Wow, No Thank You.

by Samantha Irby

  “Settling” is a coarse way of saying “adjusting my expectations,” and I think that gets a bad rap. Dude, I would rather settle than be “chronically unfulfilled due to my outsize desires.” I don’t mean that you should marry someone you hate just because they won’t go away, but I do think it’s worth examining what you actually want while being honest about what is important to you. Then it won’t feel like such a compromise, you know? On top of that, it’s totally unfair to make a flesh-and-bone person compete against an imaginary ideal that was imprinted on you when you were too young to understand what was happening. Shit, growing up I wanted to marry the Beast from Beauty and the Beast. A strong, virile creature who read tons of books and could fuck up a wolf? Yes please! Sign me up! I could’ve lain awake every night waiting for Mufasa to save me from a wildebeest stampede in a gorge, but do I climb into bed next to a fucking lion? No, bitch, because I am realistic. Instead, I married this person who makes her own kombucha and charges her crystals under the new moon. Girl, adapt!

  Lately I have become perplexed at the vanity and immoral behavior now associated with the task of dating. I’m a single man living by myself, with no responsibilities but my own. I am looking for someone who will fit into my lifestyle. Unfortunately, I have encountered some roadblocks that keep me single. First: I am not looking for a ready-made family. Second: I’m not in a position to analyze her last relationship, which left emotional baggage. Third: I am definitely not looking for someone who isn’t business-or life-oriented. What I want to find is someone who doesn’t have a long history of suitors or life issues that cause further relationship problems. How do I go about separating the disposables from the possibles?

  CAN YOU GET ON A ROCKET TO MARS? First of all, don’t knock a ready-made family. I joined one and you know what? It’s fine! There’s so much less for me to do, and that’s comforting. Second, is this emotional exploration really being asked of you, a regular person who wrote to a housekeeping magazine for advice? Is this a thing, asking a single man you met on Tinder for deep Jungian analysis? Third, are there sentient, breathing women who are not life-oriented? What do those words mean? “Business” I understand, but if I am alive, am I not life-oriented? Also, my kingdom for a person on Earth over the age of five who does not have any “life issues.” LIFE IS MY ISSUE, SIR.

  Who cares about helping some asshole who refers to people as “disposables,” but is this what it’s like to date these days? I’m not asking from the snooty perch of the Smug Married. I am genuinely concerned that this is what women are encountering when they are trying to see a movie and get a pizza with three toddlers stacked in a trench coat masquerading as an adult human male. The thing about having this many stringent requirements is not that you aren’t allowed to want what you want. Of course you are! You should have standards. You deserve to be happy! It’s that, if I had this many stipulations, I would feel like I had to offer the exact same and then some in return. And I couldn’t. I’m fucked up.

  I imagine that if this is the standard I expect a person to meet before I’d consider dating them, I have to have a dope crib and an 850 credit score and a lifetime six-figure job with benefits and a clean bill of health and regular therapy sessions and a mom who loves me and all my chakras balanced and be very good at bringing a person other than myself to orgasm. I don’t have even one of those things, which is why the job application to be my boss is incredibly short. It’s basically: “Can I pick all the music and have 75 percent ownership of the remote?” And if you agree to tolerate me, I’m yours! I aspire to have the confidence of this perplexed single man. How does one build up nerve like this?

  My husband has an extensive sexual history. He has had sex with more than eighty partners. All the encounters were from when he was in high school and in his early twenties. Most were one-night stands with female friends. When we met, he was honest, and I was understanding. He didn’t keep in touch with any of those women (pre-Facebook). But now he’s friends with several of them on Facebook, and while he doesn’t “talk” to them, he comments and “likes” many of their posts. This makes me uncomfortable, because I don’t feel that past sexual partners should be part of one’s life once someone is married. I’m not jealous or insecure, I just think it’s disrespectful. Am I controlling?

  You know what feels like a lot of pressure to me? Being the sole object of one person’s affections. Stay with me—I’m not about to surprise you by pretending to understand what being polyamorous actually means. I’m saying that I spent many, many agonizing years desperate for someone to pay attention to me, and now that there’s a spotlight on everything I do, it’s like, “Hey, babe, should we get you a girlfriend?” I’m not as interesting as I thought I was. I mean, is anyone? It’s one thing to be cool and glamorous on date night once a week, but when you have to see a person Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday: I do not have enough party tricks for this.

  Every time I glance over and my lady is texting someone, my brain screams, THANK GOD, I HOPE THIS BITCH IS GOING OUT!!!!! “Wow, sweetie, are you liking someone’s Instagrams? Would you like to talk to that person while I try to do literally anything I can tell you about later?” I am flooded with relief every time I walk in the house and she’s on the phone with someone I’ve never met. You know why? That takes the heat off my ass for five minutes. Listen, I’m not posturing as one of those ~cool girls~ who is supremely confident and doesn’t get jealous. I just don’t get jealous of my wife double-tapping some stud in cornrows and boxer briefs on her pocket computer. What’s the harm? Is she going to leave me for her? Probably not—all her shirts and canned tomatoes live here!

  Control is a wild concept. I think the one thing I’ve learned from my many exes—most of whom I do not follow on social media, because it’s fine if they have a better life than mine, but I don’t need to fucking see it—is that you just can’t have it. Short of imprisoning someone, it’s just not possible. There is no such thing as total control. And if you’re a reasonable person, you probably don’t even really want it. It’s a lot of work being in charge of a whole other person and their Facebook likes.

  One day, you should secretly add up all the minutes he spends online, surreptitiously favoriting pictures of women named Debra and Jackie as they pose in front of slot machines on the riverboat with Virginia Slims dangling off their lips, and imagine he’s spending all that time focused on what you’re doing instead. Watching you pick at your cuticles, and try on old pants, and giggle over dumb gossipy shit in the group chat, and eat peas out of the can, or whatever silly shit you like doing without an audience. Disconcerting, right? Let him have his likes! You’ve got episodes of Basketball Wives clogging up the DVR.

  We’ve only been married for a couple years, and our love life is still pretty hot if you ask me, but why won’t my wife have sex with me in the shower?

  Probably because she values having intact front teeth. If life were a movie, you would return home after a grueling day at the office, sexily loosen your tie as you drop your briefcase in the mudroom, brush past the towering stack of overdue credit card bills on the kitchen counter, and take the stairs two at a time up to the master bedroom where your beloved sits weeping over a “hey just thinking about u” text from that one dude she really thought she was going to marry back in 2007. Ignoring her attempts to hide the phone, you kick a path through piles of soiled laundry to the bathroom you meant to bleach last weekend when your mother-in-law was in town, wait for the water to get hot and the pressure to build, then coax her into joining you in the shower with promises to carefully shave that stubbly bit of thigh-back that always gets missed when she bathes in contended solitude. You initiate clumsy, ham-handed slippery-fingered lovemaking that is over before it has really even begun, then immediately retreat to a separate corner of the house. You indulge in whatever SPORTS!!! happen to be on television for the remainder of the evening while she locks herself in the spare bedroom to text homeboy back.

  Sadly, life is not a movie. Life is a
n impossibly long and unyielding march to the grave, peppered along the way with myriad disappointments and misfortunes. Living is a mistake and everyone is trash, which is why shower sex usually winds up with one or more of the naked parties shivering alone at the back of the shower, trying not to slip on a viscous glob of body wash, while the other gasps and sputters as shampoo burns her sensitive eyes. Your wife sounds pretty sensible. Just leave her alone already.

  I am a morning person, and my newly retired partner is the opposite. At night in our bedroom, they read on their iPad for several hours while I try to sleep. I am in bed by 11 p.m. while my partner usually stays up till 1 or 2 a.m. If I wake up, they’re on our couch in the bedroom with a glow of light from the iPad. We have been married twenty years and usually went to bed at the same time because of work, but now that they’re retired, they like staying up reading, watching movies, or watching videos on YouTube. Bottom line: it bothers me that one person is doing an activity while the other sleeps or tries to sleep. What would be your advice?

  I don’t have a job. I mean, not for real. Sometimes people try to act like writing about my asshole on the Internet qualifies as work, but those people have obviously never worked as receptionists for veterinarians and been vomited on by a dog with parvo while trying to schedule dentistry for a cat. THAT SHIT IS WORK. Burning my knees with an overheated laptop all evening after crawling out of bed at 3 p.m. is most certainly not!

  That said, I love to go to sleep at 2 a.m. Which is weird, because I’m an extremely jumpy and anxious person, especially in the dark. As soon as night falls, a family of raccoons will skitter across the deck eating compost or a deer will ram its head repeatedly into the garage door, causing my heart to skip several beats as I brace myself for a horror-movie villain to come crashing through the glass door while my wife sleeps peacefully upstairs, blissfully unaware of the corpse she’s unfortunately going to have to heave out of the way when she wakes up to get past the guy in the Scream mask hiding in the closet. But let me tell you what your partner won’t: it’s worth risking getting your head chopped off by Freddy Krueger to watch your makeup tutorials and/or read a couple chapters of your Book of the Month in blissful unadulterated silence.

  When I lived alone, I would go to bed at 9 p.m., but now that there is a family in my home who won’t stop talking to me, I can’t really get anything done, or enjoy anything in my life, until all those people go the fuck to sleep. Respect a pair of headphones? Give a shit about a locked door?? No, ma’am, not in this house! If the sun is up, guaranteed there is someone beating a snare drum or sprawled in front of a blaring television or bleating, “Sam? Sam? Sam? Sam? Sam? Sam? Sam? Sam? Sam?” while standing right in front of me until I drag my eyes to wherever they want me to look. So when they sleep, I’m up. It’s just me and the cats watching R-rated violent, sexy shit without anybody asking where the scissors are or if lentils are okay for dinner. Sure! Cook whatever you want! I’m going to have my real dinner (Triscuits and pimento cheese from Zingerman’s) at midnight.

  I’m up writing this at 1 a.m. on a Thursday, with nothing but the drone of a couple fans and a white-noise machine whirring in the distance for company. Four hours ago I stood in the assembly line outside the bathroom waiting to double cleanse, pat some drops of antiaging serum into my cheeks, brush my teeth a little, dab on some moisturizer, and get into my PJs. As everyone completed the routine by settling into bed, I turned on the recorded episode of Real Housewives of New York they wouldn’t allow me to watch uninterrupted when it aired a few hours ago.

  You either have to let it go or quit your job. Or maybe get them a pair of fancy headphones so Wendy Williams reruns aren’t filtering into your dreams. Now that that’s out of the way, what is this I’m reading about a “bedroom couch”? What exactly is that, and how can I get one?

  My husband of many years has an offensive eating habit. When finishing his meal, he takes the plate or bowl, puts it up to his mouth as one would a drinking glass, and shovels the remains into his mouth. As he does it, he makes little sucking movements with his lips like an animal lapping food from a bowl. I find it revolting, but how can I address it without offending him?

  I do this. Everyone does this. How the fuck else are you supposed to get all the liquid part of the stew? Tell me how to finish my entire bowl of Corn Chex in under an hour without tipping the last of it from the bowl directly down my throat. If I have to eat room-temperature soup with you at four in the afternoon, I want to be able to eat all of it. You can’t insist I try gazpacho, and then make me scoop out the last bit one-eighth of a teaspoon at a fucking time. Don’t address it, you monster. Just let him eat his runny oatmeal and unsalted broth in peace.

  are you familiar with my work?

  You don’t have to cry for me, but listen: trying to make new friends as an adult is the hardest thing I have ever attempted to do. Harder than multiple colonoscopies? Yes. Harder than listening to the dentist pry my tooth bone away from my jawbone while I lie there wide awake? Also yes!

  When I moved to Kalamazoo from Chicago, I thought for sure that I was going to be happy being in the house and never going outside. And, for the most part, I am. I get to travel and work in fancy cities with mass transit and Ethiopian food, then come back and pay $1.87 for a gallon of gas for the car that I can park anywhere on my sprawling 2,000 acres of land that were practically free. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but I used to pay $850 a month for 350 square feet of living space, which is $2.43 per foot, and now I pay $2.39 a foot for 1,700 square feet. Yes, I probably fucked up the math, but my point is FUCK THE CITY.

  But, how does one make friends without an office to go to? Or a club to participate in? Or various PTA meetings to grimace at each other through? Are you just supposed to walk up to an interesting-looking person on the street and ask them to be your friend? I don’t know if this is some kind of reverse profiling, but I can usually glance at a person and know at first sight that we’re probably going to get along. I don’t have it down to a science (I’m not researching shit, dude), but here are some dead giveaways:

  interesting, alternative, “cool person” hair

  visible armpit hair

  hip glasses

  dumb tattoos, because people with serious tattoos are exhausting

  carrying a book, multiplied by a factor of ten if it happens to be one I wrote (I’m sorry—I am an egomaniac)

  fat

  mean

  has an old-ass cell phone

  eating something gross, with fervor

  feline

  But even if you see a girl on the street who looks like she climbed right out of the most whimsical page in the plus-size section of ModCloth, eating a whole pizza with a well-loved copy of Bastard Out of Carolina tucked under her arm, what are you supposed to do? Can you just go up and introduce yourself and ask her to do a friend thing with you? “Um, excuse me, miss, would you like to sit around and vape sativa with me and eat Trader Joe’s Cubano wraps while MSNBC plays on a continuous loop in the background?” Or, “Hey, stranger, would you like to skim the extensive collection of sad memes saved on my hard drive to see the kind of shit I will regularly be texting you at three in the morning?”

  Have you ever considered what a friendship is, or what any of your current friendships are, and thought about how to present that to a prospective new friend? You know, like how you are going to eventually be sending them selfies of you trying on twelve similar-yet-slightly-different pairs of glasses in your ophthalmologist’s waiting room while your garbage insurance is being processed? How do you convince a stranger to give you their real e-mail when you are definitely going to litter their gmail dot com with dumb nonsense. Scrolling through my phone to find recent examples of what I text my stupid-ass friends has yielded this treasure trove of idiocy:

  jenny (12:09 a.m.): “AT ELEVEN AT NIGHT?? wow mom *devil horns emoji*”

  cara (2:22 a.m.): “lmao i mean great i hope they feel good, but you gotta be gross AND show tits” megan (9:39 a
.m.): “it’s nothing, just capitalizing on the love being sent my way”

  Michael (10:43 a.m.): “hey this is really important” *posts link to a Twitter profile*

  Jessie (1:11 p.m.): “we’re thinking about adopting this orange cat from the shelter and his name is reginald but i want an orange cat named pumpkin so what do you think if i call him ‘reginald pumpkin’ aka ‘little reggie pumps’ that’s a cool name right!”

  john (1:12 p.m.): *mo’nique meme: “see when you do clownery, the clown comes back to bite”*

  abbi (2:13 p.m.): “i just don’t like that i can feel my organs working, you know? like my gallbladder burns and that makes me terrified that it is going to burst out of my body.”

  jenn (3:12 p.m.): “i am too humble and ashamed, i had guilt throwing out a face wash i hated”

  helen (4:11 p.m.): “BEETS ARE DISGUSTING”

  Fernando (4:17 p.m.): “do you think i could go to urgent care to get tested for stress shingles?”

  keely (9:06 p.m.): “i’m glad it’s finally spring, because i always thought i hated it as a season but i’ve actually missed the sun!! i even bought a sad lamp wtf”

  A few years ago (before I moved to Michigan and joined my wife’s community of backyard composters and travel-soccer chauffeurs), my lady and I went to her friend’s costume wedding and—I know you already know this, but let me just say it for anyone who is new or still has a shred of hopefulness in their heart—I did not wear a costume. The last time I wore a Halloween costume was in the second-grade costume parade at Lincoln Elementary School in 1986 (go, dolphins), and the only costume I could come up with was “housewife,” a concept I didn’t fully understand but thought I could approximate with my mom’s tattered old robe, a half-melted spatula, and the satin cap she slept in the nights after a fresh press ’n’ curl. Because I was a Very Large Son, everyone just thought I had worn my shitty pajamas to school. I think I can speak for anyone who has ever been mistaken for their friend’s mom, that any kind of childhood dress-up situation is precarious at best.