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PERSONAL ESSAYS
posted 1/10/2005
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Four months after I got the line no one wants to hear, I'm still wondering when "you are not the one" became acceptable breakup vernacular. The last time I got dumped, "it's over" worked just fine.
Even when said on six different occasions, "it's over" leaves room for reconciliation, as does "I need some space" and "I need some time to recover from the last one." But Mark's declaration was definitive as death, so much crueler than anything I've ever heard or used before.
You see, Mark was my first. Not my first lover, my first love
or, embarrassingly enough, the first man to dump me. He was, however, the first
to do so by saying I was not "the one."
"Really?" asked my friend Emily. "You've never heard that before?
It's happened at least once to most of my friends."
"Edison said that to me for the last three years of our relationship," said
my friend Jyl. (They'd dated for six.)
"Oh, I've used that line before," said my thirty-seven-year-old
friend Eric. "I've been using it for the past ten years."
None of this made me feel better.
When I moved to New York seven years ago, I was still dating
my college boyfriend, Blair. We were the androgynously named duo, considered
a perfect couple by everyone except my Great-Uncle Meyer, a crotchety old Texas
Jew who thought towheaded Blair looked too much like Jesus to become a Levy.
Much to my uncle's dismay, Blair and I moved to Manhattan together.
For a year, we shared a studio apartment. As is the case with many cohabitating
couples, our relationship ended when our lease did. It was an amicable split,
brought about partly by my desire to explore what else was "out there." The number
of people I'd slept with could be calculated on the hand of someone who'd lost
a few digits to an auger. I wanted to date, experience innocuous
trysts and, as much as the phrase now makes me want to walk off a roof, the "sex
and the city" lifestyle.
For the next five years, I did. There was the karate instructor
who was actually dating my officemate's best friend; the Scottish soccer player
whose brogue was so thick that I'm still not
sure I ever got his name right; the animal-rights activist who lived with his
mother; the male model who was
in love with my best friend; the unemployed film guy; the pompous "money guy" and
at least a couple of derelicts.
And then there was Jane Fonda. I met him at a Halloween party.
He was dressed as the '80s workout queen: tights, leotard, leg warmers and all.
If memory is any indication of performance, the next day I remembered everything
about
his outfit
and
nothing
about
the sex.
Finally, I had stories, and plenty of them — of good
sex
with bad people or bad sex with
good
ones
dressed
like
Jane
Fonda.
But
I
also
wanted
to love some of these men. I wanted some of them to love me. All of them, however,
left me feeling lonely, expended and disposable.
Life as an "ethical slut" had stopped working for me. According to the media and most of my friends, I had two
options for recourse: I could make like Kim Cattrall and blindly slut my way forward, or I could appreciate my change of heart as a symptom of baby
panic, register on J-date and find myself a husband ASAP. Neither was particularly
appealing.
See, my new aversion to sleeping around had nothing to do
with
my
ovaries. It was that apathy had become a chore. After five years, I was tired
of
feigning indifference when Mr. Last Night didn't call me back or never called
at all.
It was a dubious predicament. I had girlfriends who'd confessed to
I've
become a horrific urban cliché.
being disappointed, even temporarily devastated,
when a one-night stand didn't turn into something more meaningful. Many
of them had even taken a temporaray hiatus
from promiscuity. But I was starting to lament a time when sex was, if
not precious,
then
at
least a pretty good indicator I'd see the guy again. Innocuous trysts
stopped being enjoyable when I'd started hoping the man in my bed would
turn out to be "the
one."
Things are different now. I'm pushing thirty. Blair is happily
married. Uncle Meyer now resides in my sister's kitchen, in an urn next to a
placard that reads, "Quiet please, day sleeper." And I've met "the one." Unfortunately,
because I'm not "the one" for him, I've become a horrific urban cliché:
the single, embittered, slightly unhinged protagonists in those chick-lit novels
I refuse to read.
The transformation seemed to happen impossibly fast. One day
I was single, self-possessed and intentionally not sleeping around. The next,
I
was
in a healthy
relationship with a man I loved (and, I thought, loved me). The next, I was a
parody of Bridget Jones, afraid of being alone forever, yet even more petrified
of being thought of as a parody of Bridget Jones.
Seeking comfort, I read Ethan Watters' Urban Tribes,
a
book
that claims "my generation" is choosing to marry later in life, if at all. In
his
research, Watters found that twenty-and thirty-somethings were focusing more
on
their
jobs and
friends, because they had "higher marriage ideals than previous generations." Apparently,
I'm not alone in wanting to find a soul mate, but I'm anomalous in not enjoying
the waiting period. According to Watters,
other single
women
my
age
are relishing their extended freedom.
It's
a
topic
covered
again and again in the New York Times Style section,
alongside cerebral ruminations on the
thong being "out" and
the exploding number of underwear options for men. According to these
sources,
people
my age
are supposed to be planning thirtieth-birthday parties instead of rehearsal dinners.
Women
who
think or talk too much about marriage seal their fate
as untouchables…or at least undateables.
My friend Bob, who works at a
men's magazine, confirms this. His friends refuse to date women over thirty when
it's clear they've veered from the path of marital indifference.
"How can you tell which women have marriage on the mind?" I asked.
"They have that. . . look in their eyes," he
explained.
"What look?"
"You know, fear. Desperation."
My friend Michael concurred: "The women in Sex and the City always talked about how they were afraid of being alone forever. It was a driving plot every season."
I never got HBO because I refused to become one of those women.
You know,
the kind who reserved Sunday nights for false empathy from fictional characters
who were too attractive and well-shod to truly fear being alone forever.
(If Carrie Bradshaw were truly preoccupied with spinsterhood, she'd have moved
to
the Midwest,
bought an SUV and started popping
out kids in season one.) Anyway, to say that you're worried
you're never going to meet "the one" — or
at least retire the metaphorical knife that marks the metaphorical
notch on the metaphorical bedpost — seems strangely taboo.
What now? As a twenty-nine-year-old woman who let the words "the
one" creep into her head and out of her mouth, my options are limited. So limited,
in fact, that roughly half a million women — all presumably in similar
states of recovery, shock or morbid depression — have bought a copy of
Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo's He's Just Not That Into You, "the no-excuses
truth to understanding guys." The authors presumably operate on the following
assumption: if you learn how to identify the men for whom you're not "the one" before you
think they're "the one," you'll save yourself heartache and find "the (right)
one" before your childbearing years are over.
I had previously refused to read the book, partly
because Rick Marin, author of Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor,
wrote the review in the New York Times, and partly because, as Marin
not-so-insightfully
put it, "There's something wildly condescending about the image of women as helpless
creatures, standing around minding their own business until men come into their
lives and break their hearts." Then a review copy showed up at my office. Curiosity
overtook common sense, and I picked it up. In the introduction, Ms. Tucillo explains
the
genius
in
embracing
the titular mantra. "Knowledge is power, and
most
importantly, knowledge saves time," she writes. You'll be spared hours and hours
of waiting by the phone, hours of obsessing with your girlfriends." If you're
getting mixed messages from the person you're dating, she continues, you should "assume
rejection first. It's intoxicatingly liberating."
During the "mixed messages," pre-breakup phase of my relationship,
I assumed rejection. But there was nothing liberating or time-saving
about it. I spent weeks wondering what I could have done or said
to make him stop caring. Had I gained weight? Had I unwittingly embarrassed him?
Was it because I smoked or had a cat
Moving
on is not
that
easy
or formulaic.
or cursed too much? About a month before the
end date, after he unconvincingly assured me that "nothing was wrong" with
us, I spent hours analyzing every phone
conversation,
every
intonation, searching for anything that would prove me wrong. It was shameful
and debilitating. And it only got worse after I got dumped, and rejection
no longer had to be assumed.
In the book's subsequent eleven chapters, Mr. Behrendt and
Ms. Tuccillo provide an extensive list of stereotypical excuses that indicate
your
guy's "just
not that into you." "Because you're all dating
the same guy," they claim. Allegedly "real life" stories illustrate their points.
Every
chapter ends with an infantilizing checklist of "what
you should have learned." There are testimonials
from women who heeded Greg's advice and became poster girls for healthy dating.
A couple of years ago I went to Vietnam. Before arriving, I'd
read about a popular sandwich sold, like New York hot dogs, from street vendors
in Saigon. In print, the sandwich — a French baguette with pate and pickles — sounded
delicious, a cheap fix for the traveler on a budget. After trying one
and realizing the "pate" was a close cousin to Spam, I named the sandwich Good
in Theory and avoided it for the
rest
of
the
trip. He's Just Not That Into You is the literary equivalent
of that sandwich. In theory, I should be able to read the book, come to grips
with the fact that Mark isn't into me, stop "wasting the pretty" (Mr. Tucillo's
egregious way of saying that you shouldn't waste your best-looking years on someone
who'll never love you), and move on. In reality, however, moving on is not
that
easy
or formulaic.
I knew I was not "the one" for Mark long before the breakup.
I didn't need a book to highlight the indicators or encourage me to find someone
else.
I
just
couldn't
end the relationship. What He's Just Not That Into You and most self-help,
grrrl-power guides to Getting Over Your Man fail to address is the underlying
conflict that had me paralyzed. Say you're in your late twenties. The man
you
want to love you forever won't. You don't feel like slutting it up or reentering
an antiquated dating game. You're suddenly afraid of being alone forever but
not supposed to admit to being afraid of being alone. How do you move forward?
Why are there no guides to that point in life?
Perhaps it's because the answer
is too subjective. When my friend Karen broke up with the guy she thought was "the
one," she gave up on relationships and started sleeping around. When my friend
Sarah's "one" broke up with her, she threw
herself into work. Another friend quit her job and moved out of state when her "one" moved
in with someone else. Another, whose "one" had been "the
one" for five years, went on a drinking,
dating frenzy.
I saw Mark the other night, for the first time in months. Over
drinks, his
not
being into me was even clearer — he fell asleep at the table. To be
honest, I left the bar in tears. It wasn't just the unnecessary reminder
that
I'd "wasted" nearly a year of "my pretty" on someone who now looked at me as
though I were a can of dog food. I was
sad because I realized how futile being sad in the name of Mark really was,
and because, finally, I realized that the guy for whom I was not "the one" was,
in all honesty, probably never "the one" for me.
Do I still believe "the one" exists? I'm not banking on it.
I'm not ruling out the possibility either. I'm just going to do my best to stop
thinking
(and writing, and reading) about it for awhile.
n°
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR:
Tobin,
our androgynously named Texan, comes to Nerve after time served at Talk
magazine, Contents and a book-scouting firm that made her an expert
on post traumatic stress disorder. Her writing has appeared in Men's Health,
Elle, Time
Out New
York and Teen People.
