Was I not your lithium?

I have long been open about my hunter-esque dating tendencies. I am slow, circumspect. I identify my prey from a distance of months, sometimes as they are still living, happy and unsuspecting, in relationships with other people. I carefully size them up, decide what seduction tools I will need for the willing capture, and embark on the long, cautious journey toward capturing their gaze, desire, and, occasionally, hearts.

The seduction of which I used to be most proud happened in college. It was a dangerous game; she was older, and dating a senior who was about to graduate. They were one of those established couples, which only I seemed to understand (about 5 years before my peers eventually would) meant that they were probably unhappy and/or bored. I slowly befriended her, stopping by her room to ask her questions about the treasurer position that she occupied that I was about to step into, worming my way into her line of vision. When she left for the summer for a program abroad in Paris, she left me in charge of her car and her address in France. Bingo.

I started crafting letters to her. Careful, innocuous letters, full of the suggestion of my "deeper feelings," but short, and only in response to hers. Caution.

This delicate, graceful seduction was consummated on the first day of the fall semester, not particularly delicately or gracefully, as we got raging drunk and then blisteringly high on the green and headed back to my room. Her extreme dry mouth and my tendency to drool while plastered only came in a close second to the hotness of my two best friends, whom I had forgotten were crashing with me in my one-room single, walking in while both of us were naked and writhing in a booze-sweaty single mass on my dorm-issue single bed.

From that moment on, it was love. We spent several evenings a week together watching movies, holding hands, and having copious amounts of sex. For one blissful month, I was as happy as I'd ever been in college, even though my body burned every day in the shower when the hot water hit the spots where the sex had scraped my skin raw.

One day, she asked if she could come over. My room wasn't clean, but that didn't matter to me in the face of the sure possibility of getting laid. I gave her an ebullient affirmative, and five minutes later she was at my dorm room door. And five minutes after that, she had told me that she had been off the meds she took for her bipolar disorder, that she had fallen in love with a senior in another dorm, and that things clearly weren't working between us. Five minutes later, it was over.

I will say that I put on a good show; when she told me, seemingly out of nowhere, "this isn't working," I thought on my feet. Seven years later, I remain proud of my kneejerk reaction, which was a casual, disinterested, "Yeah, I was thinking the same thing," although my twenty-year-old china shop of a heart was internally suffering at the rages of the bull that had been unleashed in it. She left, I called a friend who was effectively a functional alcoholic, and we drank ourselves blind and later vomited in the dorm bathrooms, side by side, holding hands under the institutional-yellow wall of the bathroom stall as we emptied our insides into the communal porcelain. I spent the next two weeks crying, moping around campus, and learning that with the aid of a little excessive drinking, I could be my own lithium.

[coda: my muscular sense of pride compels me to mention that I later re-seduced her, dated her for ten months, and broke up with her over the phone. So, you see, I still won.]

Strange pick up line.

Maybe not quite in the vein of the others, but...I met this girl at a drag party a couple of years back who said that she would like me if I weren't a democrat. Seriously, she said this more than once. But apparently she got over it. For about three weeks. Then I never heard from her again, despite several attempts to make contact.

Oh well, she looked hot in a top hat.

Mistranslated Phone Call

So I am Jewish in the way that I eat matzah and dig channuka but not in the way that I believe in God. BUT like all Jews, I embrace cultural guilt so on Yom Kippor I go somewhere by myself, think about bad things I've done and then call people to apologize. It is a delightful yearly ritual that leaves me charmingly embittered and self-debasing. Last Yom Kippor, I call my long distance boyfriend of 2.5 years who I was madly in love with. I leave an innocent message with "we should talk" meaning "i should apologize for all those times i sucked in the past year." He calls me back and says "I think we should talk, too. I'm not in love with you the same way anymore." This was totally out of the blue and also the sort of hilarious miscommunication that is usually found in clumsily written sitcoms and not my life. So, kids, remember to leave full and detailed messages after the beep.

My Accordion

Well. So, once upon a time, I met this really truly wonderful guy, who was funny in all the right ways, and incredibly smart, and really great in bed. And we knew all the same children's books and he could do very funny accents (and with him mine got better), and we stayed up way too late one night arguing about feminism in a way that made me totally hot. He always held my hand or casually threw his arm around me in the subway in a way I'd been looking for. He was wiry and cute and wore slightly ridiculous shirts in a way that made me sigh when seeing him from a distance in Union Square while on my way to meet him after work. I'd see him and I'd sigh, and I'd think, That one's mine, and I'd be so pleased while on my way to sneak up on him and put my hand on his shoulder and kiss him hello. He wore plaid pants and was passionate about many things, and I loved him.

With him I was safe, smart, funny, engaged, interested, listened to, understood. I felt more like myself with him than I had with any other boyfriend. Usually I have to change myself to be with someone-- be quieter, pithier, more or less reserved, meaner, more or less sarcastic, or more outgoing... to make up for his awkardness, anger, drunkenness, bitterness, or whatever his problem was. But with this guy I didn't have to make up for anything on his part. He made me go more places and do more things and think about more and bigger and better things. I supported him and listened to him and made him a little saner and more grounded, and I thought it might work out. I had things to offer him, he had things to offer me, we play off each other and support each other in a really good, kind, useful, fun way... this could be good.

So. Things are good, right? Things are occasionally weird, and things are being worked out, but things are being talked about, and I am telling him about how I feel about these things, and we're talking and it's making sense. It's nice. I'm feeling good about talking to him rather than resorting to my usual habit of being quietly unhappy while hoping my passive aggression is enough to make someone notice that he should be noticing something. But instead of being just someone, this time it's him, so I care more, and I feel safe and understood, so I'm talking. This is good. It's going to work out.

Then it's my birthday, May 15.

Or almost. May 14, I come home from dinner with a friend and he is waiting for me at my apartment, eager to give me my present. It's a big heavy square box, and I am terrified that it's some weird suitcase, to replace the duffel bag of mine he lost last week when he borrowed it to visit friends in San Francisco. But I open it, and it's... the best, most perfect present anyone's ever given me. I hate opening presents-- I worry so much about not liking what it is but not wanting to let the giver know, and blahblah, that whole thing-- but this time I open it, and I gasp. I gasp genuinely and happily and THAT is the best feeling I can remember in a while: genuine, real delight that someone loves me and knows me and has gone to the trouble of giving me the absolute perfect gift. This is awesome. I love him, and I love the accordion he's given me. We get out the accordion and mess around with it together, adjusting the straps, figuring out which way is up, admiring the way everything you play on it-- even when you have no idea what to do with it-- sounds insanely cinematic and awesome. We are smitten with the accordion and I am smitten with him, and we have lovely happy sex and fall asleep. This bodes well, no?

May 15-- my actual birthday. I go to work, there is one of those awkward office parties in the kitchen. I amuse everyone by telling them my wonderful perfect boyfriend has gotten me the best present ever. They think accordions are weird. I feel funny and interesting and happy and satisfied. We spend that evening with a small group of close friends at my favorite bar. It's lovely. It's casual and fun, people like each other, and I am quite happy.

We leave. We walk back to Union Square to get the train, and by the time we get on the train it seems like something bad is happening. But it's my birthday, and I've had a few glasses of wine, and my boyfriend gave me an accordion last night, so I'm not too worried about anything.

By the time we get all the way home to my apartment, it is very clear something quite bad is happening. He doesn't think we are meant for each other forever. I am unsure how to respond to this, not having put it in terms of forever yet myself (we've known each other 7 months), and being a little tipsy, and being caught rather offguard by this happening, from this nice man, ON MY BIRTHDAY. I cannot process, I cannot believe, I cannot fight, I cannot respond. One thing I certainly cannot do is sit across my bed from someone who is saying, "I don't want to be with you," and beg him to please stay with me. So I don't. And so he leaves. And that's that.

I don't go to work the next day-- my eyes are too swollen. Next week, many jokes will be made about how fantastic my birthday must have been if I couldn't get out of bed the next day. Hilarious.

A week later he comes to get his stuff (he didn't live with me, but he spent more nights with me than he did at home, and most of his clothes were at my place) and we talk. It turns out most of the reasons he did this didn't make sense-- he admits this now and sees how this was unfair, and that he shouldn't have done it the way he did, and he should have made it a conversation rather than a unilateral decision, but it's done. He doesn't take anything back. He seems to regret nothing. The means sucked, but the end is what he intended-- not being with me.

He admits he wasn't thinking of me as an equal. For me, that's kind of it. Someone who can be with me for 7 months but not think I might be interesting or intelligent to have a conversation with about this-- clearly not The Guy. Clearly, The Guy will be someone who makes me even happier than him, or just as happy but also has some respect for me and isn't so arrogant and fucked up and scared. Clearly, all I have here is things to look forward to. He made this decision out of fear and I just can't admire that.

So that's that. It happened over two months ago now, and mostly what bothers me now is just that I had nothing to do with it, that I wasn't consulted. Also, I worry about him. He's not an asshole, and so the things that go on in his head that make him act like an asshole must be terrifying, and small and awful and powerless. And I hate that for him, but he'll be all right. And I'll be all right. I think we could have worked things out in some ways, had he thought I had been worth having the conversation with. Maybe not. Obviously not, now. But that's not how it happened so it's not how it is.

And, fucking... ouch. OUCH. But that happens every time, and that fades. I have my accordion, right? And maybe I'll learn how to play "Since You've Been Gone" on it this summer, and that'll be pretty awesome.

Not exactly a breakup story

I guess I'm hesitant to post anything exceptionally detailed on this blog because, uh - I feel like anything I would write would be so, so sad.

But, I am particularly interested in the things people find to help them feel better about a broken heart.  Cheetos.  Booze.  Kelly Clarkson.

How Z100 Unbroke My Heart from bearfax on Vimeo.

I guess it depends on how bad you feel. I mean, whatever, you may be content to drink a ton of mojitos and pass out watching Ella Enchanted on a loveseat at the house of your friend (who has also recently broken up). But I feel like in the long run, this is probably not as bad for you. And you'll really have something to talk about with preteen girls.

Break-Up Hall of Fame

You always hear about those horrific break-up stories, people being left at the altar, finding him in bed with your sister AND your brother, or a myriad other ways of being spectacularly and thoroughly dumped. I never really believed them, but now that I'm in my twenties these flaming breakups are no longer legends but actually happen. And they don't need to be theatrical to be horrible. Like the time this guy told me he really wanted to be with me, but a night and 7 rounds of sex later, was like "oh actually, nevermind." This can also be a forum for both breakupper and breakupee. I once broke up with someone at a playground at night listening to another couple have sex. It went sort of like:
Me: So, I don't think this is really working for me.
Couple having sex less than 20 feet away: Oooooh. Ahhh. Give it to me.
Boy being broken up with: Gulp.

So let this be a testament to all of the awkwardness, the misplaced bodily functions, the misunderstanding and ultimately, the unraveling of our collective dignities. And in this way, at least we will get to laugh at it. .