Your Ex-Boyfriend Will Hate This (2 page)

Chapter One

The Commitment Vacation

I honestly believe every human being, male or female, needs to spend at least one year of his or her adult life in mandatory “singleness” (an awkward word but useful for our purposes). Call it a “commitment vacation.” Whenever I mention this idea to my friends, I always receive a certain amount of resistance.

“What? No dating? No sex? For an entire year?”

Before you start to hyperventilate, I’m not suggesting you give up any romantic interaction. Your sexual needs are yours to explore as you see fit, but don’t indulge in any serious relationships. You’re banned from anything that even winks in the direction of a committed relationship. “Love at first sight” (an insidious juvenile fabrication we will address later) isn’t only banned from your kingdom, it will be shot if found anywhere on the premises.

If that seems unnecessarily punitive and you honestly can’t imagine yourself without someone, I’m tacking on an extra year for you. Generally speaking, people like this are serial monogamists who haven’t gone more than two months without a boyfriend since the day they first discovered the recreational usefulness of their lady parts. They need an enforced commitment vacation more than anyone, and one year usually won’t do it. They have spent so much of their maturation process defining themselves by their significant others that when their partners are gone, almost no “self” remains…until a new “love” comes along to redefine it.

Two years, serial monogamists—no appeals, no parole. It’s time you found out more about yourself than how much you’ll tolerate just so you won’t have to be alone.

This doesn’t mean there is no value in monogamy. On the contrary, it’s the very reason you’re reading this book, right? To find that special someone who you can spend a lifetime with? So it may sound like an impossible contradiction to suggest true commitment must be preceded by at least some period of absolute aversion to it. But think of this as a series of directions, a map whose ultimate destination is you. If it leaves out key details, or details that might change completely, the map is useless. Even if you gave the map to exactly the right person, he or she couldn’t find you for a simple reason.

Even you don’t know where you are.

Describing this year (or years) as a commitment “vacation” is a bit of a paradox in itself. On a normal vacation, we choose to abandon (albeit temporarily) the world we know in order to go “off the grid.” However, the whole point of your commitment vacation isn’t to escape, but to try to find your way home to the starting point—i.e., you. When you were ten, you didn’t worry about relationships, at least not romantic ones. You were still learning what it means to be a daughter, a friend, a student, and a good person; you were still dreaming about what you want to be when you grow up—just beginning to draw your map, as it were.

(If all this seems simplistic, bear with me. Your patience will be rewarded with more wisdom and more wryly vulgar humor ahead.)

A widely-accepted tool of modern psychology is to try to help patients get in touch with their “inner child.” The belief is that, by reconnecting with our much younger selves, we can unlock past trauma and free ourselves from the self-destructive patterns that haunt our adult lives. It’s an idea that, however fanciful it seems, is fundamentally logical and relates well to our “map” analogy. It’s no coincidence that chronically unhappy people quite often describe themselves as “lost.” Maybe you’ve used that word to describe yourself at some point during your life too.

If you’ve ever gotten lost on foot or by car, you know that one of the first things you do is to try to retrace your steps back to where the surroundings are familiar. Inner child therapy operates on the same principle: going over the path of your former life to figure out when, where, and why it turned away from the destination you once envisioned—presumably a place of happiness, belonging, peace, and self-fulfillment. I’m giving a necessarily less sophisticated description of this type of therapy, since I’m not a psychologist. My education on the subject is limited to the research done for this book: my own therapeutic experience and the same two psych classes most of you took in college. For a more detailed description of inner child therapy, try
Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child
by John Bradshaw.

There was a time in our youth when a simple act gave us joy, contentment, and a sense of gratification, whether it was riding a bike, playing games, or just doodling in a notebook. The simplicity of these activities was an essential part of what made them so gratifying. You didn’t jump rope to improve your calves (so that mini-skirt would look better on you); you did it simply for the joy of jumping rope.

Before I began the graduate writing program at the University of Southern California, I had the opportunity to interview filmmaker Kevin Smith (writer/director of
Clerks
and
Chasing Amy
). As a fledging author, I asked him how I could be a successful writer.

“Don’t read the trades,” he answered.

The “trades” are the two daily magazines that cover the business side of the entertainment industry,
Variety
and
The Hollywood Reporter
. They cover insider news, a good portion of which is reporting sales figures for new script sales and the rights to intellectual properties like novels or magazine articles. (So and so was paid $500,000 for a certain script or $1,000,000 for the rights to a certain novel, for instance.) I didn’t fully understand the significance of Smith’s advice until I worked at NBC and found myself skimming through the trades on a daily basis. The effect of constantly reading about others’ financial windfalls made me want to change how and what I wrote about for the sole purpose of getting paid.

“If you write for any reason other than you love to do it, you won’t last,” Smith had advised me. “Even if you get rich and famous, you’ll burn out. You’ll lose the whole reason you started writing in the first place.”

Smith was right. After I sold my first movie script and went through the gauntlet of constant rewrites for a gallery of producers, actors, and directors, I was burnt out. I spent so much time trying to appease other people in order to get a big paycheck that I lost any love I had for writing. When my script stalled out due to problems with financers and the film didn’t get made, I was so embittered that I didn’t write anything substantive again for five years.

Eventually, I regained my former love for writing, and the result is this book. Writing is something that gives value and meaning to my life—not only now, but presumably for the rest of my days. What does that for you? What in your life gives you joy just by doing it? It doesn’t have to be artistic. It could be working out (if you truly love working out, you lovable masochist), camping, playing tennis, continuing your education, or just reading about a favorite subject. When I describe these as “simple” activities, I don’t mean rudimentary or dumb. I just mean activities you can access easily that are relatively immune to financial circumstance.

Some of you might offer sex as the favored activity, but I’m excluding it from the discussion because the enjoyment of it is so dependent on your partner. If you can enjoy sex equally with every nameless person on the street, then you probably don’t need this book, at least not yet. You need to be exceptionally vigilant about safe contraception and maybe think about keeping a separate apartment for your liaisons. One sociopathic stalker can sap the fun right out of an otherwise fruitful life of casual sex, as can one STD. I’m not recommending this lifestyle choice, but I won’t condemn it either. Many men live like this, and I believe in fair play.

Just be careful.

Let’s go to back to the question of what gives your life pleasure and meaning. Ideally, we aren’t discussing a passing fancy (like that winter you learned to snowboard, then never picked it up again), but something that will be a comfort to you for the rest of your life. Discovering a source of bliss that has permanence is important, because here’s what will change from the present to the end of your life:

Everything.

Every aspect of your life—your friends, your job, your family, your lovers—will almost certainly change. If you’re married, your marriage may also change some day. (Your author can’t guarantee a 100 percent success rate, no matter how irrefutably brilliant his advice is. Your author’s modesty is beyond reproach, however.) Why do I bring up such a sobering truth? I do it to underline the importance of this period of unencumbered self-discovery. After the world has thrown its worst at you, what part of you will remain?

Answering the question about who you are makes answering the next question so much easier, namely, “Who should I be with?” Failure to do so will make you powerless to find the right person and can make you susceptible to all sorts of romantic lies.

Speaking of romantic lies…

Chapter Two

Fighting the Fairy Tale

The idea of “love at first sight” is so endemic to our culture that there may never be a generation of women who don’t grow up being told at a young age that it’s the way romantic love is supposed to occur. Women are encouraged to believe that lasting love is the product of pure romantic happenstance—seeing a handsome stranger across a room, sharing his glance, and in that moment, feeling with every fiber of her being that “he’s the one.” Fairy tales are rife with heroines falling at a glance for some prince or duke or other beautiful rich boy. In contrast, the story of
Sleeping Beauty
stands out by switching genders and having the hero prince be the one to fall in love at first sight.

Fairy tales aren’t the only fictional stories to promote this idea. The structure of nearly every romantic comedy is based on a similar principle. Poor, lonely career gal discovers that despite all her success, there is a man-shaped hole at the center of her life. Then, by some silly contrivance, she runs into the “man of her dreams.” This scenario is such an essential staple of the romantic comedy that there is a name for it in film critic circles: the “meet cute.”
[ii]
  The term was created by famed film critic Gene Siskel to describe the way that “girl meets boy” in this type of movie.

It’s never enough for two people to meet at a party or a bar or through a mutual friend in the “meet cute,” like it happens in the real world. No, usually the girl quite literally runs into the boy. The most common method of conveyance in the “meet cute” is the pet who breaks the leash and, by fate, ends up knocking down Mr. Dream Man, who doesn’t even live in the neighborhood but stepped out of a cab moments before in search of blah blah blah…

It’s essential that Mr. Dream Man almost never appears because of any effort by the heroine. Girl doesn’t choose boy; boy is willed to her by cosmic mandate. This central theme is repeated in most fairy tales and rom-coms: no matter what her station in life, once “love” is introduced, the girl is essentially powerless. She’s powerless to choose, powerless to resist, powerless even to guide the direction her life will take from that point forward.

Broken down to its elements, “love at first sight” is no more rational than betting horses as your primary financial investment strategy. You would be giving an essential part of your future happiness over to pure, blind chance. The fact that it occasionally may lead to lasting relationships isn’t proof of logical behavior. It’s merely proof that some people hit the “soul-mate lottery,” while many others don’t.

Here is what “love at first sight” actually means for those who experience it:

“Wow, that guy/girl is really cute! I really would like to see him/her naked, and preferably in close proximity to my own nakedness!”

This antiquated idea occurs most often among the very young. I’ve encountered many married couples who were “high school sweethearts,” and they often describe their first encounter with the passionate excitement of a unicorn sighting. Their first meeting place is raised to almost mythological status, even if that place is a Taco Bell.

Take a look at the plot of the most prominent tale of “love at first sight,”
Romeo and Juliet
. Romeo first meets Juliet at a ball—a ball where, by the way, he has come because of his mad, unrequited passion for another girl. Yet as soon as he overhears Juliet vowing her “star-crossed” love for him (Translation: “I really would like to see you naked, but it would seriously piss off my folks.”), Romeo passions take a U-turn toward the new girl, and he proposes marriage to Juliet. They’re given a quickie secret marriage by Friar Laurence so as to enjoy a guilt-free consummation. (Translation: “I need to see you naked immediately, but I’d prefer to avoid the wrath of God.”) Because of their “love,” Romeo and Juliet become accomplices in the deaths of three relatives before they both die in a grotesque double suicide.

By the end of the play, “love at first sight” has led, either directly or indirectly, to the deaths of five people. If it were a person, the “love at first sight” theme (as presented in the play) wouldn’t be glorified as a “romantic.” It would be condemned as a serial killer and put to death for its crimes. From this point of view, it seems entirely possible that Shakespeare never intended this play to be a celebration of perfect, timeless love. Maybe Shakespeare meant the whole lurid affair to be a warning, one that goes something like this:

“Hey, young lovers. Take a deep breath before you run headlong down a blind path. You’re just as likely to end up dead upon an altar as in love for all eternity.”

Had Romeo and Juliet been transplanted to the modern age, their chances of staying together would’ve been lousy. Assuming they had survived the whirlwind of death and tragedy that surrounded their relationship, their marriage would’ve been unlikely to last. A study conducted by the CDC, entitled the “National Survey for Family Growth,”
[iii]
found that women who marry before the age of eighteen are literally twice as likely to be divorced within ten years as women who marry at the age of twenty-five or later.

According to the stage directions within the play, Juliet is thirteen years old when Romeo marries her. Although his age is never specified, it’s assumed that Romeo is just a little bit older, maybe sixteen. Not only would their marriage be unlikely to survive today, it probably wouldn’t outlive Juliet’s crush on Justin Timberlake.

Here’s another reason to mistrust the wild initial passion that often masquerades as “love” in new relationships:

Your body may be lying to you.

One of the most influential factors in determining romantic compatibility between two people is something you might not even be aware of. It’s called MHC (Major Histocompatibility Complex), and it is a portion of your DNA that helps control your immune system. MHC is found in your saliva and your pheromones and is detected by both taste and smell. When you kiss someone, your body secretly tests the compatibility of your MHC with the other person. If it complementary, you’ve probably got a love connection. According to a report in
Psychology
Today
[iv]
, the smell of MHC may be the second-most powerful factor in determining whether you find a particular man attractive. So a match should be a reason to celebrate, right? I mean, who can argue with DNA?

Your method of birth control can.

It turns out that birth control pills basically short circuit this biologically-imperative exchange of interaction completely. Suddenly, you’re attracted not to men with complimentary MHC, but to those with MHC exactly the same as your own. Why is this a problem, you ask? We’re conditioned to choose a mate whose immune system provides something ours does not, in order to create a stronger immune system in our future children. Marry a person with the same MHC as yours, and you might face a rude awakening when you go off the pill. Your husband might no longer pass the kiss test. It’s such a significant factor in compatibility that some psychologists believe it a primary reason for the rise in divorce rates since the advent of the pill.

This doesn’t mean you should never marry a man whom you dated while on the pill. It just demonstrates a similar lesson to Romeo and Juliet: those untamed, passionate urges you initially feel for someone new aren’t a terribly good predictor of your future happiness together.

They may even be exactly the thing that’s leading you astray.