Well, This Is Exhausting

by Sophia Benoit

  Make excuses with person number one (e.g., “I have to go to the bathroom,” “Oh, did Kaitlyn just get here?,” “All my parakeets died last night; I need a minute alone on the balcony”) and move on to the next thing. Go refill your drink in the kitchen, then join in the discussion about the Lindbergh babyVII in the living room. Mingle, mix, be. The verb of the moment is to flit. Yes, flit. Flit around finding new people. Ask these new people questions! If you’re interested in other people, people will think you’re interesting. Of course, don’t only speak in interrogatives. Drop a personal anecdote every once in a while.

  Be hilarious. Sorry if I forgot to mention it earlier, but you’re going to need to be at least a little funny during these interactions you’ve been having. The only way to get around this requirement is if you are 10/10 hot and very, very kind. Like not nice, kind.

  Make friends with the pets. Everyone loves their pets and that means you need to love their pets. I mean, you should anyway—animals are angels and I’ll never forgive humans for stamping out biodiversity. Play with the dog. Pet the cat. If it’s a hamster or a tree frog, I’m not suggesting that you go in and scoop it out of its cage and try to be Steve Irwin. Just appreciate the pet! Comment on how cute they are. Remember its name. Make the dog like you the most of any of the guests. This could unlock the whole thing.

  Circle around the hottest person at the party, occasionally throwing in the absolute quippiest, funniest lines that make everyone roar with laughter. “Is she serious?” ARE YOU? You don’t even know where the joke stops and the truth begins, hahahaha funny!!!! FUN! You’re funny!!!!! Sardonic, even!!! Get a little close to being “too dark” and then pull back and be effervescent again!!!

  The energy drink and the adrenal rush of being around a bunch of people who are performing loose approximations of Having Fun is making your mania reach new heights. You feel like you’re in a low-budget commercial for vodka. Ask people more questions! Bring up a funny joke from forty-five minutes ago: “Hahaha, remember Mona at the fridge trying to open the beer?” More questions! Start flirting if you haven’t been already! Tease people about their home state (classic flirt); steal a cute person’s hat and put it on your own head (a flirt that happens in movies a lot); laugh so hard at a medium-funny joke that alcohol almost comes up your nose and then laugh at yourself for that (one of the best flirts of all time). Someone call you Bob Dylan because you are freewheelin’!!!!

  Everyone loves you. You can tell. You know everyone loves you. People are saying it. They’re like, “Oh my God, you’re so funny!!!!” and “I love you!!” and “We should totally go to CinespiaVIII this summer,” which you heartily agree with, even though you are not the kind of person who can sit on a picnic blanket on the ground for three hours without major hip pain. The more they love you, the deeper in you go. Their adoration is fueling you. You’re riding a high that rivals drugs. I don’t know enough about drugs to tell you which drugs it rivals. Maybe you do? Great.

  You’ve had a lot to drink and you make the mistake of going to the bathroom. The relative silence of the bathroom is suffocating, almost… poetic? You look in the mirror while washing your hands and start thinking about how your world really only exists in the bathroom; who knows what’s going on outside the door anymore? Isn’t it crazy that you’re you?? Like, you’re having your life experiences while other people are having their life experiences? This is the most alive you’ve ever felt; the most you! Here in this bathroom and, oh God, you’re really drunk, huh? Shit. Okay. Pull it together. Collect yourself. Get back out there!

  In the two minutes you’ve been in the bathroom—it has been two minutes, right?—somehow the entire party tone has shifted. What a betrayal! Everyone is sitting down now. People are on the couch; some are even under blankets. There is scientifically no way to be the life of this kind of get-together. People are sleepy, they’re worn-out. This makes you think: perhaps you were the linchpin holding the party atmosphere together; no one could hold shit down for two minutes while you peed? What role are you supposed to play now? Are you supposed to stick around for the maudlin, waterlogged end of the party? Are we all gonna watch Step Brothers on Blu-ray? Are we doing raucous commentary over it or are we falling asleep scattered across the apartment like a litter of puppies?

  Panic.

  Don’t say goodbye to anyone; they don’t care that you’re leaving. Why the fuck would anyone care that you’re leaving? Are you going to go around to each person and offer your condolences regarding how much they’ll miss you after you’re gone? Deranged. No. Wait until the focus is on something not-you (everyone trying to get the TV to work, a new person who just arrived with an edible arrangement, the hottest person in the room speaking) and then slip out the front door into the night, Uber arrival time be damned.

  Stand and wait in the wet grass (grass is always so wet at night!!) while your eyes adjust to the dark. Ahh, it’s so nice and quiet out here. And you were just the life of the party.

  I Check to Make Sure My Boyfriend Is Still Breathing When He’s Sleeping

  I have written about sex and relationships for quite a while. I got into it basically by loving only to write (and read and talk) about being horny and by never actually becoming an expert in anything else other than Fleetwood Mac intra-band drama. I’ve had a relationship advice column in some form or another for years. After reading this far into this book, you may question my ability to give advice, which I think is fair of you! Anyway, perhaps the number one question I get in some form or another from women and nonbinary folks is: Am I crazy?I

  Am I crazy to leave this person who treats me poorly? Am I crazy to leave this person who treats me well? Am I crazy for being sad that my parents didn’t want to come to my graduation? Am I crazy for asking my partner to be kinder to my pet? Am I crazy to be offended when my partner asks me to dress differently? Am I crazy for moving in together, for wanting children, for demanding he get a divorce before we date, for asking her to stop commenting on how much I eat, for being mad that they locked me out of the house?

  That’s the big question on everybody’s lips:II Am I being unreasonable?III

  Women are near-constantly being told they’re being unreasonable; this is the sternum of the question, “Am I crazy?” You do not ask, “Am I nuts?” unless you’ve been told over and over again that you are. Women obsessively check in with one another, relying on consensus as a barometer of their behavior. We have been made to distrust our instincts, to question our requirements, to lower our standards. To believe that if something is upsetting us, we must be responding to it wrong, somehow, because the other person must be right. We must be crazy.

  This tiny flame of self-doubt burns across all kinds of interactions. The late-night requests from your boss, the weird, shitty phone calls from your dad, the way your friend’s boyfriend talks over you all the time. Am I being crazy for asking for better treatment? For expecting more? The answer is (almost) always no.IV No, you are not crazy for finding your partner’s friends’ pranks mean. No, you’re not unreasonable for asking your girlfriend to meet your parents. No, you’re not a bitch for insisting that your roommate take out the trash as often as you do.

  The thing is, women are—generally speaking—not supposed to have boundaries or expectations of others. It kills other people’s vibe, and if you have one job as a woman, it’s to not in any way harm the vibe. This is especially true in romantic partnerships. In fact, there are few places where the stakes feel higher, where there’s more pressure to go along with someone else’s expectations, than a romantic relationship.

  In the beginning, it’s little things that you’re asked to put more effort into, like staying over at their place instead of yours every time, hanging out with their friends more, engaging in their hobbies but never asking them to engage in yours. Anything to fit into their life easier, while they make little to no effort to fit into yours. All of this is especially true if you’re dating a man. If you’ve dated straight cis men, you’v
e probably sat and watched at least one of them play video games as part of a “date.” No man has ever sat quietly and watched me read romance novels. You might be asking, “What the fuck would he get out of sitting there and watching you read romance novels?” Well, the same exact experience I get out of sitting there watching him play Call of Duty. But early in a relationship women are often asked to explicitly signal that we will not disrupt a man’s life in any way. Women are, as a general rule, extremely good at reading the room and then catering to the desires of others. And nowhere does the need to track and manage someone else’s preferences manifest more strongly than in the early stages of a relationship, when becoming something other than yourself always seems so appealing.

  Obviously, everyone shifts a little during the opening salvo of dating. None of us brings our full whole self to the table on the first date. I don’t come in a bar, plop down, and say, “Let’s be honest, I shut down a lot in the face of minor criticism and need a lot of attention.” We all perform a shinier version of ourselves for potential partners, but one of the ways that a woman excels at being appealing is by molding herself into whatever her counterpart wants, or whatever she thinks they might want. And we’re pretty good at it. We pick up the other person’s expectations and shift ourselves so subtly as to make it seem brilliant of them that they like to hike. What a sexy hobby you have. I’m so down to go on that hike; I’ve never been. Can you believe it? I’ve lived here four years! What an adventure. I’ve been meaning to be more outdoorsy and then you came along and created an opportunity for me to be a better person by taking up your hobby.

  There is a subtle, albeit meaningful shift, after the relationship becomes “official” (as if you’ve registered the fact that you’re dating a guy named Connor with a bureaucratic body somewhere). As soon as a hetero relationship gets serious, gendered expectations morph a bit. Namely, they become more care-centric. Here is how I’ve seen it play out among my straight friends and acquaintances: the woman slowly starts taking over small tasks like remembering if a friend’s birthday is on Friday or Saturday, bringing a bottle of wine for dinner, scrubbing the grout in the bathroom. Then the tasks get a little bigger—doing friendship maintenance for her boyfriend, planning the unfun part of vacations, calling Spectrum and yelling at them about how the bill goes up every month. Somewhere in there, these tasks become something that the guy they’re dating doesn’t value; sometimes, he claims he doesn’t think those tasks need to get done at all.

  It’s a stroke of genius, really. To have someone take over the unfun parts of your life. Then when they say, “This is too much work for me,” you can reply with, “Well, I’m not the one who cares if this stuff gets done.” As if they made up the concept of living in a clean house and maintaining personal relationships. What a fucking cop-out. How antagonistic to the very thesis of romantic relationships, which is—or should be: I would do anything (within reason) to make my partner’s life just a little bit better.

  The truth is, men likely would care if that stuff didn’t get done if there were actual consequences they suffered. Obviously, this all varies by task. Some people are never going to bring a bottle of wine over to a friend’s house, regardless of gender, regardless of their partnership status. Additionally, some of the people who claim they wouldn’t miss these tasks are simply people who don’t care about other people, about generosity, about the social contract we have with others. And that is what women are to men in these instances: a way out of caring about other people, about norms, expectations, and chores. If someone else simply does the caring for you, you get to be carefree.

  Women do not get to be carefree almost ever (unless they’re wealthy). Certainly poor women, Black women, women with disabilities, and trans women rarely do. Cis able-bodied white men get to be carefree all the time. You know why? Because they have delegated caring to someone else. They’ve made the women they have relationships with—whether familial, romantic, or friendly—do the caring for them. The women around them will do the care work that keeps up the appearance that this is a guy who participates meaningfully in society.V

  And it’s not just care of others that women track and manage and execute for their male partners, friends, sons, and brothers. It’s care of self, too. It’s women urging men to go to the doctor, asking them not to take certain risks, making them get that mole checked out, pressuring them to apply SPF, talking to them about their drinking habits in ways that aren’t alienating, cooking for them, buying water filters, dusting fucking baseboards, calling the landlord to make them look at the mold in the bathroom. The list of ways that women keep men safe is endless.

  I love my boyfriend a rather disgusting amount. (As a former Chill Girl Who Hated All Forms of Vulnerability, yes, I’m appalled by this admission.) I have approximately 2,498 kind things to say about my boyfriend, and I know good writing is all about specificity, but I don’t want any praise of him in published writing, okay? I’m not a fool. I don’t need him bookmarking this page and bringing it up later. Instead, I will frame his good traits as a recommendation of myself and my good taste. I would not, for example, ever be with a guy who wouldn’t help me with something around the house simply because I was the one who cared about it getting done. I have incredibly high expectations of what a partner is and he exceeds them (because I am good at picking boyfriends now. Again, Dave, don’t get cocky).

  That said, we both fall into the occasional hetero-relationship cliché. Take the time we went on our first couples’ trip to Mexico City. Neither of us had been before, and we, stupidly, were not entirely prepared for how much the altitude would effect us. Mexico City is at 7,382 feet above sea level. Somehow, in all the research that we’d done about what to see and do and eat and experience, we hadn’t taken just how high that is into account. Especially coming from 285 feet above sea level.

  Soon after we landed and checked into our Airbnb (in an apartment on the fourteenth floor of a building, which is even higher up), we both started to feel the effects of being over a mile up in the air. I felt light-headed, which is super common for me, but also my hands started to swell and my fingers felt like they couldn’t bend. I was tired and had a headache, but again, my body is pretty shitty, so it’s always hard to tell what’s going on. We were both determined to push through our minor suffering and enjoy the trip, though. After all, it’s just altitude sickness.

  I looked up the symptoms of altitude sickness and how to treat it, because I’m a hypochondriac and because I wanted to get rid of the feeling as fast as possible. We took ibuprofen and drank water and went out into the city. We started with a seven-mile walk into town, which perhaps was not our most inspired idea. Dave felt mostly fine but a little more tired than usual, and I was… struggling. We found a place to get food (for me) and beer (for Dave) while debating what to do next, and it was at that restaurant that I noticed that Dave’s hands were kind of… blue.

  Now, as someone who had only hours earlier read the entire WebMD page on altitude sickness, I could say with clear authority that when your extremities or lips turn blue, you are experiencing severe altitude sickness. It’s likely to be worse if you came from a low altitude (check) or if you’re drinking alcohol (check). I begged Dave to not finish the beer; I was like, “WebMD says you’re dying right now. We should find an urgent care!” And Dave was like, “I feel totally fine. Honestly, you’re struggling more with the altitude than I am.”

  Which is a logical-adjacent argument but his hands were fucking blue!!!! That’s like the last stage of altitude sickness before you die. It’s never a good thing when your hands turn blue. It’s not like, “Oh, that happens when I eat tomatoes; it’s no big deal!” It’s your body not having enough oxygen! To be fair to him, severe altitude sickness does not usually start at the elevation we were at; it’s more common when mountain climbing. But when your fingers turn blue, it’s only ever bad.

  Dave kept insisting he was fine, that he felt fine, that he really wasn’t that tired or light-he
aded. He wanted to keep going. I was walking gingerly next to him the entire day, waiting for the moment he would collapse on the sidewalk, imagining trying to scream for medical help in bad Spanish. We finally made it back to our Airbnb that night, where the air felt impossibly thin to me, the worrier, and we both lay down to try to sleep. I kept surreptitiously looking up how far it was to a hospital and trying to hint politely that we should maybe think about considering maybe visiting an emergency room possibly. Just a little bit! A little hospital visit as a treat! Dave was at his breaking point and I was at mine. He finally got upset with me because he’d already told me about fifteen times that, no, he did not want to go to a hospital and that he was fine.

  Dave turned over to go to sleep and was successful almost immediately, aided by travel, beer, and a day of being heavily monitored by me. I, however, felt deep in my bones that Dave was going to die in his sleep and I would wake up next to his dead body in a foreign country where I speak almost none of the language other than travel basics, in a rented Airbnb. Who do you even call when you wake up next to a dead body in a foreign country? Is that just a police thing? Is the number for the ambulance separate? Do I need to testify that I had nothing to do with this? How do I bring his body back to the States? He wouldn’t care about his body, but I’m assuming that’s a step, right? You can’t leave your boyfriend’s body in another country, surely. Do I plan the funeral? We’ve only been dating a year. I don’t know what kind of funeral he wants, other than “open bar.”

  I’m in bed running through how him dying is most certainly going to ruin my vacation, and I start to get a little miffed. I’ve never been to Mexico City before. I finally got days off work from my three different jobs!!! And he might die on me? He won’t even go to urgent care and he’s mad that I keep bringing it up? At this point, I’m running on spite. I’ve now looped around from concern over him to anger at him and I don’t even care if he dies! In fact, when he dies, I’m going to be a single twentysomething woman in a foreign country; I’m going to kick up my heels and flirt my way around the city without him! Mexico City has a fabulous bar scene! GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK, PAL!