Do you measure up to love?

Want a little reality check on how you perform your relationship? Try this humbling little exercise.

Take this wedding-ceremony passage and replace the word "Love" with your name. (It's 1 Corinthians 13:4-7.) And though the words often are spoken during wedding ceremonies, the exercise can shed light on any relationship.

Let me show you:

[Alicia] is patient. [Alicia] is kind. [Alicia] does not envy, [Alicia] does not boast, [Alicia] is not proud. [Alicia] is not rude, [Alicia] is not self-seeking, [Alicia] is not easily angered, [Alicia] keeps no record of wrongs. [Alicia] does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. [Alicia] always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

When I first did this exercise (thanks to writer Jill Rigby for suggesting it), I became more and more disheartened every time I inserted my name for "Love."

Patient? Sometimes. Ditto for kind. Easily angered? Far more often than I'd like to admit, and the same goes for "shows no record of wrongs." But I sure try hard on protecting, trusting, hoping and persevering -- to the point of annoyance to some of my friends and family.

After doing the exercise, do I feel like an adequate partner in any relationship? Not so much.

But I do have a good starting place for improvement.

Finding my sometimes father

I haven't seen my father in more than 16 years.

If you've known me for at least that amount of time, that wouldn’t surprise you. My dad has always had a sometimes there, sometimes not presence in my life. When I was very young, he worked a difficult job with wacky hours, and didn’t always make it home. Sometimes, perhaps he wasn’t working, and he didn’t make it home.

He and my mother had at best a strained marriage for all sorts of reasons. They got married young, had kids quickly and struggled to pay the bills. They separated when I was in junior high, and divorced several years later. He remarried, and his new wife often pressured him about his commitments – financial and emotional – to his former life. There were periods of time when my siblings and I didn’t hear from him even then.

We stopped talking the last time, this one by more of a general agreement, right after I got married. We had a falling out about his new girlfriend and his family, and their involvement in my tiny wedding ceremony.

At least, that’s how I remember it. He may have a very different and certainly valid recollection. There's all sorts of blame to go around when it comes to what went wrong in our family.

My dad does, however, acknowledge the general framework of our past – he and I began talking again intermittently about two years ago – but I haven’t asked him to confirm details or asked him to explain why any of it happened. I don’t think either of us is ready for that.

But when he called me, he did admit to this: He said that he wrongly put other relationships in his life ahead of his relationship with his children.

I think that’s part of it. I also think he doesn’t much know how to relate to his children. He has always wanted a very traditional, family-ties kind of relationship, but we have never had a run-of-the-mill family. And I think it would have been difficult to deal with three tweens/teens even if there isn’t a divorce involved.

All of that is to say this: In the end, I know my dad’s a pretty good guy. He means well, even if he doesn’t always do good. (I sadly report that he currently isn’t returning my calls.) I don’t always like him, but I can say that I don’t want to regret not having tried to rebuild a relationship with him. I want to give him and my children the opportunity to know each other. And I think that, should I peel away all the years of armor I built up to keep from getting hurt, I probably would say I love him.

Maybe it won’t take another 16 years for me to be able to tell him that.

Are you happy?

Maybe it's because we're at the beginning of a new year and people are all optimistic, but I seem to be hearing a lot about happiness.

I've heard radio shows and read articles about the benefits of stress reduction (after all, 'twas the season), but it's more than that. I listened to interviews with the authors of three books in particular: "Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia" by Elizabeth Gilbert (she spent a year soul-searching and self-discovering after a bitter divorce); "Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone" by Beth Lisick (she spent a year trying self-improvement methods, including Buddist monks and Richard Simmons); and "The Geography of Bliss" by Eric Weiner (the "self-described grump" spent a year traveling the world in search of happy places).

The one thing I took from all those interviews is that striving for happiness is a sure way NOT to achieve it. Happiness is a state of being -- it just is -- not a destination. Sure, where you live might play a part (according to Weiner the happiest places aren't tropical paradises like Hawaii or Tahiti or Bali, but the wintery wonderlands of Iceland, Finland and Switzerland), but by no means does your location guarantee contentment. Nor does a healthy collection of stuff -- houses, cars, designer clothes, jewelry. Happiness comes from within.

Ask yourself right now: "Am I happy?" Is your answer an enthusiastic "Yes!" or are you like me, unsure if you even know what true happiness feels like?

One thing's for sure: where you are psychically affects all of your relationships. So if you're not one of the lucky ones who consider themselves happy, maybe the key is to not strive for happiness, but to simply allow yourself to be open to its existence.

My stripper stash

I was in "purge" mode this weekend, going through a box of papers and old notebooks, when I stumbled across a pile of stripper photos. I wasn't kidding before when I said my friend Trouble and I were male stripper connoisseurs. There were photos of men in G-strings dancing, autographed posed shots, photos of dudes surrounded by dollar-waving, liquored-up women that made you wonder if the guys made it out alive.

I actually blushed as I flipped through them. I flashed back to the time my mom found a Polaroid of me at one of the shows -- I was sitting in a chair surrounded by men in tiny denim shorts, with a blond hunk on my lap. My smile in the shot is nothing short of beatific. "Were you drunk?" my mom exclaimed, offering me an excuse. "Nope," I admitted. It was the truth. I was totally at home with a pack of near-nekkid, sweet-smelling, tousled-haired men pressed against me.

Hmm. I hope I still have that Polaroid somewhere.

The photos remind me I'm not the girl I was 15 years ago: hard-drinkin', barely-sleepin', spending my money on strippers and club outfits while the credit card bills went unpaid. Now I'm nearing 40, a homeowner who drives an SUV and has a retirement plan.

And yet ...

The remnants of that girl live inside me. I came of age with raves and rap, so I have to go out dancing periodically to stay sane. (If I get too old for the clubs, I guess I'll start having house parties. Rob Bass and Lords of Acid will not be denied.) I still like alcohol, but I've stopped going for the drinks designed to get you the drunkest, fastest. The girl has matured into a woman who likes to have a good time, but knows there's more to life than the next good time.

However ... I do have a framed, autographed picture of a porn actor smiling at me here in my home office. He goes in a drawer when mom comes to visit.

Some habits are hard to break.