Free Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me by Ben Karlin Page B

school crowd. Also, she was into diet pills. Also, she fantasized about plastic surgery. Also, she said she had a problem with dating guys and then banging their best friends. And this is just the evidence that to me speaks well of her.
    Did all these pieces add up to a red flag? Try a massive, rippling banner of war. Maybe that’s why I didn’t see it—too big. Maybe I thought I could beat the system. Maybe I just really liked her. Either way—I was all-in, gung ho.
    One night, after a play, she called me from a bar and said she wanted to come over. I met her at the subway, and before we’d walked a block she told me she didn’t want any romance. She just wanted me to be a friend. I wish I wish I wish I explained to her that she was just with her friends, at that bar, and that I was something different—a friend with a hard-on. I should’ve said I’m sorry and good-bye and been done with it. Instead, I tried to be that friend. We sat on the swings across from my apartment and discussed her confusion. It got late, and I convinced her to sleep over as a friend. She worried it would be awkward. I wish. Watching the person you want to touch, who doesn’t want to touch you, sleep in your bed, in your boxer shorts, is searing. “Awkward” would’ve been a vacation.
    Some nights later she told me she loved me “as a person.” Unless you want someone to hate you forever, don’t ever tell him you love him “as a person.” It’s like a consolation prize you don’t want that leaves you with an unwieldy tax burden. If you absolutely have to love me as something, love me as a walking dildo.
    And I didn’t even get breakup sex. Isn’t breakup sex Article One in the relationship Bill of Rights?
    A couple months after she broke up with me—while we were still having fraught, sexless rendezvous—she screwed one of my close friends. She screwed him not once, but on three separate occasions. Then she had a threesome with my roommates. My roommates! A threesome! With! From a distance, I have a sort of reverence for this blitz—it took some set of labia to pull it off. But really, I felt like I’d been smashed in the back with a folding chair, then elbowed in the gut. I worry the nausea will never go away completely. And these are just the things I heard about.
    And I didn’t hear about it for over a year—one of those years where everybody knew I was a patsy but me. I’d known the friend since college, and once, when we were taking a long walk and having an old-friend talk, he asked if the girl at the center of this gave good blow jobs—when he knew the answer from direct experience! I didn’t know it at the time, but here was the humiliating vaporization of our friendship. And I’m flexible—if he’d only gone to first base with her, I would’ve let it ride. A lot of gay couples don’t even think of making out as cheating. But anything in scoring position and beyond is a problem. I miss the guy on occasion, but the image of those two repeatedly fucking each other, while I still wanted her more than anything, blots out all the good memories.
    Right after I found out, I ran into her at a bar. She was with her new guy, a pip-squeak. If she’d been toting around a movie star, or some Wall Street stud, I would’ve at least had the grim solace of being soundly beaten. But this dude was her age. And in acting school. She was slumming it with a peer. And . . . they made out in front of me. A fail-safe display, in case I didn’t get it. This was a rout. I got it, I got it.
    What was I supposed to do with all this? People rarely say, “You know what you need to do? Carry a grudge. An old-fashioned, dense and righteous grudge .” Forgiveness and forgetfulness are prescribed so often that we’re likely to forget the grudge is even an option. But I didn’t feel like I had any other choice. The grudge picked me.
    It’s not easy. I didn’t have any experience with grudges, had no good models to follow, so I had to