Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me - Ben Karlin [43]
In reality, relationships only end this cleanly when one of the participants is a prostitute. The rest linger and fade and slowly deteriorate, regardless of how simple and exciting they seemed at the start. For Amanda and me, this deterioration came labeled “growth.” We ignored our misgivings about the cooling fires, convinced that this was what it meant to mature; our needy childish desires were mellowing into something deeper and more sustainable, the kind of love they had in the Middle Ages when everyone wrote poetry, not just East Coast nerdlingers. We were becoming adults, we told ourselves. So what if sex was less frequent than trips to the Home Depot? Adults have significant hardware needs, and if the intrigue of our early days was fading, we consoled ourselves that we were discovering the real virtue under there: teamwork. As if companionship, when you boil it down, is essentially a sport, and not one of those coed naked ones from the T-shirts of our youth.
To be fair, it’s a pretty pleasant phase of a relationship. Teamwork is satisfying. Sure, on the passion/adrenaline scale, you just can’t top frantic sex on the hood of your beat-up Camry, but there is a distinct satisfaction in dropping off her movies at Blockbuster or remembering to use only the approved utensils on the nonstick cookware; these are things that scream WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER! It’s a nice feeling, togetherness, and looking back, those couple years were like the warm fuzzy version of a climactic A-Team montage; we cobbled together a life the way Murdock and Face made fully armed tanks from kindling, telephone wire, and two or three riding lawnmowers. We talked our way into private parties and produce-market discounts, we convinced our landlord to spring for a dishwasher, we encouraged our single friends to date each other, we shared winter hats and sunglasses. And, crucially, we got a dog.
Let me just get this out of the way right now: we’re not like those sick fucks who have babies just to save their relationship. Under the surface, the excitement of the early days might have been waning, but we were doing our best to ignore the ebb, and in any case, Ella The Dog was not some Band-Aid or stopgap to keep the home fires burning. She was a helpless, six-week-old, burrito-sized, tailless puppy who’d been rescued from a cruel dog-fighting ring, and she needed a home. But all the same, I can’t say she didn’t help out on the relationship front. She brought us together and turned us into a little family. I loved the dog, Amanda loved the dog, we all loved each other, and for a while there, that’s all anybody needed.
We potty-trained her and took her to obedience classes. She fell over when she tried to wag the tail that didn’t exist. We taught her to swim and catch Frisbees and jump through hula hoops held head-high. She learned to recognize the word “squirrel,” and just by saying it we could incite Björk-like howling and vicious attacks on innocent trees. We bought her a toy piano, which she’d bang on like a palsied Elton John when we told her to “rock out.” When I went into the studio to make my band’s first album, Ella The Dog played on the recording, and she’d lie for hours on the base of my mic stand while I sang.
You’ll notice this is the first time I mention being in a band. Up to this point my band had mostly been irrelevant to my relationship; everyone has a day job and a pipe dream, and if I was