How to Grow Up

by Michelle Tea

  Do I think people experiencing extreme hard luck just haven’t chanted in the shower enough? No way. There is lots of bullshit plonked in the path of people who’d like to improve their lot. But I think it is possible to cast a spell on yourself, hold lightly to expectations, and see what happens. Fire your judgmental, old-guard god and let your awesome new HP hook you up a trust fund, or let her be your matchmaker, or your literary agent; use her to get whatever you’re after. Figure out what your own weird-ass, shaky, earnest, doubtful praying sounds like and do it in your own shower or at the gym or on the bus or while you do the dishes. The worst it’s going to do is make you feel a little dumb and maybe give you some additional insight into yourself. But at its best, it just might help you make some legitimate magic.

  5.

  Beware of Sex and

  Other Rules for Love

  When I emerged from my eight-year monogamous relationship, ready to date, I was insane—like, feral. I was like a child who had been locked in a closet for ten years and then unleashed upon a world of toys and goodies. I was tripping over my feet and drooling foam from the corners of my mouth at the prospect of new partners. The possibility of fresh romantic adventures was a terrific distraction from my breakup heartache. Plus, my ex had hooked up with someone immediately, and the only way to engage with that seemed to be (A) never date again, as if I was now completely above such landscapes of sordid trysts and disappointments, and also so satisfied with my own company that I wished not to compromise my independence even the slightest; or (B) get totally competitive about it.

  Everyone told me to give it a minute. Don’t hurl yourself into the dating pool just because your ex has shacked up with the local DJ who tromps around town in Daisy Dukes and thigh-high stockings. Don’t jump in bed with the nearest stranger because the two of them start showing up at your favorite brunch spots and 12-step meetings and—horror of horrors—acting friendly toward you. Even though I was being urged by concerned friends to take some time off—a month, six months, a year—I knew I was not that girl. You know—the girl who does a cleanse instead of hitting a club looking for a hookup. Or, like, knits. My life as a sober person had calmed down a lot, but I clung to the thrill of sex like the addict I was: You’re not going to take this away from me, too!

  After I sent my ex on a couch tour of his closest acquaintances, I did what all females recently released from a long monogamous relationship should do: I called my best, sluttiest gay boyfriend and asked him how to get my game back. Unlike my other friends, Lee would never tell me to take a break from dating. He was part of a gay-boy world that contained steamy bathhouses and department store men’s rooms, roadside truck stops and vertiginous city parks—places for gay men to find one another and, in complete anonymity and flagrant disregard of the law, get it on. He understood that the thrill of sex was a natural high, as important to the body as a bowl full of kale and a jog on the beach. Lee believes that in submitting to our animal instincts, we encounter a sort of pagan holiness. He was the perfect enabler.

  I phoned him from the front stoop of my North Beach apartment. I was smoking, and the skin above my heart was burning. Not with love—I’d just gotten a tattoo. It was of a pair of elegant female hands holding branches of lush blue roses. It was really pretty.

  So was my tattoo artist. After sitting beneath him for hours, watching flowers bloom around my collarbone, I had developed a crush on him. I thought maybe he had a little bit of a crush on me, too. I didn’t mind making the first move, but every motion I thought of felt clumsy and awkward, too tacky or too buttoned-up. I realized that if I had ever had any game at all, it had surely shriveled up and died during my LTR. Lee would be filled with advice on how to execute my first seduction, and he’d get a gossipy delight from hearing my story. I was filled with anticipation as I pressed my phone to my ear. When he picked up, I overwhelmed him with a deluge of chatter and questions and details. The tattoo artist was so cute, with his pixie-boy rocker shag and the crappy tattoos that crawled up his neck like those of a Russian jailbird! Should I proposition him boldly, or would he think I was too trampy? Should I act demure? Demure takes so long, and I wasn’t confident I could pull it off anyway. I didn’t want to marry the gent; I just wanted to fornicate with him on the tattoo table after the shop was closed. What if he turned me down? I’d be humiliated! Help me, Lee, help me!

  “You gotta be ready to get rejected,” Lee said to me, a simple piece of advice, but also profound enough that it stuck with me through the next four years of falling in and out of love like the dumbest baby bird who just cannot figure out how to fly out of the fucking tree without crashing again and again and again. “The more you put yourself out there, the more rejections you get. It’s just the law of averages. You can’t take it personally.” My BGB (best gay boyfriend) knew what he was talking about; the gay-guy hookup world allows for extremely particular preferences. Dick size, cut or uncut, age, fitness specifications, ethnicity, whether you are a pitcher or a catcher in the game of love—it’s like they’re buying a house, not sourcing a BJ in the back corner of a bathhouse. This culture hadn’t hardened my BGB, but it had nurtured a sort of detachment in him. I found this advice crucial, as was his response when I asked him if you have to use a condom while giving a BJ: “The only people I ever see doing that are Renaissance Faire bisexuals at sex clubs, and they don’t look like they’re having very much fun.”

  There was another problem, besides my near-decade out of the game: I’d never hit on a person sober. I’d never dated sober. Formerly when I wanted to sleep with someone I would get drunk and sidle up to my lust object with a blunt, “Wanna make out?” Sometimes they made out with me, sometimes they ran for the hills. My ex and I got together over margaritas in a Mexican restaurant, him wooing me with promises of the best crystal meth ever, so pure it glowed a faint lavender glow. He never did produce this mythical substance (and wasn’t pure meth an oxymoron anyway?), but we did slide down a dark hole of drugs together, then clambered out together, and then broke up. When I looked back at the romances I’d struck up before him, I was embarrassed at how sloppy they’d been, at my inebriated bravado. It had worked well enough in my twenties, when everyone was stumbling in and out love, but I was hoping to have more dignity in my sober thirties.

  “You’re overthinking it,” Lee counseled. “If you’re not trying to seriously date the guy, just ask him if he wants to hook up.”

  “How?” I wailed. “It would be so weird for me to call him . . . and I can’t do it at the shop, with everyone around.”

  “Text him,” Lee suggested. Duh. Text him. Nobody actually talked on their phones these days; they took pictures and sent messages. Plus, I was a writer! I would be in my element with a text, would I not? I glanced at the clock on my phone. It was nine o’clock at night. My neighborhood was bumping. Handsome Italian maître d’s beckoned passersby with platters of bruschetta; down the street, strip club barkers solicited similarly, while dancers in kimonos took cigarette breaks by the curb. Actual sailors, in their spiffy white uniforms, barhopped around me. The tattoo artist lived in this neighborhood as well. Perhaps he was sitting on his own stoop nearby, watching the lusty commotion, wishing for a way to jump in.

  I hung up with Lee, who offered me a bounty of blessing and good luck wishes and you-can-do-it encouragement. I spent twenty minutes experimenting with variations on the sentence: I think you’re really foxy and if you ever want to hook up you should call me. “I think you’re really foxy. Want to hook up?” “You’re a fox and I want to hook up with you.” “Hey, fox, want to hook up?” The longer I obsessed, the more ridiculous they all seemed. The guy either thought I was a fox and wanted to hook up as well, or he didn’t. A slight change of phrase wasn’t going to doom me, nor would it suddenly enlighten him to my charms were he oblivious. The tiny green screen of my Nokia glowed up at me. I hit Send. And was immediately rejected. It was a nice rejection, and may have included a complime
nt and claim of feeling flattered, but it was a rejection. I deleted it so I could pretend it never happened, and sent the news to Lee: Denied.

  I wasn’t devastated, but it stung. I understood that Lee’s prepare to be rejected advice was good, but I also wanted to minimize the damage. I recognized that I had poor impulse control when it came to sex and romance, and I wanted to temper my nature with some structure. If this was a game, I needed some rules. At first my Rules for Love were formulated to try to minimize heartbreak and embarrassment. Later they helped me not to waste my time. Altogether and unexpectedly they led me toward an understanding of what I did and didn’t want in relationships as I assimilated these new experiences and learned more about myself.

  What Rule for Love did I learn from the tattoo artist? Well, first of all, don’t hit on your tattoo artist. A female hitting on her tattoo artist is the equivalent of a dude hitting on his lap dancer. Just because they periodically back away from your partially naked body and say, “Nice,” does not mean that they think you are nice. They are not thinking of you at all. They are thinking of the design they are sinking into your flesh—a process, by the way, that is releasing tons of endorphins and other pleasurable chemicals into your brain, chemicals that might make you feel a little bit goofy and possibly in love with your tattoo artist. Especially if he is super-hot, and he wears pegged skintight black jeans and tiny, shrunken denim jackets and has jet-black hair jagging into his face like a painter inked it there. This entire scene might leave you (me) very vulnerable to thinking (wishing) there is a connection, some kind of energy occurring between the two of you. There is not. If you must ignore my advice and proposition the tattoo artist—who I promise is looking at you not like a nuanced, intriguing person with a hot bod, but more like the side of a building in a run-down neighborhood that he is tagging with a can of spray paint—at least wait until your tattoo is done. I learned the hard way. After embarrassing myself with my tattoo artist via text message, I then had to go back for two more sittings to complete my tattoo.

  Ultimately, being rejected by the hot tattoo artist was the sort of baptism I needed to bravely saunter back into the world of romance. I wish I could say that my subsequent conquests were less bumbling and ridiculous, but as you will soon find out, they were not. The dating blitz I embarked on after ending my LTR was wild, fun, humiliating, exhilarating, and very, very educational. As relationships flared and failed, I began to take note of patterns. I gained some clarity on the choices I was making. By paying attention, I began to realize and refine what I wanted. I found that I didn’t like being single—I loved it. I didn’t cry all the time when I was single! I wasn’t always recovering from an emotionally exhausting argument! I didn’t have to endure the wack television choices of my significant other! (The Real World? Really?) Another big plus of singlehood: I had way more money now that I wasn’t partially supporting—get ready—a rapper who’d had an equally hard time supporting himself on rhymes as he had holding on to jobs. Being single was super cool. I felt like I was finally living the life of the liberated, bohemian female I truly was.

  Eventually, though, the novelty of my bed being a lazy Susan wore thin. I found myself envying the closeness and stability of my two best friends, Tali and Bernadine. They loved each other so hard, they had matching tattoos of each other’s initials framed by a love letter held in the beak of a dove. Bernadine happily declared she would rather see Tali dead than leave her for another woman. I wanted something that deep and passionate.

  I was also really inspired by my sister’s marriage. She’d found a sweet, sensitive man she could be profoundly silly with, and together they had a couple of babies. Babies! I’d never really been around them, and my ex-boyfriend had been so anti-procreation that even wondering aloud if I might someday maybe want to think about having kids provoked one of the huge and downward-spiraling arguments that I could only heal from by embarking on a beauty-product shopping spree. Those fights were expensive; I avoided them. But now, free of that stifling relationship and delighting in being a new aunt, I considered it. Kids. Who knows? Maybe someday. I was open to it.

  But first, I decided, I wanted a stable relationship with someone who was so crazy into me that they wanted to freaking marry me. Yeah. That’s what I wanted at the end of my sex vacation. I wanted to get married. I didn’t care about its history of female oppression, all that selling women for dowries and vows of obedience. No one I knew practiced such a marriage, and when I dreamt about marriage, it was not a dream about cutting my life away in service of some dude. It was a dream, first, of a party, a big, fun celebration of love in which I would finally once again have the opportunity to wear a veil—something I’d not enjoyed since attending a Billy Idol concert dressed as the bride from the “White Wedding” video.

  After enough experimentation with the various models of being in relationship—serial monogamy, monogamy with some “gray area,” outright polyamory, dating—I loved the idea of a monogamous connection with someone awesome enough that you knew you’d be interested in them forever, hot enough that you’d want to get it on with them forever, loving enough that you wanted to stay all wrapped up in them forever. For so long, my feelings (or fears—is there a difference?) were summed up, as so many feelings are, by a Smiths lyric: Love is natural and real / But not for you, my love. I don’t know why I thought I’d never get my day at the nondenominational altar—maybe I was trying to protect myself from wanting it in the first place, or maybe my dating track record didn’t inspire confidence. But as my standards for the people I dated grew, so did my standards for the kind of relationship I wanted. I wanted someone capable of the big-time forever love affair I always knew I was capable of.

  I investigated my love life. I couldn’t deny that the choices I was making weren’t helping. Into my Rules for Love, a tier system was built: There were Sex Only people, Dating people, and then the elite and somewhat evasive Marriage Material. If I was serious about wanting to build something solid and lasting, I was going to have to spend less time frolicking in the first two camps, no matter how fun and sexy (or darkly psychologically compelling) they may be.

  A rule I eventually devised—and it took a while—was Beware of Sex. The warning came first as a whisper, then as a haunting echo, then as an annoying nag, and finally as a blood-curdling scream. What I’m saying is, though I started to know better, it took some disasters before respect for this warning was stronger than the dizzy pull toward romance. And part of the problem was limerence.

  Freshly sprung from my monogamous LTR, I had no idea how vulnerable I would be to the onslaught of chemicals your brain releases when you’re attracted to someone. These chemicals are responsible for every single people-in-love-are-crazy-fools song, movie plot, and Shakespearean drama ever written. They stimulate the same area of the brain that lights up when you snort a fat rail of cocaine. This state of mind, limerence, is a biological relative of obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you are an addict, or perhaps have the sort of low-dopamine, low-serotonin brain soup best served with a side of SSRIs, you are perhaps more sensitive to the mind-altering power of limerence. And if you are a romantic, you are perhaps more likely to label this heady, overwhelming sensation love. Being a low-serotonin addict with romantic tendencies, I had to experience many crashed-and-burned affairs to understand that for me, love really was a drug.

  As someone who hangs out in 12-step circles, I was aware of support groups for people who find themselves addicted to sex, or love, or both. Before I dealt with my own addictions, I’d thought these love-addict people were terrible killjoys, if not flat-out crazy. Love and sex and the ecstasy that accompanies them were the best things in the world. They made life worth living! They were worth fighting for—dying for, even! (I told you I was a romantic.) But as I began to face up to my drinking and my copious drug ingestion, I started to understand that a person really can be addicted to lots of different things, because the highs induced by the dopamine ma
chine in your brain can become addictive. Some people find that activities the rest of humanity is able to indulge in without consequence—dating, food, shopping—trigger in their special chemistry a reaction that spurs increasingly compulsive behavior. From my own experience and the stories of other alcoholics who sober up only to find themselves ruining their lives with a brand-new eating disorder or maxed-out credit card or STD, I’ve come to the conclusion that some brains are just super addict-y, and can get obsessively focused on whatever triggers a dopamine release. Your friend who can’t stop checking her phone for incoming Likes and text messages? Dopamine fiend. The one who gets weirdly manic and sweaty and spaced out while you’re browsing at Topshop? Dopamine fiend. The one who falls in love and off the face of the earth every other month? Dopamine fiend. Maybe that friend is actually you. It’s certainly me.

  Because it would take me about a year to learn about sex and love chemicals and that psychedelic state limerence. I mistook my first post-LTR romance for True Love instead of what it was—hot sex with a sociopath. I was so out of my mind with the tsunami of dopamine this Johnny Depp look-alike provoked in my nervous system, I ignored a ton of red flags. First of all, he was unbearably pretentious. Asked a friend of mine in a cynical voice, “Does Fake Johnny Depp really begin every morning with a poached egg on a bed of brown rice and miso?” I understood his skepticism, but the answer was yes, Fake Johnny Depp did prepare himself a breakfast of poached eggs, brown rice, and miso each morning. Which prompted the next question: “Well, does he have to talk about it in that voice?”