Vital Stats: 6’2”, 170 pounds. Work-wise, he was some kind of project manager. Aesthetic: Sometimes he wore see-through silk long underwear shirts as regular shirts, so he looked kind of gay-gay. He also had a goatee and got his hair highlighted—again, gay-gay—but I suppose it was 1998. Demeanor: Languid bordering on dumb.
Background: One of the members of the fabulous group of gay men I ran with in Chicago threw a Snow Ball every year in his Lake View apartment. At the 1998 ball, I met a guy who said he wanted to set me up with his friend. A month or so later, the guy arranged a meeting at a bar art show for a group of people, including me and #71.
First Impression: He seemed kind of dumb. It was the way he spoke. He sounded sort of like Goliath from that creepy 1970s animated Christian cartoon Davey and Goliath. But he was kind of cute. And tall. And he had a cool black leather jacket.
First Date: He asked me out for pizza and pool. When the bill came, he had us split it. (It was 1998 and I didn’t know any better.) I remember I was feeling unsure about him, but, like I said, he was kind of cute and his highlights looked good…and then he told a joke. I thought, “Oh, look! He’s funny. Yay. I can date him.” I hung onto that joke for the next eight months.
The Next Eight Months: To be fair, I’m trying to think of the good things about him, too, but it’s hard. The most succinct way to cover good and bad may be to do bullet points.
Signs of Hope:
- He had cool friends.
- He liked to get dressed up to go to parties.
- We had a lot of sex.*
- He knew how to make a yummy burrito and had a great recipe for spaghetti that involved raisins.
- He was blogger before there were bloggers.
Red Flags:
- He was a cheap bastard:
- When I was sick, he bought me medication and then the next time it was time to pay for something, he said, “I got you that medication, so you can get this.”
- Possibly more horrifically, another time when it came to paying for something, he said, “I got you those flowers for your birthday, so you can get this.”
- He fancied himself a music connoisseur and had thousands of CDs. He would make copies of his CDs onto tapes for me if I bought the tapes.
- He was a homebody—he was a Cancer, after all (not that there's anything wrong with Cancers, just this Cancer)—and would often have no interest in going out but would say, “You can come over after,” which only made me feel, well, cheap.
- He was always blaming me for anything that went remotely wrong and never apologized for anything.
- Whenever I tried to talk to him about something that bothered me about our relationship, he’d tell me I was being passive-aggressive. OK, I admit that a couple of times I was passive-aggressive, but he used it as a weapon.
- He’d pick fights—especially after weekends where we had a good time:
- One time, we were driving back from Wisconsin after a pretty nice weekend in my sporty red stick-shift Toyota Celica and he told me that my driving was choppy and then, to make his point, jerked himself forward and backward in his seat. Hence, a fight.
- Another time we took a trip to New York, where I had lunch with a managing editor of a big travel magazine. He was jealous, so he picked a fight and then said that, actually, he had an important meeting set up, too, and then he went off to “meet someone.”
- He had given me a tattoo necklace from a trip to Barcelona that he’d taken with a friend. After we broke up, I noticed it had disappeared. And then, after we agreed to be friends, he stopped by my apartment and it miraculously reappeared.
- He didn’t have a protective or supportive bone in his body. Once when I’d gone to a party—by myself (see "homebody")—and then told him afterward that I thought my friend’s husband had been hitting on me, he said, “Well, you should have called him on it.”
- Not only did he sound dumb, he sometimes looked dumb, too, especially when he ate. It was like he lacked nerve endings in the area around his mouth because he constantly had crumbs sticking to his face. And he’d talk with his mouth full.
- He gave me a bracelet for our six-month anniversary and said it represented “early love,” which, even at the time, I thought was gay-gay. The bracelet was made of cheap metal and soon fell apart.
- He only told me he loved me at the end of a fight, like it was a reward for behaving.
- Sometimes, when he was naked, he’d stand up in the middle of his tiny studio apartment, twist back and forth so that his penis slapped against his legs and cry happily, “Wheeeeee!” #71 was only the second man I’d slept with, so I assumed at the time that all guys must do that. Of course, I soon discovered that this was not the case.
- After he thought I was asleep, he’d watch soft porn on cable.
Turning Point: He was suffering from his “January Depression,” which was basically his excuse for acting like a total asshole. I had a revelatory conversation with my friend Tim (of the great couple Tim & Tim, or “The Tims”) in which he asked me:
“What percent of the time are you actually happy in the relationship?”
I calculated for a moment in my mind and said, “Maybe 20 percent?”
Tim just looked at me, and I realized that was not good enough.
I tried to get ahold of #71 that night, but he wasn’t answering his phone, so I broke up with him on his answering machine.
The next day, of course, I felt bad about it, so I asked if we could at least talk. I didn’t want to get back together, I just wanted to end things on a good note. He said he didn’t want to talk—he was having a difficult month and didn’t want to deal with anything more.
I vaguely recall lots of nasty emails back and forth and me losing ten pounds as I tried to get him to see his part, too. But, of course, everything was my fault.
I remember saying to my friend Christine, “Why can’t he see it? Or even try to see it?”
“Sometimes some people never do.”
A month after the breakup, he came over and we finally talked. Neither of us wanted to get back together. By then I had experienced such great relief at not being involved with him anymore that it was like a huge weight had been lifted. I realized how much I had been enjoying life again without the burden of him.
A few weeks after that, he stopped by for sex. We did it, but I wasn’t really into it, so the next time he came over and tried for it again, I said, “You’re just torturing yourself.”
“Aren’t I torturing you?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said.
A few months after that we went for drinks and he made references to getting back together. It was something along the lines of, “I thought we might get back together after a few months.”
“Um, uh uh,” I said, shaking my head, and then told him I was having too much fun dating two men bi-coastally (See Summer of Love Part 1 and Part 2).
We tried to be friends and I even invited him to a party I had but I saw how asocial he was and I didn’t feel like exerting any compassion after that, so I didn’t invite him to my going-away party before I moved to New York. He found out about it and sent me a nasty email.
Oh yeah, and he owed me money. In 2006, I got an email from him over Friendster in which he told me I looked too skinny in my photos and then he went on and on about his life—that he was writing a novel, that he had a girlfriend who was a doctor who he kept fighting with, that he knew he owed me money and would send it to me “no strings attached”—and, oh yeah, that he knew that he’d broken up with me sooner than I’d wanted to.
I went to therapy laughing, “I broke up with him!”
“In a few more years,” my therapist said, “he’ll probably think that you owe him money.”
She suggested I email him back with my address and a little joke about how I wasn’t charging him interest.
Forgetting that #71 lacked a sense of humor (remember, he told one joke on our first date, and that was pretty much the only joke he ever told), he wrote a vicious message back to me and said that, actually, he didn’t have the money to send me after all.
He wrote again in 2010, another long missive, but this time over Facebook. He said that he often thought fondly of me and had thought a lot about our relationship and the breakup and his part and my part and how we were both to blame and how he was married and how he would send me the money once he had it.
This time, knowing he only had an appetite for conflict, I figured out how to respond. I ignored any potentially incendiary content, thanked him for his sweet note, said that I was very happy for him and his relationship, that it was so kind of him to offer to pay me back and that he should let me know when he had the money so I could give him my address.
As I suspected, he never wrote back.
Diagnosis: For him: The friend who set us up said to me after it was over, “Clearly, he had an expiration date. Sorry about that.“
For me: I nicknamed him “Lame,” a moniker that my friends happily adopted. They would gleefully call me whenever they had Lame sightings. I called him that because, yes, he was lame, but it wasn’t so much that I was mad at him but, rather, I was mad at myself for staying in that miserable relationship for so long. After that, I swore I’d never date another Cancer. And I did well for 12 years, until #120, who was a Cancer. Oops.
“What percent of the time are you actually happy in the relationship?”
I calculated for a moment in my mind and said, “Maybe 20 percent?”
Tim just looked at me, and I realized that was not good enough.
I tried to get ahold of #71 that night, but he wasn’t answering his phone, so I broke up with him on his answering machine.
The next day, of course, I felt bad about it, so I asked if we could at least talk. I didn’t want to get back together, I just wanted to end things on a good note. He said he didn’t want to talk—he was having a difficult month and didn’t want to deal with anything more.
I vaguely recall lots of nasty emails back and forth and me losing ten pounds as I tried to get him to see his part, too. But, of course, everything was my fault.
I remember saying to my friend Christine, “Why can’t he see it? Or even try to see it?”
“Sometimes some people never do.”
A month after the breakup, he came over and we finally talked. Neither of us wanted to get back together. By then I had experienced such great relief at not being involved with him anymore that it was like a huge weight had been lifted. I realized how much I had been enjoying life again without the burden of him.
A few weeks after that, he stopped by for sex. We did it, but I wasn’t really into it, so the next time he came over and tried for it again, I said, “You’re just torturing yourself.”
“Aren’t I torturing you?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said.
A few months after that we went for drinks and he made references to getting back together. It was something along the lines of, “I thought we might get back together after a few months.”
“Um, uh uh,” I said, shaking my head, and then told him I was having too much fun dating two men bi-coastally (See Summer of Love Part 1 and Part 2).
We tried to be friends and I even invited him to a party I had but I saw how asocial he was and I didn’t feel like exerting any compassion after that, so I didn’t invite him to my going-away party before I moved to New York. He found out about it and sent me a nasty email.
Oh yeah, and he owed me money. In 2006, I got an email from him over Friendster in which he told me I looked too skinny in my photos and then he went on and on about his life—that he was writing a novel, that he had a girlfriend who was a doctor who he kept fighting with, that he knew he owed me money and would send it to me “no strings attached”—and, oh yeah, that he knew that he’d broken up with me sooner than I’d wanted to.
I went to therapy laughing, “I broke up with him!”
“In a few more years,” my therapist said, “he’ll probably think that you owe him money.”
She suggested I email him back with my address and a little joke about how I wasn’t charging him interest.
Forgetting that #71 lacked a sense of humor (remember, he told one joke on our first date, and that was pretty much the only joke he ever told), he wrote a vicious message back to me and said that, actually, he didn’t have the money to send me after all.
He wrote again in 2010, another long missive, but this time over Facebook. He said that he often thought fondly of me and had thought a lot about our relationship and the breakup and his part and my part and how we were both to blame and how he was married and how he would send me the money once he had it.
This time, knowing he only had an appetite for conflict, I figured out how to respond. I ignored any potentially incendiary content, thanked him for his sweet note, said that I was very happy for him and his relationship, that it was so kind of him to offer to pay me back and that he should let me know when he had the money so I could give him my address.
As I suspected, he never wrote back.
Diagnosis: For him: The friend who set us up said to me after it was over, “Clearly, he had an expiration date. Sorry about that.“
For me: I nicknamed him “Lame,” a moniker that my friends happily adopted. They would gleefully call me whenever they had Lame sightings. I called him that because, yes, he was lame, but it wasn’t so much that I was mad at him but, rather, I was mad at myself for staying in that miserable relationship for so long. After that, I swore I’d never date another Cancer. And I did well for 12 years, until #120, who was a Cancer. Oops.
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