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

by Ben Karlin

  In reality, relationships only end this cleanly when one of the participants is a prostitute. The rest linger and fade and slowly deteriorate, regardless of how simple and exciting they seemed at the start. For Amanda and me, this deterioration came labeled “growth.” We ignored our misgivings about the cooling fires, convinced that this was what it meant to mature; our needy childish desires were mellowing into something deeper and more sustainable, the kind of love they had in the Middle Ages when everyone wrote poetry, not just East Coast nerdlingers. We were becoming adults, we told ourselves. So what if sex was less frequent than trips to the Home Depot? Adults have significant hardware needs, and if the intrigue of our early days was fading, we consoled ourselves that we were discovering the real virtue under there: teamwork. As if companionship, when you boil it down, is essentially a sport, and not one of those coed naked ones from the T-shirts of our youth.

  To be fair, it’s a pretty pleasant phase of a relationship. Teamwork is satisfying. Sure, on the passion/adrenaline scale, you just can’t top frantic sex on the hood of your beat-up Camry, but there is a distinct satisfaction in dropping off her movies at Blockbuster or remembering to use only the approved utensils on the nonstick cookware; these are things that scream WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER! It’s a nice feeling, togetherness, and looking back, those couple years were like the warm fuzzy version of a climactic A-Team montage; we cobbled together a life the way Murdock and Face made fully armed tanks from kindling, telephone wire, and two or three riding lawnmowers. We talked our way into private parties and produce-market discounts, we convinced our landlord to spring for a dishwasher, we encouraged our single friends to date each other, we shared winter hats and sunglasses. And, crucially, we got a dog.

  Let me just get this out of the way right now: we’re not like those sick fucks who have babies just to save their relationship. Under the surface, the excitement of the early days might have been waning, but we were doing our best to ignore the ebb, and in any case, Ella The Dog was not some Band-Aid or stopgap to keep the home fires burning. She was a helpless, six-week-old, burrito-sized, tailless puppy who’d been rescued from a cruel dog-fighting ring, and she needed a home. But all the same, I can’t say she didn’t help out on the relationship front. She brought us together and turned us into a little family. I loved the dog, Amanda loved the dog, we all loved each other, and for a while there, that’s all anybody needed.

  We potty-trained her and took her to obedience classes. She fell over when she tried to wag the tail that didn’t exist. We taught her to swim and catch Frisbees and jump through hula hoops held head-high. She learned to recognize the word “squirrel,” and just by saying it we could incite Björk-like howling and vicious attacks on innocent trees. We bought her a toy piano, which she’d bang on like a palsied Elton John when we told her to “rock out.” When I went into the studio to make my band’s first album, Ella The Dog played on the recording, and she’d lie for hours on the base of my mic stand while I sang.

  You’ll notice this is the first time I mention being in a band. Up to this point my band had mostly been irrelevant to my relationship; everyone has a day job and a pipe dream, and if I was dumb enough to nurse a rock and roll fantasy, I was also smart enough not to expect it to come true. But about a year after we got Ella The Dog, the band reached a turning point and the pipe dream became real. When I quit my job to start touring, Amanda couldn’t have been more supportive; all we wanted for each other was happiness, and happiness, I was pretty sure, meant living on truck stop food and spending twelve hours a day in an un-air-conditioned 1986 Dodge conversion van, elbow-to-elbow with three other sweaty fools who share the delusion.

  The constant touring caused another shift in my relationship. Amanda and I went from real teammates to imaginary ones. She was sleeping in our bed and going to her job and feeding our dog, and I was sleeping on strangers’ floors and getting paid in beer tickets. While the folks around me, unburdened by monogamy, were engaging in what is generally expected of rock musicians—stumbling from city to city blotting out the previous night’s memory with a new girl and a dozen more Pabsts—I prided myself on pining. I had emotional ballast in the maelstrom, a home team to believe in, a woman and a dog to miss. For months on end, our lives only intersected for the few exhausted minutes of our nightly phone call—it was about as exciting, and only slightly less sexual, than a romance between hospice patients—but still we soldiered on, loyal and determined and dedicated. We lasted this way for nearly two years.

  But one day I came home to Chicago after an especially long string of shows, and it all came crashing down. Ella The Dog and I were throwing tennis balls and terrorizing ducks in Humboldt Park—which has surely become a thousand-acre lot for some palatial Starbucks by now, but was still knee-deep in immigrants and corpses at the time—when I realized that Ella was more important to me than Amanda. They had both come to stand for the same things: duty and loyalty and warmth and support, but to experience them with the dog was tangible; it required contact. It meant being there with her, and I loved it. I loved the sticks and Frisbees and contempt for animals smaller than herself. I loved the howling and hula hoop jumping and the careful inspection of particularly impressive stacks of feces. By contrast, Amanda and I had ripened our relationship past recognition, from practice to theory, until it had morphed into a purely symbolic belief in each other, something we didn’t even need real contact to sustain. We had lost whatever it is that differentiates romantic love from friendship and now we were just best friends doing our daily telephone checkup. The life we’d built was still there in our apartment two blocks away, but I was no longer a part of it, and all that really made Chicago home now was Ella The Dog. She had become my best friend’s girl, and I loved her, but this time I couldn’t steal her away.

  In the end it was Amanda who dumped me, both of us lying faceup in the bed in the middle of the night, talking the way we did on the phone, not looking at each other. It was pretty low-drama; by then there wasn’t much to give up except the idea that there was something to give up. That, and of course, the dog. With a hint of determination that suggested she thought I might argue, Amanda asserted that she was keeping Ella, but it was a custody battle I’d already lost, and I knew it. It stung—badly—but there’s just no way around it: you can’t stay with someone just because of a dog, and you can’t try to take the dog when she’s been the one caring for it. (Unless you’re a total dick. Then you can do pretty much anything.)

  So I just lay there and let it all go; the last traces of teamwork finally fizzled out. The saddest thing, that night, wasn’t the loss, it was the thought that there would someday be others: other dogs, other boyfriends, other girlfriends; that all of our diligent future-building would inevitably be undone by real people in the real future. We all want to believe that the people who dump us will regret it someday, but I knew it wasn’t true; it was over, and I would be replaced.

  And I was right. Now, five years later, Amanda and Ella The Dog live on a tropical island with a gentle Viking who’s apparently both champion skydiver and master carpenter. I haven’t met him, but by all accounts he’s talented at pretty much everything and a wellspring of kindness—one of those people put on earth to teach the rest of us humility. Amanda sends photos of them repairing the moat around their house and rowing at sunset in a canoe he built by hand, and I am—I’m not lying—genuinely happy for them. It’s a little weird to see your ex in love with someone else (and maybe weirder to think she could have a kid with the letter ø in its name), but I take comfort that it took a veritable Norse god to fill my shoes. And of course time heals an awful lot, so after half a decade, I really have moved on. At least when it comes to Amanda.

  Lesson#18

  You Too Will Get Crushed

  by Ben Karlin

  We didn’t meet cute. She was taking baths on the downlow with a friend of mine while her boyfriend pined away in Ignoramusland, aka Houston. It’s not polite to name names. Hers was Jill. />
  We took up, falling fast and hard in the waning light of life in a college town after you’re done with college. You know, the time when you’re supposed to have left already but just can’t surrender two-hundred-dollar-a-month rent and the idea that these were, are, will be the best days of your life. They weren’t, aren’t, and won’t be. But it’s awesome to think so.

  Let me tell you a little about her—for me though, not for you—in order to reclaim that which has been smothered beneath a calloused heart. She had flaxen hair, wispy and cut short around her opal face. She was fair and thin—not scrawny, taut. She had cheeks that shot into perfect circles every time she smiled slyly, which was quite a lot. She was a troublemaker. She made me feel like I was a troublemaker, too. I was not a troublemaker. I am a wimp who still doesn’t know exactly what spark plugs do.

  We moved through the early stages of our relationship in paces that seem stunningly familiar now—but at the time felt like a fever dream. We lingered outside each other’s front doors not wanting nights to end. Walked hand in hand through the farmers’ market, envious of no one, living in the goddamn now. We held out, carnally speaking, partially out of the now comically puritanical notion that it would be better if we waited. (The other part had to do with the fact that she had technically not broken it off with Clueless T. McCuckhold down in Texas.) The whole time, one question slowly built in my mind: What if this is the person I never run out of falling in love with?

  Alas, like poorly fenced-in pit bulls raised by angry Mexican youths, the complications of life can only be kept at bay for so long. Eventually, they will attack and tear you apart, and unless there is some passerby to pull you out of their vicelike jaws, you will be grievously injured, if not killed. Come to think of it, most of that last sentence is just about pit bulls.

  The point, however, is that upon leaving our college town—I’ll call it Eden to protect its identity from future pilgrims who may flock there to trace the origin of this very story—mistakes were made. Some were mistakes of vanity. Others of youth. Still others of the vanity of youth. Eventually, these mistakes would pile up and their weight would become too much for any one man, or relationship, to bear. Here are those mistakes.

  Mistake #1

  I told her I was moving cross-country—to Los Angeles—and wanted to stay together but didn’t want a long-distance relationship. Instead of inventing a new form of relationship, I simply moved without discussing it further. One clue this might not be the most mature tack: at least once during this period, we had sex where weeping was involved. “What, are you sad? Did it hurt? I thought it was quite good!”

  Mistake #2

  Expressing indignation, rage, and heretofore unseen emotions when I discovered she had started seeing someone else in my absence—even though I gamely, albeit futilely, attempted to penetrate Southern California’s hyper-Darwinian mating scene. Yes, by my own design I left things impossibly murky and vague—but that was for my benefit. Not hers! She was supposed to be pining for me. Hoping that I came around.

  Mistake #3

  I came around.

  On a last-minute, half-baked romantic whim, I flew from Los Angeles to her parents’ home in Iowa, where she was visiting. This was a surprise move, confusing everybody, especially the parents, since they knew she was doing some other dude. I didn’t know that. Yet.

  Why did I fly to Iowa? What was it that kept me coming back when Reason and Practicality were screaming, “Let it go, dickwad!” (You should know that Reason and Practicality are mean.) Well, though the heady days of falling and falling and falling in love were shrinking in a rearview mirror, there was still hope. That niggling itch that if you keep at it, persevere, it will come back. Maybe not permanently, but in waves big enough and frequent enough to make everything else worth it. I wasn’t ready to give up. And what came of it?

  For a few days we enjoyed something resembling romantic bliss. But, as I soon learned, it would be the roller-coaster style. The kind that makes you puke. I helped her move—not to L.A., where I lived, but to Chicago. On the drive, we went into further detail about each other’s sexual exploits during our time away from each other. My part was easy. Zero sexual exploits. “And you? What’s that? More baths?” What is it with her and bathing with dudes? Now I got really angry. And sad. I was probably more angry than sad, but I found sadness seemed to affect her more. So I went with that. In a dramatic flourish bordering on the baroque, I demanded to be dropped off—not in Chicago, but twenty miles outside the city at O’Hare Airport, where I told her I would pay any amount of money to escape this nightmare. (This was not true. In my mind I had decided I would spend no more than six hundred dollars for a ticket.)

  Mistake #4

  I stayed.

  Finished the drive. We arrived at her new place and I went right down the street to a bar on the corner. Drank two shots of Jameson, which seemed like the appropriate thing to do. I was in uncharted territory here. Maybe it should have been Jack Daniel’s. You know what, I just realized it should have been Jack Daniel’s. I walked back, and—at this point I am really taking my cue more from popular music and seventy-five years of American cinema than anything resembling actual human behavior—I told her I’m not going to run away. I was going to stay and fight. We enjoyed romantic bliss, again. Cue the nausea. Vomit from the Jameson.

  Mistake #5

  We made a new plan.

  This plan called for complete sacrifice—from her. She would bide her time in Chicago as a lame-duck resident. I would go back to Los Angeles and pick up my life as if nothing had changed, save for the fact I would be talking on the phone more late at night. As late as it was for me, it was two hours later for her—and she had the job that started at nine. I made my own hours and frequently didn’t put on pants until one p.m.

  Three months later, I flew back to Chicago to pick her up and drive cross-country together. We stopped in Sedona, Arizona, and got so high we slept through New Year’s. That was fun. And not technically a mistake, though I believe we did have dinner reservations and that is a very uncool thing to do on New Year’s Eve.

  We arrived in L.A., but not to live together. (This is a mistake within the larger mistake, but not necessarily one that warrants its own number.) I helped her find an apartment a few blocks away with a friend of mine, convincing her this gave us something to look forward to—a step to take together. I will admit, at this point I was starting to believe my own bullshit and, worse still, had lost the ability to determine what was bullshit and what was truth. Now, this is an easy call. Bullshit. The truth: I was afraid to live with her for fear of it not working out and feeling guilty that I dragged her all the way to L.A., only to have it end badly and now we live together and it sucks for everyone. In poker and the stock market this is called hedging your bets. In relationships it’s called being a pussy.

  Mistake #6

  This really is the killer and I will say all the others can be dismissed as mistakes only in retrospect. They are situation specific, original, and unprecedented. This, however, is a really stupid thing I did and something I should have known not to do. I introduced her to all my friends and encouraged her to hang out with them on her own. Now, the operative word here is all. Some is fine. Many is all right. Just about every one would be okay, too. But not all. Not the ones you know are dodgy. Not the ones whose dodginess you have personally witnessed for years. A dodginess legendary amongst his contemporaries. That’s just buying a ticket for an express train to Crushtown.

  The Dumping and the Damage Done

  We drift. We don’t break up, but we don’t try too hard to address issues either. She tried. I know I tried to try. One time we were in a car with my dad and he mentioned casually how his mother died. Turns out I never knew. I was embarrassed because I was twenty-six and you should probably know this kind of stuff at that age. Especially since by my standards my dad and I had a “good” relationship. According to Jill, that was “telling.” I thought about trying to turn my emotio
nal retardation into a plus. “Won’t it be exciting to watch me grow up before your very eyes? And there’s nothing illegal about sleeping with an emotional preteen!” Alas, I didn’t know how to talk to her. Or at this point, if I even wanted to.

  Time to take stock of the relationship. Not together. That would have been foolish. I decided to go someplace exotic, but not too exotic so as to undercut the weight of all the stock-taking. I chose Scotland. I had some friends in Edinburgh and I could go and wander around soft mossy hills, awash in sheep dung and low clouds. I went in the dead of winter, so there were only five or six hours of light per day. Then I went to the northernmost part of the country, as if I was trying to escape the revealing light of the sun itself. This added gravity—especially since I was the only person in all the hotels I stayed at. Do you get it? I was alone. Isolated. A four-year-old could psychoanalyze what I was doing! I thought long and hard about where we were at. What I wanted. What was fair. What was right. I also spent a good deal of time wondering why they call eggplant aubergine. That’s just way too fancy a word for, let’s be honest, a pretty shitty vegetable.

  Soon after I returned to the States, a letter arrived. It was from one of my best friends—the dodgy one—telling me he had developed strong feelings for and was now in love with my . . . I guess ex-girlfriend. The letter made no explicit mention of “bath” time, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine.

  What followed wasn’t pretty. Letters and accusations flew. On more than one occasion I uttered the words “I would rather starve than eat your bread.” (Thanks for the assist, Pearl Jam!) Gifts and baubles were repackaged and left on doorsteps. Not a small thing, considering one such gift was a decoupaged coffee table. That bitch was heavy.