A week ago, when I volunteered with Suzie, she was depressed. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, and talked all about it. Well, not exactly all about it – she never actually explained what it was that she thought she wasn’t getting from the relationship. But she did say – several times – that once she had told him she was all through, that’s when he started giving it to her (whatever it was). She also talked a lot about how she had made a lot of changes in herself the last two years in order to please him, and now that she was reverting to her “true self” he told her “Now there’s the woman I fell in love with!” I have no idea what really happened in all of this, because I heard only Suzie’s story; and I think that Suzie, like Wife, can be kind of oblivious to the people around her. But it sounds like a classic breakup to a young “starter relationship”: Suzie is 22, her (ex-)boyfriend must be a similar age, … who knows? Suzie was certainly full of a lot of justifications for what she had done, and she told me about them as we walked all the way home.
It so happened that Son 2 was home for a week from school, so he was waiting at the apartment when I got there. Suzie said “Hi” and then left, while he and I went out for dessert. I explained that Suzie had wanted somebody to talk to about her boyfriend problems, and Son 2 suggested that this may be another part of the Curse of the Tanatus. So I guess he has girls at school bend his ear about the same kind of thing.
The one thing that makes Suzie’s situation just a little more interesting is that she was living with her boyfriend, and that she can’t find anywhere else to move that she can afford. So she might continue to live with him for a while. To her I said, “Awkward.” Inside I just smiled and shook my head.
Last night she started off the evening even more distracted and anxious. I asked if she was still in her awkward living situation and she said yes. But in the meantime the plot had thickened.
You see, Suzie had also figured out that she had “feelings” for one of her female friends, a classmate I’ll call Carrie. Apparently some time during the last week she told Carrie about this, in the course of a long, complicated conversation in which she also said that she might just leave town and move back home. Apparently Carrie told her something like, “Well I might have feelings for you too, but right now I’m in a complicated relationship-like situation of my own so I don’t really know how I feel. Also I have noticed you acting around me in ways that I find very alluring so I wish you’d tone it down because I already feel so conflicted. And how dare you threaten to leave town and abandon me – don’t I mean more to you than that?” Then Carrie started crying. Apparently it was actually more complicated than that and took several days of face-to-face conversation, texting, and pointedly ignoring each other in class. So by the time that I saw her at our volunteer work, Suzie was tied up in knots. She didn’t know what to think or feel, she had no idea what Carrie “really wanted” … and so she couldn’t concentrate on what she was doing, couldn’t eat, couldn’t do much of anything but fret.
I made a few false starts at trying to say something helpful while we were working together, but mostly my remarks felt flat and platitudinous. Not very helpful. Afterwards we went back to my apartment (Son 2 had since returned to school) and talked about it some more. Suzie reminded me that in an earlier conversation I had remarked that women’s tears – when deployed in an argument with a man – constitute a “nuclear option”. She agreed and said she was starting to understand how guys must feel.
And then somewhere along the line, as she continued to tell me more and more of what had happened, the whole picture became much clearer to me, and I was able to start giving her very practical advice. In summary what I told her went like this:
You tell me Carrie is being confusing, and that she’s giving you mixed messages. OK, that’s no surprise. Girls are confusing, and when you are trying to get them into bed they give you mixed messages. From everything else you are telling me, she is behaving as if she’s profoundly attracted to you. And she says ‘Tone it down’ because what you are doing is attracting her? Who in his right mind – sorry, her right mind – would ever ‘tone down’ a tactic after being told that it’s working? For heaven’s sake, the point now is to ramp it up as far as you can. Whatever you are doing is working, so keep at it. You might also consider just not letting her get away with making this complicated. When she starts spinning long webs of confusion around the subject, just take her very gently by the waist, pull your face over to hers, and start kissing her. It’ll make her stop talking, at least for a miinute … and if everything else you have said is true about how she’s acting around you, it will be just the signal she’s waiting for.
My gentle readers, all of whom are a good bit more mature and experienced than Suzie, will recognize in a heartbeat that the advice I gave her is painfully stereotyped and politically incorrect to a shocking degree. I get that. But the story Suzie was telling me made me pretty sure that in this case it was probably also right. And in any event it cheered her up a good bit. She started laughing and volunteering more tidbits about the relationship, all of which confirmed my diagnosis that the main problem was Carrie was acting like a “nice girl” from the 1950’s … wanting sex but not daring to admit it. (I asked if Carrie might be a bit weirded out because they’re both girls, but Suzie said nonchalantly, “No, she’s gay.” So it’s not that.) Maybe there’s more to the story, but I can’t help thinking that what the story really needs is less detail and not more … also that the only way to get out of this rat’s nest of complication is with direct action rather than sensitive talk. So I found myself in the unexpected role of giving Suzie advice about how to date girls.
I don’t know if any of my advice will prove to be any good. But I’m looking forward to next weekend when I hear how it went.
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