I Know What I'm Doing (8 page)

OKAY, WELL CAN I ASK, “DO YOU THINK YOU’LL GET MARRIED AGAIN?”

How can anyone know if they want to get married again when they aren’t even in a relationship? Just know that marriage is the furthest thing from a newly divorced person’s mind. This isn’t due to heartbreak or cynicism but to the strange and disturbing new reality that your divorced friend now sees marriage AND divorce as two very real possibilities and will always carry that reality to their next romantic endeavor. Do you think a sinkhole will swallow you? What do you mean, you don’t know?

2. “WHAT WAS THE FIGHT THAT CAUSED IT TO END?”

Marriage isn’t a toddler friendship where you suddenly decide to end all playdates because Suzy didn’t share her blocks one time. One fight does not end a marriage. This question implies that you’re trying to figure out what went wrong so that
you
can figure out what
your
fight with your spouse meant last night. Don’t worry. Divorce isn’t contagious. You’re fine.

3. “WE WOULD HAVE INVITED YOU TO DINNER TONIGHT BUT IT’S ALL MARRIED COUPLES. YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN SAD.”

First of all, no one likes to hear in retrospect that they weren’t invited to a thing. That’s just shitty. But it’s especially shitty to think that if only they were legally bound to someone, they could have had a seat at your dinner table. Maybe it’s not about a sad divorcée at all? Maybe it’s
you
who would be uncomfortable. Are you afraid that inviting a divorced person to a couples dinner might be like inviting a political radical to a black-tie fund-raiser? You think we might show up, kick open the door, strut around with pamphlets, and start “tellin’ the truth about some things, man? Turns out—it
is
just a piece of paper, man!” We’re not going to do that. And of course, even people who know divorce is for the best get sad. So it’s shitty of you to point that out and then try to keep a sad person from an event that has
food.

4. “WELL, WHY DID YOU GET MARRIED IN THE FIRST PLACE?”

How come YOU got married? Love. Or what you thought was love. What do you expect a divorced person to say to this? “I’m sorry, I don’t have a crystal ball and can’t see the future”? Or maybe “We just wanted some presents!” To be fair, today I have more than ten knives for ten different kinds of cheese. That never would have happened if I hadn’t gotten married.

5. “DO YOU STILL SLEEP ON ‘YOUR’ SIDE OF THE BED OR DOES IT FEEL WEIRD?”

What feels weird is you thinking about me in bed. And also what was even weirder was being married and not wanting my husband in my bed. That’s what’s weird. Once the divorced person is in that bed alone, it’s just a bed. And a bed is a wonderful place to do what we all love to do—sleep. And occasionally eat. Without a plate.

6. “OH.”

This is what usually gets said to the divorced person after she tells her married friend that she had her first post-marriage sex. We aren’t asking our married friends to high-five us, but we are just trying to share what we’re going through. And trust us—we feel awkward about it too. Just say, “I hope you’re having fun.” We’re going to have to go through some sex before we settle down again or become monks. As long as your divorced friend isn’t giving gory details there’s no need to get all puritanical on them. If you do, then you have to wear a Pilgrim hat and belt buckle and really commit to the part.

7. “IT JUST UPSETS ME TO HEAR ALL OF THIS SINCE I LOVE YOU BOTH.”

Yeah. It must be hard for people to hear about their friends divorcing—but guess who it’s harder on? The divorced. Don’t even try to steal our feel-bad glory. This is
our
moment not to shine.

8. “ARE YOU SCARED IN THE HOUSE ALONE?”

Because we weren’t until you brought it up.

***** BONUS ADVICE*****

DON’T SAY TO A DIVORCED STRANGER, “I’M SO SORRY.”

Sometimes divorce isn’t a bad thing. Sometimes ending a marriage can feel so oddly right that when divorced people see that strangers are more affected by the news than they are they question themselves.
Am I a divorcée
and
a sociopath?
Instead, just say what every person wants to hear. “You look thin!”

9

JEN COUGAR MELLENCAMP

Older women are best, because they always think they may be doing it for the last time.

—IAN FLEMING

I
have complicated feelings about what does and doesn’t empower straight women—especially when it comes to women acclimating to the social/sexual habits of men in the name of “If they can do it—why can’t we?” I’m talking about being a cougar—an older woman who dates a younger man. Sure, older straight men date younger straight women all the time, but they don’t have some name for it where they’re compared to a lithe yet desperate-seeming animal that crouches in the brush, hiding, either waiting to be preyed on or nuzzling her cub. For men, dating someone twenty years younger is just called being a man. There is no slang from the animal kingdom that stands for the “man with the hair growing out of his ears who doesn’t want to face mortality with an age-appropriate mortal.”

For the longest time, I never understood the phenomenon of desiring to rub up against someone half your age. When I was a young twentysomething I thought older men were gross and if one of them ever hit on me I would have found it menacing, not sexy. Even thirty-five seemed like a lot of mileage when I was twenty. I wasn’t turned on by chest hair peeking out of a shirt, wrinkles around the eyes, or a guy who has to keep getting up to pee in the middle of the night due to an enlarged prostate. As a teenager imagining some of my adult male celebrity crushes—well, I could have never gone through with the fantasy if it became real. (Sorry, David Bowie and David Letterman.) But as
I
hit my late thirties, I noticed I was attracted to men my age and even (gasp) some who were in their forties—formerly known as “gross older men.” (Probably because I got older and chest hair started peeking out of my shirt too. Not really—but I have spotted a few gray pubic hairs this year. And yes, I’m sure they’re mine. They’re rooted. We’ll discuss that later.)

As women age there is pressure to stay youthful by altering our faces. Instead of looking younger, with the kind of plastic surgery that the average noncelebrity can afford most women just end up looking Asian. There’s nothing wrong with looking Asian, but if you were born a white lady from Palm Beach, Florida, I’m sure it can get a little disconcerting for everyone at the family reunion. Society doesn’t ask men to modify their faces (though pioneers like David Hasselhoff and Kenny Rogers have insisted on doing so); instead, they just have to trade in their age-appropriate arm candy for less leathery, perhaps more of a soft pleather, twentysomething arm candy.

The problem with being a forty-year-old woman and dating a twenty-five-year-old guy is that you’re
dating a twenty-five-year-old
. Remember how shitty it was to date twenty-five-year-olds when you were twenty-five? They’d bring their friends along on a date—or never even ask you out on one in the first place, thinking you’d be overjoyed to sit and watch them play video games or noodle around on their out-of-tune guitars and stupid bongos. Sure, they were all yours once it was time to get to the fucking portion of the evening and that was great too except that sometimes they were
just fucking
and you were
loving—
because, you know, you were a twenty-five-year-old girl full of hormones and promise and hormones that felt like promise.

But take a been-there-done-that nearly forty-year-old divorcée who really just wants to get laid and pair her up with a twenty-five-year-old who also just wants to bone and can’t relate to any of the girls his age who want something meaningful, and you’ve found a situation where two people can really be useful to each other. The cougar doesn’t even have to capture her prey. The cougar will, however, apply anticellulite cream to her ass cheeks, tell her Pilates teacher to go really hard on her today, get a body wrap to decrease water weight, and skip lunch
and
dinner for a few days. She doesn’t realize it but none of this is necessary because the cougar possesses what the cub wants, a maturity he can trust and a wisdom about things like what the world was like the day that Kurt Cobain was found dead.

The cougar won’t fall in love with him right away or cry when he wants to go back to his studio apartment instead of sleeping over at her fancy condo and she will certainly be too busy to want to see him again the next day. And lastly, the cougar provides a house that’s as comfortable to hang out in as his mom’s home, populated with couches that aren’t futons and lamps that . . . well, just lamps.

Three days after my separation, at age thirty-seven, Ryder the twenty-three-year-old bassist turned me into a cougar for one night.

•  •  •

When I first met Ryder, the twenty-three-year-old bassist with the gauge earring in each lobe (the rubbery ones that stretch out the pierced hole in the earlobe and look not like jewelry but like something industrial that could be popped onto a faucet to stop the leak), it was the summer of 2010 at a vodka bar in West Hollywood, California. I have an aversion to vodka. I think it tastes like earwax. At that time in my life I didn’t like gallivanting about, especially not for vodka, because that meant that
I
would have to go along with
me
and I didn’t like myself very much. I was forty-five pounds over my normal weight. My goal was to just stay inside until the weight decided it was so uninterested living in my body that it would just pack up and liberate itself on its own. My then husband Matt and I were having conversations about our mutual doubts about staying in our nondenominationally blessed and legally contracted union. I was sort of hoping my husband would do the same thing as my newfound poundage. We’d been married for one year and unbeknownst to me in that summer of 2010 this Town Hall–approved platonic friendship had only ten more months left. The reason that I dragged my Smirnoff-loathing ass out was to perform in a comedy show, for free, in the small cabaret toward the back of the otherwise thriving Bar Lubitsch. It’s not as pitiful as it sounds. Or maybe it is if you’re the two-car-garage, two-point-five-kids-and-one-husband type who likes to stay in and play board games rather than go tell jokes to strangers who may or may not have known that a stand-up comedy show was going to spring up during their date as they canoodled in a pleather booth.

If you had told me that while I was onstage at this legal speakeasy doing nothing resembling speaking easily, someone I would eventually find attractive was watching me and that this was his first impression of me and I’d be single again in a year and have a chance to make sweet, hot, and awkward love to
and
with
him—I would have probably just hid under my car in the parking lot instead. And yet, Ryder, the twenty-three-year-old bassist, sat in a booth in his painted-on pants with zero gut spillover, observing my set with what I can only imagine was childlike glee.

It’s all my friend Sharon’s fault. Unlike married me, who only hung out with my husband and our vast array of cheese boards, Sharon was social. She was also in the show and brought a bunch of her musician friends. They came out to support her since she had sat through so many of their acoustic café “concerts.” Ryder was a friend of Sharon’s friends. All of them were in the music industry and all of them were from Silver Lake. Silver Lake is the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, of Los Angeles. If you still don’t understand what that means, think of it this way—if Los Angeles were a high school, Silver Lake would be the overgrown outskirts of the football field where the burnout musician boys and the girls who write poetry for them live and everyone wears skinny jeans—even on their arms.

After the show Sharon asked me to stay and have a drink with the Silver Lake-ians. I said no, I had to get home and be married and stuff. She motioned to a table of people that looked like they should be in a black-and-white photo from the seventies with Debbie Harry, Lou Reed, or Joey Ramone in their midst. I saw the boy who I would come to know as Ryder smoking a cigarette in his white T-shirt. His arms—where biceps should be—were unable to fully fill his sleeves. He was dainty and sexy and mellow and young. I changed my mind. I didn’t have to go home right away. I could have
one
drink, right? Hello! I was married but not dead! Nothing in that marriage license framed on my wall said anything about not bumming a cigarette (even though I had quit years before) off of an aspiring musician.

“Sharon! Introduce me to your friends!” I said, suddenly the life of the party that I’d just decided to throw for myself on the patio of a vodka bar.

I met Producer Armen, Some Chick Named Something-Or-Other Who Was Just Staring At Her Phone, Guitarist, and then . . . Bassist Ryder.

Ryderhadsunglassesonatnight. Ugh, don’t make me say that again. He had sunglasses on. Indoors. At night. But they weren’t expensive sunnies. Just cheap plastic black ones that maybe he was forced to purchase in an emergency blinding sunset from a gas station on a road trip to one of his out-of-town gigs.

When I took a seat next to Ryder, he said, “Damn, girl. You’re funny.” I couldn’t believe he thought my unfocused ranting was funny, but then again he was wearing plastic sunglasses at night. What did he know about anything? But who cares? He was fetching. He looked like a guy I would have wanted to date when I was twenty but didn’t. I was naive and inexperienced when I was twenty and didn’t realize that guys probably wanted to get it on with me and the reason they weren’t asking me out was because they were discouraged and dismayed at the words “RIOT GRRRL” I had written on my forehead in black Magic Marker. And I don’t even know if half of my classmates knew that I wasn’t a dude myself because I often wore long underwear underneath cargo shorts with combat boots. It was the 1990s and the fashion statement I was making I guess was, “Look, any second I might have to be shipped to a frozen tundra to take a feminist studies class about the sexual politics of the meat industry. I have to be dressed and ready.”