Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me - Ben Karlin [26]
Nineteen! Was I angry? Hell no. I felt like I’d won the Barely Legal sweepstakes. I pinched myself, then her, and wondered what I’d done to deserve such good fortune.
This put our span at eleven years—scintillating, but hardly a scandal. It was nothing compared to those chasms bridged regularly in Hollywood, where an actor can be in his forties, dropping the kids off at college, and his dream girl is taking nursery school entrance exams. None of that for me—what this girl and I had was positively wholesome.
Ours wasn’t just a novelty act—we got along, bantered well. One waitress even thought we were a stage duo, our jibes were so in sync. There was a picnic in the park, the Guggenheim, a Mets game. She had big red hair and a Birth of Venus beauty that was all invitation and tease. She liked to say it was a good thing she wasn’t more attractive, because then she’d really be able to wreak sexual havoc.
That should have been a warning. Also, she was an aspiring actress. Also, she said she wasn’t looking for anything serious. Also, she drank a lot. Also, I had to buy her beer—suddenly I was the skeevy older guy who gets booze for the high school crowd. Also, she was into diet pills. Also, she fantasized about plastic surgery. Also, she said she had a problem with dating guys and then banging their best friends. And this is just the evidence that to me speaks well of her.
Did all these pieces add up to a red flag? Try a massive, rippling banner of war. Maybe that’s why I didn’t see it—too big. Maybe I thought I could beat the system. Maybe I just really liked her. Either way—I was all-in, gung ho.
One night, after a play, she called me from a bar and said she wanted to come over. I met her at the subway, and before we’d walked a block she told me she didn’t want any romance. She just wanted me to be a friend. I wish I wish I wish I explained to her that she was just with her friends, at that bar, and that I was something different—a friend with a hard-on. I should’ve said I’m sorry and good-bye and been done with it. Instead, I tried to be that friend. We sat on the swings across from my apartment and discussed her confusion. It got late, and I convinced her to sleep over as a friend. She worried it would be awkward. I wish. Watching the person you want to touch, who doesn’t want to touch you, sleep in your bed, in your boxer shorts, is searing. “Awkward” would’ve been a vacation.
Some nights later she told me she loved me “as a person.” Unless you want someone to hate you forever, don’t ever tell him you love him “as a person.” It’s like a consolation prize you don’t want that leaves you with an unwieldy tax burden. If you absolutely have to love me as something, love me as a walking dildo.
And I didn’t even get breakup sex. Isn’t breakup sex Article One in the relationship Bill of Rights?
A couple months after she broke up with me—while we were still having fraught, sexless rendezvous—she screwed one of my close friends. She screwed him not once, but on three separate occasions. Then she had a threesome with my roommates. My roommates! A threesome! With! From a distance, I have a sort of reverence for this blitz—it took some set of labia to pull it off. But really, I felt like I’d been smashed in the back with a folding chair, then elbowed in the gut. I worry the nausea will never go away completely. And these are just the things I heard about.
And I didn’t hear about it for over a year—one of those years where everybody knew I was a patsy but me. I’d known the friend since college, and once, when we were taking a long walk and having an old-friend talk, he asked if the girl at the center of this gave good blow jobs—when he knew the answer from direct experience! I didn’t know it at the time, but here was the humiliating vaporization of our friendship. And I’m flexible—if he’d only gone to first base with her, I would’ve let it ride. A lot of gay couples don’t even think of making out