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February 14, 2011
Grand Gestures of Love Gone Wrong
Five true stories that prove it’s better to have loved and won.
By Nerve Readers
Brother for Life
Connor was apparently an heir. That was the second thing I learned about him. The first was that he was adorable. And the third was that he was latently gay.
I was a freshman in college, not latently anything, and we met at an “icebreaker” event. He was a senior; he’d snuck in, staggeringly drunk, with a female friend so they could amuse themselves by pretending to be small-town yokels. When the man in track pants asked us all “divide up by astrological signs!” I followed him and his friend out the back to his house.
When I woke up, it was the third day of college and I was smitten.
Which turned out to be a fraternity, populated by somewhat athletic, very straight, good-natured young men. And he was their interloper king — fraternity president, captain of the sailing team, and a liar. We did cocaine off the back of a record, listened to the new Rilo Kiley album, and I spent the night. When I woke up, it was the third day of college and I was smitten.
Three months later, he convinced me to pledge. “For me. I need someone I can trust inside the house so I can finally be honest with everyone.” At the time, my friends were a rag-tag bunch of music nerds, bespectacled, thin, and far too edgy to understand joining a frat. Even ironically. And they could understand everything ironically.
So I did it, obviously. I stood on a coffee table in the dark and got shot with squirt guns full of cold water. I drank twenty four natty lights and then vomited into a barrel. I wriggled on my stomach through a maze of cardboard boxes filled with whipped cream and cold spaghetti and then ran off to meet my friends at a Grizzly Bear concert. I let them call me AlphaFag.
A few weeks later, a day into my second semester, the administration asked Connor to a “voluntary leave of absence” to deal with his burgeoning coke problem. At the next night’s pinning ceremony, I was named brother for life. — Benjamin Warren
Have you ever done something totally crazy in the aftermath of a breakup? Experienced temporary post-relationship insanity? Tell us about it! Submit your 300-500 word true story to submissions@nerve.com or click here for more information.
Commentarium (28 Comments)
Best feature Nerve has done in a long, long time.
Agreed. Completely agreed. This was beautiful.
Agreed. Absolutely.
Loved this. The Great Cookie Offering hit so close to home.
nice. vintage Nerve....really liked this one
Amazing.
Weekend Getaway hit me right in the kisser. ALl of these were completely raw and really effectively written.
love this article, i can relate to the cookie story.
So, so good, all of them.
This was very very well done.
i was blown away. great job on each story. this feature reminded me of nerve from about ten years ago, when the site had big literary aspirations.
Agreed.
nerve's first story ever about a fraternity. of course, it's a gay one. still, classic. love it.
I like the implication from the picture that it's Princeton.
except does Princeton have frats?
I too have made cookies in my unused kitchen for sexual encounters that I wanted to validate. (God knows why I would this, an urge far surpassing my feminism) Will never bake a cookie again.
I second what anna Dremousis said. Or hell, bake cookies for yourself, bake for the elderly, or bake for some NYC firefighters. Just don't bake with expectations. Sometimes you have to learn the hard way how to "respect yourself enough" to leave people alone when that's what they want. I don't think that lesson takes anything away from the lovely gesture, though.
I predict Litsa will bake cookies when she falls in love again. Food is love. It takes love to generate the cookie baking gene.
Dear god that was the best thing I've read here in a long, long time. Great writers, great subject, and a relief from all the saccharine sweet v-day crap all over the place.
Beautiful story. I'm not looking for relationships, and people I get involved with know this - I have a lot of those amazing wurl wind not date dates that last all weekend with people I genuinely have feelings for - that said, still not ready to be someones serious someone. I hope I'n not hurting people :( xoxoxoxoxo.
Awesome feature.
I too made the mistake of letter a girl read a journal that was made up almost exclusively of my pining for her as she broke up and got back together with me several times.
Extremely bad move. I feel sick even thinking about it. But she insisted once she discovered it existed.
Any story that begins with "I baked chocolate chip cookies for a guy I’d recently started sleeping with" and ends with "I don’t mind swallowing" is almost guaranteed to be one of the greatest things ever written.
Been there, done that. Why do we think our long dormant baking genes will get us anything but frustration? Off to bake for a more appreciative contingent - who subscribe to the notion "burned cookies are better than no cookies." LOVE that you share all the subtle nuances of loves, lost, found and in between.
The Amelie girl was amazing and perfect. Nice to know there are women like that out there.
I baked these INCREDIBLE Martha Stewart Lime sugar cookie concoctions and mailed them to Seattle... Later, I was informed I had too many "things". I'm a girl!!! and "things" are just that. I don't need them. People are more important to me, which is why I baked the cookies in the first place!!! Sheesh! A friend of mine who knew him said that in another lifetime he was a servant of mine and would never feel like he deserved me! Freaky!!! Someday someone will appreciate my Martha Stewart cookies (I sometimes do giant bears with individualized sweaters)....Someday.
This was so incredible, best valentines day cure ever!
My favourite is definitely the Weekend Getaway.
Bittersweet, sad, poignant and yet, is the only story of the series where there is a sliver of hope at the ending that things might work out.
Great set of stories.
Stands back from the keyboard in amazement! Tahnks!