Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me - Ben Karlin [3]
Cynics might say that last word had a great deal to do with what happened. Cynics might say these beautiful, fantastic women who have taken us on actually looked at us a few years ago, found us wanting, and have since come back to us, having argued themselves into believing that, actually, we aren’t that bad, all things considered. I married the one who dumped you, and you married the one who dumped me, but that’s the story. Effectively we become the DVD of Elf that you ignore in the rental store at nine o’clock on a Friday night, on the presumption there will be something better (or at least, something more fulfilling, more complex, and that you haven’t seen twice before) on the shelves somewhere. And guess what you end up going home with? Well, that’s what we are to these beautiful, fantastic women: Elves.
Here are the titles of some e-mails my wife has sent me in the past few months: “Event reminder: The Wiggles”; “Catering Menu”; “Joint a/c”; “Various boring”; “New plans for car tax”; “Fishcakes??”; “No fishcakes”; “Fishcakes?!” E-mail hadn’t been invented when I was suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous Miss Fortune, of course. But if it had, I would never have believed that anybody for whom I had any kind of romantic feelings would communicate with me in this way. In life during wartime, there were neither fishcakes nor no fishcakes, and e-mails would have titles like “Sorry,” “Last night,” “My relationship with Michael,” “My actual relationship with Michael,” and “You bastard.” These might sound more interesting than the various borings, but they weren’t, not really, because they became life itself; there were no children, of course, but there wasn’t much else, either. I never had the time or the concentration to write books, and I never even had the time or the concentration to read them, either. Everything was focused on trying to get my romantic life right, and that turned out to be precisely the way to get it disastrously wrong. I get e-mails about fishcakes because there’s absolutely nothing to say about the other stuff: it just is, day after day, and that seems like a miracle. You get a lot more done during peacetime; you even get a love life thrown in.
Lesson#1
Sex Is the Most Stressful Thing in the History of the Universe
by Dan Vebber
When I was a child, sex was awesome. Of course, when I was a child, I didn’t have to deal with it. Sex was what Dan of the Future would one day enjoy, and I saw no reason to obsess about it any more than Present-Day Dan obsesses with . . . what’s something old people enjoy? Nice breezes? Let’s say nice breezes.
In fact, I never beat off as a kid. I didn’t beat off thinking about girls, I didn’t beat off thinking about boys, I didn’t even beat off thinking about spaceships. (This is the point at which people quote me HILARIOUS statistics along the lines of “99 percent of teenage boys masturbate, and one percent are liars!” HA! Thank you for your opinion, please return to hosting your Morning Zoo program.) The fact is, not once during my outwardly normal adolescence could I dupe my machinery into getting physically aroused by the mere thought of sex, the touch of my own hand, or porn. (Not every guy has a long-standing and storied relationship with porn. Some of us honestly don’t find it interesting enough to warrant looking past the girls’ bad teeth.)
When I was seventeen, I started dating Molly Malone. I’ve changed her name here, but not her full-blooded Irish ethnicity or any of the attendant baggage that implies. Catholic? Check. Shocking red hair and freckles? Check. Overbearing, shillelagh-waving father? Double check. Our senior year of high school, Molly and I were inseparable, and at least as far as the sex thing