2005-02-14 - 11:09 a.m.
I�d thought to go see the Ramones documentary for anti-Valentine�s Day, but it�s already closed at the local arthouse theater. Instead, I took a test and figured I�d share my �top 5 ex-girlfriends project�.
Last summer, broken-hearted from my breakup with Alithea, I took a cue from �High Fidelity�. Like the John Cusack character (I�ve never read the Nick Hornby novel, though I�m told it�s really good), I sought to revisit my top 5 ex-girlfriends. Now, mine are geographically dispersed. I also had no illusions of any movie-style happy resolution with Alithea enabled by my newfound self-awareness (and the death of her father). But I thought it was perhaps an opportune time to see what�s up.
I was able to find all of them largely through the power of Friendster. I had never before formally compiled a top 5 list, but I realized there were certain relationships that came up more often than others. These were characterized by Alithea as �the one you lost it to�, �the one you knocked up�, �the one who got away�, �the one who became a prostitute�, and �the crazy one�. These aren�t presented here in the order I revisited them, but roughly chronologically:
J. and I started dating the summer we were 14. When our relationship stopped is less clear, as I kept hooking up with her long after we�d stopped formally going out. My teenage hormones said �Hey, free sex!� But it took me a long time to see causality in the fact that I slept with her and the fact that I was always involved in not-necessarily-related emotional dramas afterwards. As a friend noted, �Geoff, you always pay for it�. As I�ve gotten older, I�ve taken this to heart. Nothing is free. Still, we had fun. (And a friend of hers with whom I worked independently years later once offered to write me a recommendation based on the stories she�d heard. Okay fine, I just wanted to be able to include that�)
J. was from deepest Jersey (we met at CTY nerd-camp) and I would sometimes go way out there to see her. I had the odd idea that people had sex more in the suburbs and so, by corollary, that suburban girls were easier. (As someone recently pointed out: �talk about fetishizing the Other!�)
The �burbs (Short Hills � cf. Philip Roth�s �Goodbye, Columbus�) proved to be the homogenized horror I�d suspected they were. A favorite memory is J.�s father picking up the phone, talking to the caller about his daughter�s schoolwork or something, and rescheduling their racquetball game. Only after confusion about the original time for their game did they realize they didn�t know each other at all. The caller had dialed the wrong number and assumed he was talking to some other guy about their game.
I got back in touch over email. Today J. lives in DC, where she went to law school. She realized early on that law wasn�t for her, but stuck it out and graduated. Now she�s a stats-type administering a 401(k) plan. She was in a long-term relationship that ended right around the time mine did. Now she�s dating again, but says that she finds it hard to really connect with someone as a peer (she notes it�s an unadvertised peril of being smart).
Overall, she seems much happier and calmer than I remember her. Partly, this could be the fact that we�ve all grown beyond our troubled youths. She�s not as angry as she used to be. She says she loves politics, but wants to work from the inside to build things up instead of tearing everything down (�although W can inspire some pretty racy stuff from me sometimes�). I guess she did have a dissatisfied anti-establishment streak that I was attracted to, although her style was less punk rock than 80s New Wavey (I always associate that Modern English song with her).
Was she my first love? I don�t know that I knew what love meant at the time. But certainly I felt more strongly about her and cared about her more than anyone I�d ever known before. (I wrote her an embarrassingly adolescent poem that referred to us �clinging together like the last two Cheerios in the bowl�. Oof.) We knew each other half a lifetime ago (or several, depending on how you count), but it makes me very happy to know now that she�s in a good place and that she�s found some peace. It�s exactly what I wanted to find.
(Note that there are four more parts to this project in the next four entries.)
� 2005 Geoff Gladstone
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