A good friend of mine was recently divorced. This was a shock to him as he was with
this woman for a decade, and by all outward appearances things were going
swimmingly. One day she came home
and said, “This isn’t working” and it was over. It takes two to tango, and this dance was over. She took her stuff and moved out. As it turned out, her stuff was the
good stuff, and he was left in a depressing small house trying to figure out
what went wrong. It’s a tough
situation when you want to make soup and realize you don’t have that soup pan
anymore.
The difficulty in these situations is attempting to figure
out what went wrong, who was to blame, and what could have been done
differently. Unfortunately he will
never really know what went wrong as almost no one has the courage to say “I
realized I didn’t love you and being in the same room with you felt like a
prison”. Or maybe it was something
as simple as “I realized I knew what every predictable second would be with
you, and I wanted a story I didn’t know the end of yet”. No matter what, being the one dumped
can’t be easy and he will always wonder in the back of his mind if he is
fatally flawed and ultimately unlovable.
He has attempted to move on and has discovered that almost
every woman he comes in contact with is totally fucked up. I suppose this shouldn’t be a total
shock, as a man in his forties is left with what is left on the shelf. Additionally I think a strong argument
can be made that almost every single person on the planet is pretty fucked
up. Take inventory of your
friends. I will guarantee that
even some of your closest and dear friends are damaged beyond redemption, and
would drive you crazy if you spent more than an hour with any of them. Living with them? You’d leap off a building. It’s not easy. As Willie Nelson kinda said, “90% of
the population ends up with the wrong person. That’s what keeps the jukebox spinning.”
My friend meets a woman in a bar. She's nice and they have an easy companionship. He keeps the relationship on slow
advance. They see each other once
a week. The holidays are
approaching, and he has unused vacation time. He has a real desire to visit Paris properly. He was there once for two days by
himself and was eager to return. He
asks her if she wants to travel to Paris with him in December. She eagerly agrees and they make plans,
with the hedge of a cancelable ticket. They do their thing, getting together
once a weekend having fun together.
Then, without warning, he gets a text message. “This isn’t working.”
As of our conversation he had not heard from her in ten days. No return calls. No explanation.
The question remains, what about Paris? They are both vested in the trip as
they split the costs. She had not
logged online to cancel. He has
not either. It’s like a game of
virtual chicken, neither of them yielding the bargain trip. So how will this play out? Will she arrive at the airport
and go on the trip, assuming he will not show for the flight? Will she score a 50% discounted Paris
trip due to my friend’s fear of an awkward scene at the airport? And what the fuck was that deal with a
text message breakup?
In the pyramid of human communication, the text is the
lowest form. OK, maybe if she had
sent him a piece of direct mail it might have been worse. I am envisioning a colored envelope
stuffer like a Dollar Stretcher where she has a photo of him with the text
“Mary is no longer seeing This Guy”.
That would be more insensitive.
Skywriting would be bad too.
As would leaflets dropped by a cargo plane. But a casual text sent without explanation sent to a guy
that you were planning to go to Paris with a week ago is pretty poor
etiquette. She couldn’t have
broken off a call? C’mon now…
Now if I am in his shoes, I go on that trip no matter
what. If she shows up at the
airport and unblinkingly checks into the same hotel room, he shouldn’t budge. If she goes out at night and returns to
the room with a French guy that performs 38 minutes of cunnilingus on her 2
feet away in a micro Euro hotel room, I recommend that he calmly reads a book
in the bed next to hers as if it isn’t happening. Maybe he puts in ear buds for some discretion, but under no
circumstances should he turn the bedside light off and place his novel
down. They want room service? Put a club sandwich on the order and talk about soccer, Jerry Lewis movies, and America's role in WW2 when the food comes. It’s really the ultimate
game of social chicken. If he has
to, he should walk into the ridiculously small and poorly engineered shower and
lather up while she’s in it. Text
message? Text message? Take a close look at me lathering up my
scrotum Mon Cherie!
I don’t know how this thing is going to play out. I know that he is now more crippled by
self doubt than ever. The last two
women you have been intimate with have decided that “it isn’t working” without
warning? Hey, it’s not good. As we sat at the bar over a beer I
listened to his story like a good friend.
We talked about his next moves.
We talked about what might have gone wrong. We talked about Paris.
Finally, the conversation turned quiet. We had one of those comfortable silences that make good
friends. He turned to me with a
pause. He hesitated. “What is the deal? Is it something I’m doing?”
I took a long pull from my beer. I looked him straight in the eye. “Yeah. It’s
probably you. But you’ll always
have Paris.”
No comments:
Post a Comment