It's Not Me, It's You: Subjective Recollections From a Terminally Optomistic, Chronically Sarcastic and Occasionally Inebriated Woman (10 page)

I
have been broken up with a number of times. The first time I ever got my heart truly broken was on an international call to Italy at 3 a.m. My boyfriend, Billy, and I had moved in together in an apartment in Los Angeles, and while I was busy planning our future together, he was busy planning his escape. I probably should’ve seen it coming, but somehow I wasn’t focused on the clues that he was leaving me. Sure, we fought a lot, but didn’t lots of couples scream, “Shut the fuck up” at each other? Chet was Billy’s best friend, and Billy used him as an alibi on more than one occasion. A couple of times he came home in the middle of the night and when I demanded to know where he’d been, he said, “I was at Denny’s counseling Chet on a relationship issue. You know he’s having a tough time getting over Heather.” Like that was
the most normal thing in the world and only a truly insane person would question something so obviously reasonable.

“But why didn’t you at least call me?”

“Stefanie,” he said in that condescending way people have when they use your name in the conversation. “That would have been rude. Chet was really upset and leaving to make a phone call would have made him feel unimportant.” It was as if God lowered a waving red flag from the ceiling telling me Billy was either gay, watching way too much
Oprah,
or most likely screwing someone else. But I let it slide. Sure, he was kind of an asshole, but I was in love and it was easier to believe he loved me, too.

Besides being funny, Billy was the first guy I felt completely comfortable with naked. It’s not that I’d never been naked with other men, but I preferred extremely dim lighting where my cellulite would be less likely to be discovered. I’d also perfected a sideways walk that allowed me to get out of bed and sidle out of a room while remaining in silhouette if, God forbid, I had to pee or get dressed to leave. I thought I was pulling off a sort of Mae West move, but apparently it was a bit awkward and it wasn’t unusual for the guy to ask, “What’s up with the limp?” During extreme body insecurity stretches, I’d been known to hold my pee all night long until I could furtively put my pants back on while still in bed and head to the bathroom—the downside being, after holding it all night, I probably peed louder than a camel. But with Billy, I could lie around buck naked playing chess, drinking beer, and making crank phone calls without feeling self-conscious.
For some people, comfortable may be the kiss of death; for me, it’s a drug. Every single morning when we woke up together, even if we’d had a vicious fight the night before, he told me I was beautiful and I chose to go with that. Hey, if a Lean Cuisine tells me it only contains three hundred calories and a third of a gram of fat, who am I to argue, even if it seems way too ridiculously tasty to be true?

One day, a passport arrived for him in the mail. “Why’d you go get a passport?” I asked, truly perplexed.
Doesn’t that seem like something you’d mention in casual conversation to the person you live with?

“Oh, Chet was getting a passport so I decided to go with him for the hell of it and went ahead and got one, too.” You didn’t need to be Perry Mason to find offering to share an entire afternoon standing in line in a government office suspect. It was like volunteering to work at the DMV.

“Really? ’Cause you never mentioned it,” I said, trying to sound casual.

“Jesus, what are you, my parole officer? Do I have to tell you everywhere I go? What’s the big deal? It’s a passport. I went to keep him company.”

“Then why get a passport? That just seems weird.”

“You are so needy and paranoid; I can’t even deal with you right now.” He did have a point there—which just showed how well he knew me, which proved I needed to work harder to keep him around. So I put it out of my mind.

Before I met Billy, I’d been single for a long time. I was incredibly picky, as I called it, or afraid of intimacy, as my
therapist called it. I found it tough to find men who didn’t annoy me. I’d put the kibosh on a second or third date with men who seemed otherwise nice for reasons that made perfect sense to me, like: Too passionate about bowling, showed up for a date wearing a beret, called me a “special lady,” owned every Tom Cruise movie, loved the Starship song, “We Built This City,” referred to wine as “vino,” counted carbs at every meal, saw no problem with mock turtlenecks, and one who thought that
Three’s Company
was breakthrough television.

I felt incredibly lucky to have finally found a guy who was funny, cute, smart, and didn’t irritate me by having opinions I didn’t share or quirks I didn’t find endearing. In my twenties, nonirritating trumped nice. Although, even in my thirties, nice inched up quite a bit but never overtook nonirritating.

A couple of days after the passport incident, the phone rang at 6 a.m. next to my side of the bed. I picked it up, and a woman’s voice asked if she could speak with Billy. He took the phone looking sheepish, and said, “Hello? Oh,
hi
…uh huh…um…can I call you when I get into the office in a little bit?” I felt a white heat travel through my entire body. How was he going to talk his way out of this one? Not wanting to support his notion that I was paranoid, I tried to play it cool.

“
Who the fuck was that?!
” I yelled, surprising myself and probably the residents of our entire apartment building.

“It’s not what you think,” he said, barely reacting to my rage. I hoped not, because what I thought was that the woman on the other line was his secret fiancée and that they
were deep in the planning stages of an extravagant wedding to which all of his friends and family were looking forward to, me his live-in girlfriend being the only nagging hangnail holding up the proceedings. The bitch was probably calling because she was freaking out over which calligrapher to go with for the invitations. “I really didn’t want to talk to you about this yet because it’s very premature, but I guess I have to now.”
Premature?
The wedding was probably only a few months away in my estimation.

“That was a woman calling me from Italy about a job I applied for at a television station there.”

He was right. It wasn’t what I was thinking. It was worse. He was leaving me to move halfway across the world. The asshole wouldn’t even be in stalking distance.

“How and when were you planning on telling me this? By calling me from a gelato parlor?” While I was gearing up for a huge fight, Billy had turned over on our futon and was actually thinking he’d go back to sleep. He didn’t even seem slightly worried I might stab him.

“I haven’t even interviewed yet. It’s not something I’m seriously considering. If it was, I would have absolutely told you.”

A month later, he was boxing up the rest of his belongings for the shipping company that would be coming to send his things to Rome. Luckily for him, he “happened” to have a passport.

“This doesn’t change anything,” he said. “We’re not breaking up.”

“Then why aren’t I coming with you?”

“Because,” he said, as if explaining to a toddler why she can’t have a sixth juice box, “I need to go have an adventure. And you wouldn’t have anything to do there.” An adventure that would be hampered by a girlfriend tagging along, obviously.

The bastard cried at the airport when I dropped him off. “Take good care of my car for me! Don’t forget to start the engine once a week!”

Then I didn’t hear from him. This was a pre–cell phone breakup, so it wasn’t completely clear to me that we were over until a month later when he finally called from work and said what he’d been saying without saying it from the first three months of our relationship on. “I don’t see myself ever marrying you. I’ve had my doubts for a while.” I was devastated. Why I continued starting his car for him once a week is beyond me.

That split left me vulnerable and got the attach/abandon cycle ball rolling. There was the guy who after a couple months of dating—each date initiated by him—left me a five-minute-long message on my voice mail to break things off, which I had the luck of checking while at work.

“Hey, it’s Ben. Sorry to leave this on your voice mail, but I just didn’t want to see you or I knew I’d just end up changing my mind because you are so damn hot.” (Full disclosure: He may not have said the thing about me being hot; I may have added that in my mind in retrospect to take the sting out.) “The thing is, I just don’t think I’m up for the type of
relationship you seem to want. I have a lot going on in my life, and although I really like you as a person, I simply know I won’t be able to meet your needs and will only end up disappointing you. So…” It went on and on from there; I wish there’d been an intermission. The funny thing is, I
knew
the relationship was going nowhere. The writing was on the wall, or, actually, on his nightstand in the form of a book called,
Obsessive Love: When It Hurts Too Much to Let Go.
And he wasn’t obsessed with
me.

Then there was Paul, my boyfriend of about four months, whose answering machine did the dirty work of breaking up with me for him. We woke up in his bed one morning to the sound of the phone ringing. He grabbed me, pulling me close for a snuggle, letting the machine get it while he sleepily reached for my breast. Bad move. After his outgoing message played, we both got to hear:

“Hey, babe, just reminding you that we have dinner with my parents tonight. Grab a couple bottles of that Chardonnay they like, will ya? Call me later.”

He wasn’t the only one who’d be grabbing a couple of bottles of wine for later.

Another guy I’d been dating for the better part of six months showed up on Valentine’s Day with a huge bag that did not hide a huge, adorable stuffed panda or a giant chocolate heart but four pounds of laundry he needed me to do because he had to go to Brazil on business for three weeks. I never received one phone call, but I did get a postcard featuring a sunny beach packed with topless girls in bikini bottoms
that read, “The weather’s beautiful, wish you were here!” It should have read, “The girls are gorgeous, glad you’re not here to cock block!” I never heard from him again.

But lest you think I’m a victim, many of these breakups or even failures to score a second date I had coming to me. I can only imagine what their reasons have been, but I’m assuming a few were that I cried on a first date—more than three times; on a double date I once made out with the “other guy” I’ve been known to be a bit needy, calling a guy once and then when he didn’t call back, calling three more times just to “check in” and too many talks about “our relationship”: “Where is it going?” “Do you see yourself getting married?” “How soon?” Oh, and then there was the time I got drunk and puked on a guy’s bath mat. Except he didn’t break up with me; he married me.

All this is not to say that I haven’t been on the giving end of quite a few “It’s over”s myself. My normal passive/aggressive approach to ending a short-term relationship has always been the time-honored practice of just not returning phone calls. I’ve always felt that it’s more humane than saying, “I’m sorry, but due to the fact that on our last date you yelled at the valet, undertipped the waiter, and wore a puka shell necklace, I can no longer imagine you inside me ever again.” I’ve never been great with the face-to-face. I have a friend with a membership to Match.com who goes on first dates like it’s her job. Because of this, she’s mastered the art of ending a relationship with the precision of a brain surgeon—and the bedside manner. She has no trouble just saying, “Sorry, it’s not going to work out.
But I wish you the best. Please don’t call me anymore.” I once employed her to call a guy I’d been out with on one date and knew I never wanted to see again but who continued to call me over and over. Since I’d only been out with him once, I banked on him not recognizing my voice and had her do it. I hear he took it well.

Another time I actually faked a tonsillectomy that would put me out of commission for weeks in the hopes that the guy I was dating would meet someone new in the meantime. It might have worked if I hadn’t run into him a week later at a 7-Eleven buying a six-pack of beer. “It helps with the healing,” I said as hoarsely as possible. I suppose I deserved being called a bitch, but really I kind of dodged a bullet. I mean, hey, a guy who can just fly off the handle that easily is someone I’m glad I avoided!

But by far the most dramatic breakup was fortunately the last one before I met my husband.

I’d been trying to end a disastrous nine-month affair for quite a while when it finally culminated with me having to pull a Tori Spelling. This is a maneuver that I learned straight from a Lifetime movie awesomely titled
Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?
starring woman-in-peril Tori Spelling. In the movie, Tori’s character falls in love with a guy but then figures out he’s totally psycho so she tries to break up with him. Unfortunately, as it often goes with psychos, he doesn’t take the news so well and he drugs her, kidnaps her, and hauls her to a cabin in the woods, where, of course, no one can hear her scream. But when Tori comes out of her drug stupor to
find psycho berating her for betraying him, she keeps her wits about her and comes up with the perfect ploy: She tells him that she’s madly in love with him but that it’s her
mother
who’s keeping them apart. He and his ever so slightly dysfunctional personality are not the problem at all! This confuses him, like when you hide a tennis ball behind a dog’s head and the dog gets disoriented and starts to walk in circles, not knowing what to believe. That’s when Tori makes a break for it. Luckily, I had seen the movie fairly recently when I found myself in an emergency situation.

This was one of those relationships that in retrospect makes you question yourself and your judgment. I might as well have been taking a catnap on railroad tracks, thinking, “Surely a train won’t be coming by anytime soon.” The man in question and I started out as friends but soon found ourselves dating. He called me constantly from the time we started hanging out. My friends found it weird, but I found having a guy I was really into calling me ten times a day to be sort of cool and intense. He wasn’t codependent; he just needed to know my schedule! He was just thinking about me! He had a funny thing to tell me! Of course, there’s a fine line between “a little too into me” and “a fucking lunatic.” He was always a moody guy, either brooding for days and drinking way too much, or full of manic energy, planning Vegas getaways at the spur of the moment and drinking way too much. At first I found his moods sexy and interesting, mistaking his brooding as existential angst—when in actuality he was just out of Vicodin. I also sometimes mistook his giddy moods as being
extra in love with me when really he was just excited that he’d gotten away with shoplifting.