You're Making Me Hate You (18 page)

Now, before we get into this messy text, let’s outline what the word “relationship” actually entails, shall we? To do that, I’m going to go right to
Dictionary.com
for the definition, but fear not: there will still be running commentary (and maybe a dick joke).

re·la·tion·ship [ri-
ley
-sh
uh
n-ship]
noun

1.
a connection, association, or involvement.

Well, that’s real helpful, isn’t it? It’s pretty damn general if you ask me. … People have connections, associations, and involvements with a lot of things, such as lactose, TV psychics, and clothes dryers during use if you lean in close and correctly.

2.
connection between persons by blood or marriage.

Okay, that’s getting a little more specific. This could mean anything from marriage to sibling rivalry. Being in a band has the feel of both, without the sexy payoffs. Well, I guess it depends on who you’re in a band with …

3.
an emotional or other connection between people:
the relationship between teachers and students.

That can take on a whole
list
of other meanings—way to go, web. “The relationship between teachers and students”
…
that could mean anything from how much I hated my ninth-grade English teacher to the lady who went to prison because she fucked her student so many times they had kids together.

4.
a sexual involvement; affair.

Bingo: the Hunka Chunka. That’s what I call a relationship. I believe that’s what everybody else in the world considers a relationship as well.

Relationships can be intense, like a heated romance or rivalry. They can be fairly innocuous, like the way we treat coworkers or people we go to church with—not that I would know anything
about that. It can be a specific energy between yourself and a nonhuman, like food, clothes, and such. Relationships are the balance one strikes between oneself and the outside world. It’s a very relative term, because everyone has a relationship with something or someone. It’s like referring to something as “natural.” No shit, Mr. Holmes. Thanks for the fucking head’s-up.

Another relationship we all have to deal with is with our family, blood or otherwise. I have to be honest: it’s getting brutal out there. Family reunions, established as a way for tight-knit broods to stay close as they grew up and moved away, have now become something of a UFC title fight with fried chicken and that shitty lime-green Jell-O that no one eats. There are whole limbs and branches of family trees that can never be spoken of in certain company. “Why aren’t the Boones here this year?” “
Fuck
those people—Janice can’t keep her
fucking
mouth shut!” Seriously, it’s like
Game of Thrones
with a softball game at the end that no one really wants to be a part of but everybody desperately wants to win.

I have been blessed with an amazing family here in what I call the “Afternoon of My Life.” My wife’s family has accepted me in a way I’ve never felt before in all my years on this plane. So let me say, with all the love in the world … they are
the
biggest bunch of crazy people I have ever known in my life. From the Bonnicis to the Bennetts, every one of them is wonderful, weird, and utterly unforgettable. They are ALL LOUD. They are incredibly opinionated. They love with the strength of the Hulk on deep Gamma saturation. They scare me a little, and I love every minute I get to be with them. Don’t get me wrong: I love my side of the family as well. But my family is a little more scattered, and there are only a handful I’m really close with, like my Gram and my cousins. My in-laws? They are a lot like if the Avengers and the Justice League got together for Margarita
Monday and decided to spend the whole night debating everything from quantum physics to why
Quantum Leap
should have
never
been canceled.

Every dinner starts and ends the same way: screaming over the top of each other. Here’s the scene: fifteen of us all waiting for a table at the Cheesecake Factory. Some are milling about outside smoking cigarettes and others are inside making comments about the many and varied cheesecake flavors that have manifested over the years. “Turtle cheesecake: why would they have turtle cheesecake? I bet it’s rich …” We finally get a table outside under the heaters, and the Bataan Dinner March begins. Some break off to go to the bathroom and thereby spend another ten minutes trying to find the table, hoping the others ordered the appetizers they wanted. It takes another thirty minutes to decide what everyone wants to eat.

The whole time the conversation swings from the important—“I really think she needs to go to the doctor, that thing looks swollen”—to the banal—“I am
not
taking down my Christmas lights! Those colors are seasonal, and I think they look better in the summer anyway!”—to the insane—“You do this
every
time we come here. We
know
you’re upset they changed your favorite dish, Corey. Suck it up and get a damn hamburger.” Eventually the debate begins over who owes what and how to tip and who wants the leftovers. Finally the long loud procession moves toward the front door, where, as most of us smoke, the good-byes take another thirty minutes to bid farewell to people we will most likely see the very next day. This is a typical night out for dinner: five minutes driving, ten minutes waiting, thirty minutes eating, two hours talking about pretty much anything that comes to mind. You may think it’s a bit crazy, but I love it.

I suppose that, besides family, the one relationship we all have in common is the herald of pain and compensation rogue CDs:
the girlfriend/boyfriend. For a lot of us this is our last taste of an uninitiated experience. I mean, let’s face it: we grow up with family, we come of age developing friendships, and in between we’re all just adjusting to responsibilities like education, respect, and ethics. And just when you think you’ve got the whole science of life on a lockdown, puberty comes and hits you in the nuts and tits and throws this wrench called sexual tension in the bitch’s brew. As an adolescent—not quite young and sure as shit not old—this is like having to start from scratch because, depending on what your sexual preference turns out to be, you have to relearn who you are all over again. The end result can be awesome, but that shit ain’t right.

So with that kind of adversity hanging over all our heads at such an early age, we proceed to trounce down a path of ridiculous mistakes that eventually leads to the idiocy we can all relate to, gay or straight, man or woman: the Dating Scene. Seems simple here on digital “paper”: having years of experience trying and failing to attract members of the opposite or identical sex, you’d think we’d have worked the kinks out, pun intended. But as it turns out, life and karma have even more strange adventures for you to endure. Funny that: anything else we’d spent half our lives working at we might actually get better at. Actually, because we spend so much time doing it the
wrong
way, we get set in those wrong ways and develop hang-ups, aversions, and cold silences. What in the virtual fuck is
that
?

The crazy thing is that romantic relationships can lead to sex—something any sane person would
love
to do. With that in mind, you’d think we’d put more effort into figuring out the best way through the mind field. Nope. Not even close. I’ve got it sorted. Here’s the thing: for guys, when it comes to other men or women, we almost always revert unconsciously to whatever worked the first time we got someone into bed. It doesn’t matter
if it was ninth grade or last week, guys have a tendency to compartmentalize the shit that works and forget what wasn’t effective, thereby giving them a wheelhouse they can consult when in jeopardy. However, we as dudes forget the cardinal rule: all keys do
not
work on all doors. Men and women have different things that turn them on, and believing that one way works across the board, sexual or otherwise, is a recipe for disastrous relationships. If men can just learn to adapt to each situation until they find the one that fulfills them the most, they would be a lot happier, as would their partners, and they’d spend less time at Happy Hour or pounding the shit out of the heavy bag at the gym.

Women have a worse dilemma: they watch too many fucking movies.

Nicholas Sparks and all those others have
got
to fucking stop with the sappy, saccharine rom-com dramedy flicks that make all men on Earth look like either spineless wishy-washy ball bags or knuckle-dragging shit heels who don’t give a shit about anything other than cars, beer, and pussy. Although some men certainly fit that bill, shit just ain’t like that. But you women watch Ryan Gosling and Josh Duhamel and fucking think, “Why can’t more men be like them?” Simple: IT IS A FuckING MOVIE. They’re like that because the SCRIPT DICTATES SUCH. Not saying they’re not decent chaps in real life, but Judas fucking Iscariot …
The Notebook
?
The Vow
? Are you completely fucking with me? Shit like that is possible but not plausible; real life keeps going past the happy endings and rolling credits. But regardless of the chances of things like this happening, women heap these expectations on us men, who can barely keep the “brown parentheses” out of our Hanes briefs (easy: no more white underwear). You want to talk about walking into the game with a handicap? Men have a snow cone’s chance in a furnace of making a woman
happy on their own merits. So most men fake it for a while but then give up because it’s fucking exhausting. How many more times can we stand in the rain and tell you how we waited for you forever, praying to God that our shirt looks good across our pecks even though we didn’t do that many push-ups that morning? Christ, it’s like playing baseball blindfolded while you’re swinging at grenades.

I’m not saying all men and women are like that; I’m saying most men and women fall into these traps. But I can also see the “disease” spreading. If there were a worldwide survey laden with honesty, I bet it would show masturbation is on the rise on both sides of the gender fences. I can’t blame people: who the fuck wants that kind of pressure when it comes to something that should feel good inside and out? Look, I’m no Dr. Ruth, but I can tell the difference between smart choices and incompetent theory. The problem comes when no one talks to each other. How the fuck are we suppose to
really
know what turns someone on without actually getting to know them? None of us can be bothered. If we spent more time talking and less time texting, we’d pick up on so much more. People can’t even look up from their smartphones long enough to pay attention to where they are
walking
. You expect them to have the capacity to put in the kind of effort it takes to get to know someone past name, rank, and what they order at Starbucks? Good fucking luck.

This isn’t just a romantic problem. People of the planet Earth are trying to download themselves into tiny screens and fancy-looking Oakley sunglasses. They consider time spent surfing the social networking sites the same as hanging out with real live flesh-and-blood humans. Then why are we all so uncomfortable and awkward when we sit down with other humans? It’s very simple: real life has no memes, no headers, no tweet history, no bios, and no portfolios of pictures to pick through at your
most convenient disposal. You have to actually
talk
to people. That’s how you get to know someone. Sorry that sharing space with “icky humans” isn’t as sterile and clinical as you’d like it. Then again, after seeing what goes on in these “clubs,” I wouldn’t want to hang out with other people either. From the shit I witness on the dance floor to what some of these dudes try to do to women when they think they’ve had enough booze to get away with it, those seem to be the grossest places ever imagined. Even Caligula would stay home. If you go to those places, I’m telling you now: your evening is going to end with gonorrhea at best and
Law & Order: SVU
at worst.

To quote an eight-year-old kid who once kicked me in the nuts, “They’re all butts … and farts.”

Let’s whittle down what is essential to having a relationship with another person of either sex. You see, I think we need a checklist for the first year of a relationship. This would be known as the “Deal Breaker contract.” Pretty standard stuff: for the first twelve months of the relationship there will be a number of violations deemed acceptable for termination at any time, regardless of the other person’s feelings. I think this will solve two issues humans suffer from: (1) fear of that exit conversation and the crushing guilt that comes with it, and (2) after enough time living with this contract, it will leave more people comfortable with the idea of talking when they know it’s not working out and less people stuck in shitty relationships that go on for years with no way of making them any better, no matter how many pity kids you have or how many times you try to give each other what you think you want. Like I said before, if you don’t learn to talk to each other, not only will you never find out what your partner likes, but you’ll also never know when things aren’t going well. That’s the only limbo I believe in: no babies who were never baptized, no innocent souls waiting for the rapture—just
millions of people who can’t speak to one another, thereby living as strangers and dying miserable.

Anyway, my checklist would break down like this.

Month One would be called the “free one.” This is usually the month spent getting to know each other anyway, so it makes the most sense to commit the most flagrant fouls in this time period because there’s a good chance the other person might consider them quaint or precocious—they still don’t really
know
you! These could just be nervous quirks that might be ironed out over time! Besides, what’s a month hurt? Anyone can afford a month—a month is not a decade. Give yourself a little time together. However, you need to pay attention to the reactions concerning your weirdness. If there is genuine laughter there, you might be okay; that’s some shit you can keep doing if you like. But if it’s met with things like nervous laughter, stifling silence, eye rolling, or a stone cold frown, you might want to add this to the list of things that will come up next month.