I could be any dude’s soul mate. I had racks full of jerseys representing almost every football team: Jets, Seahawks, Dolphins. My closet looked like a Foot Locker. And not even a Lady Foot Locker. I would commit so hard to supporting a man’s sports team that one time I went so far as to buy some Giants lingerie on Etsy with Giants helmets on the bra, which seriously almost amputated my nipples. Hot tip: If you’re going to wear lingerie with your man’s team on it, make sure the team didn’t lose the day before, because that’s all he’ll be thinking about when you’re having sex. Walking out in lingerie is a very vulnerable moment for a girl and nothing is worse than strutting out and seeing a guy’s face fall from having to relive the previous night’s disappointing performance on a football field by some player who doesn’t even know he exists. Anyway, the point is that I’m from D.C. and I can finally admit that by blood I have no choice but to be a Redskins fan, or whatever the name of the D.C. team is when this book comes out.
I’ve been a very different person in every relationship I’ve had. Different style, look, everything. I went through more hair colors than a prostitute on the run: I had black, blond, and greenish hair from trying to do red hair by myself. When you’re insecure and codependent, every day is Halloween. My style choices for guys included everything from English schoolgirl, western cowgirl, Goth apocalyptic princess who shopped in the children’s section, and way-too-much-spandex girl. Basically the rule of thumb in getting dressed for a guy was if my body hated it, he loved it. After much soul searching, I found out that my authentic self is a jeans and T-shirt type gal and that’s okay because I now know that if a guy isn’t into that, he’s either gay or very gay.
Looking back, I actually might have even switched ethnicities for a guy. I dated someone who had only dated South American girls, so naturally I doused myself in self-tanner. If you’ve seen me—even if only on the cover of this book—then you’ve realized that I’m basically an albino, so when I put on self-tanner, I end up looking tie-dyed and slightly ill. Because I also have no patience and won’t sit still long enough to let the self-tanner dry, I end up having what look like brown skid marks all over my sheets. News flash: Brown stains in your bed are not an aphrodisiac. When I look back on how much I morphed my skin color, I’m shocked I wasn’t arrested for a hate crime. Or at the very least, didn’t get a Facebook message from Tan Mom.
Another reason to get a handle on codependence is that when your identity is contingent upon the person you’re dating, you end up eating a lot of very weird shit. I put so many things in my mouth to avoid conflict in relationships and I’m not even talking about the thing you’re thinking about. I ate pickled eggs. Once I ate prawns on a boat. Prawns. I don’t really know what a prawn is, but I just Googled it and it seems to be a shrimp with a weave, so apparently I ate fishy hair.
I even put myself in physical danger because I couldn’t say no or stand up for myself. I went scuba diving at night, which may sound really fun to some of you, but it’s my living nightmare. You don’t need to be Neil deGrasse Tyson to know that fish are designed to swim underwater while humans are clearly not. I felt like Clarice in The Silence of the Lambs when Buffalo Bill had his night-vision goggles on and could see her, but she couldn’t see him. The only saving grace of night diving is you can piss yourself and nobody can tell.
I was so reckless in my codependent attraction to people that I should be rotting in a Guatemalan jail. It all started when I met a cute French guy on a flight. He slept most of the time, so I projected an awesome personality onto him. Once he woke up, he didn’t live up to my fantasy, but he was interested in me, and that’s usually all I needed to give a year of my life to someone. He spoke just enough English for us to communicate, but not enough for us to be able to argue too much. And due to the language barrier, whenever we did argue, we both thought we had won, when in fact we probably both lost.
I should’ve known it wasn’t an excellent idea to travel with him after I came across a shoe box in his closet full of credit cards with his name spelled differently on each one. I also found another shoe box full of photos, one of a girl with whipped cream on her hoo-ha and boobs. This was pre-iCloud, when we had to print dirty photos. I found this stuff when he was at work, so I obviously couldn’t confront him about it. I didn’t know how to confront someone, I only knew how to quietly fester. I was eighteen—gimme a break. And to answer your question, no, he never tried to put whipped cream on my boobs, which really hurt my feelings. That being said, I’m thrilled that there aren’t hard-copy photos of me with my tits looking like sad cupcakes available on eBay.
To make things weirder, he lived in Fort Lauderdale. I had been spending most weekends commuting there to see him, and one night out of nowhere he asked if I wanted fly to Mexico, then drive to Guatemala. At the time I thought it was romantic and spontaneous, although now I suspect he was probably avoiding some kind of legal issue. Since this was before I had any idea how to say no to things I didn’t want to do and felt a lot of socially constructed pressure for us to be soul mates, I enthusiastically responded, “I’ve always wanted to go to Guatemala!” I mean, no offense to Guatemala, but I had not always wanted to go there. The country is gorgeous, but it’s also corrupt and intimidating. The first thing I saw at the border were fourteen-year-olds with machine guns, so I felt a low-grade sense of anxiety the whole trip, as if at any moment we could be punished for being American. Luckily, my dude was French, and his accent made everyone want to rob us just a little less. He told me since I was American to just be quiet in public, which was very insulting and very hot.
I loved Guatemala, but I spent most of my time there trying to pretend that I didn’t have headaches and explosive diarrhea. Again, as a codependent I can’t admit that I have needs, ask for help, or allow anyone to know that I’m human. This was quite a challenge, since our hotel had one “toilet.” You had to pull a rope to “flush” it, and it was about four inches away from the “bed.” Clearly whoever built this hotel did not believe in love and was very interested in challenging others’ belief in it. The good news is that the French guy had a habit of drinking a lot of tequila during the day, so when I knew I was going to have a gastrointestinal episode, I’d push even more tequila on him to ensure he was knocked out cold so I didn’t wake him up with what felt like giving birth to triplets every night at two A.M.