If you are ready to commit the rest of your life to me after a couple of weeks of getting drunk while a camera crew follows us around, you are not a rational person who makes good choices. It would be incredibly flattering, but ill-advised nonetheless. At the end of the season I’m always surprised when the dudes actually propose, yet not surprised at all when I read in People magazine two weeks later that the happy couple has split because he still has feelings for his college sweetheart and the bachelorette can’t leave her career as a dental hygienist in New York to move to Montana and run the family dairy farm.
The season finale will go something like this: We’re sharing a postcoital can of beer and watching Jimmy Fallon. I get up (WEARING MY ROBE) to find my bra and to pee for the thirty-seventh time while he tries to wake up his erection for round two. I come back to bed with more beers, a bag of pretzels, and cold leftover pizza. I send a few text messages to other dudes; he eats all my food without offering me any while getting cheese and grease all over my remote and crumbs in my nice sheets. I pee again—I really cannot be out here risking UTIs like they don’t hurt like the devil—and he takes a call that I suspect might be from another woman, because the parameters of our relationship thus far have been unclear. I can’t really say anything, so I just sulk and pretend that nothing is wrong, but I’m totally ignoring him and pulling the duvet to my side as I turn on Sex and the City reruns (I’m a Miranda), and just to make sure he knows I’m really ignoring him I put on my headphones and crank up my iPod really loud and sigh a lot until he hangs up the phone and says, “What’s wrong?” Then I respond, “Nothing,” with a little too much aggression in my voice as I flip through the channels like a woman possessed until it dawns on him what my problem is and he exasperatedly sighs and says, “That was my mom,” but it’s too late because now he knows I’m a jealous baby and he doesn’t want to be my boyfriend anymore, but maybe he’d still like to sleep with me because of that thing I do with my pinky fingers. Then we’ll fall into a fitful, uncomfortable sleep, after which he’ll decide that he needs to go “home” or to “the gym” or to “ESPN Zone” or wherever you penises like to hang out in your free time. I’ll tell him my last name (finally), and he’ll promise to get my phone number from Chris Harrison and text me when he gets home. Just like Cinderella. Or on TV.
A Blues for Fred
Fred and I ended our relationship on a sticky August afternoon in the summer of 2012. In the years before our introduction in the comments section on a piece I’d written about how I couldn’t have sex with a man who didn’t think that not having his own checking account by his thirtieth birthday was a big deal, Fred had flown to New York by himself just to see the Basquiat exhibit. For that I was grateful, as his passionate description of Basquiat’s early graffiti work kept me from having to make polite conversation while huffing up the stairs at the Art Institute in the waning days of summer. I’m pretty sure there was no Instagram way back then, so I was left to my own devices and forced to look closely at Lichtenstein’s brushstrokes and read descriptions as the gentle voice from the audio tour guided me from painting to painting, Fred trailing behind me taking notes in a battered Moleskine.
If you are a certain type of sap, this is one of Those Moments. You know, the ones in which you relax long enough to think that this might actually be real and cool and maybe start thinking about accidentally leaving some allergy meds and an old toothbrush in a dude’s bathroom. I had already “forgotten” a lip balm and my emergency glasses on the bedside table and hidden a case of fancy bottled water in a kitchen cabinet, but visions of five inches of available space in his underwear drawer had begun dancing through my head and I could not get them to shut up. This is the shit that is exciting to you eight months into a casual-sex thing, a thing that might hopefully blossom into something less casual if maybe you play your cards right and have managed not to be too interested or available-seeming, that maybe this person who went on vacation with another woman a few months ago might give up some closet real estate so you don’t have to either (1) wear pajamas on your dates, or (2) go to sleep after the dates in your clothes.
I didn’t see the end coming. Which is not to say that I was surprised, because I wasn’t—I just thought that I had more time. I knew that when we had Serious Grown-up Talks about our goals, and mine didn’t include much more than “king-size bed and lightning-fast wireless Internet,” that I was eventually in store for a heartfelt yet awkward conversation about my lack of motivation toward property ownership. And that’s okay. Dating is totally weird at this age, what with all the pushy relatives and ticking clocks that people have to contend with. At twenty-four, who cares if you drink a couple of beers across from an irresponsible hipster’s ironic haircut and then take him home for less-than-memorable sex; but if you wake up on your thirty-second birthday childless and untethered to a human with health benefits who has read more than one book in the previous twelve months, you have to get your ass out of bed and start Dating with Intention. And maybe people don’t really say it that way, but let me clarify that that is precisely what “Oh, you’re still dating that guy who’s an iPod DJ?” really means.
Fred had a house, man. Which was like, LOLWUT. My previous life had been filled with so many gentlemen trying to get their dicks sucked in their childhood bedrooms (complete with superhero twin bedsheets, in one unforgettable case) that the first night I walked into Fred’s actual crib and met his actually spayed Rottweiler who came bounding down his actual stairs after we’d parked in his actual garage, I almost burst out laughing. I was peeking into cupboards and putting my ear against closed doors trying to determine whether anyone else lived there. That kind of shit was mind-blowing for a person who once dated a dude with six actual roommates. I was like, “How much is your seventh of the rent, thirty-seven dollars?!”
—