Some Sad Stories About Love

I: Arrivals and Departures

"And you know what the really sad thing is?"

"Sadder than when you faked a bladder infection to get out of sex? Because you told me that story already."

"...Yes. Well, maybe. No, definitely sadder."

"Wow. Now this I have to hear."

"Well, it was... OK, you remember when Kathy and Andrea had that accidental threesome?"

"Accidental? I... no, I do not remember that."

"It was when they went to New York that time. They were staying with this friend of Kathy's from library school, and one night while Andrea was in the kitchen the friend suggested that they, you know, have a threesome. So Kathy didn't know what to do, and when Andrea came back in from the kitchen, Kathy's like, "So, um, Susan thinks we should have a threesome..."

And Andrea didn't want to be the one to say no because Susan was Kathy's friend, and she didn't want to be rude, plus she thought that maybe Kathy was into it. And when Andrea didn't say no right away, Kathy didn't want to say no in case Andrea was into it, and so they ended up having this sort of awkward threesome that neither of them really wanted."

"That's an oddly Canadian story, I think - having a threesome because everyone's afraid that saying no would be rude."

"Exactly!"

"So what are you trying to tell me? That you guys had a bad threesome?"

"No! The really sad thing is that I only told her I loved her by accident."

"An accident as in you didn't mean to say it, or you didn't mean it?"

"As in I didn't mean it. Well, both I guess - I didn't mean to say it either, it wasn’t like I was intending to lie to her, if you know what I mean."

"So what happened?"

"Well, we were at the airport..."

"And the airport gives you some kind of love Tourette's?"

"No! It's just ... it’s just that usually when I'm at the airport with someone it's because they're dropping me off, and you know, it's all, "Bye dear, have a good trip, love you," and you say, "Bye Mom, love you too!". And it was really early in the morning, and I was distracted because I couldn't tell if we were in the right line-up, and cranky because she had already remembered like three things she had forgotten that I was going to have to mail to her, and I wasn't really paying attention, so when we got to the gate and she said 'I love you," - which incidentally she had been saying every five minutes since our second date so I didn't take it that seriously - I just automatically said, "love you too!".

"Oh god..."

"Yeah. And there is no polite way to take something like that back. Plus she got all big-eyed and happy, so what was I going to say? "Wait, on second thought, let me scale that statement down to, ‘Happy enough to keep seeing you for a while, but pretty dubious about a future for this relationship because you’re obsessed with women’s volleyball?’ or ‘Whoops, didn't mean to say that, for a moment I thought you were my mother?’ There is just no graceful way to deal with an accidental I love you."

"So what did you do?"

"Tried really hard for the rest of the relationship to be in love, so I wouldn't have to feel like an asshole or a liar."

"And?"

"It didn't work."

II: The Interview

My computer skills? They're excellent. No, I don't have formal training, I'm self-taught, but I used them extensively in my last job. Plus I was trapped in a loveless relationship for most of my twenties - I spent a lot of time beta-testing Windows 95. Or at the gym.

It's sad, isn't it, the way that at a certain point in a bad relationship you can't remember what it was like when it was good. I mean, you know objectively that it was good once, and you have all this furniture you bought together to prove it, but what it actually felt like... that's just gone.

But hey, I can do things with spreadsheets that you wouldn't believe. And my 10K time was never better...

III: Hating Your Thighs

The thing about hating your thighs is that it gives you a reason for no one to love you. I mean, think about it: it gives you permission to sit around in your unflattering pants, eating ice cream and wallowing in self-pity, because you tell yourself that no one could ever love thighs like yours. You could try and do something about it - put down the ice cream, or just buy better pants, whatever. But you don't. Because what if you fix your thighs and still nobody wants you? What if it's actually your inside, not your outside, that's the problem?

If you concentrate hard enough on hating your thighs, you never have to think about that little possibility.

No one wants to have to change to be loved, but we all secretly think that if we could change, love would be better. I have a cousin who hated her thighs as much as I did, and she finally did something about it - with the wonders of spin class and liposuction she became a size eight and bought a whole new wardrobe.

But she was haunted by the ghost of her old thighs. Whenever anyone told her she was pretty, she'd start to think about how they wouldn't even have looked at her before she fixed her thighs. And then she'd get angry, and tell herself how blind and shallow they must be if all they could see was her thighs. And then she'd start to think about how much money and work she'd put into fixing her thighs, and she'd tell herself that she could do better than someone that shallow, and she'd brush them off. And before you knew it, she was back eating ice cream alone and feeling sorry for herself, hating her thighs as much as ever.

IV: Happy Birthday Girl

So it was my birthday, right? And I'd been going out with this guy I really liked for about three months, so it was at that point where you're getting kind of nervous, you know, like maybe this is something serious.

And he was working late that night, so my friends from work and me went ahead to the bar, and he was going to meet us there. And when we got there, there was this chick there that someone knew, and what I didn't know was that she had totally been after my guy before we got together, and she was totally pissed that he chose me, not her. So we all had a couple of drinks, and she comes up to me, and she's all, like, "So, you're Roy's new girl, huh? You know he's been cheating on you, right? Like since day one?"

And I'm playing it cool, I'm all like "Duh, of course I know, what do you think, I'm stupid? I’ve been cheating on him too!" But inside I'm all "Whoa," like "Whoa, since day one, man, since day one, holy shit," ‘cause the truth is I’d hardly even looked at anyone else since about our third date.

So people keep buying me drinks, and buying me drinks, 'cause it's my birthday, and by this time I'm like drunk, I mean drunk, so drunk I can't even tell you. And it's late already and Roy hadn't shown up yet, and I'm still thinking 'Whoa, since day one,' and that maybe, you know, he wasn't really working late after all.

So there was this other guy there, I knew him from work, and he'd always, you know, always had this little crush on me, I could tell. And I was drunk, so fucking drunk, so I drag him off, and I didn't even know where we were going, right, but we found this back staircase thing that went upstairs, and from upstairs you could get out onto the roof. So we get out on the roof, and I'm wasted, and I'm thinking "since day one, man," and I’m thinking, “it’s my fucking birthday,” and the roof’s all gravel except for this big flat metal thing, and then I'm fucking him, this stupid guy from work, on this big fucking metal thing which is making all kinds of crazy clanging noises, up there on the roof.

And then I look up and there's Roy, just standing there, looking so sad, and all I can think is, like, Happy! Fucking! Birthday! to Me!

V: Sad Stories About Love

There are some sad stories about love that everyone knows, you know what I mean? The ones where everyone winces when you bring them up because they’ve been there too?

Like the one where you have this friend, who maybe you like as more than a friend, but he has a girlfriend? And maybe the girlfriend is even your friend too... So you just hang out with them, and it's all cool, everyone is friends, no problem. And then one night your friend calls you and wants you to come over because they've had a fight and he needs to talk to someone.

You know that story, don’t you? You say you'll go, and you tell yourself that you're just going as a friend, as a shoulder to cry on. But you still make sure you've shaved your legs before you leave the house.

That one is sad because right there you know it's going to go badly - if something happens, you'll never feel right about it. And even if nothing happens, you'll still feel like a sneaky bitch, because no matter what you told yourself at the time, you know full well what you were hoping when you shaved your legs. Plus even while you're feeling bad about it, you'll still be kind of sad that nothing happened, because when you shaved your legs you let yourself hope just that little bit.

Or maybe the really sad thing is that knowing all that doesn't stop you from doing something else just like it. Or maybe something even sadder.

Then there are the other sad stories, the kind you only tell when you’re drunk or you’ve been out all night because even you know how they sound. Like the one where you go to assertiveness classes, and they go around the circle and ask why you're there, and everyone else has these horror stories, they've been harrassed or beat up or worse. And then it's your turn, and even though you'd made up a whole cover story you blurt out the truth, which is that your boyfriend made you take assertiveness lessons as a condition of not breaking up with you. And then no one there really talks to you and he breaks up with you anyway.

Or the one where you go out with someone crazy, and you weather all the big stuff, the hospital and the meds and all that, but then the little things start to get on your nerves. Like why can't he change his socks before he comes over? Or why does he always want to watch hockey when he knows you think it’s boring?

So you start to be mean to him in little, stupid ways, and you know he can't really complain about it because even his friends are like, "Dude, she stuck around when you were hearing cosmic voices, so what if she makes fun of your comic-book collection?

And your friends all say that you're so brave to be with him, but you know that you're not brave at all. You know that the reason you went out with him in the first place was because you thought that being with someone crazy would mean that he couldn't expect you to act sane. Even though it didn't work out that way in the end.

In the movies they make it look like love turns you into a better person, but in real life it just makes us all liars, we lie to ourselves about what we want and to each other about who we are and to anyone else who gets in the way. In the movies they never talk about how the heart can be so heartless. And then half the time if you get what you want you immediately ruin it. Or you start to want something else entirely, and then the whole sad thing starts all over again.