Okay Fine Whatever

by Courtenay Hameister

  Trying to communicate was pointless because I was mostly incoherent, but I needed to hear a voice outside of my own head. I’ve never wanted so much to crawl out of my own skin.

  “We’re not going to survive this,” I said.

  “You will, sweetie,” she said. “You will.”

  Good friends know when to lie.

  That night, Jake came down to bed wordlessly and turned away from me as we went to sleep. I put my arms around him, but it was like sleeping with a man-shaped two-by-four.

  The next morning, he’d already left the room when I woke up. As I lay in bed, I heard him come down the stairs to get something.

  “Aren’t you going to kiss me good morning?” I asked.

  He started back up the stairs, not looking at me. “I’ll let you know when breakfast is ready.”

  I sat in bed, hugging my knees to my chest and staring at the spot on the stairs where he’d been, surprised to discover that it was actually possible for the pain to get worse.

  We returned to Portland that day, and for the following week, that was how our communication went. Jake had wanted my help with Josey’s Portland memorial, and I arranged the flowers and the photos and created a memorial book, all with a minimum of conversation between us. I was still hosting Live Wire! at the time, and the memorial, at a local St. Johns pub, was on a show night for me, so I couldn’t stay long.

  I knew I’d probably never see Jake again after that night. I approached his friend ND, a photographer who had known him for over a decade, and asked him to take good care of Jake.

  “Try to get him to stop smoking,” I said through tears. “And get him to lighten up if you can. See if you can get his inner dork to run free.”

  ND agreed to do what he could and kissed my hand, and I left in tears.

  I don’t know if things would’ve been different if I had known how to handle my anger. I spent my life in a houseful of people who were terrified of conflict. I used to watch families scream at one another, then enjoy raucous Thanksgiving meals or mock-punish each other with noogies, but somehow, because that hadn’t happened in my house, I never internalized the lesson that you can yell and then have a nice sandwich together when it’s all over. I thought if I expressed my anger or frustration to people, they’d stop loving me.

  The funny thing is, that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not only because I ended up expressing myself at the absolute worst moment imaginable, but also because I didn’t do it a million other times at moments that felt small and unimportant but were collectively gigantic.

  I couldn’t deal with my anger, and Jake couldn’t deal with his grief.

  So it ended.

  In a fucking graveyard.

  It probably would’ve ended anyway, years later, when we both hated each other for one reason or another.

  But at the time, I was inconsolable. I think it was the one-two punch of losing Josey and the breakup, but for months afterward, I felt like I’d had layers of skin torn off me and I was just wandering around in the world with my organs exposed. If I saw an old man walking an old dog, I cried. If someone cut me off in traffic, I cried. If I got a bad bagel, I cried.

  Part of the problem was that, even with everything that had gone down, I still loved him. It’s embarrassing and probably quite telling, but I did. I’m sure it had a lot to do with him having been my first…everything. But the fact that I still loved him made it almost impossible for me to accept that we were no longer together. Because movies and songs and poems and books and scrawled messages in beach sand all say the same thing: Love conquers all. I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea that two people could love each other and still be absolutely incompatible in the long run.

  Of course I understand that now, but it took me a couple years and a lot of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to gain some perspective and a lot of the weight I’d lost. When it was all over, I was well on my way to becoming that big girl who didn’t want to put herself out there again. Which, at that point, was the safest person to be.

  And that’s what I became.

  Until right before the OFW Project, when I started the whole damn I-think-I’m-finally-ready-to-date thing again.

  This time, I hoped, with a little more self-knowledge and a little less self-loathing.

  1 “But wait,” you might say. “Didn’t you lose sixty pounds a decade later, right before the Casa Diablo debacle?” I did. But it was sixty of the seventy-five pounds that I had regained over the previous decade. That’s how weight works: like a wildly ineffective, never-ending treadmill.

  2 It may appear that he was a hipster poseur, but remember that this was the early aughts, so it was way before the rest of the world became fascinated with typewriters, retro iPhone filters, and vinyl.

  Adventures in Dating I

  Winter, Spring, and How Microsoft Excel Turned Me into an Asshole

  Once I’d decided that dating would be a part of the OFW Project, I wanted to use every tool I had at my disposal. I wasn’t motivated enough to come up with an algorithm to assess my odds of romantic success, but I assumed the combination of my age and the high percentage of married people in my demographic meant that my dating pool would probably be kiddie-pool-size. I had to throw a wide net, and I had to be fearless about doing so.

  Fearless wasn’t really my jam, but even so, after kissing off Rich, the guy who wouldn’t kiss me, on January 1, on January 4, I posted the following status update on Facebook:

  Friends: I, like millions of people across the country, have recently signed on to a dating site in an attempt not to die alone. If you can help me to avoid going on dates with strangers who speak about themselves in the third person, please introduce me to your favorite single un-crazy friend (or your single friend who is fucked up in a way that you believe complements the ways in which I am fucked up).

  I appreciate your attention to this matter.

  You may be thinking, Wow. How could she possibly post that? I’d be mortified. Let’s look at an equation that explains where I was at the time:

  L + E[OA] – AG > PTPMLWKDMAL + FDA

  Or:

  Loneliness plus Encroaching Old Age minus the Ability to control Gravity is greater than the Possibility That People in My Life Will Know the Depths of My Aforementioned Loneliness plus Fear of Dying Alone.

  I wish there were a different word for the brand of loneliness that comes from being partnerless in a partnered-up world. (Untethered? Genitally unattended-to? Terminally unaccompanied?) Some way to quickly communicate the strange juxtaposition of being happily surrounded by people you love and grateful for their presence while periodically sobbing in your driveway after returning home from a party because Gillian Welch’s “Dear Someone” grabbed your chest through your car stereo.

  It’s a loneliness that comes with a tremendous amount of guilt for not recognizing how lucky you are to have the love you do have and for behaving eerily like the kind of woman who’s so weak that she can’t be happy without a man.

  I was happy overall. Or at least happy-ish.

  I just periodically sobbed in my driveway, and I decided I would rather not do that. That doesn’t seem unreasonable. Does it?

  So I embarrassed myself on Facebook, and it didn’t lead to any setups, but it did cause a couple of men who hadn’t known I was single to message me. Lesson learned: Increase the number of sly status updates that clue people in to your singlehood, things like I sure do look silly on this tandem bicycle! or I liked The Revenant, but I would’ve enjoyed it so much more if I weren’t so desperately lonely.

  I was also on Tinder at that point, which triggered a couple more offers of dates, which also triggered…a thought. And that thought was How will this not end like the last time? I am bad at this.

  Not bad in the sense that I’d been doing it for years and still couldn’t catch my snap, just bad in the way anyone’s bad at something he or she has done just five times. Yes—I really, technically, had been on only about five dates in my life. An
d now, because of this ridiculous project, I had made a deal with myself that if someone expressed an interest in me and I found him interesting too, I had to agree to a date if he asked me. (I had toyed with the possibility of forcing myself to ask people on dates but quickly ditched that idea because it made me nauseated and no one looks cute while throwing up.)

  I wanted to go on as many dates as I could, y’know, for practice, and I needed a good way to document them since my memory had turned to shit in my forties. Also, I had not chosen so well my first time out of the gate, what with the ravaged heart and all, so I needed to figure out a way to look at this next foray more…pragmatically.

  So I made a spreadsheet.

  I know.

  It’s truly horrible.

  But I honestly believed that if I approached dating with something as cold and scientific as a spreadsheet, I would be more objective, and any resulting relationship would be less likely to fail.

  This also meant I could add the ability to freeze header rows to my Microsoft Office skill set. So, win-win?

  The categories I created were as follows, each of which were rated on a scale of 1 to 10:

  Smart

  Funny

  Finds Me Funny

  My Attraction to Him

  His Attraction to Me

  Interesting Job He’s Passionate About

  Good Conversation

  Sex

  Likes to Talk About Ideas

  My Overall Affection for Him

  I realize that this makes me seem, well, dickish. I don’t refute that. Rating a person on a scale from 1 to 10? How cold and calculating. I mean, literally calculating. I suppose my only defense1 is that I believe we all do this in our heads anyway; I just typed it into an algorithm.

  I don’t expect you to forgive me for this, but I will say that I’ve adopted three cats and one dog in my life and I once almost gave the Heimlich to a stranger in a restaurant but she managed to swallow so it wasn’t necessary. What I’m saying is, I’m not all bad.

  Plus, I wasn’t looking for a perfect score. I just wanted a tool to help me make a choice that wouldn’t bite me in the ass later. Or one that would bite me in the ass, but only if I asked it to.

  In any case, the spreadsheet was how I moved forward into the strange and not-so-wonderful world of online dating.

  I’m now going to outline some of the dates I went on. And I’ll include some spreadsheet notes and highlights just to remind you of what a jerk I am.

  First Date #1, Early January: Text Guy

  Text Guy was someone I’d met through work years before and who had asked me out after reading my humiliating Facebook post. For various reasons, he couldn’t meet me in person for a couple of weeks, so we texted each other. Constantly.

  He was quick-witted and had a self-deprecating charm that came through even in a medium that’s not known for revealing a person’s warmth, and I immediately fell deep in like with the digital version of him. So when we finally went out, our corporeal selves had to catch up with how far our text relationship had progressed. I knew all about his family, the years of work he’d invested in his dream of becoming a motorcycle designer, and his most recent heartbreak before I even shook his hand. Oh, and I knew that he was living in his truck.

  Well, technically, he was living with his parents after losing his job a few weeks prior, but he didn’t like staying there, so he mostly slept in his truck in and around Portland.

  Lives in his truck wasn’t on my must-have list for a mate, but it didn’t really faze me because I liked him so much.

  On our first date, he picked me up in his truck (aka house) to take me to sushi and said if things went awry, we could always just turn our backs and text each other.

  That wasn’t necessary for me. I was even more smitten with him in person.

  We had already met years prior, and after the texting, I felt like I knew him, so that helped shrink my dread ball. I had a little bit of buzzing anxiety in the beginning but nothing that threatened to turn into a full-blown anxiety attack.

  He was six foot four and athletic with penetrating dark brown eyes, lashes like furry butterfly wings, and a wide, ever-present smile. He was also nine years younger than me. After four dates (one where he spent the whole time trying to warn me off him) and two sleepovers at my place, it became clear he Just Wasn’t That Into Me.

  But it was confusing. Because if all someone had to go on was our text threads, that person would have thought he was very interested. We spent a good hour or more every day text-flirting back and forth. I think he enjoyed the banter and didn’t want to lose that even when he was losing interest physically.

  Which he definitely was, but I didn’t want to see it because I was so amazed that this handsome, fit, younger guy was paying attention to me.

  Originally, I’d rated his sexual attraction to me as a 7 but later I’m pretty sure I saw him cringe when I took my shirt off in the dark so I had to downgrade it to a 2. Perhaps due to his youth, he wasn’t used to the fact that things aren’t as perky when a woman hits forty. I chose to pretend it hadn’t happened, because if I were to accept the reality of that experience, I might not ever be able to take my shirt off again. And a person needs to shower.

  The biggest takeaway from the 7-down-to-2 situation: Sometimes the dark is not as dark as you think it is, so be careful what you do with your face. And body. And heart.

  After about three weeks, Text Guy ended the relationship via text, which I was initially angry about but in retrospect decided made perfect sense. Our physical selves barely knew each other, while our digital selves were quite intimate, so they were the ones who required a breakup. It was logical, but my physical self was stung.

  I’d already had my first minor heartbreak, and it was only January.

  Text Guy epilogue: He wanted to remain friends, so we did, because that’s what I thought adults did.

  We went out to sushi as friends three or four times, and the first two times were miserable for me. Hanging out with friends is supposed to be fun. Sitting across the table from someone you are extremely attracted to but can’t fuck is not fun.

  On our third sushi friend-date, he showed up having grown a beard that served only to make him significantly more handsome to me. This may be because I’ve lived in Portland for twenty years, during which time my mental male archetype has grown a beard. (It’s a beardy town.)

  In any case, now I was even more miserable because I was more attracted to him.

  I told myself that I would say no the next time he asked me to go out.

  And then he asked me to go out again.

  And I said yes. (Don’t judge.)

  And something magical happened.

  This time, he had grown his beard so long that it had a sort of Grizzly Adams vibe. A vibe that I was totally not vibing with. Like, at all.

  So I sat there across the table from him and listened to him talk, and for the first time, I really heard him.

  He talked so much about motorcycles. So much. Why hadn’t I noticed this before? And he wasn’t the least bit interested in the things I wanted to talk about, changing the subject every time I brought up my work or an article I’d just read.

  And that’s when I learned what a shallow douchebag I am.

  Somehow I had convinced myself that Text Guy and I were totally compatible and that a relationship between the two of us was feasible. I had created a verbal Instagram filter, whereby everything he said got prettied up by his hot, hot face.

  In retrospect, Text Guy was a good person to start my dating experiment with because he rejected the shit out of me, and while I had an unpleasant couple of days at the end of January, I didn’t immediately die of mortification from liking someone more than he liked me. Getting rejected right out of the gate doesn’t feel like an ideal situation, but when one of your goals is to quell your fear of rejection, it kind of is.

  High Score: My Attraction to Him

  Low Score: His Attraction to Me

>   Lesson Learned: I am hella shallow and it’s totally okay if someone I shouldn’t have been interested in in the first place isn’t interested in me.

  First Date #3, Mid-January: The Ethical Slut

  I met the Ethical Slut on Tinder. Of course.

  For the uninitiated, Tinder was supposed to be the straight world’s answer to Grindr (a hookup app for gay men), but since women were involved, it turned into a dating app but with more hookups per capita than OkCupid or eHarmony.

  I wasn’t looking for just a hookup, but because I felt so behind, I was hoping to do a cannonball into the dating pool, and Tinder was so ubiquitous at the time that it seemed like it would offer me the most choices.

  As a nervous Nellie, what I liked about Tinder was that no one who didn’t like me could contact me (both parties must swipe right on, or “like,” each other’s profiles in order to be able to communicate),2 meaning I probably wouldn’t get horrible, cruel messages telling me to eat some kale or get a neck lift or learn how to handle my finances. Even so, I hovered over the Post Profile button for a good ten minutes before I actually clicked on it.

  I spent about a half an hour the first night cringing as I swiped right on profiles, sort of hoping for a match but also sort of not. I got three matches that night, but no messages.

  The next day I was swiping right while eating an amazing pulled-pork taco at my desk when I knew I should’ve been researching an author who was coming on the show to talk about why humans loved water so much. (I might have cared about my job around 15 percent less at this point. But I would never stop caring about pulled-pork tacos.)

  I felt a rush of adrenaline when the Ethical Slut messaged me immediately after we matched.

  He was an HR rep for a large law firm. He was compact and athletic with a healthy tan, a chiseled chin, and a wild mop of wavy black hair.

  He said he wanted to meet me that night.