It’s complicated, it’s definitely a complicated situation, and I always look at something like the Academy Awards, when Julia Roberts won the Oscar and she was with Benjamin Bratt. I always watch them up onstage and it’s like, “Bye-bye relationship.”
It’s just too hard. In having a successful relationship now, having someone who’s not in the business really has worked better for me.
Marc
Am I going to get married again?
JANEANE GAROFALO—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I would assume you would. You seem to be a romantic in that way. I don’t know why you’re not just content to live with people, but you seem to like to get married. There’s nothing wrong with getting married. It’s marrying the right person. I myself have never wanted to be married either. I have no problems living with people, I just don’t want to be married.
FRED ARMISEN—COMEDIAN, ACTOR, MUSICIAN
There’s always a way, if you really like someone, to keep them in your life. It doesn’t have to be dating.
Marc
So why would you get married again?
Fred
Because it’s so intoxicating. It’s so exciting. This is going to sound very shallow, but I get lost in fantasy a lot.
Marc
Really? The guy who does characters?
Fred
I would hope that I had a place where I didn’t get lost in it, but the fantasy of this person. This is something that’s happened to me a million times. I have a problem with intimacy where all of a sudden there’s a real person there.
I’m trying to fix this. I’m trying to get better at this, but something happens in me where it’s almost like an amnesia. It’s almost like waking up and going, Where am I? Who is this person? Why is this person looking me directly in the eye and having a conversation?
Marc
Who usually ends it, you or her?
Fred
It’s me becoming impossible. I shut it down. There’s infidelity, there’s cheating. It’s the most chaos I’ve had in my life.
I say these things because I’m not finished being a person. A person who I can be intimate with is a person who I don’t have sex with. Like Carrie Brownstein. I find true intimacy there. I know that I have it. I know that I’m not shut down.
CARRIE BROWNSTEIN—MUSICIAN, COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
Fred and I hit it off. We did not date. Which I’m certain is why we’re still really good friends. He would agree.
Marc
Was there a discussion?
Carrie
Yeah, there have been discussions.
Marc
Is it an ongoing discussion?
Carrie
We revisit that. But now for sure, we need to just be friends.
DAN HARMON—DIRECTOR, WRITER, PRODUCER
Whenever I’m going back to therapy I’m going because I’m in danger of fucking up with somebody who deserves better. I shut down. It’s all negative space. It’s all “what’s not there.” I don’t do anything bad. I never cheat, I don’t even flirt. I don’t compete. I also don’t make a lot of eye contact. I go into a domestic kind of cocoon. Stop having sex, I stop taking showers, I focus on my work.
CHELSEA PERETTI—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I max out in relationships it seems like at a year or two. I get cheated on, or … I don’t know. This is where I feel like I will be alone perhaps forever, but I do feel like things get uninteresting or something. I get that thing of like, “Oh, maybe there’s someone else who has something better.” And then you get to see that everyone has flaws eventually once you’re a year in or something. Also, I don’t feel like I’m always myself until a year in, and that’s also problematic. I’ve been cheated on actually many times, so.…
Marc
How do you handle that?
Chelsea
Depression. I shut down emotionally. Sometimes I’ll try to work it out, and then I break up with a person, and then I go through a period of total relief and feeling powerful. I feel freed of things.
I think I’m evolving, but it’s very hard for me to just say, “This doesn’t really feel like it’s working. Let’s not go further.” Instead I’ll say, “This doesn’t feel like it’s working, but we have so much fun eating dinner,” and just, “Let’s give it two more years. I like cuddling.” You know?
Marc
Yeah, I don’t know how the hell to get out of things. I usually wait until it explodes into some dramatic mess.
Chelsea
Yeah, me too, but my goal as a human being is to be able to be more honest about “This doesn’t really feel like it’s working.”
AMY SCHUMER—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I feel, with men, like if you and I were together, say we’re married, and you have sex with someone else, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything about your feelings for me. I believe that’s true for men.
Marc
But if you were in that relationship, would you be able to make that distinction?
Amy
Two, three years ago, no fucking way. Like, run for your life, but now, I don’t know. I don’t want to ever find out about it, especially if it didn’t mean something to you. Because I believe that something’s going on with you. People go through phases. It would be very hurtful, but I don’t believe that having sex with someone else necessarily affects your feelings for the person that you’re with.
Marc
Have you ever dated an enraged dick Jew?
LENA DUNHAM—ACTOR, WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER
Like fifteen of them. It was my specialty before my current relationship.
I was raised by a decidedly nonabusive man and by an intensely self-actualized feminist, and then when I found my way into the world as an adult woman embarking on my sexual life, and saw that I had this incredible drive to find myself in dark situations where I wasn’t being treated with the respect that I thought I or even any human deserves.
I would have walked right out if somebody screamed in my face or was abusive to me in any physical way. It was much more just like people who have a dark relationship with themselves, an uncomfortable relationship with their sexuality and expressed that through hate and disdain for the women that they’re with, disguised as humor and a need to be obliterated half of the time.
I got all the dark stuff of dating a comic minus the pleasure of dating somebody funny. They’re needy people who want to pretend that they don’t need you. Needy people who want to pretend you’re not an important role in their life. People who aren’t happy for you when you’re successful. People who don’t believe in you. People who act like they’re doing you a favor by being attracted to you, all of those things factor into my early dating life.
I’m not describing one boyfriend or one incident. I’m describing a chain of people and situations that I put myself through. They were painful and they took a good four years off of the evolution and health of my self-esteem, and they seemed like these cool explorations of a life that I had never known, and in reality, they were super damaging.
I do definitely have something like “look at me now” energy directed at ex-boyfriends and I don’t really want to own that. But how can you help it? You must have some of that toward people who you feel didn’t understand?
Marc
My second wife said, “You’re not going to be famous until you’re dead.”
Lena
Really? You’re alive.
Marc
I’m alive.