Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me - Ben Karlin [27]
Right after I found out, I ran into her at a bar. She was with her new guy, a pip-squeak. If she’d been toting around a movie star, or some Wall Street stud, I would’ve at least had the grim solace of being soundly beaten. But this dude was her age. And in acting school. She was slumming it with a peer. And . . . they made out in front of me. A fail-safe display, in case I didn’t get it. This was a rout. I got it, I got it.
What was I supposed to do with all this? People rarely say, “You know what you need to do? Carry a grudge. An old-fashioned, dense and righteous grudge.” Forgiveness and forgetfulness are prescribed so often that we’re likely to forget the grudge is even an option. But I didn’t feel like I had any other choice. The grudge picked me.
It’s not easy. I didn’t have any experience with grudges, had no good models to follow, so I had to wing it. A year or so after she broke up with me, the actress crocheted me a scarf. Most likely, she really did love me as a person, or at least felt some vague guilt she wanted to ease. I could’ve just accepted the scarf, held it to my face while imagining her having sex with my former best friend, and left it in a garbage can—maybe on one of those dark, lonely alleys near Wall Street. That would’ve been a dignified move, with a nice quiet drama. Then maybe we follow the scarf’s adventures after it gets picked up by a lovable hobo. But that wouldn’t be true to my grudge. Instead, I took the scarf back to the girl at work. I said it was the only scarf that made me feel colder when I put it on. Zing! I was hoping she would cry and be mad at me. She did! She was! I swear I had a grudgegasm.
The grudge is a way to show you care, a way to stay connected. It would have been an insult to let what we had be downgraded to a mere polite acquaintanceship or even worse, nothing. The grudge required embarrassing, accusatory letters. It required sending blank e-mails. It required every meeting we had to be ambiguous and tense. It meant feeling sick when I saw girls who just looked like her.
I started doing some stand-up comedy, and she said she really wanted to see me get up and tell jokes. I forbade her from watching, as my main reason for doing stand-up was to spite her.
She said she wanted to be able to ring me up and have long, late-night chats about her dating life. I blocked her number.
Who knew a grudge could be so sweet? I would love it if a girl I dumped cared enough to stage a performance based partly on my idiotic moves, and then prohibited me from attending. I even started feeling disheartened by exes who didn’t hold grudges against me but should. It’s like, don’t you care?
The good moments of our relationship—when we were both just aggressively happy to be in each other’s company—would add up to fewer than forty-eight hours, and that includes being asleep together. It has what people in the relationship business call a long, spiky tail. Now, I’m the only one lumbering around with this bitch of a tail—I’m sure the other principals have long since sloughed it. This freakish thing is all mine by now. A grudge distorts—it wears a brain-path that you keep going down.
If I could erase the whole thing from my memory, go Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I would. She even looked like Kate Winslet’s character in that movie. My facility with grudgecraft is something about myself I’d rather not know. So I’ll allow myself this one grudge, and maybe if I don’t work on it it’ll just get worn down into something faint and powerless, like graffiti on a park bench.
I do know where I’ll see her eventually: on a reality show. She is genetically and socially engineered to tear through one of those setups like an erotic tornado. She’ll wire the group together, then detonate every basic interaction. The cameras will find her. She’ll make for fantastic