* * *
Hockey Warehouse Guy and I had been together for eight months when I was leaving for college. I tried to talk to him about breaking up. Or at least not having such an ironclad exclusivity agreement. Or at least about how my living two thousand miles away might change our relationship. He got upset that I even brought it up. Was I planning on leaving him? Cheating on him? I assured him I was not because how can you say, “Yeah, well, I’m certainly not as jazzed about this relationship as you are, and college would be a clean break.” You can’t be eighteen years old and say that. At least, I could not.
So I entered college as I’d sworn I never would: with a boyfriend. More prepared than ever to be chill.
The hockey warehouse and then Hockey Warehouse Guy himself had taught me—trained me—how to garner male attention and approval. I knew how to always let him pick the music and the movie and the date. I knew how to let him and his friends be the stars of the show. I knew exactly what to do, and more often what not to do, in order to be liked. I learned how to be quieter.
I took all of that knowledge to college. Plus I had the added benefit of having a long-distance boyfriend. You can easily become invisible to men when you’re dating someone else because really, upsettingly, most straight cis eighteen-year-old guys are not all that interested in female friendship. They’re also simply not very good at it—they’ve been taught to relate to women as sex/dating objects and when that’s off the table, they’re not sure what to do. This is true in the reverse as well. A lot of young people have no idea how to untangle attraction and friendship with certain people. Being eighteen is all about being a horny, hormonal dipshit.
Even though I already had a boyfriend, I was not ready to cede to anonymity. I wasn’t ready to disappear. Frankly, I didn’t even like my boyfriend that much, and college often felt like being free of him, but he did give me a bit of a gift: if you play your cards right, you can make being in a relationship a facet of your chillness. The mere existence of a boyfriend gave me license to be a whole lot more relaxed around straight guys, a group that had historically made me extremely nervous. The answer to “Do you like me?” was suddenly unimportant, as was the very question itself. I was liked by some guy (my older boyfriend) somewhere (Missouri), and if someone on the fifth floor of the Birnkrant honors dorm didn’t want to fuck me, well, tough shit; I wasn’t free to fuck anyway. I made friends with women, too, to be sure. My roommate Shelby and I were the closest roommates on our entire floor, probably. We were obsessed with each other; we kept each other up almost every night just laughing. But for the first time in my entire life, most of my friends were guys.
By the end of freshman year, I’d made enough male friends and gotten enough male attention that breaking up with Hockey Warehouse Guy didn’t seem like a loss, but a gain. Despite my conviction that it was the right thing to do, it remains possibly the hardest thing I’ve done. Hurting someone who doesn’t know the hurt is coming is the worst. I was stupid about it, too. First, I broke up with him during the summer after freshman year.
It started when he asked me to marry him. Well, more specifically, it started because he asked me via text if he should ask my dad’s permission for my hand in marriage. He literally said “hand in marriage” in the year of our Lord 2012. I mean, please. Please. He had never outright proposed to me before, but he talked about it a lot. He talked about how it would be the best day of his life when he proposed, and how he believed all men felt the same. He talked about us honeymooning in Ireland. When his uncle got married, he insisted we go along to the engagement photo shoot to get our own pictures taken and I worried he was going to propose there, while someone was photographing my reaction. Which would have been one of horror, by the way. I had told him from the beginning that I was not into marriage, which was true at the time because I thought marriage and weddings were feminine and therefore pathetic but also because I did not like him and the thought of a lifetime with him quite literally made my heart race. In a bad way. But he was never any good at listening to me, so he asked me what I thought about him getting my dad’s blessing for us to wed and that was the final straw. I knew I needed to break up with him because I was never going to want to marry him.
He was away on a work trip—keep in mind he worked for my dad’s company, which was a complicating factor. I think I realized while he was gone how much nicer my summer back home was when he wasn’t around, when I could see friends and family and not spend my time coddling him and walking him through all his bad days at work. I don’t really remember much about the first breakup because I was so scared. I panicked, called him, broke up, hung up, and then sat around in my living room with my mom and my sister and I made a bunch of jokes about it. I remember thinking, This is the funniest I’ve ever been, even though I don’t remember any of what I said. I just know I was elated. Weightless. Giddy. I was so excited to be single. I was so glad I wasn’t going to have to marry him.
But the next day I woke up feeling the worst brand of horror: guilt. He called me and texted me about how sad he was and how he was thinking about leaving the work trip early to fly home, which I knew would not look good for him as an employee, especially because he was vying for a promotion. He was very into rash decision-making and my role was usually to talk him down. This time, my role was to agree to get back together. I kept telling him over and over during this call that I didn’t want to waste his time because he wanted to get married and I didn’t. Again, I was nineteen! He insisted that if I thought there was any chance that we might get married in the future, it wouldn’t be a waste of time. I, being the nineteen-year-old that I was, wanting the pain of the breakup to stop, told him, mostly honestly, that I didn’t think we’d ever get married, but of course there was some chance. And that was enough for him. He stayed on the work trip. A month later he got the promotion and I went back to USC.
I paid for him to fly out in September. He had never been on a plane before and he hated it, which probably set the tone for the entire trip. He was thrilled to see me and I was indifferent. It felt like my grandparents had just shown up to a night out. I couldn’t stand him being around my friends because the person I was with him was not the person I was with my friends. With him, I was more meek, I was less fun, I listened to country music and let him open car doors for me. At college I was still deferential to men, but it played out differently. I laughed at their stories, I went along with their dumb ideas, I took every dare.
As soon as he left at the end of his weeklong visit, I felt pure relief. I was noticeably happier; my friends commented on it. My roommate Shelby urged me to break up with him. October 2 was a Tuesday and I had decided that I needed to do it once and for all. I needed to break up with him, and I had to do it over the phone again, this time because we were long distance and not because I was a coward. I made a plan to wait until Friday of that week because I felt like I should give him the weekend to process it before he had to go into work and see my fucking dad—his boss. Also, I had asked him two days earlier to do me a favor and buy flowers for my mom and leave them at her house because it was her birthday and I couldn’t figure out how to send flowers to her from LA that weren’t eighty-nine dollars. So I knew I couldn’t break up with him while he was doing that errand for me.
When we got on the phone for our daily phone call I panicked (a theme for me) and adrenaline surged through me and I broke up with him. I don’t know how I said it. I mean, I know I said some version of “This isn’t working and I don’t want to marry you.” I know he asked me repeatedly where this was coming from and I had no answer to give because I couldn’t be like, “The entire relationship.” He asked if we could keep talking, as friends, which I said yes to because I felt evil and would have done pretty much anything to feel less cruel. Breaking up with him was probably the least chill thing I did in our entire relationship; maybe the only not-chill thing I ever did.
So the next two days we had our normal daily phone call and he texted me throughout the
day and I knew, I just knew, that this was his way of trying to keep us together, but the thing was I had no desire to even be friends with him. I didn’t like him as a person at all. If I had met him in college, I wouldn’t have spoken to him after the first time. He was boring and conservative and traditional and he didn’t actually give a shit about me and I didn’t give a shit about him. I wanted a fuck buddy and he wanted a wife and neither of us cared to find out who the other person was until it was way too late. I don’t know that he ever did find out who I was. I worked up more adrenaline and told him we had to stop talking. He was distraught. He told me he had been planning to fly out to LA to surprise me and talk me into getting back together. I can’t think of anything that would have made things worse than that plan. I told him in no uncertain terms to not do that. And then we hung up and I never talked to him again.
I felt consumed by guilt. I felt certain that I was responsible for messing up this guy’s whole life. How will a guy who works in a hockey warehouse with all men find another girlfriend, a future wife—his only goal? I felt guilty because I knew I hated commitment and exclusivity. Why the hell had I even agreed to date anyone? I swore to never date anyone seriously ever again, lest I ever wanted to leave someone. Here I had ruined Hockey Warehouse Guy’s life, when I only ever wanted to make men happy.XVIII After a couple of days of self-flagellation, I took a nice long bath and in the bath I farted and bubbles came up and it made me laugh so hard that I remember knowing, “Sophia, you’ll be just fine.”
SECTION TWO,
in which I try really hard to impress shitty men, discover Skinnygirl piña colada mix, and learn how to do eye makeup.I
One Time I Listened to the Sara Bareilles Song “Brave” to Work Up the Courage to Ask a Guy Out (I’m Embarrassed for Me Too)
Once I broke up with Hockey Warehouse Guy, some part of me half assumed/half expected that I would be getting dicked down on the regular. It wasn’t that I thought I was hot. This expectation was a function of the number of times I had heard some version—mostly explicitly stated, occasionally hinted at—of “You’re a woman; you can get laid anytime you want.” Straight cis men are convinced of this “truth,” which is not a truth at all. Straight cis men say this a lot. It’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard and I worked with improv actors for years; I’ve heard stupid things.I Sex being available for any and all women practically on demand is perhaps the only myth more omnipresent than the myth that sex with straight men is rewarding or worthwhile.II
I can’t be sure of why precisely I failed to find casual sex partners as often as I would’ve liked, but I have my suspicions. I’m stabbing in the dark here but I would guess that it was a heady combination of (1) the times my “too-much” (actual) personality would break through the chillness, (2) the scent of desperation lingering around my person, (3) the abundance of other more chill and more hot casual sex options, and—perhaps the biggest issue of all—(4) none of us knowing what the fuck we were doing or how to initiate casual sex.
I had the idea in my head that everyone else magically knew how to hook up with one another. That they’d gotten a head start in high school that I hadn’t. I knew for a damned fact that I had never even texted a guy not-about-homework before I was eighteen, and I felt sure that every other person had already perfected the art of casual but flirty, chill but encouraging messages. In reality, I think all of us were kind of stumbling around in the dark, hoping to hook up with people, praying for no one to get hurt by or disappointed in us.
If you want to know my deepest, darkest, most shameful secret, it’s that some of the best advice I ever got came from the horrendous film We Bought a Zoo. At one point, Matt Damon tells one of his kids, “Sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage.” I could be paraphrasing or misremembering the quote, which is fine with me. I’m not going to rewatch We Bought a Zoo just to get this right. But this is excellent advice when it comes to being vulnerable, because there’s no way through it but, well, through it. You basically just have to accept that opening up to people and getting love and sex requires moments of really dumb courage. This is a speech I’ve given to multiple friends while very, very drunk and I always cite where I got the advice from because my friends deserve to know that it’s from We Bought a Zoo before they follow it.
The truth of the matter is that almost everyone in college was horny all the time and many (or at least a handful of) people probably would have been down to bone me; I just didn’t understand how to get out of my own way and make it happen. Most of the hookups I did have came from myself and another person being incredibly, excruciatingly awkward and fighting through that in order to have a chance at sex. One time, for example, I commenced a friends-with-benefits situation because I jokingly said I loved barbecue sauce so much that I would suck it off a dick and a guy was like, “How much are you joking about the barbecue thing?” We had sex, although we never, ever, ever involved barbecue sauce in it, because I was NOT serious. I don’t think. Anyway, he and I hooked up on and off for a few years at the end of college, mostly when he got drunk enough not to care that he would feel weird and apologetic about it the next day. I always felt like it was no big deal. What’s a blow job in the shower between friends?
But perhaps I thought it was “no big deal” because I was desperate as hell. I had always enjoyed flirting with guys while dating Hockey Warehouse Guy because it had seemed harmless,III and now I was ready to actually do some rumbling. Get ready for cringey shit because I’m about to dump a whole load of it on you. I would walk to class with earphones in and purposefully be really smiley and happy, assuming that people would want to… I don’t know… stop me on their way to chem lab and ask me to fuck? I was fanatical about wearing perfume. I tanned constantly. I shaved my legs every day.IV I worked out daily and hung around my apartment and friends’ apartments in vaguely slutty—FOR A MIDWESTERN HORSE GIRL—loungewear that didn’t actually look that good on me and just made me seem like I was trying too hard. I went to three football games and got very sunburned and even more bored. I mean, I really tried.
More than anything else, I showed up to everything. God fucking forbid I miss even one fun night where a guy I’d known for weeks or months or semesters might realize that after all this time it had always been me; he wanted to fuck me. Imagine: You see me—almost as if in slow motion—across the beer-pong table, laughing with my dozens of friends about getting the words to “Just a Friend” by Biz Markie wrong and realize, “Wow. Sophia? How could I have overlooked her?” I didn’t want a guy to actually fall in love with me—that seemed overwhelming and icky—I just wanted someone to be, like… very into hanging out and sleeping with me. I wanted late nights in someone else’s dorm and walks of shame and hookup disaster stories that I could share with friends. So I showed up all the time. But it’s very hard to be mysterious or alluring, or to embody any other facet of desirability, when you’re around constantly. I’m not saying that it’s bad to show up all the time, or that you can hang out with your friends too much. I am saying that if you’re around people all the time and they haven’t tried to fuck you, maybe they don’t want to fuck you. And maybe being around people a lot is not the way to convince someone they want you.
Because of my desperation, almost every experience that involved a semi-attractive guy felt laden with meaning. Just bursting full of what I thought were opportunities to flirt and what everyone else thought were normal everyday experiences. By my sophomore year I was friends with pretty much exclusively guys, who hung out with pretty much exclusively guys. Often, I’d go to a friend’s apartment to play beer pong with six to eight guys and one of them would have invited another group of friends over and when that new group arrived, it would be made up of six to eight guys with their own Token Chill Girl. That’s college, babyyyyy!
Anyway, because I was friends predominantly with men out of desperation for male attention—literally if I had gotten laid sooner after my breakup with Hockey Warehouse Guy,
I think I would have made way more female friends in college—I leveled up into a somehow even chiller Chill Girl.
Before I continue, I want to clarify that while I was attempting constantly to be a chill girl, I was not always succeeding.V Often, I would suppress my thoughts and words and personality for as long as possible, pushing things down like a trash compactor until I would explode at seemingly random times with anger and irritation and anxiety. These explosions became more and more fun when I started drinking late in my sophomore year. And by fun I mean mortifying. I would end up in the parking lot of a Panda Express, passive-aggressively ignoring half of my friends for something hurtful they’d done two hours ago, or halfway through a party I’d climb out onto the structurally unsound roof of my apartment to have a panic attack. But day-to-day, and without the influence of Skinnygirl piña colada mix, I was really becoming an expert at chillness.
The key to my leveling up was one of the most classic attention grabs of all time: [confetti trumpet emoji] hating women! I made jokes about women being bad drivers, annoying girlfriends, and emotional wrecks. Yes, outside of being sexist, these are terrible, pedestrian jokes. And while many men loved getting to talk shit about women to a woman, I think a lot of them found it grating, weird, and annoying. I remember many people hearing my “jokes” and responding with “Jesus Christ.” Which I hoped was awe, but which was likely disgust. Probably a few of them even did the simple math and calculated that if I was that loud about hating women, I probably just hated myself.
Well, This Is Exhausting Page 10