Last month, Boston Globe columnist Beverly Beckham wrote a column with the above title. I contacted Beverly and she gave me permission to reprint her column. Due to the size of my column, I am printing an excerpt from her original.
\nI will tell him tomorrow. I will pick-up the phone and call his office and talk to his receptionist and say, \u201cI have to cancel my appointment.\u201d And she will say, \u201cWhen would you like to reschedule?\u201d And I will say\u2026..What will I say?
\nI am trying to break up with my dentist, and I don\u2019t know how. I don\u2019t want to hurt his feelings. We\u2019ve been together for 30 years, longer than most marriages.
\n\u201cHow about I tell him I\u2019m moving?\u201d I ask my friend Beth, who is the reason I\u2019m in this mess in the first place. We were walking and she was laughing, and I noticed her back teeth. \u201cHow come you don\u2019t have any fillings? Your teeth look perfect.\u201d \u201c I used to have fillings. These are crowns.\u201d I made her open her mouth. I peered inside. They didn\u2019t look like crowns.
\nI should have said right then, don\u2019t tell me anymore. I should have blocked my ears and said I have a dentist. I like my dentist. I am not going to leave him. Who sees the inside of my mouth anyway?
\nBut Beth kept talking, and I kept staring at her molars and bicuspids thinking, wow. So I went to meet this dentist. It was just a consultation. Everyone should have a second opinion, right? Trouble is, I liked her. We clicked. Now I have to call the Man who has taken care of my teeth for three long decades and tell him I\u2019m moving. \u201cYou can\u2019t tell him that,\u201d Beth says. \u201cWhy not? Maybe I will move.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re not moving,\u201d my husband says.
\nNot too many years ago, I cheated on my hairdresser. A friend, as a birthday present, took me to hers. She watched gleefully as he cut and styled my wild hair and morphed me into a more refined rendition of me. I went back to him once, twice, maybe five times. And then I returned to my hairdresser. Why? Because I missed her. Maybe I\u2019ll miss my dentist too.
\nIn the meantime, though, there\u2019s now. The breakup. The fess up. The records that have to be transferred. The phone call that has to be made.
\n\u201cYes, it\u2019s me calling from New Zealand. We moved. It was sudden. I know, I know. I\u2019m going to miss you, too.\u201d
\nI am sure that many of you can relate to Beverly\u2019s story. I know I can\u2026.maybe not with my dentist but with other service providers. We often get caught in a comfort zone. We like the person and there is no real reason to leave. Don\u2019t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with loyalty. The point is \u2013 there are many different ways to do the same thing.
\nIt is difficult for us as consumers to randomly pick people to work on our teeth, cut our hair, service our car, etc. There are so many options. What if we are comfortable where we are? What if we are missing something by not going somewhere else? The only thing we really can do is to keep an open mind and to take the information we learn to make a decision on what we feel is right for us as individuals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last month, Boston Globe columnist Beverly Beckham wrote a column with the above title. I contacted Beverly and she gave me permission to reprint her column. Due to the size of my column, I am printing an excerpt from her original. I will tell him tomorrow. I will pick-up the phone and call his office and talk to his receptionist and say, \u201cI have to cancel my appointment.\u201d And she will say, \u201cWhen would you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[57],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-leaving-your-dentist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jpeterstclairdentistry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jpeterstclairdentistry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jpeterstclairdentistry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jpeterstclairdentistry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jpeterstclairdentistry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.jpeterstclairdentistry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":358,"href":"https:\/\/www.jpeterstclairdentistry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jpeterstclairdentistry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jpeterstclairdentistry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jpeterstclairdentistry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}