, I didn’t recognize the number that flashed on the screen – but decided to pick up anyway.
“Hello my dear, its Rich-ahrd!” he says. “How are you doing todayyyy?”
Everything seemed to have an ah or ay at the end. How cute, I thought.
“Doing well,” I said. “How about you?”
“Well...,” he paused, drawing in a deep breath. My heart sank. He was about to cancel. I just knew it. “I have a favor to ask.” “Okkaay.” “Do you think that perhaps you could, uhh, pick me up tomorrow night at my place?”
My senses went straight to high alert. What was the reasoning behind that? What kind of woman did he make me out to be? Did he think I was desperate? “I booked us a reservation at Café Victoria for 8,” he quickly added, as if he could suddenly read my mind.
Nestled in a cozy little alcove, Café Victoria was a very intimate, romantic, high-end Italian restaurant frequented mostly by locals and not one of the usual gimmicky themed-restaurants that catered to the millions of tourists that flooded the area every year. In other words, not the place you would take your next potential victim. Or so I hoped. This fact put my mind at ease – but only a little. Still, it apparently was just enough to convince me, since I don’t bother asking why he needs me to pick him up. Deep down, I guess I didn’t want to know.
After going over the logistics – time, address, etc – I quickly ended the call.
Just my luck, I thought. Another date that fills me with anxiety and dread.
The next night, I followed the directions on my GPS to his place, the eerie white glow emanating from my phone serving as my only source of light as I turned down one of the countless little side streets of Miami that had sprung up in the late 50s and 60s. They were now overshadowed by the glittery city that had spread up all around them, leaving them looking as sad and forlorn as the tossed-aside contestants from some dating show.
Sure enough, as I approach the address, I spotted a low slung 60s-era beach bungalow in the distance. As the wheels crunched on the gravel driveway, my anxiety suddenly began to grow. I was back on high alert. The driveway was a long, sloping pathway that quickly descended into a dark den of overgrown bushes and 16-foot Areca palms. It seemed more than ready and willing to suck me into its dark black hole. I envision the news report the next day, “She just disappeared without a trace. She hasn’t been heard from since...”
I stopped well short of the house, ready to throw it in reverse at the first ominous sign. With shaking hands, I search for his number in my phone to let him know I’m waiting.
“Dammit! Why can’t you ever find something when you really need it!” I whisper to myself. I eventually find the number from my contact list.
I’m here, I text.
One minute passes. Then another. Should I honk? I think. Real classy, huh? I quickly begin to wonder why I’m even in this situation. “Why didn’t I just cancel?” I ask myself in disgust.
I don’t have the answer to that question at the moment, but one thing I know for sure is there is NO way I’m getting out of this car. My mind suddenly wandered to the only piece of dating advice my father ever gave me. “If a guy picks you up and just waits in the driveway for you… and doesn’t even have the class to come to the door... Don’t even bother to come out. Just dump him! Immediately!”
I smile at the irony of it all. I know what my father’s advice would be in this situation too, but try hard to push it out of my mind. After what seems like an hour, Richard finally appears, walking out of the front door with the same great smile, same tousled blond hair, and same cheery exuberance I remembered from last week. “Hellooo,” he says brightly, as he slides into the curved leather seat beside me.
I immediately began to relax and decompress, as I all-too-happily pull out of his jungle driveway. I smile to myself in relief. There is something about him that is so decidedly un-American and refreshing to me.
But now that we’re back in familiar territory, I quickly notice something seems off. He still has the same easygoing way I remembered from last week, yet something seems different. Without the distraction of a million conversations going on in the bar, all the nuances I clearly missed from last week finally begin to make an appearance. I still don’t ask him why he needed me to pick him up. The reason soon becomes obvious.
As soon as we arrive at the restaurant, he orders a bottle of Chenin Blanc before I’ve barely had a chance to sit down. “It’s South African,” he says with pride. I’m a red wine drinker (he doesn’t bother to ask) so I sip on my glass obligatorily while he proceeds to knock back the rest of the bottle like there’s a prize waiting for him at the end.
He tells me he wants to learn more about me, so I mention to him that I want to be a writer.
“Oh yah...” Me too!” he says with his usual enthusiasm. “I’ve been thinking about writing a book about my MANY adventures in the African bush. At least one of these days,” he says, as he sips earnestly at the last remaining trickle of wine in his glass.
That turns out to be the extent of any meaningful conversation between us. Before we even place our dinner order with the waiter, I notice his eyes begin to droop, his speech becomes heavy and dense and then quickly slips into the unintelligible. He’s beyond drunk and considering the appetizer has yet to arrive, I strongly suspect he had a good head start before I even picked him up. I’m a quick learner, what can I say? For the first time, I feel grateful that he had not arrived at my door like the gentleman my father advised me to hold out for. I’m even more grateful that he hadn’t picked me up at all. For this is no fairy tale and this is no gentleman, whose driver’s license clearly did not exist – for good reason. As I looked on in disbelief at the scene unfolding in front of me, it suddenly hit me why I had even gone through with this disaster of a date even though anyone with a drop of common sense would have told me not to. It’s because at 37, there is a part of me that still believes in the lie – the fairy-tale version of what love should be.
In the fairy-tale version, love defies all of the odds or, clearly, any semblance of common sense. Love comes when you least expect it, and the more zany or preposterous the circumstances, the better the story for friends and family at this year’s Thanksgiving table. Love comes only when it is destined, and you need to be open to accepting it in whatever way it is delivered to you. To have cancelled this date could have meant missing out on “The One” without me ever knowing. I can almost picture myself laughing with semi-strangers at cocktail parties – or even with our future son and daughter over French toast at the breakfast table – about how I thought I was going to end up as a floater in Biscayne Bay after our first date. But, of course in the fairy-tale version, it would have all been just one big misunderstanding. In the fairy-tale version, it would have just so happened that his car was in the shop that day and wouldn’t you know it, he forgot to mention that on the phone. “Hahaha, isn’t that funny?!”
Unfortunately, this version manages to completely sidestep the truth that (a) he probably doesn’t have a car and (b) he drinks like Ernest Hemingway. Whether he writes like him no longer interests me. My only interest now is getting out of this quaint, beautifully-lit, and ridiculously romantic restaurant as soon as possible.
I end the date as quickly as I can by signaling to the waiter. I pull out my wallet and discreetly hand over my card after barely touching my $25 appetizer. At this point, no price is too high to get me the hell out of here. The waiter nods at me sympathetically. Even in his drunken state, Richard notices my abruptness and eagerness to get away and quickly tries to make up for it, a quiet look of desperation on his face. Too late. I leave gravel spinning as I pull back out of the jungle driveway, the glow of his crisp white shirt quickly diminishing from sight as I leave him standing there after dropping him off, his mouth agape. As I safely pull into my own driveway 20 minutes later, I immediately call my friend Bella who answers on the first ring. She’d been on standby ever since I left my house to pick up Mr. South Africa. I figured she could at least give the cops a lead when I show up missing. I hear talking and laughing and the clinking and clattering of glasses and silverware in the background. She’s out having dinner with our boys. “It’s still early. Come meet us!” she tells me, taking pity on me.
I suddenly feel a rush of guilt. Just a few weeks earlier, she had an all-too-similar experience after being set up on a date with a chef who she’d met through some work friends. When he showed up at her door, she noticed a taxi idling in the visitor’s space directly below the breezeway of her second-floor condo. When her date noticed her looking, he shrugged and said: “Oh, yeah, I caught a DUI last month,” offhandedly, like he hadn’t really just picked her up in a taxi.
“He picked you up in a cab?!” I had asked in sheer disbelief. It may have been hard to believe then, but now I believe.
Long before the days of Uber, Bella – a street-smart Jersey girl – had the foresight to get the taxi driver’s cell number before he pulled away. She ended up taking the same taxi home after she grew weary of her date’s public intoxication and took off. The cab driver wouldn’t make eye contact with her on the way home, she later tells me.
As a single person at 36 myself, one can imagine the excitement I felt when Elin Lytle’s book, “Rolled in Glitter: The 16 Decisions That Lead to Lasting Relationships” crossed my desk.
It’s like she had harnessed her clairvoyant abilities to seek me out and help me— and no better than someone who once walked in my shoes and kissed a lot of frogs before stumbling on real love. To anyone else out there who feels like they’re a fiscally responsible, funny, attractive perfectly eligible bachelorette (or bachelor) finding it difficult to find the reason they’ve never settled and growing impatient and perhaps hopeless as the clock ticks, this book’s for you.
The author — now happily married and a mother — knows all too well the agony of being a 30-something single person in search of Prince Charming. Like most of us who have experienced the “playboy” for whom we harbored the warm fuzzies and wanted so badly to believe his late-night summons were akin to throwing pebbles at our window, because we were the lucky ones on their minds at that odd hour. The last people they thought about before the night was through. Sadly, when taking off the rose-colored glasses, I do emphasize last here. Sigh.
In our quests to find non-toxic love, Lytle fleshes out what healthy relationships should look like and not what we are disillusioned to think they are. The reader will find humor in the dating mishaps and ill-fated relationships and situationships the author unwittingly found herself in because she ignored the red flags early on, and painfully relate to and empathize with her experiences. They could even see themselves in her dating faux paxes and take pleasure being walked through the sultry city of Miami doling out her number from her Prada clutch to the man of the moment. But despite the wasted hours of time, energy and attention spent on the pursuit of love with Mr. Right Now, readers will find humor in Lytle’s experiences, which she likens to any other commitment in an adult’s life, like finding a job that appreciates and values them, and taking the necessary action to leave if the bare minimum is being served when they know they deserve much more.
In reading Lytle’s riveting book, that I devoured like a self-help book for the broken-hearted that actually helps (maybe more than a therapist with little to offer) it brings to mind a quote from Charlie Chaplin: “Life is a tragedy when seen in up-close and a comedy in long shot.” And that goes for all aspects of life, the love department being no different. While many hapless daters sit there and think “Why me?” haunted even years later following the aftermath of one bad experience, a cross you unfairly carry this day, Lytle drills home that the experience was exactly what we needed: To quote the author, success in relationships are learned, not luck. And perhaps an extraordinary occurrence that happens when one is living their life and not looking for it. Cue, for example, her friend who forgot her laptop and forced her to miss her train and board another. The ride turned out not just a mundane commute to her job; she happened to have met her soulmate. The scenario reminds me of Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey’s similar meeting in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” A scenario like this is reason not to be frighted to get up each morning at the thought of another day into a bleak, uncertain future, but to treat a new day like a new opportunity, as you never know the unexpected plot twists that could come with each rising sun. This is evident in Lytle’s musing: “There will always be other opportunities and it’s our responsibility to align ourselves with them.”
What’s more, the author’s experience of a single 37-year-old old is reminiscent of Charlize Theron’s role in “Young Adult,” who plays just that — a 37-year-old beautiful and successful write, but desperate for the kind of romance-novel love with the one who got away. In the movie, her attempts to ingratiate herself into the arms of a man who rebuffs her advances only burns her in the end, and she’s forced to leave her native town for good, knowing she’s better off.
While Lytle’s book is not just a “how-to” of sorts to obtain the relationship of your dreams and live happily ever after, and it’s an actual proposition (despite what your string of relationship failures may say about you), she assumes the role of the dating coach to show people their life-long patterns and provide useful advice on how to break them so they don’t keep repeating the same mistake. She also shares the bad dates she’s been on with men who she thought had long-term potential, but wound up the opposite: the assclown who proved to be unreliable and only half-invested. She also speaks to the person who feels stuck in a mediocre relationship who feels it’s better than being alone (Or is it?) To inject some refreshing perspective to a somber dating scene, she introduces a friend who’s enthusiastic about returning to the playing field after the end of a 10-year relationship.Â
Knowing there’s people out there in varied scenarios, Lytle removes the veil of embarrassment and stigma around being a single person as well as debunks the myths about the need to accomplish things at a certain age, namely, getting married and having a family. In “Rolled in Glitter,” Lytle gives single people hope that life is in fact, a cycle, and relationships — short and long term — do even run their course, and the people whose unions you’ve been celebrating and perhaps envious of, wind up back on the market and in the exact same boat as you.
The key to finding love, she offers, is not in looking at all, but living, and letting the chips fall where they may instead of desperately maneuvering an outcome.
To quote the author: spend time on becoming what you want to attract. And this bit of insight you only gain from the joy and brokenness of experience. (It’s how the glitter of enlightenment gets in.) Â