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
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I’ve become a horrific urban cliché.
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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
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Moving on is not that easy or formulaic.
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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°
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Tobin Levy has worked at Hooksexup, 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. |