What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

  Ben had something that turned out to be my own personal Pied Piper’s trill: an epic, wildly flattering story of how we met. One that was so big and romantic that it sounded just like what I thought my How I Met Your Father story would sound.

  The story went like this: one night, at a friend’s birthday party, about a minute after I wondered if I was getting bored with my whole single-and-dating life, I re-met a girl who had apparently come to a Christmas party I had thrown almost a year earlier, just after my breakup with Trevor. When she put together that I was the girl who threw that party, she got very excited. Coincidentally, just that week she had had dinner with her old friend Ben, who was unhappily dating girls he wasn’t liking. He complained that he couldn’t stop comparing them to a girl he had briefly met at her Christmas party almost a year earlier … ME! He had apparently been brought to my party by a mutual friend, and while I did not remember meeting Ben, he had been smitten. He hadn’t had the courage to track me down and ask me out, but for a year he and his coworker at a production company would talk about the women Ben was dating, and he would always declare that they were “no Kristin Newman.”

  Who wouldn’t like the sound of that?

  Now, it’s important to remember that this all happened in Los Angeles. And I looked like a thirty-year-old writer. Not like a twenty-year-old model or actress or epically legged songstress, which is a category into which an alarmingly high percentage of Angelenas fall. And, because the city is so lousy with these leggy aliens, regular- to below-average-looking guys with reasonable employment levels can actually get one, another maddening aspect of being a woman in this city. So getting to be someone’s standard-bearer in this dating pool was not something I expected.

  Anyway, the story sounded like a story I would like to hear told for a lot of decades, especially at high school reunions, or in front of twenty-year-old actresses. So I let this girl set us up, and it turned out that Ben was a funny, smart, crazily intuitive guy with a dreamy voice. He came from a family of East Coast artists and writers who ran around Greenwich Village apartments and the family avocado ranch in California. (Avocado ranch! With an ocean view!) He could weave stories about the quirky characters in his family like a great novelist. Our e-mail repartee was like fireworks. He was a great kisser, and guitar player. And so, I thought, maybe a year of being single was enough. I thought this for a few months.

  And then it started … Why does he annoy me sometimes? Do I love him? Am I really ready for him to be The One? Shouldn’t I feel more sure? I was sure with Vito. I wasn’t sure with Trevor and I broke his heart. I don’t want to break someone else’s heart. He really likes me. Do I like him? Is it that I’m not ready yet? Why does he drive so slowly? Making a left turn should not make him this nervous.

  One day, a few months into our relationship, I decided I wasn’t happy enough, and I broke up with Ben. We got back together a week later, because Ben’s most special talent was an uncanny ability to see deep into my neurotic soul and talk me right off a cliff. During that get-back-together conversation, he also let me have it for being crazy, which I, upsettingly, discovered I found attractive. But during that week in between breaking up and getting back together, I went on a ski trip with two couples, and that’s when I first heard about the man who led to this chapter’s foreign adventure in Paris and London. A man I will call “Ferris Bueller.”

  It started with a simple postbreakup après-ski conversation in Mammoth over nachos and hot chocolates with one of my friends, a fellow TV writer:

  “You know who you should meet, Kristin? This guy I work with—Ferris Bueller.”

  Immediately my friends’ wives got big eyes and nodded resolutely—yeah, do that. They said the guy was a real-life Ferris Bueller, twenty years later. This was exciting because Ferris Bueller had been my Perfect Man since junior high—charismatic and fun, the guy who lit up the room, was loved by fancy bankers and school secretaries alike, and led great adventures with unfailing enthusiasm. I had crushed on another real-life Ferris throughout high school and college, but he had eventually become a professional lifeguard, which wasn’t as appealing over thirty. So when I heard tell of a fully grown Ferris, with a successful career that didn’t require a swimsuit at the office, I was excited.

  My friends all said this Ferris was just like me—a comedy writer with a big, enthusiastic personality who was always traveling, throwing great parties, and connecting people. He specialized in organizing trips to far-flung places and voraciously hunting movie-like life moments, just like I did. He even lived right around the block from me (which made the subsequent stalking much easier). But unlike me, he also came with mythical stories of the Ferris variety, often involving hundreds of people traveling around the world in costumes he dreamed up, skinny-dipping celebrities, and (his own) Andy Kaufman–esque public ass-shavings during fake wars with angry college lesbians. Oh, and one more thing:

  He loved to do the thing you’re supposed to do in the place you’re supposed to do it.

  Everyone was really sure Ferris and I would be the best setup anyone had ever seen. But, as almost everything does with a roomful of comedy writers, it soon turned into a bit. So as I struggled to carry my snowboard, one friend would pipe up, “Oh, Kristin, if Ferris were here he would definitely carry that for you.” Then I would coo, “I know, he’s so considerate.”

  In line for lunch: “Ferris is the best orderer. He’d definitely get you lunch if he were here.” And I’d respond, “I know, his taste and manners are impeccable. I love him so much.”

  It soon progressed into an imaginary relationship: “You guys, do you think Ferris loves me loves me, or just kinda loves me?” “Oh, are you kidding?! He doesn’t stop talking about you!”

  By day two, the relationship started going through a rough patch: “Ferris just doesn’t look at me the way he used to, guys.” “No, Kristin, he does! He’s over the moon! Everything’s great!”

  It was fun, and, in my party of five, with the two married couples and an empty spot next to me in bed where Ben was supposed to be, it legitimately cheered me up. The myth of “Kristin’s Boyfriend, Ferris” took up so much conversational and mental space, it made me feel like I wasn’t alone. I was there with my boyfriend, Ferris.

  Which, of course, sounds insane.

  But spending that much mental time with someone, whether they are there or not, apparently tells your brain something: you love them. I experienced the same weird phenomenon one time when I was trying to work up the courage to ask a platonic work friend to write a movie with me. He was very talented, and I was nervous he would say no because he didn’t like the idea, or didn’t think I was good enough to partner up with. So I spent the week kind of pining over him as a writing partner, and rehearsing how I would ask him to write with me. I would practice in my head, then chicken out, then mentally practice some more. Much like if you wanted to ask someone on a date. And that’s when this weird thing happened: my practice conversations in my head started turning sexy. I would be imagining us writing, late at night, leaning over the same keyboard, faces close, when he would reach around me to type and …

  Basically, the simple act of obsessing got the juices flowing, and I created a temporary crush on my married colleague. And once I stopped obsessing about him as a writing partner, the crush disappeared, too.

  Point being, apparently the brain can be tricked into love. So, even though I went home from the ski trip with my friends, and got back together with Ben a week later, a thought was stuck in my admittedly cuckoo head:

  Are you sure you should get back together with Ben? Or should you give things a try with Ferris?

  Which is when the interventions from Sasha and Hope started. “Ferris doesn’t know you.” “You don’t know him.” “This isn’t real.” “It’s not Ferris versus Ben, because Ferris is imaginary.” Nonsense like that.

  Now, I’m not completely off my rocker, so I managed to put the whole business far enough back in my brain to get back together
with Ben. And, a few months later, to finally say “I love you,” and mean it. Of course that, too, was a bit of an ordeal. Because I had already broken up with him once, I made a list of rules I had to follow to make sure I meant it before I said the L word for the first time:

  1. I couldn’t say it while under the influence of alcohol.

  2. I couldn’t say it in any sort of hyperromantic situation, like on vacation or at a wedding.

  3. I couldn’t say it during sex.

  The problem was, I only ever felt like saying it during one of the above scenarios. Watching Ben play the guitar in a condo on the lake in Tahoe after a joint and sex on a speedboat?! Signed, sealed, delivered! Sober, on a Tuesday at Baja Fresh? Not so sure. Which made me wonder if I meant it or not.

  My friends also tried to intervene on these rules—when did I think most people felt like saying it for the first time? In line at the DMV? People generally say it drunk, having sex, in romantic locations. Which ultimately turned out to be true—the Three Big Words popped out of me one night when we went to a party thrown by a billionaire, got drunk, and snuck off to do it in the billionaire’s child’s tree house that was nicer than my actual house. I managed to break all three of my rules at once.

  And the next day, I still loved him. But then we’d go to Baja Fresh the day after, and I’d wonder: Did I? And that’s when I took all of that “love” and started making pro/con lists, which are both the death of love, and a good 10 percent of my journals. And, deep down, I kept wondering about Ferris.

  Because every time I turned around, literally every month or two, someone else was coming up with the same great idea: I know this guy who is the male version of you! You have to meet Ferris Bueller!

  They said that amazing things just happened when he was around, because he imagined them and then willed them into existence through personality alone. The stories about him were more epic with every telling. I had a boyfriend, but one I was torn about. And Ferris represented the possibility of being untorn, of being blissfully, 100 percent signed-sealed-delivered. And so I wondered.

  So there I was, trying to forget about Ferris, the summer that Sasha got married. It’s hard to overstate how much Sasha getting married affected me. Aside from the fact that she was yet another friend going in a direction I was starting to fear I would never want to go, she was my partner in crime, my sister, my wild, funny, adventurous friend who helped teach me how to be wild and funny and adventurous.

  And it wasn’t just what was going on with Sasha’s life that hit me in the face that weekend. Sasha’s wedding weekend was one of those real-life moments that, if it were in a movie, would feel trite and convenient. She got married in New York, and also invited were Hope and our friend Ann, whose parents were a second family to me growing up. Ann had grown into a calm, organized lawyer who calmly married her college boyfriend and was now calmly nine months pregnant with the first baby any of our friends had produced. Hope was wildly depressed, and in the middle of an awful divorce from that boy she brought with us to Amsterdam, the one who snuck off to the sex show without her. And I was there with Ben … struggling with what I wanted to do next. We were a Sex and the City quartet: one marrying, one divorcing, one trying to decide if she’s in love, one giving birth.

  On the day of the wedding, Ann gave birth a few blocks away from the ceremony at precisely the moment Sasha said “I do,” while Hope rolled her eyes at the promises of “forever,” and I wept at losing my single buddy. Not those emotional, joyful, smiley wedding tears you shed because you’re so happy. Big, heaving sobs of genuine grief sprang out of me as I stood under the chuppah, watching a person who felt like a piece of myself walk toward me, while somehow really walking away.

  By the end of the weekend, I had lost my best girl. And when I got home, the old panic about Ben and my readiness to settle down continued. And so, after a tremendous amount of soul-searching, and self-created misery, and pro/con lists, I broke up with him again. Because … well … because. That’s what I do. It sort of had something to do with the way he grocery-shopped. So … because of me.

  I tortured myself a lot. I wept a lot. I doubted my decision a lot. I sat in my backyard crying to Sasha and her new husband, Jared.

  “Why are you crying when you broke up with him?”

  “Because I’m broken! He’s great! And Trevor was great! I’m getting older, I should want to settle down! But I don’t want to! Maybe I won’t ever want to! Everyone else wants to, what’s wrong with me? Maybe I’ll sabotage all relationships forever because I’m broken!”

  And they would assure me that I wasn’t broken. That Trevor and I just weren’t a match. Sasha’s husband wrote me an actual guarantee on which he staked ten thousand dollars that I would meet a man I wanted to marry within the next five years.

  “Five years?!” I wailed.

  “You said you weren’t ready yet.”

  “But I should be ready in sooner than five years!”

  “I’m sure it will be sooner. I just want to make sure I don’t lose the bet,” he replied.

  A few years ago, I found the guarantee, and saw that Jared’s marriage-guarantee date had passed years before, and cried again. He owes me ten thousand dollars to this day.

  So it was while in this place that, out of the blue, I finally met Ferris. He just walked into a restaurant and sat down at my table.

  I was at a big group dinner, and, without my knowledge, he had also been invited. (Coincidence! Fate!) He was late, and so I was nibbling on a salad when this friendly, boisterous guy walked in and shouted, “Hello!!!!” The guy had an entirely shaved head, save for two small, round patches of three-inch-long black hair that were sprouting out of the top, a little off-center, apparently the result of a bet. He certainly stood out, but not in a hot way. Just in a jolly and poorly coiffed way. The stranger sat down, and offered me his hand:

  “Hi! I’m Ferris Bueller.”

  And there he was.

  While fireworks did not exactly go off, it really didn’t matter. I had already decided the truth based on “Ferris Bueller: The Myth”: we were meant for each other. And The Real Ferris Bueller was certainly cute enough aside from the hair polka dots on his skull, and likable as hell. But that didn’t really matter.

  Because after all these months, and all these people telling me he was perfect for me, I had fallen in love with him. Like, really in love, in a way that made my friends hold interventions since I had never met him. Like, in love like I’ve written TV shows for major networks with characters based on him. More than one. In love like I eventually flew to Europe to try to kiss him.

  And, finally, here is that story:

  A couple of months into my Ferris-stalking fever, Ferris organized the first of what would be yearly New Year’s Eve trips that I spent the next decade going on. The trips usually consist of twenty to sixty people going wherever in the world Ferris tells them, and having the most ridiculous, high-profile, memoir-worthy adventures imaginable. There was even an article about Ferris’s usually costume-bedecked excursions in the New York Times. He’s taken us to chalets in the Alps, jillionaires’ estates in Punta del Este, beach houses in the Dominican Republic, twenties masquerade balls in San Francisco, Brazil, Portugal, the Bahamas. Last month, he and his merrymaking right-hand man Thomas sent out an e-mail to hundreds of people, telling them to show up on a Thursday night with a passport and three hundred dollars for a mystery three-day international adventure. Sixty people ended up on a bus to Mexico.

  This first trip was to Paris, where Ferris’s brother was an Episcopal minister at the American Cathedral, which is located just off the Champs-Élysées. Ferris was throwing a party in the cathedral on New Year’s Eve. And while I was not “invited” per se, the friends who had first suggested I date Ferris on that weekend in Mammoth were, and promised it was a “come one come all” sort of affair. So the next time I ran into Ferris, I informed him that I was going to be in London, by coincidence, and he said of course I should come to t
he party in Paris, and then I grabbed my cousin Emma, and she grabbed her awful friend Sally, and we bought tickets to London and Paris.

  A little on my travel partners: my cousin Emma is two years older than I am. Growing up, she had an amazing Dorothy Hamill haircut and I wanted to be just like her. She married her first college sweetheart at twenty-five, when I was living with my first college sweetheart, Vito, in Vail, working three ski-town jobs to afford my six months as a “ski bum.”

  It was these similar starts—long-term relationships with guys we both met at eighteen and both thought we would be with forever—that made what happened with Emma so resonant for me. Basically, while I had a wrenching breakup after six years with my guy, she married hers (thereby breaking my “don’t choose your spouse young” rule). But after thirteen years, she found that he had become just a best friend. So they officially separated.

  She got back out there, single and living alone for the first time at thirty-two, and met men who woke up something in her that she had never even realized existed. And she found me again. Just as I was breaking up with Trevor, single at thirty for what felt like the first time in my adult life.

  Emma finally filed her divorce papers just before we left for Paris. Like me, she had few friends left who were still single, and so eagerly jumped on a trip that would be filled with dozens of new single strangers. I knew Emma would mix easily with this new posse, because she’s the most easygoing person in the world, up for anything, capable, and cheerful. Her friend Sally was not.