Sometimes your ex leaves more than just a toothbrush and weird sensations when you watch Amelie. This series explores the leftovers. You can read parts 1, 2 and 3 by clicking the numbers.
Is there more loaded of a question than “what’s your type? What do you look for in a ____?"
If I reduced women to their barest features, measured along a faux-empirical rubric, and based the probability of “romantic/sexual pursuit” on how those features cross-reference with my interpretation of the platonic ideal of womanhood, I sure as shit wouldn’t tell people.
Why are we eager in our antipathy, in the depersoning of others? Were you hoping I would be impressed with your excited display of personal shallowness?
What a mixup! You read a book in college and so you thought people would admire your misogyny and mistake it for realness, for depth.
Well, you’ve left me no choice.
I must subject you to that which you fear most: women laughing at you. Own it, and in doing so, own yourself.
To own myself: There are very few women in my life I would not hook up with, if given the opportunity. This speaks less, I feel, to the wide net cast by my sexual flexibility, than to my ability to fill my world with women who conform to what I consider “good” in the world.
Being abstract, the “qualities” I look for in a non male-identified partner exist, to some degree, in all my former and present partners, regardless of background and identity.
They are: a commitment to social justice, a compassion that makes room for consensual sadism, and an effervescent vivaciousness that inspires an all-consuming inferiority when around them.
That last one’s the easiest because I feel inferior to every woman I am ever around, ever.
It’s not a question of anything material. There are cisgender women who are taller, fatter, more muscular than me, who fearlessly grow their facial hair and roar with deeper voices as I pluck my neck clean and practice speaking in fraught falsetto.
It’s patriarchy, it’s a culture of competition, it’s not being able to see into the heads of other women and knowing they share my fears, anxieties, my forced march to self-confidence.
It’s something. It’s everything.
I feel like a ledger bloated with minuses. I am less than the sum of my parts.
So I take the parts that I think are good and offer them a la carte. You don’t have to date or love me. You can just take the parts you like. From here, dating becomes a barter economy of bad ideas. OK, so I’ll put my hand in here and you can be big spoon when we go to bed and tell me I’m not terrible and we’ll pretend that we are not rapidly descending into emotional attachment to one another.
I think about this when I think about a particular relationship I had—one that left me with a coloring book and a powerful realization about myself.
Lyla And Daisy And Me
I met “Lyla” on OkCupid. She was dating my friend Daisy. But Daisy lived in SoCal; I lived just a few blocks from where Lyla worked. And I was into Mommy play, too. Now Lyla had someone to play with when my friend couldn’t visit.
I asked for Daisy's blessing to date Lyla, which she gave with gusto. Daisy even said we could still go on a date sometime, even with both of us seeing the same girl. I said I would really like that. I said that I felt really grateful to have her in my life.
I did not say “I sense she might be using me to fill in for you and that might be bad for both of us”—though I should have.
Daisy was just so fabulous. Lyla, too. They had lovely hair and manicures that were magically resistant to chipping. I was a cowering philistine, smiling and nodding at small talk because I knew I would never actually “get” such works of art, no matter how much I wanted to.
In a way it seemed impolite to “break it to them,” to tell such beauties—arresting and glamorous—whose moods controlled the weather, that their attentions were wrapped up in an empty shell of a semi-person. As if admitting my own vulnerability and insecurity was in some way being ungrateful for the attention I was receiving. This, though tragic, isn't rare—we tell this to women with mental illness all the time.
After an anxiously shared Fenton’s sundae, I brought Lyla home. I tied her up. I tickled her, spanked her. And every now and then a “Mommy” would escape her lips and I would wipe it from my face, like mud or a patch of mosquitos on an otherwise idyllic summer’s drive. It hurt because I wanted to be her Mommy, but I believed so much that I wasn't, that I was just the fill-in, that I stormed through sex with her the way I'd storm out of the dining room, dramatically dismissing my parents' opportunity to give me an apology I would 15 years later realize I could have probably stood to hear (if for my own mental health as an adult.)
As she got dressed to leave she told me about her other partners—the Daddy in Santa Cruz, the johns at work—picking up in the middle of a story she had started with someone else. With Daisy. She didn’t stay the night and I took this as paying it forward. I’d get to be little spoon later . . . with interest.
For our second date we were walking hand-in-hand to the Emeryville Toys R’ Us. She picked out some coloring books—making sure the clerk heard her say “mommy” while I reached into my purse. Buying the ticket. Taking the ride.
She laid on the floor and loudly debated shades of green while I made dinner.
It never occurred to me that Daisy’s feelings would be hurt to find Lyla now had two Mommies. It seemed obvious to me that she would be in on the bait and switch.
I was just a stunt double sweetheart.
As it turned out, it was not obvious to Daisy that I would be doing her stunts. Lyla had told Daisy she missed their sex when she was having sex with me, and Daisy, reasonably, didn’t take this super well.
One morning I snuck out of Lyla’s bedroom (she slept with so many blankets in such a tiny room, I was afraid I would die of heat stroke) and texted Daisy, to say I missed her, to say I know it must be hard to have her friend and girlfriend doing stuff without her and wanted her to have space to talk about it with me.
Daisy told me she wasn’t interested in ever speaking to me again. She withdrew from the workshop we were putting on together. She told her other partners not to speak to me anymore.
I started out as her stunt double, and now I was blacklisted from Hollywood.
It was a year and a half later before I heard from her.
When confronted with how hurt I was that she had contributed to my friend break-up with Daisy, Lyla waved it off as an “overshare” and swapped in a lecture on boundaries for my goodnight kiss.
We agreed to swap our things, but it never happened. I prefer writing the bridge out of my story instead of burning it.
So I still have the Disney Princess coloring books, a gentle reminder that my relationships affect people outside of the relationship, and that I should never love myself so little that it causes someone else to feel spurned or unwanted.
Also, giving the coloring books back to Lyla, even a year and a half post break-up, would be really painful to follow through with. I hate goodbyes—even with people I don’t really like.
However dubious my position as her Mommy, I still hope to have done right by her. I hope she’s learned to cook and will use the tupperware I left at her house to make a picnic.
