Kit, 28

What do you do for a living?
Right now, I'm an intern at a non-profit, and I'm a freelance writer.

How does being a writer influence your relationships?
Well, that title comes plagued with so much. When you say "I'm a writer," everyone looks at you with pity, like, "Oh. You're going to die penniless." In terms of relationships, it was actually my current girlfriend who encouraged me to pursue freelance writing, and really make that my thing, because before I did all this, I had run a business, and I had worked on an oil rig, and I hadn't really found what I liked to do. But I wouldn't want to date a writer [laughs]. Not at all.

Why not?
I guess I should say, if I were a girl, I wouldn't want to date a male writer. I mean, you have to be pretty fucking self-centered to be a writer, and males are a little self-centered to begin with. A writer also has the excuse to say, "I need to be this way, because I need to create." And if you then say to the writer, "You're being a jerk," you're not just saying something about who they are; you're also infringing on their career, and what they want to be. Fuck! There's no way I'd date a male writer if I were a girl [laughs]. It just seems horrible.

Tell me about your girlfriend.
We met in Austin at a wedding. I was working in Houston at the time, repairing the roof on a stadium after Hurricane Katrina. The stadium had a big fabric roof that had gotten torn to bits and I was in the construction crew helping repair it, for whatever reason [laughs]. So I was working on that for about nine months, with a bunch of men, living right across the street from the stadium, and just sort of hating my life. I got an invite to go to this wedding, and I was like, "Yes, absolutely! I need to get the fuck out of here." I was invited by a girl who I'd been sleeping with in the past, but we only slept together when she was drinking quite heavily, and she had just recently gotten sober. Which was really great for her, but we found out that we just didn't get along the way that we had when we were drinking [laughs]. So, by the time we got to the wedding, we were barely talking to each other. And that's when I met my girlfriend.

How did your date feel about this?
She was pretty pissed! [laughs] It put a serious block in our friendship for quite a long time. It's probably not advisable to go to a wedding with someone, and then pick up someone else. And truly, at that time in my life, I was probably as self-centered of an asshole as I could have possibly been about that sort of thing. The other thing is, I had been working so hard for those past nine months — although it's not really an excuse — that I just didn't give a damn about anything. I was just eager to meet people who would talk to me, who were not other... construction workers [laughs].

Before this relationship, how did you meet women?
I was living in Scotland years ago, and I was this tall American in a small Scottish city. I was dancing a lot, and relied heavily on that as my crutch to pick up girls. Like, "Hey, I'm from New York, and I'm dancing with you!" That was sort of how the conversation would start. But obviously this loses all power and effect in New York. When I came back to New York, I realized how poor my game was. I had no idea how to pick up or talk to girls.

How would you compare Scottish women to American women?
It's hard to make any generalizations about women, really, because they're always very surprising [laughs], but in America, there seems to be more of an emphasis on the status of your relationship very early on. People are so concerned with their futures here that it kind of takes the fun out of what you're doing at that moment. In Scotland — at least the part of Scotland that I was in — you can be dancing with someone, and going out to dinner with them, and sleeping with them every night, but there's never really a clear indication of what that is for many months down the line. Girls are a lot faster in Scotland. People do things without putting so much thought into it, which is freeing. Mind you, I was young and in college, so maybe it's the same way in American college and I just don't know it.

You said women are always surprising. Any examples?
There's one girl who's actually become a really close friend of mine. We had sex when we first met, but every time there was slightly less of it than the time before, until it just sort of ended with a handjob and a "Goodnight." [laughs] That's sort of how our friendship was sparked, because the next morning, she said, "That was really terrible, wasn't it?" and I was like, "Yeah, that was the worst ever!" [laughs]. We've somehow remained very close ever since.

Do you regret anything from your early twenties?
There were definitely some relationships where I found out later that the girl was more invested than I'd thought. Maybe I even knew it a little bit, but chose to ignore it because it was nicer to have this fuck-buddy. You're too immature and self-centered at twenty-three to make that conclusion. All you know is that you have this lusty thing happening, and to really analyze it — or maybe even to protect the person you're with, emotionally — would be to somehow ruin it. And that's the last thing you want to do at twenty-three, so you just keep doing what feels good. There was one relationship that went on for a really long time. It was just so sexy, all the time [laughs], but very much to the detriment of this girl's emotional well-being, afterwards. I may have been taking advantage of the feelings she had for me. But also, they had never been clearly articulated. I sensed they were there, but since they were never spoken, I didn't feel like it was my responsibility. The power dynamic that that created was just very intense, so it was tough to do the right thing. I didn't find out until several years later just how traumatizing it was for her. Which made me feel... pretty fucking terrible. For a long time.

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