No One Asked for This

by Cazzie David

  You don’t even know what. Well, it’s something along the lines of Promise you still love me just as much and always will and will never leave me no matter what?!

  The dialogue now is him saying normal things and you getting offended because you’re analyzing everything he says for evidence that he doesn’t really love you. He’ll say something as gentle as “Love is an incredible thing.” And instead of just agreeing that love is an incredible thing, you think, Oh, so you think love is super-common? That anyone could fall in love? That you could fall in love with anyone and have fallen in love many times?

  In my experience, the honeymoon period in a relationship doesn’t end because you and your partner have gotten too comfortable with each other; it ends because you start to feel insecure. The moment you enter that dark side is when the reality that the two of you each had a life before meeting each other hits. And while having life experience can be good for both people in a couple for many reasons (e.g., sexual experience, maturity, knowledge about the female/male brain and anatomy), it can also become the cause of all of your insecurities in that relationship.

  Dating someone in high school was easy. The odds were that you were this person’s first relationship ever, or at least their first serious one, leaving them with no one from their previous experiences to compare you to. Let me rephrase again: leaving you with no one from their previous experiences to compare yourself to. If you dated someone during your college years, your boyfriend (or girlfriend) most likely provided you with at least one serious ex (usually from high school) to stalk and be insecure about. College relationship exes are particularly bad, because your college boyfriend is probably homesick and his ex is the personification of home.

  The moment you stalk your new boyfriend’s ex for the first time is pivotal, as it is the moment your relationship will be altered forever. It’s also the moment you take a match to all the good thoughts your relationship had given you about yourself, extinguishing all the joy that the metaphorical fire extinguisher brought you just weeks before. Darwin once said jealousy is a survival tactic, but if that’s the case, why does it make me feel like I’m dying?

  Don’t forget all of the wonderful things he has said about you! Remember that day he said you were enchanted?But he’s probably said just as wonderful things about the people who came before you. What were the wonderful things he said to them? They just get to have memories of nice things he said to them? While I’m with him?

  My college boyfriend once asked me why I didn’t wear dresses more often or dress up for him. The comment clearly came from a building frustration with the fact that I only wore pajamas day in and day out. If I’m home, I’m not going to not be wearing pajamas. That would be insane. I’m not a Kardashian. The second I get home I switch from jeans to sweatpants so fast, I resemble a cartoon tornado. The thing is, I’m almost always home, therefore I’m almost always in pajamas. But it’s not like he had never seen me at my best. I tried to explain it to him in a way his young-boy brain could understand.

  “Well, you know what I look like when I’m not in sweatpants, so what’s the difference, really?”

  He retaliated with “Well, you know what I’m like when I’m nice, so why do I have to be nice all the time?”

  Instead of thinking about how ridiculous that argument was, I thought about how his ex-girlfriend probably always wore dresses, which led me to believe that his dress-preferring sentiment was unquestionably spawned by the fact that he was not over his ex-girlfriend. Meanwhile, I hate dresses so much that I look forward to winter so I can witness everyone’s collective disappointment about having to wear pants. Ha, I’ll think, now we’re ALL in pants. Including your stupid ex-girlfriend. I unfortunately don’t have the choice not to wear pants, as wearing anything else makes me feel like a fake. When I wear a dress, I feel like I’m lying. A dress represents Femininity, Joy, Positivity! All the antonyms of my character. I’m Negativity with Butch undertones.

  Being the person that I am, I was nervous about going out into a world of dating where boys everywhere had more life experience under their belt. The guys I would date could have anywhere from one to five ex-girlfriends. This, I think we can all agree, is just too many ex-girlfriends for one new insecure girlfriend to handle. Older and wiser adults will tell you that the more relationships you’re in, the easier it gets, that you’ll have more confidence and know how to deal with certain situations. This is wrong. The older you get, the more ex-girlfriends and ex-hookups your partners will have racked up, leading you to be more insecure than ever before. “There’s a reason those other ones didn’t work out!” they’ll say. But why did they break up? Did she initiate it, and now he just has to live on without her, settling for someone else? Or did he break up with her? Even if he was the one who wanted to break up, there’s always the possibility he regrets it. Is that worse than him being dumped? Is regret more lasting than rejection?

  Any reason your new boyfriend and his ex-girlfriend broke up other than “I suddenly became disgusted with her” is unacceptable. There’s just no way to know how much your new boyfriend enjoyed the times with all of the others that didn’t work out. And when you hate yourself, it’s hard to believe that your new boyfriend’s experience of being with you is better than others he’s had. You’re just supposed to assume you’re the best? How does one do that if she’s pretty much positive she is not the best? Believing you’re better than one person is somewhat doable, but the amount of convincing it takes to get you to believe he likes you more than three girls? Four? In any or all departments? Impossible. (You’re all special in your own ways! says a feminist voice in my head that I buried under rocks to write this essay.)

  The only type of person you can ever feel secure in a relationship with is a person who has never had a life before you. Unfortunately, there’s only one type of person that fits the category of never having lived before seeing your face, and that is a newborn baby.

  Newborn babies have no ex-girlfriends, no DMs, no past hookup experiences. They don’t know what they like or what they dislike. They don’t even know what a girl is, let alone what a hot, confident girl is. A newborn doesn’t have memories they can pull up at any time from that night with the sexy girl in the Jacuzzi who gave the most amazing blowjob he’s ever had. Or the smart model who played a perfect game of pool and wanted to show him one of her scars from dirt-biking in the bar bathroom. (Those are my personal worst-case-scenario-new-boyfriend-greatest-hits memories, in case that wasn’t clear.)

  Obviously, you can’t date a newborn baby. Sorry to even clarify that. So the next best route to go would be dating the most inexperienced but age-appropriate person you can find, the only pitfall being that it’s up to you to teach them how to be good at sex. If the sex education is too much work for you, you can seek out someone with serious commitment issues who’s had only a string of meaningless, yet informative, sexual encounters. There’s just that constant mental hurdle of wondering if you are interesting enough to keep him from inexplicably leaving you to move to Paris or go to grad school. You could also go after someone with just one official ex-girlfriend, but that ex-girlfriend needs to seem so awful that you aren’t jealous of her at all. Except if she is evidently that bad, it can only mean she has some other redeeming quality that he couldn’t help but be in love with. She was probably really sweet or the life of the party. She helped him through a really rough patch, had great taste in books and music and movies, and all of his friends and family loved her. She probably dressed up for him.

  Yeah, it’s a newborn or therapy.

  * * *

  Environ-Mental Mom

  My mother is an environmentalist. An overzealous one. I know what you’re thinking: What a swell gal, How nice of her. It sure was nice for the rest of the world, but it certainly wasn’t nice for me growing up.

  For my entire life, my mother’s job has been to help inspire change to protect the environment, from big to small. She organized and advocated—lobbying Congre
ss, speaking at schools, fundraising, working on increasing fuel-economy standards, and producing documentaries on the climate crisis. Meanwhile at home, she was an absolute eco-friendly dictator. Everything that wasn’t done in an ecologically efficient way was scrutinized. That’s generous of me; truthfully, everything was scrutinized—if you’re inside reading, she asks why you’re not outside. If you’re outside, she asks why you’re not inside helping with something. If you’re sitting eating snacks, she wonders why you’re not exercising. If you mention being sore from your workout, she’ll say, “You work out too much—it’s not healthy and you need to eat more snacks.” But the environmental scrutiny was always the most passionate and thus the most frightening.

  The only times I was ever grounded by my mother was when I left a towel on the floor or didn’t unplug something after using it. “You’re part of the problem!” she’d yell. “If you can’t unplug a charger, you can’t have children, because they will have to grow up in a world that is MELTED!” I lived in fear of accidentally leaving lights on after I left a room, not because I thought I would single-handedly melt the earth but because I knew if I left the lights on, my morals would be seriously questioned.

  When I was in elementary school and kids asked me what my mom did for a living, I told them she was an electric-car salesperson. I said this because I believed that was her job. Why else would someone get out of her car and approach every parent in the carpool lane to tell them they needed to buy an electric car? I thought she was just hustling. I didn’t find out until 2005 that she didn’t work for the electric-car industry, and that she was instead just crazy.

  When I was growing up, no one else I knew seemed to have any idea about the severity of climate change, let alone their carbon footprint. It felt like this niche, bizarre thing that only my family had decided to devote their lives to, like being Scientologists. And the same way Scientologists try to recruit or save people, so did my mom, informing every parent and stranger she came across about how they could do better, with an additional ten-minute bonus lecture about the precise ways in which the planet was burning up.

  In most houses, drugs and alcohol were prohibited. In mine, plastic was. Bringing plastic into my house was as disrespectful to my mother as bringing in a rock of cocaine. It wouldn’t matter if I was dying of dehydration and my only option was buying a bottle of water; I think she would rather I drank my own urine. One time when I really wanted to upset her after a fight, I bought a six-pack of plastic water bottles and placed them in different spots around the house. As punishment, she forced me to stare at pictures of landfills, disturbing images of plastic that had settled inside whales’ stomachs, soda rings choking turtles, and balloon ribbon suffocating birds. Then she made me keep all of the bottles in my room for eternity as flower vases—“Must reuse everything!” Ten years later, we probably still have them somewhere.

  My mother’s attitude toward plastic was tolerable compared to some of the other house rules that my family endured on a daily basis. Turning on the air-conditioning or heat was strictly forbidden. If either system was ever turned on out of sheer desperation, she would have us line up in the living room—me, my dad, my sister, and our housekeeper—as if we were at a police station. Pacing back and forth in front of us like a detective, she peppered us with questions and demanded to know the culprit.

  At some point, she realized how long my sister’s showers were, so she started monitoring everyone’s shower time. She bought these special extra-loud alarms for all of us and would yell, “Soap up and rinse!” right outside the door. We were each allowed two minutes, which she thought was more than generous, considering the environmental repercussions if we were in there any longer. My dad and I held a grudge against my sister for years for ruining showers for us all.

  Complaining was the communication style of choice in my house, but it never fazed her. Nothing was going to get in the way of us doing “the minimal amount” to save the planet. “We just want to be comfortable! Is that so wrong?! We deserve comfort!” my dad would yell. It seemed reasonable to me. No one in any other household I’d visited seemed to get yelled at for using paper towels to dry their hands or wipe crumbs off the counter.

  We cared about the environment because we had to out of fear of reprisal. That’s not to say that we didn’t believe it was as important as she made it out to be. It’s hard to question anything my mom says because she has no doubt in her mind that she’s right about everything. I know this because she once told me, “I have no doubt in my mind that I’m right about everything.” As a result of never thinking she’s wrong, she has also never felt insecure. She is so freakishly confident she can barely fathom how she could have raised someone who is anything but. I do wonder if my mother would be just as confident if she’d grown up with social media, having to be subjected to a million people’s faces, bodies, and personalities, but if anyone could, it’d be her.

  Because of my mother’s inherent confidence, she hosts one hell of a nonprofit benefit and salon. I can barely go to a dinner without having a panic attack, let alone host my own. Every week when my sister and I were growing up, she’d host a dinner with the most interesting human beings, experts in every field. You would not be at the table if you weren’t what she considered interesting. Or if you were a slob, which was why I was no longer allowed to attend after I spit-taked in front of Senator John McCain. Still, no matter who was sitting at the table, my mother’s presence was always the most dominant (at least through my eyes as a kid), which often made it hard to know who really was the most important person there.

  She would tell people exactly where to sit and then would follow it up with “Sit wherever! There are no bad seats!” There were definitely bad seats, and she knew exactly which ones they were. Hosting seemed like this unique skill she was born with. She always made the guest of honor feel special, kicking off the gathering with the kind of toast that would usually only be heard at a birthday party or a funeral. Conversation was never boring, and there was never a lull, a result of her ensuring there were always funny people at the table and that only “one conversation!” was allowed, something she shamelessly blurted out whenever anyone started to have a side discussion. Of course, the main goal of the dinners was to debate important issues affecting the world and persuade people who were in positions of power to do whatever they could to help, starting as soon as they left the house. This, I had no problem with; she was free to educate anyone who came over voluntarily about environmental destruction. As her daughter, I don’t know how voluntary my situation was.

  My least favorite thing to do with my mom, besides going to the beach where she tells strangers not to put on sunblock before going in the ocean because it’s bleaching the corals, is grocery shopping. Shopping is not an activity I recommend doing with an environmentalist. My mom is appalled every time she enters the market, acting as if she hasn’t been there a million times before.

  “Look at this! Plastic, wrapped in plastic, wrapped in plastic,” she’ll pontificate as we make our way down each aisle. “WHY DOES A TANGERINE NEED TO BE WRAPPED IN PLASTIC?!?! I’m bringing this up with the store manager.”

  “Mom, please, do you have to?”

  “And look at this—coffee filters. Can you believe people buy these things? Every morning throwing another one out when they could use a percolator and waste NOTHING!”

  I’ll nod. There’s nothing else to do.

  “What’s even worse is the people who order their coffee filters ONLINE! Creating endless fumes from the delivery truck just to drop off your precious coffee filters, all because of your laziness and greed. Ordering anything is just terrible, not to mention it makes local stores go out of business.”

  “Totally,” I’ll agree.

  “And how about people going out for coffee every morning! Plastic top, plastic cup, plastic straw, now existing in a landfill FOREVER. BECAUSE OF THEM. I hope any time you see someone drinking coffee, you tell them that.”

  “Y
es, I try to.” (I definitely did not try to.)

  Once, on one of these trips together, I threw a pack of tampons onto the conveyor belt when we got to the checkout line.

  “Nope. You’re not buying those,” she said in her usual disturbing tone, pushing them away from the checkout guy, who had just reached his hand out to scan them.

  “What? Why not?” Right after the words came out of my mouth, I realized why.

  “They’re plastic. Find eco-friendly cardboard ones,” she said. The checkout guy’s face contorted into an expression of pure vicarious embarrassment.

  “There weren’t any! Sorry, but I need them . . . now,” I murmured, doing my best not to be heard by the checkout guy. He started to press buttons on his register to escape the awkwardness. I could imagine his internal monologue: Yep, that button works. So does that button. Great, great, great, all the buttons work.

  “Not only will the plastic from that tampon sit in a landfill for eternity, but it has chemicals in it that will seep into your vagina. Do you want that?”

  No, I did not want that.

  Cardboard tampons weren’t that bad; they were just a tad less . . . smooth going up. What actually was bad was the 100 percent recycled toilet paper we had in all of our bathrooms, which led to a never-ending battle between my mother and our butt cracks. It took years for my butt to adjust to the thin, scratchy eco-paper, mostly because anytime you used any other bathroom anywhere, you would experience the softest, most-horrible-for-the-environment toilet paper your butt has ever felt. Our toilet paper felt like you were using a winter leaf.