Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me

by Ben Karlin

  Being a brainless troglodyte, I ended up in Madison at the University of Wisconsin. My existence became an endless blur of dorm-room keggers, advocacy journalism, and focusing my abnormally large reserves of vitriol on fellow students dumb enough to be vexed by the question, “But is it art?” Clarity only seemed possible during the times when Molly and I would visit each other. As these dorm-room visits were the first time we had access to unsupervised beds, we’d spend a lot of time sleeping together. Though for us “sleeping together” was merely the next logical step on our path toward sexual intercourse, as opposed to a euphemism for it. The mere insertion of parts into other parts would have seemed anticlimactic after an evening spent solving the Gordian knot of balancing two sleeping bodies on a single mattress, waking up with severely restricted blood flow in at least one limb, and overlooking each other’s post-Chinese-food morning breath.

  As magical as those visits with Molly were, the time spent apart from her became that much more unbearable. This wasn’t helped by the fact that Molly was acting totally unreasonably at her new school, engaging in conversation with guys who weren’t me and attempting to join social groups that weren’t made up of me, me, and me. On some Friday nights she would even choose to attend a book club or act in a play rather than sit alone by her phone waiting for my sobbing call. How could one girl be so heartless?

  Our dance of dysfunction and lack of sex continued throughout our freshman and sophomore years. We called the whole thing off more times than I can remember, and usually for reasons that were entirely my fault. The ratio of time spent long-distance dating to time spent long-distance broken up gradually decreased, until we agreed to acknowledge what geography had been screaming at us for months: we were no longer together.

  The spring of 1991, my junior year, was an exciting time. I had a dorm room to myself, I was drawing a well-regarded daily comic strip for my school paper, and Our Troops had just finished kicking Saddam’s ass in the first Gulf War, setting the stage for the peace in the Middle East we enjoy to this day. I had moved on from Molly and was a better man for it, though my inexperience with sex was starting to be a problem. The girls I dated wanted more than a smooch and a boob kneading to top off their night. “We should wait until we’re ready,” I’d declare, usually succeeding in convincing potential partners that I was a sensitive and decent man as opposed to a tragically repressed and inexperienced boy. The problem with this tactic was that a girl, once flattened by my tsunami of sensitive decency, would fall for me even harder, making it that much more difficult to dump her when my well of excuses for putting off sex finally ran dry. Their faces haunt me to this day: the suburban punker who worked the counter at the record store, the doe-eyed lifeguard certified in massage, the perky art chick who scraped up roadkill and used it in an installation piece . . . They were nerdy goddesses all, young and horny, but I could never make a relationship with them last more than a couple weeks and I was starting to hate myself for it. Such was my state of mind when Molly called me out of nowhere and requested I fly to Boston for the express purpose of having sex.

  The specific circumstances surrounding Molly’s offer of virginity loss are admittedly fuzzy, and largely rooted in emotion. But what I do remember with the clarity of tropical fish footage on a Best Buy showroom HDTV is that we were definitely, definitely not in love anymore. Knowing this, I was overcome with the absolute certainty that this “orgasm-or-bust” odyssey could not possibly end in anything but disaster and embarrassment for both of us. I bought the first plane ticket I could find.

  Once I arrived at Havrard, Molly and I went straight to work constructing the infrastructure she deemed necessary for “safe sex.” This consisted of four forms of birth control, which, per Molly’s instructions, would need to be utilized simultaneously.

  One: The Rhythm Method

  There was a window of three or four days in Molly’s cycle that she had calculated to be “safe.” That window didn’t open until a couple days into my visit, so we killed time, probably walking the Freedom Trail or some shit.

  Two: Condoms

  We went to purchase these together, studying the boxes until we were confident we’d found the thickest, least comfortable, most spermicide-drenched contraceptives science could produce.

  Three: The Sponge

  I’m thirty-seven and I still don’t know quite how these are supposed to work. More on this later.

  Four: The Number-One Rule

  “DO NOT ejaculate while inside me! Pull out the second you think it’s getting dangerous.”

  In retrospect, she may not have wanted to get pregnant.

  Beginning with her phone call, and throughout our quest to purchase birth control, Molly’s constant mantra was, “We’ve got to get this over with.” Is there any sentence in the English language that conveys less passion or romance? Thanks to the last moments leading up to our attempt at sex, Molly provided me with at least one: “Just so you know, this is going to be really painful for me, and I’m probably going to be bleeding all over the place.” This final sweet nothing imparted, and the fortress of contraception having been built (including Molly’s mood-killing last-minute dash behind a closed bathroom door so she could have privacy as she put the sponge in), it was finally time for me to get a boner and fuck my way into adulthood. Three, two, one . . . go! Go! The light is green! The ref fired his starter pistol! Cut the yellow wire RIGHT NOW or the bomb goes off!

  It didn’t take Molly long to notice something was up, or more accurately, wasn’t. After all, whenever we had gone at it with the unstated understanding that no sex was forthcoming, I’d grow a cop’s flashlight in my pants. (My point is not to imply that I have a particularly large penis, but simply to state via colorful metaphor that my boners came more easily when I wasn’t picturing Molly bleeding to death.) Molly’s reaction to my lack of stiffness was, at first, sympathetic, if confused (“It’s okay. Take your time.”), but quickly snowballed into impatient, nastier territory (“I’M doing everything right. What’s wrong with YOU?”). After a couple futile hours of frustration, hair pulling, and being flat-out belittled by My Wild Irish Rose, I put on my clothes and exited Molly’s dorm room into the drizzly Havrard night, alone.

  On that walk, I ate half a bag of white-cheddar popcorn and came to the conclusion that would screw me up forever: I was incapable of having sex. Never mind that no one but the randiest of porn stars would have been able to get it up amidst the shit-storm of stress, fear, and inexperience I was dealing with. Such logical explanations were obliterated by my feelings of failure and shame, compounded by Molly’s anger that her virginity problem wouldn’t be solved anytime soon.

  The next night we went to a party, where I embarrassed Molly by conversing with one of her more bearable friends about our shared obsession with the band Devo. “These people go to Havrard! They don’t want to talk about stupid shit like Devo!” Molly screamed. I, in turn, exploded at her flat-out wrong assessment of her friend’s degree of interest in Akron’s proudest sons, and suddenly we were in the fight that ended our relationship once and for all. We agreed to avoid each other over the six remaining days of my trip. (Why I didn’t just fly home on an earlier flight is lost to the mists of time, but knowing me, I probably didn’t want to inconvenience the airline.) I spent my nights freezing on Molly’s couch, and my days reading Vonnegut outside an Au Bon Pain. I think I may have had a nervous breakdown at some point, as I distinctly remember curling up next to Molly’s dorm-room fireplace, sobbing uncontrollably about nothing and everything. (And what kind of bullshit dorm room has a fireplace in it, anyway? Fuck Havrard.)

  In the end, after all we went through, the most enduring lesson I learned from Molly is that regardless of whether or not my parts work on a given try, sex is always the most stressful thing in the history of the universe. After (and because of) our failed attempt at Sin, it took me three more years to officially lose my virginity. And to this day, despite being blissfully married and having fathered a kick-
ass son, I consider myself a victim of Post-Traumatic Sex Disorder. (If I’ve inadvertently stolen this term from a struggling stand-up comedian, I humbly apologize.) Every single sexual encounter of my life has been preceded by feelings of overwhelming dread, because no matter how many hundreds of times I’ve hardened up and rocked it in there, part of me is still that confused twenty-year-old, staring at my flaccid shame, getting berated for being defective. Worse still, the mere whiff of white-cheddar popcorn still brings back all the hopeless feelings I went through in the rain that night almost twenty years ago. And I used to love that shit!

  I did, however, learn to masturbate at age twenty-four, making me the only man on earth to lose his virginity to a girl before losing it to himself. And if that fact doesn’t bring a tear of hope to your eye, then I’m sorry, but you simply aren’t human.

  Lesson#2

  Girls Don’t Make Passes at Boys with Fat Asses

  by Andy Richter

  My parents divorced when I was four, and afterwards my brother, mother, and I moved into my grandparents’ house, where a particularly bone-crushing form of matriarchal rule was practiced. At first my grandmother protested against having to care for me while my mother worked, and insisted that I be enrolled in the Jack and Jill Nursery School so that I wouldn’t cramp her Margaret Dumont of Mayberry lifestyle. Her protests were soon proven to be just a way to fuck with my mother, waste our money, and make a difficult time in my mom’s life even more difficult, as most days my grandma kept me out of Jack and Jill and made me her sidekick on an endless round of shopping trips, bridge game lunches, and ladies’ auxiliary something-or-others.

  On one such excursion, my grandmother and I were in the tearoom of Marshall Field’s department store, where we had stopped for a snack. The snack, for me, consisted of a hot fudge sundae, which my grandma asked me if I had enjoyed. After I responded in the affirmative, she asked a question which still chills me.

  “Does it taste like more?”

  There were moments in my childhood where a preternatural maturity rose up in me, where the Future Me would seem to pop through to the surface and say, “Hold on, wait a minute, what’s going on here is fucked up.” This, however, was not one of those moments. In this moment a fat little boy was given permission by his adult guardian to order a second hot fudge sundae, and the fat little boy, being a little boy, said yes. As I tucked into my second sundae, my grandmother smiled, enjoying seeing her grandson made happy. Now, though, I imagine there was more to that smile. I like to think that that smile was a sly wink to all the women who would someday not fuck me, and a fuck-you to all those who might.

  Now it is not my intention to get all victimy, as I know just as well as the next guy how to put down a spoon. And I don’t really think that the women in my family were conscious of the fact that by overfeeding me they were channeling their aggression towards the women who might someday steal me away. But, while it might not take a whole village, it definitely takes more than one person to make a fat kid. And the fat kid is what I was, with the “husky” jeans, President’s Physical Fitness Test dread, and chafing thighs to prove it.

  Navigating the waters of adolescent intergender relations is tricky business for even the most psychologically aerodynamic youngster, but doing it with the added weight of added weight is far more conducive to sinking than swimming.

  For the longest time I couldn’t fathom how a girl could find me attractive, when there were so many other examples of young manhood burgeoning unfettered. And since I was doing such a fantastic job rejecting myself, it seemed redundant to let the local girls get a crack at rejecting me, too. So, except when absolutely necessary (homecoming dances and proms), I didn’t date. At the time, and in later therapy sessions, I would put this down to being the product of two divorces; to being so shell-shocked by the dissolution of my parents’ marriage and my mother’s subsequent one, that any attempt at a romantic relationship was so deadly important and fraught with eventual domestic doom that I would just rather sit on the sidelines and watch the other kids play the game. Looking back, however, I think a stronger contributing factor to my inaction was simply the fear of having to take my clothes off in front of somebody. Luckily, at some point in college, biology won out and I realized that if I didn’t cut out this self-loathing bullshit I was never going to get laid. And to my surprise, I was very good at getting naked. A genius, even. God bless artsy girls and booze!

  I am now on the southern end of forty, married, and the father of two, and my weight is what it should be for a man my age, a health concern. This is because of my wife, whose love and affection make me feel safe and secure and give me a place in the world to really be. And while I really do believe in and truly know unconditional love, I don’t want to give the impression that my wife is that kind of asshole who will stand by her man no matter how much he messes his spiritual diaper. No, don’t get me wrong: if I was to really bloat up, she might very well leave me. Or at least start sleeping around, bless her heart.

  And so, aside from wanting to be with my family for as long as I can, my girth, or occasional lack of it, is almost entirely a professional matter. Now that I’m a grown-up it’s as if I’ve somehow transformed my fear of rejection into a career as a rejection junkie, or at least as somebody with a high rejection tolerance. Why would someone with a history of happiness-crippling body issues choose to go into a line of work so heavily focused on appearance? To a job where it seems I can’t read for a part unless the script refers to the character as “expansive,” or “a bear of a man,” or in the better-written scripts, plain old “fat”?

  My coping mechanism is fairly simple, and it goes like this: I have brainwashed myself to believe that if they like me, they’re geniuses. And if they don’t like me, then they’re idiots, and I will gather the pearls I have cast before the hopeless, clueless swine and head off to some other sty. This M.O., which really does work for me, most likely comes from an ironic inheritance from dear old Grandma, and that is the firm belief that I am better than almost everybody.

  I have even occasionally been a leading man. Well, that is to say, I have been the lead character in a number of television shows. That they are all no longer on the air could be seen as evidence of a mass rejection of me, but I know that it’s much more complicated than that. (So many factors contribute to the demise of a show that I can’t explore them all here: for the sake of space, let’s just boil it down to its essence and say that many of the men and women who run our television networks are gutless cunts.)

  No, I have come to believe that people generally seem to like me. I don’t think of myself as the sexual untouchable that I once did, although there is actual scientific data showing that men like me better than women. And I like me, too, so I will keep plugging away, fueled by the belief that people will actually pay money to see me, to accept me just as I am.

  Although, of course, it wouldn’t hurt to drop a few pounds. It almost never does.

  Lesson#3

  Beware of Math Tutors Who Ride Motorcycles

  by Will Forte

  Her name was Michelle and she was my first serious girlfriend. We had met at a fraternity party one night and somehow, during the course of that evening—aided no doubt by generous portions of cheap beer—I tricked her into liking me. That first meeting turned into a first date and then another date and then soon, she and I were boyfriend and girlfriend. How had I lucked into this? I was dating an attractive woman who didn’t care that I dressed like a slob and had a bowl cut and drank myself into oblivion every third night. It was paradise.

  One weekend, I went up to Lake Tahoe for a ski race. After a day of getting my ass handed to me by superior ski racers, I was in a bit of a funk—and there was only one person who could cheer me up: my beloved Michelle. As this was pre–cell phone and the rotary phone at our condo was locked, I convinced the team to drive by the local grocery store pay phone. My call went to her answering machine, but that was okay—I had a plan. I offered Michelle
three different times to wait by the phone for a call from me later—8:00, 10:00, and midnight. Satisfied, I jumped in the van and took off for dinner.

  After dinner, I convinced the team to swing by the grocery store again. I called Michelle at 8:00 on the nose and once again got her answering machine. No big deal. She was probably at dinner or something. With two-thirds of my calling options still available, I hopped back into the van and headed back to the condo.

  I returned to the pay phone at exactly 10:00, dialed Michelle’s number, and once again got her answering machine. Again, no big deal. In fact, I should have seen it coming. 10:00? Michelle wouldn’t pick 10:00. She’d pick midnight, for sure. She’d want my voice to be the last thing she heard before she went to sleep and dreamed sweet dreams of the two of us sharing our lives together. What a romantic! I walked away from the pay phone, smiling.

  By midnight, everyone was pretty drunk. Everyone except me. I mean, somebody had to stay sober enough to drive me to the pay phone. Eventually, a few ski teamers figured out the reason for my sobriety and I caught a considerable amount of shit for it. The general consensus was that “Forte’s pussywhipped!”—a charge I vehemently denied. But deep inside, I knew they were right.

  I got to the pay phone at 11:50, had a ten-minute fake phone conversation to fend off any would-be phone users, then finally at midnight, jammed my quarters into the coin slot and dialed. “Ring . . . ring . . . ring . . . ring . . .”