Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me (11 page)

Year 1

This is the year of “The Crush.” Excitement, energy, warmth, and hope infuse every aspect of the relationship, making the possibilities seem limitless, rosy, and un-put-downable. Not much to say beyond that.

Year 2

Some afterglow remains. You begin to perceive shortcomings in your partner’s psyche, which will severely limit your ability to grow as a couple. You get pissed. You argue. Roses make things better. You start to notice how good food tastes, how interesting books are, how marvelously distracting distractions can be. Men might rediscover masturbation and think, “Hey, I’m a pretty good masturbator!” Your relationship is tumultuous, but in a classic pop song sense—this is pretty fun, actually, you sort of feel like a tortured artist, except you’re not creating art. Nor will you.

Year 3

Your friends tell you to get out. Her friends tell her to get out. You relearn each other’s emotional limitations and psychological shortcomings on a daily basis. An hourly basis. You consider therapy. This is good. This is the beginning of a choice growing inside of you. But you are still five years away from therapy! So slow down! The drama of the relationship is tarnishing, which makes you suspect that it is not actually made of gold, but brass. Here is what you will find out: It’s not even brass. Your relationship is made of mold, what you are seeing as tarnish is actually just more mold breaking down and feeding on itself. Fuckin’ mold, dude [
uncomfortable coughs from the back of the room
].

Year 4

A pretty good year. Some ups and downs in the relationship. Mostly downs, though. Even the ups are a bit downish. You are using this year to see if you can make your partner’s shortcomings work to your advantage. Good for you. You will fail. People around you are “clamming up.” They tolerate your relationship like they tolerate the clanking sound in a car engine. After a while it’s just there, no reason to acknowledge it. You go on a trip with friends, without your partner. You have a real good time.

Year 5

Your mother tells you to get out. You begin to consider divorce, but then realize you aren’t married yet. You think, well, maybe we should get married and with that commitment we can finally relax and let go of the “fantasy” of a happy relationship but find happiness in reality and a promise of undying okayness. And if that doesn’t work, then the divorce thingy is a legit option. You are also entering into the arena of long-term relationshippery. You are sort of proud of this—good, go with that, you’re going to need every bit of momentum you can get to make it through FOUR MORE FUCKING YEARS.

Year 6

You are going strong, avoiding each other, not asking too much from the relationship. Many of you might think this is the time to move into therapy, to actually confront the many issues that make day-to-day life unpleasant and long-term plans unthinkable. Too soon! This bad relationship needs to run its course, and it is a marathon. If therapy tells you to leave now you will be prematurely abandoning the race—in its final push to the finish. Plan a long holiday. It will not be enjoyable. Attend a wedding for friends who met only two years ago. Look at them and wonder. You and your partner are now in sync, sharing a low-grade depression which swarms around you like hundreds of depressed bees. This is a good year to discover the artwork of Edward Hopper. There’s something about his clean lines and composition that will speak to you.

Year 7

Same as year four. Three hundred sixty-five days, not that long as it turns out.

Year 8

Just doin’ time. You’re almost there. The couple who married a year and half ago after only being together for two years before that—they get divorced and don’t seem too distraught over it. By the end of the year they will both be in new relationships. Wow. That’s tragic. I guess some people are shallow. They have shallow relationships that start fast and end fast because they just aren’t that deep. They aren’t as deep as you, you tell yourself, at first confidently, and then, less so.

Year 9

The watershed. You can go to therapy now. Together and apart. You can do all those things you’ve been dreaming of: crying and collapsing on the floor, crying on the phone, crying in a restaurant. You can finally say, in public, “I think this has to end,” and watch the unstartled faces of your bored friends as they try to care. Give your friends multiple chances to care. They will need them. Start to separate your nine years of memories, furniture, and collections and realize it’s not that hard to do. It’s fairly easy to acquire the
Seinfeld
box set and an Irish knit sweater you both wore. As it turns out, the Irish can’t stop knitting. Spend that first night alone. The ghost of your ex wanders the halls. Don’t give it any credence because ghosts aren’t real. Not like vampires, which are
very
real, but not relevant to this particular discussion. I’ve said too much.

[
Long pause, more coughing from the back, the sound of a few people getting up and filing out
]

Great. You see that plan? You see how complete it is? How it covers every base? Here’s the great thing about the plan: It leaves you squarely sure that you will never enact this plan again. You will have a level of certainty in your life few people ever achieve. You will also have a high horse to ride as you comment on other people’s short-lived traumas. Oh how many times you will win the argument when you say, “Hey! Try hangin’ in there for nine years!” Nice. You can rest assured you tried everything, including depression and deep boredom, two flavors which must be sampled if you want to feel you truly lived. Why the hell do you think people climb Everest? Because it sucks BIG TIME! They did it anyway, and now they can rub that in other people’s faces for the rest of their lives. You wimps.

[
Light applause
]

Lesson#16

A Dog Is No Reason to Stay Together

by Damian Kulash, Jr.

Amanda was my best friend’s girl. Or at least
he
thought so. They’d had a brief fling eight months prior, and Adam’s M.O
.
at the time was to convince himself he was deeply romantically linked—like right on the brink of marriage—with whomever he’d last got it on with, regardless of how much alcohol had been involved in getting to the get-on, or how much time had passed since it’d been got. Every so often he’d run into his soul mate at a party and she’d have to ask for his name again, which made for awkward moments. Adam was my roommate, and I hated seeing him brokenhearted all the time, but Amanda was foxy, and since a guy is only obligated to respect another guy’s boundaries when they aren’t imaginary, I figured I was on stable ethical ground when Amanda and I made out after that fateful night at the monster truck rally.

We were a great couple. We dressed funny and made art and took road trips and got drunk a lot. We moved to Chicago together and filled a loft with armloads of amusements from the science surplus store, and we invited our friends over to drink wine with us and laugh at religious people on TV. It was love—love like you see in movies. Except in movies, relationships don’t change, or grow, or slowly fall apart. They either last forever or end mercifully fast with a thrown plate and a jump cut. At least in the movies I watch. I suppose Hugh Grant fans could argue there’s a whole genre of film built on themes like “Now I Can Truly Love You Because This Maladjusted Boy Has Cured Me of My Selfishness,” or “All I Wanted Was for You to Say You Were Proud of Me and My Equestrian Accomplishments.” But the movies I watch and the books I read and the music videos I’m not in are all soft lenses and hot sweet love until something suddenly brings it to an end, like, say, the Terminator strolls in and impales the male lead.

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 dumb enough to nurse a rock and roll fantasy, I was also smart enough not to expect it to come true. But about a year after we got Ella The Dog, the band reached a turning point and the pipe dream became real. When I quit my job to start touring, Amanda couldn’t have been more supportive; all we wanted for each other was happiness, and happiness, I was pretty sure, meant living on truck stop food and spending twelve hours a day in an un-air-conditioned 1986 Dodge conversion van, elbow-to-elbow with three other sweaty fools who share the delusion.

The constant touring caused another shift in my relationship. Amanda and I went from real teammates to imaginary ones. She was sleeping in our bed and going to her job and feeding our dog, and I was sleeping on strangers’ floors and getting paid in beer tickets. While the folks around me, unburdened by monogamy, were engaging in what is generally expected of rock musicians—stumbling from city to city blotting out the previous night’s memory with a new girl and a dozen more Pabsts—I prided myself on pining. I had emotional ballast in the maelstrom, a home team to believe in, a woman and a dog to miss. For months on end, our lives only intersected for the few exhausted minutes of our nightly phone call—it was about as exciting, and only slightly less sexual, than a romance between hospice patients—but still we soldiered on, loyal and determined and dedicated. We lasted this way for nearly two years.

But one day I came home to Chicago after an especially long string of shows, and it all came crashing down. Ella The Dog and I were throwing tennis balls and terrorizing ducks in Humboldt Park—which has surely become a thousand-acre lot for some palatial Starbucks by now, but was still knee-deep in immigrants and corpses at the time—when I realized that Ella was more important to me than Amanda. They had both come to stand for the same things: duty and loyalty and warmth and support, but to experience them with the dog was tangible; it required contact. It meant being there with her, and I loved it. I loved the sticks and Frisbees and contempt for animals smaller than herself. I loved the howling and hula hoop jumping and the careful inspection of particularly impressive stacks of feces. By contrast, Amanda and I had ripened our relationship past recognition, from practice to theory, until it had morphed into a purely symbolic belief in each other, something we didn’t even need real contact to sustain. We had lost whatever it is that differentiates romantic love from friendship and now we were just best friends doing our daily telephone checkup. The life we’d built was still there in our apartment two blocks away, but I was no longer a part of it, and all that really made Chicago home now was Ella The Dog. She had become my best friend’s girl, and I loved her, but this time I couldn’t steal her away.

In the end it was Amanda who dumped me, both of us lying faceup in the bed in the middle of the night, talking the way we did on the phone, not looking at each other. It was pretty low-drama; by then there wasn’t much to give up except the idea that there was something to give up. That, and of course, the dog. With a hint of determination that suggested she thought I might argue, Amanda asserted that she was keeping Ella, but it was a custody battle I’d already lost, and I knew it. It stung—badly—but there’s just no way around it: you can’t stay with someone just because of a dog, and you can’t try to take the dog when she’s been the one caring for it. (Unless you’re a total dick. Then you can do pretty much anything.)

So I just lay there and let it all go; the last traces of teamwork finally fizzled out. The saddest thing, that night, wasn’t the loss, it was the thought that there would someday be others: other dogs, other boyfriends, other girlfriends; that all of our diligent future-building would inevitably be undone by real people in the real future. We all want to believe that the people who dump us will regret it someday, but I knew it wasn’t true; it was over, and I would be replaced.

And I was right. Now, five years later, Amanda and Ella The Dog live on a tropical island with a gentle Viking who’s apparently both champion skydiver and master carpenter. I haven’t met him, but by all accounts he’s talented at pretty much everything and a wellspring of kindness—one of those people put on earth to teach the rest of us humility. Amanda sends photos of them repairing the moat around their house and rowing at sunset in a canoe he built by hand, and I am—I’m not lying—genuinely happy for them. It’s a little weird to see your ex in love with someone else (and maybe weirder to think she could have a kid with the letter
ø
in its name), but I take comfort that it took a veritable Norse god to fill my shoes. And of course time heals an awful lot, so after half a decade, I really have moved on. At least when it comes to Amanda.