By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
October 28, 1999
Dr. Drew Pinsky rarely is at a loss for words when he dispenses advice about love, romance and relationships on “Loveline,” the show he co-hosts both on MTV and on the radio.
But when he met Susan, the woman who would become his wife and the mother of their triplets, he was speechless.
“I am not the type of person who can walk up to someone and just talk to them,” says Pinsky, who just started up www.drdrew.com on the Internet. “I have a problem with that. I saw her and knew that I had to talk to her. I had never had that type of reaction to a woman before. So I went up to her and tried to start a conversation.”
And she was smitten, right? After all, he was handsome, had good manners and was a doctor-in-training.
“No, she absolutely blew me off,” he remembers during a phone call from his Pasadena, Calif., home. “It was so painful that I had to leave the bar.”
Susan, a former model, says that it wasn’t him so much as the fact that she was hit on all the time.
“He wasn’t my type at all,” says Susan. “He was very preppy and a little . . .”
“Dorky?” offers her husband?
Laughing, she says, “Well, yes.”
Fast forward two years to 1984. Still preppy, Drew ran into Susan again. He asked her out. This time, she said yes.
A funny thing, though. Neither of them realized that they had tried this a couple of years back.
“It wasn’t until I found a picture she had from that night she blew me off that I realized that it was her,” Pinsky says. “But it all makes sense. I had the exact same reaction to her two years later as I did when I first met her. I just didn’t realize it was her at the time.
“It wasn’t that we had changed physically so much in that time. But the first time we met it was in a crowded bar situation. The context was very different.”
The Pinsky romance sounds like perfect fodder for “Loveline.” On both the TV version, which airs from 10 to 11 weeknights on MTV, and the national syndicated radio edition, heard here from 10 to midnight Sunday through Thursday nights on WKQX-FM (101.1), Pinsky and his co-host, comedian Adam Carolla, field as many questions about broken hearts as they do sexually transmitted diseases, child abuse and unidentifiable protrusions on body parts.
“If someone called in with my story, I would’ve thought he was ridiculous,” says Pinsky, 41. “The whole thing sounds so unreal. But I think that’s one of the fascinating things about `Loveline.’ We hear from so many people with all these problems. Some of them are funny, and some of them are disturbingly real.”
And some prove to be genuinely fake.
“Of course that happens,” says Pinsky, an internist and addiction specialist who has hosted the radio show for 17 years. “After all these years doing this, I have a pretty good sense for which calls are real and which ones aren’t.
“But we’ve had callers phone in with made-up stories. What can you do? My feeling is that while they may have called with the intention of fooling us, if we can give a thoughtful answer or solution to the problem, then it was probably of some help to at least a few listeners.”
Regular listeners know that a good chunk of the people who phone in are young women whose boyfriends have cheated on them. Pinsky says that his heart breaks a little every time he hears excuses that the men and women make, such as, “Well, being monogamous isn’t natural for men.”
“That’s true,” Pinksy says. “It’s isn’t natural. It’s also not natural to (use toilet paper) either. But we learn to do all kinds of things that make us ultimately feel better and function better as a society. I don’t know why we choose certain biologies to try to indulge ourselves and others to try to contain. The evidence is overwhelming that men are happier, relationships are better and society functions better when men contain that biology.”
Pausing to think over what he has said, Pinsky is quick to point out that while he and Carolla try to do their best, they don’t necessarily follow their own advice. As Carolla has pointed out on-air, Pinsky and his wife slept together on their first date.
“I don’t think that is a good idea generally,” Pinsky says, laughing. “It’s a risky thing to do, especially for women, because it’s a giant leap of faith. But I’m in no position to say not to.”
