I’m Special (15 page)

“He's just a friend! We're not dating! I would never date him. I mean, are you kidding me?” Cut to ten minutes later when your friends leave and you call the Shame Crush and tell him to come over and bring pita chips. Everyone sleeps with someone they're hesitant to bring around their friends. The best thing you can do when you're sleeping with someone you're ashamed of is to be honest and tell your friends, “Listen, guys. I'm sort of with this dude, but it will be over when my depression and/or boredom lifts. Just stand by until I feel normal enough to dump him.”

THE NICE GUY

I'm not talking about the type of person who is kind and genuine. I'm talking about a guy who has no discernible quality other than being nice. He's a bland scoop of vanilla ice cream and you are the sun that is melting him down to mush. Nice guys will turn you into a person who's mean, a person who's a bully, a person who points out the flaws, because there needs to be somebody in the relationship who isn't loving blindly. Nice guys don't look at you through a critical lens; they love deeply and stupidly, like you're a puppy and they're just looking for a man's best friend. You could be anyone, really. They don't care. They just want to love something. And they like it when you push them down. They need that. When I date a nice guy, it always ends the same way. I hate them for being so pure, and then I hate myself for being so dirty.

YOUR EX

I know what you did last summer and the summer before that. It was your ex—the person whom you still text when you're drunk at 4:00 a.m., being like, “Beb? R u there? Just missing you. Cum over if u want. No pressure. I'm so wasted . . .” It's important to let them know you're wasted so they know you're not in your right mind. Then you wait for their response, which will either be, “Okay, be right there!” or “WTF? Um, no . . .” If you're “lucky” and get the former response, you're setting yourself up for sex that can continue for a shockingly long time. Sometimes it won't stop until you get into a new relationship, proving that in order to get over certain people, you need to get under someone else.

THE EMOTIONALLY CLOSED-OFF ASSHOLE

If you haven't
been
the asshole in the relationship, chances are you've
dated
the asshole. There are so many terrible things about dating someone who's emotionally distant and puts you down in subtle, creepy ways, but perhaps the worst thing is that you honestly believe you can change them. It can take years/forever (#dark) for you to realize that it's just not in the asshole's DNA to be sweet. Those rare moments of tenderness they show you are just tricks to keep you around longer. You'll never be good enough. They hate your friends, the clothes you wear, and the things you choose to talk about. But most of all, they just hate themselves.

THE PERSON YOU DIDN'T REALIZE YOU WERE ACTUALLY DATING

Since we're all a bunch of commitment-phobes, we often end up in the gray area with the people we date, which is a terrible place to be for everyone! If you're the person who's getting sent mixed signals, you're resigned to being an insecure wreck until you're given some definitive answers. You're clutching your phone like it's a lifeline and going into full-body spasms whenever you get a new text message. If you're in a position of power and keeping things loose and vague, it can still suck because you risk having someone think you're actually together when you're simply dating. Before you know it, you'll be getting an “in a relationship” request from someone you can't even bring yourself to text back in a timely manner.

We date these people who aren't right for us to learn more about ourselves or because we want to have a story to tell our friends at brunch or because we think it's better than being alone. But dating someone who doesn't get you will make you feel more alone than ever. Also, don't think for one second that these relationships are meaningless. Every one-night stand, every insult, every fight, every orgasm has gotten you to where you are right now, which might be sitting alone in your apartment x-ing out of OkCupid and opening another bottle of wine. These are the consequences of not treating yourself with care.

Sometimes when it's been a long time since I've been with someone, I'll think back to being seventeen and taking a shower with my then boyfriend, Charlie. We'd usually take them together after we had sex to wash the smell off our bodies and talk about whatever things seventeen-year-old gay boys like to talk about. Charlie would casually put a dollop of shampoo in his palm and rub it in my hair, taking an extra second to massage my scalp, and I would do the same for him. The mundaneness of these showers would often leave me feeling overwhelmed with emotion because I realized, with a clarity that made my stomach drop, that this was intimacy. Feelings of closeness rarely occurred during sex, like I expected them to, but rather in the afterglow. The postcoital silences that were peppered with the short staccato blasts of breathing, the tenderness you can feel when someone does something as simple as hand you a bar of soap in the shower. These were the moments that taught me how to love someone, and when I remind myself of it, I know that I can relearn intimacy. I can have brave love that's dripping with vulnerability. I can have love that won't dissolve because of a shitty text message, a love without deal breakers. When I was seventeen, I was raw and naïve with zero emotional baggage. Nothing held me back from saying what I felt, because I didn't know the rules to the games people like to play. Then, somewhere between a string of failed flings in college and embarrassing attempts at dating after I graduated, I became so ruled by my own insecurities and thirst for validation that I missed the point of relationships and forgot how to have a partner. Sometimes I look at my friends who are in stable, healthy relationships and I'm overcome with envy. They did it. They figured out how to wake up in the morning with someone without feeling the urge to run away. They realized they were worth loving. Having self-love is like nurturing a plant. If you don't take the time to water it, if you start to skip days and get distracted, it will die.

Believing that you deserve love is not only imperative for finding a relationship; it's also crucial for getting out of one. As far as I can tell, there are three guarantees in life: death, taxes, and someone deciding they don't love you anymore. I can pinpoint the exact moment Charlie lost all interest in me. We were lying in my bed one day after school trying to have sex before his parents picked him up (oh the joys of being underage and sexually active!), but something was preventing us from fully connecting. His body, which had usually felt like a second home to me, was distant and rigid. I asked him what was wrong. He assured me it was nothing, but the way he said it made it seem like it was
everything.
It was then that I knew we existed on borrowed time. A few weeks later, Charlie dumped me.

The takeaway message from getting dumped is that a person who once wanted to see you naked all the time is now no longer interested in seeing you at all. Just like that. “I want your private parts in my mouth” to “Get those private parts away from me right now before I call the cops!” Part of you wants to say back to them, “Wait! I wasn't done having sex with you yet. Can you give me a bit more time?” But there is no more time left to give.

I always wonder how this can happen. Like, how do you go from loving someone despite their bad breath and rolls of fat and IBS to all of a sudden being like, “Nope. I can no longer tolerate the flaws. I look at you and instead of feeling a warmth, my bones start to chill.” How? If I knew the answers to any of these questions, perhaps breakups would be easier for me to handle, but since I don't, it's difficult for me to get over anyone I've ever had feelings for.

I've dated a healthy amount. I've been with assholes, nice guys, and everything in between, but I've never actually been in a serious relationship before. One day, while at happy hour after work, my coworkers and I got on the subject of exes, and one asked me point-blank, “Have you ever been in a serious relationship?” The question left me stunned, like I didn't quite know the answer because, in some ways, it feels like I have. I've had my heart broken and dated people for respectable stretches of time. Still, none of my love-life adventures have ever amounted to much. I blame part of my inexperience on the fact that I wasted so much time being hung up on Charlie after our breakup. I was so desperate to have him in my life that I was like, “Don't worry about dumping me and causing my whole world to go down in flames. Let's just stay best friends, okay?” He agreed, and voilà—that's how you get years of pretending that you want friendship instead of “I love you” and a warm dick in your ass. I wasn't thinking clearly. You never are after a breakup. You have to pretend that everything is fine when secretly you're dying a thousand deaths a minute. It was especially hard in the beginning. I would have delusional thoughts that I couldn't vocalize to anyone, such as, “Oh, there's a hair salon. My ex had hair!” or “How do I steer this conversation in a direction where my ex gets mentioned? I know my friends are tired of hearing about him, but if I don't say his name at least five times a day, I run the risk of becoming very ill. Oh, great—they're talking about the weather. There's my in.”

I kept Charlie in my life for so long because I needed to hang on to the proof that somebody once loved me. “See?” I'd fantasize telling people after we broke up, “A guy actually called me his boyfriend once. You can ask him yourself if you don't believe it.” I didn't want to move on. That would mean I'd have to look for someone else to date me, and it was doubtful that such a person existed. Charlie was a fluke. Anyone else would see my scars, my limp, my tight legs and hunched-over back and find me grotesque.

When I moved to New York for school, Charlie and I finally began to drift apart. I stopped calling him, and since he never really called me, that was enough to end us. Now I haven't spoken to him in years, but because this is the digital age, he's still hanging around. We're friends on Facebook, and we recently followed each other on Twitter. A few weeks after receiving a notification that he'd followed me, I tried to direct-message him only to find out that he had already unfollowed me. Blind with rage, I texted him, “You unfollowed me on Twitter? Really?” He quickly responded with, “I'm sorry. I just think it's better this way. Please don't take it personally.” Even though I understood why Charlie wanted to delete me from his social media—you don't need to know that the guy you lost your virginity to is eating roast chicken for dinner—it still stung. Technology has made it impossible for us to really say good-bye. When my mother was nineteen, she married a man, divorced him two years later, and hasn't heard from him since. Isn't that nuts? The thought of marrying someone today and then being like, “Bye. Lose my number!” seems inconceivable. I don't even have the luxury of forgetting a guy I hooked up with a few times when I was twenty-one because I keep seeing pictures of him drinking stupid mimosas with his stupid friends on Facebook. He won't disappear. He's not allowed to and neither is Charlie. They'll always be only a few keystrokes away. Breaking up with someone now just means the end of physical contact. They live on everywhere else—on your computers, in your phones, in texts. We lost our right to move on from people when we decided we wanted to know everything about everyone. And it's not just our lovers who haunt us like virtual ghosts. It's also our friends. In your twenties, you expect to accumulate a graveyard's worth of failed romances. But what you don't count on is having to bury so many treasured friendships alongside them.

Best Friends Forever, Best Friends Never

It's 1:58 p.m.
on a Saturday. Do you know where your friends are?

—Socrates (JK, hon—that was me!)

I met my best friend Clare when I was a social butterfly spreading its emotionally slutty wings at college. Our mutual friend Bianca had wanted to introduce us for quite some time, but I didn't put much stock into it. If I had a nickel for every time a person wanted me to meet someone they thought I'd like, I'd be making friendship bracelets out of hundred-dollar bills. But one day, during a break between classes, Clare and I ran into each other in the quad. She complimented me on my jacket. I told her thank you and then we decided to be best friends forever. At that age, starting a lifelong friendship can be that simple. Your heart is open and you're desperate for some kind of closeness. The dipshit boys you're hooking up with at house parties only fill the void in your private parts. If you want a deep connection, you have no choice but to turn to your friends. They're the ones who'll make you come every time.

The summer after Clare and I graduated from college, she moved into an apartment near me in Alphabet City, and we spent every day in her courtyard drinking wine and talking until our brains turned into happy goo. We were in the throes of friend love, blissfully killing time together before our real lives started. That's what you do when you're twenty-two. You murder time like it's a disgusting bug. Now you'll do anything to keep it alive.