You're Making Me Hate You (19 page)

Month Two is the first shakedown. Everything from shoes left under the coffee table to how you go down on each other would fall under the microscope for scrutiny. Mind you, the sex will probably still be great fun at this point, so you have to be careful you don’t fall in that trap. You have to keep your eyes on the two main queries: Is he or she worth continuing on with, and am I still having a good time? It could be that one month’s business isn’t long enough to get a bead on that kind of answer, but it’s a good habit to get into, especially with the things you’ll need to do in the coming months. So Month Two is a bit like a “story so far” moment: “Well, they haven’t asked me to help them hide a body yet, but they
do
dip candy bars in peanut butter jars. Maybe they just need their own jars for dipping?” So far so good: the dialogue continues, and you get someone who isn’t a murderer but really likes his peanut butter and chocolate.

Month Three is all about paying attention a little more. This is the time when you notice the subtleties, the nuances, and the little shit. Things like chewing fingernails instead of cutting them and panties in the sink—these are all fodder for discussion. Honestly, I don’t know anyone who still puts their panties in the sink. But I’ve seen a pair of socks or two soaking in there, and it makes my teeth click. Discussions won’t resume until Month Four, so this is more about taking notes and getting involved. It might just be that the sex is tapering off a little bit, so you’ll have a little free time from the shackles and ball gags to put some pen to paper. Good thing too, because after a while those restraints chafe like a motherfucker. But don’t worry: after enough time you start to develop calluses in the right places; then it’s a matter of having your partner chew them … I’m sorry, I’ve said too much.

When Month Five commences, it’s going to be quiet for a while. This is because this month is all about looking at your partner in the right light—that is, do they look okay naked, and are they pigging out on brutal calories? Are they keeping their figure? Does it matter if they have a tattoo on each thigh of a snail racing a turtle toward their cooter? Do they dimple up in spots, thereby freaking you out? This shit is important because it’s all about paying attention to fluctuation. It’s also the month you book that first dinner with each other’s parents. It’s good to have the face time, but there’s a covert point as well: you know the old adage that women grow up to look like their mothers? This applies to dads as well. So get a look at the older versions and give a thought to the manifest destiny of your sex life.

Month Six: the two of you will have a State of the Union Address. This is when you air out any and all grievances: flirting with each other’s friends, too much garlic in the food you cook, leaving the seat down in the bathroom, leaving the seat
up
in the bathroom, and so forth. It’s also a good time to look at things that have been ignored from prior talks. Is he still clipping his toenails at the dinner table? Is she still bitching about her friends while you’re watching your favorite show? Is he still smacking your ass too hard in bed? Is she still bitching about her friends while you’re smacking her ass in bed? This is when you put it all on the line, because the next month is all about commonality, so get the state of affairs together quickly and try to stay on target.

Month Seven: What the fuck do you have in common? Have you started fighting more? Are you still talking? Do you still do stuff together? Time to look at the stuff you guys share, besides splitting headaches and those pints of Ben and Jerry’s after a good movie. It doesn’t have to be everything: everyone is and should rightly be different in a lot of ways. But look at certain things: Do you like the same movies or TV shows? Do you watch them together? Do you still go out together, or have you both gone back to hanging with friends? Do you talk about stuff other than what’s right or wrong about your relationship, like whether or not the new
Star Wars
movies are going to be cool or if any of the Kardashians shoot ass fat into their faces in a desperate attempt to appear human? This is about relevance and relativity. No one wants to have the same conversations over and over.

Month Eight: time to talk about what’s off limits and what might be on the table in the bedroom. Some people are up for anything, including the Twisting Pinky and the Dog in a Bathtub. Other folks aren’t quite so open-minded or open-ended. You have to make sure the boundaries are in place. Anal? No? Fine and dandy. Oral? On both sides? Good call. Reverse Cowgirl? Thank God. Toe sucking? Too ticklish, huh? That’s too bad but understood. It’s only a pain in the ass—no pun intended—if you’re too stifled by embarrassment. If you get past that and you
trust the person
, you can have it all. But that’s one of the things about talking as much as you should—it can help develop that trust, in bed and out. Thusly, the more you get to know each other in life, the more you’ll see the reflection of what they’re like in the bedroom.

Months Nine and Ten are very simple: Have you tried living with each other?
Do
it, then see Month Eleven.

Month Eleven is the last ditch effort to find out what the fuck is going on. Is he a maniac about Trash Night and does he lose his cool if it’s not on the curb before you both go to bed? Is she a nut if you’re not romantic enough, like rose petals on the pillow every once in a while or a quiet lunch that ends in a make-out session by a lake? Is he faithful? Is she fucking around? Have you both started sizing up other people? This is the point of the system that maybe I didn’t quite convey: at
any
point during this first year you can burn rubber for the horizon. Every month is a free one. If you haven’t taken the opportunities afforded by these skull sessions to get out with dignity, it’s your own fault. That’s because after Month Twelve, you deserve the horseshit that comes your way if you’re not happy anymore. Any schmuck, male or female, should fucking know within a
whole year
whether that other person is not The One, especially considering you had
monthly chances
to bail with honor and intelligence. If you fuck it up in the next year, you deserve the punishment and hassles from everyone, because you’re a nimrod who doesn’t know what they want, and you shouldn’t be allowed to date or romance anyone else for a year. Shit happens, douche pickle. Next time know yourself a little better instead of wasting everyone’s time.

Let’s get away from romance and all that frilly crap for a second and examine the relationships we all have with the nonhuman. People fight weird issues with food. Some got hard-ons and
rocky nipples for cars or money or expensive homes and whatnot. Like my friend Leon used to say, “Ain’t nothin’ but nothin’, motherfucker, now gimme a smoke.” Well, he wasn’t so much a friend as he was a dude who bought drugs from my friend’s parents. But that’s a great quote. It applies to so many different situations that I use it a lot when you need just the right amount of wit balanced with a decent dose of the word “motherfucker.”

Food: some can handle it and others can’t get their cravings under control. It’s like being with addicts but the availability is everywhere, staring you in the face when you really need the respite. Some people binge eat and throw up, afflicted as they are with either bulimia or anorexia or body dysmorphia or any number of things that have become diseases over the last few decades. I try not to get too cynical about these problems because I know people who suffer at their hands. But I also know that there’s more to the issue there, and just getting someone to stop that cycle is not enough. Some don’t give a shit about getting help and would rather die than “look fat” in their mirrors. Others truly cannot get a grip on these gripping dilemmas. All these negative aspects over a substance we all need to stay alive. It hurts my head to think about it.

Is it a product of wanting for nothing? Is it that side effect of never needing a thing? Is it a hell that stems from the subtle opulence that comes from being free in a country that offers opportunities of every and any kind? Could be. Think about hoarders, those people who turn houses that were once homes into tombs sealed with belongings, important or pathetic alike. I understand there is a psychological angle there that, like bulimics and anorexics, takes time and therapy to work through, but growing up in houses that all had hints of hoarding going on, I can tell you right now it’s no picnic being a nonhoarder in a hoarded household. There’s a sadistic selfishness that goes along
with it that no one wants to talk about—it’s all about the people who can’t stop filling their fucking houses with garbage and sales items. Nobody talks about the ones who never had a choice in the matter, who suffered because they couldn’t bring friends home and, if they did, were made fun of constantly. Yes, life isn’t fair. But work out how fair it is to people who have to deal with these sicknesses even though they’re not the ones afflicted.

The gross underbelly are the people who just want more—not because they’re hoarders but because they’re greedy cunt lips who take advantage of people, glom onto their bank accounts, suck them dry, and move on to the next derelict with a bank roll. Yes, I understand that some of the people who get taken to town should’ve been a little more savvy and privy to the vixens and vacillators, the people running the grifts in the first place. But then again, can’t people just not fucking
suck
as human beings once in a while? Is that too much to fucking ask? Is it too much to ask that people like each other for who they are and not what they have? Am I naïve about the nature of motherfuckers under Mother Nature’s broken wings? Nah, fuck that. People have just as much capacity to be good as they do to be shit. It’s a choice. People make choices. So they need to make better fucking choices.

Then there’s that strange borderland of religions and our “relationships” with the unknown. Oh Boy Howdy, everybody’s got a god these days. Everybody’s got the inside track on the better end and the bitter truth. Everybody has a different book full of fun facts on how to have a better understanding or relationship with their gods, every one of them. The crazy bit of business here is that you’d
think
this would bring people into a better relationship with each other. But nope. Because everyone’s so fucking smart these days, they think they know better than everyone else what these books are really saying about
those gods, and their interpretations are different because they
know
they’re right. Too many prophets, not enough flocks—this is what happens when dumb creatures get it in their heads that there’s divinity out there somewhere. No one’s on the same pages of the same books about the same gods. Guess what? That’s how wars start, children.

Isn’t it scary to anyone else that as much as we ridicule or feel pity for the ancients, after thousands of years we’re still having the same arguments about gods that don’t exist? Think about that before you pat yourselves on the back too hard for being able to program a VCR or change your fucking ringtones.

In the end relationships of all kinds define who we are inside, the one nobody sees or talks to. They are reflections of the unspoken soul because, as hard as it is for some of you to open up, who you inevitably spend time with is a good indication of who you are or want to be. They say you can judge a person by the company they keep, but what they don’t say is that you should dig a little deeper to understand how you and the company you keep get along in life. There are infinite lines of dialogue and energy that can go back and forth between the masses, and just because one person is a douche doesn’t mean his friend is too. However, maybe that friend has moments of douche baggery when he or she is
with
that friend, doing things or acting in ways they would never think of with their other acquaintances.

The way we approach relationships with
anything
these days is to overdo it. No one knows how to find the right balance and go with the flow. Everyone has to get
exactly
what they want
exactly
when they need it from
exactly
the right person or food or thing or fucking whatever. People are obsessed with fulfilling their needs before anything else in life. The selfishness makes for a million “butts and farts” running around, convinced
they’ll never be happy unless they get
precisely what they want
. I don’t know whether it’s what personal freedom persuades us to think we need or it’s just because, with so many things around us so readily available, like information and technology, we have developed an addiction to instant gratification. Either way, we’re all a bunch of spoiled brats wandering this galactic pebble, yelling and arguing when we don’t get what we want.

Life’s not the Internet, fuckholes.

Life doesn’t sway or give when you try to force it to give you what you crave, whether it’s a lover or a liver transplant. Because of life, you learn to roll with the punches, even if you have to take a few head shots before you find out the hard way. Satisfaction only breeds selfishness: it’s not a bad thing per se, but depending on what you’re pursuing, it can be anything from the death of desire to the destroyer of the ability to dream, if I can paraphrase slightly. When you always get what you want, you build up a tolerance—in the sense of an illness—against appreciation. More importantly, you become intolerant to anything, perceived or real, that feels like a setback or a loss. This is how we are meant to develop as people and expand on our inner compassion and empathy. When we lose that, forget about relationships; we are
fucked
as a species. We will be headed for the day when we’re just finely dressed monkeys assaulting each other with shit (
literal
shit) filled with gravel and cherry pits.

Don’t get mad at me:
you’re
the ones who look like brown stains in the world’s underwear. I’m just pointing it out. You know why people don’t get married and stay together anymore? It’s because they think their momentary lust is love, and when that lust burns itself dry, they want out to find someone else. You know why so many people are fucking obese these days—and I don’t mean by those bullshit universal standards you get when you go to the doctor; I mean based on the eye test. It’s
because no one can stand the thought of not being able to eat anything and everything as much as possible all the fucking time. Humanity has run out of willpower. Humanity has run out of patience. It has turned into Gollum, stroking his Precious in the caverns and eating what he kills. Our backs have arched and our hearts have gone black. We want everything and we want it
now
. Never mind that we don’t know what real love is: we want love
now
. Never mind that we can’t handle food or drugs or booze or sex or anything in moderation. We want it all
now
. Never mind that we don’t know how to make ourselves truly happy because the only way we know how to be happy is to get what we want
now
.