Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me - Ben Karlin [65]
I should have learned not to wear sweatpants from Siobhan, the vapid fashionista I should have met, and dated, and been dumped by, right out of college. Siobhan would have taken one look at my “awesome” collection of “exercise trousers” and had them secretly rendered to a base in Uzbekistan, where they would have been boiled alive. (My “special scarf” would have been water-boarded.) Then, when I met my wife for an anniversary cocktail I would have represented in a sleek pair of tailored slacks, not in paint-splattered Russell Athletics with the drawstrings hanging out over my crotch.
And Starshine, the free-spirited vegetarian carpenter I should have bumped into and dated in 1999 (and been spectacularly dumped by on the eve of the new millennium because of the Zodiac!), should have sat me down and reminded me that baking bread connects me to all humanity. For I am MAN, provider. Why deny this wretched world my gifts? If Starshine had done her job, my wife would be enjoying fresh-baked focaccia as I write this. Not frozen bagels made by robots.
Then, of course, there’s Krystyn. Long-lost Krystyn. Lovely Krystyn. Sure, she had the world’s worst name, and I sometimes called her “Kyrstyn” by mistake. (How we would have laughed about that!) But I still would have wept when she dumped me for watching too much television. I would still be haunted by her final words: “You watch too much television. I’m marrying Jaysyn, my X-treme athlete frynd. Because you watch too much television.” I think that would have registered.
Alas, I have learned none of these things. Because none of those women existed.
You know those dummies with the black and yellow pie charts on their foreheads who are always smashing into windshields in slow motion? And in the slowed-down instant before impact, you can almost hear them say, in their mannequin drones, “Oh, I get it—I should have worn my seat belt?” I’m one of them, learning all these important lessons too late, in the melancholy split second before my head smashes through my marriage’s windshield and bloodies any hope I had of eternal bliss.
I blame all the women who never dumped me.
Lesson#45
It Wasn’t Me, It Was Her
by Rick Marin
I got in touch with my college girlfriend recently when her husband left her for the daughter of a famous TV mogul. We exchanged e-pleasantries. Then she asked how come in my memoir, Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor, I didn’t mention that she dumped me. Okay, Julia (as I called her in the book), I’ll bite. I e-mailed back, “I thought I dumped you.” Her response came fast and furious:
“Say you’re joking or I’ll lose what little faith in men I have left.”
My fingers froze on the keys. I thought we were engaging in a few gentle jabs to the ribs, but she was serious. The woman was clearly in a vulnerable place, man-wise. A TV star in her own right in Canada, where we both grew up, she had now been reduced to tabloid fodder. I needed to be giving, sensitive, understanding . . . Unfortunately, I possess none of these qualities. But I can be quite condescending.
“Well, if it was important for you to think that,” I wrote, and changed the subject. Still, she’d planted the seed of doubt. Could my first love possibly have dumped me? For two decades, I’d firmly believed otherwise. You might even say I cherished the belief. Now I needed proof—a forensic analysis of the death of the relationship. Fingerprints, DNA, sunglasses like David Caruso’s on CSI: Miami. So I snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and went out to the garage to dig out a musty shoe box of Canadian-stamped letters with 1980s postmarks. Then I went into the musty shoe box of my mind (isn’t that a Barbra Streisand song?) and dug out some memories of those years when I met the girl who almost became the first ex-Mrs. Marin.
It was my second year, Julia’s first, at McGill University in Montreal. She had a wild mane