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Rescuing my old college corkboard from the depths of my storage space, I created an FBI-style link chart of my ex-boyfriends.
TARA’S EX-BOYFRIENDS Daniel (childhood love) Tommy (ninth-grade boyfriend) Jacques (Student Senate boy) Cody (high school sweetheart) Jeff (frosh week fling) Zion (campus bookstore cutie) Brandon (world traveler—the one who got away) Linus (Brandon rebound) Mark (book club intellectual) Seth (ex-fiancé)
“Should I be scared?” Trevor asks, perusing my list. “Not unless you’re my ex.”
Grandma Flo inspired me to embark on a second-chance romance quest.”
“You want to date your exes because you don’t want to resort to Tinder?
Grandma Flo says men only get better with age. Sure, some of these guys were boneheads years ago, but what if they’ve turned into amazing people?”
Ridiculous as it may be, thinking about my exes is nostalgic.
I’ve always been a bit of an anomaly, finding purpose not through what I do but through my relationships with friends and family.
But when everyone is absorbed with their own lives, where does that leave me at the end of the day? Alone in my twin bed, listening to my roommate’s sex-capades?
just because I don’t need someone in my life doesn’t mean I don’t want one.
“Please tell me this isn’t a mold of your ex’s . . .” I wince when he tosses it back into the box as if it’s a used dildo. “God, no! It’s just a candle.
“I wore this the first night I had sex with ex number seven, Brandon.” “Where’s the rest of it?” “Okay, Dad
Trevor shakes his head, overwhelmed when I brandish my shoe box full of old Valentine’s Day cards and love letters. In fact, he even starts ordering the books on my shelf, probably to escape my chaos.
And before you go on to slander it, I feel the obligation to tell you it’s my favorite holiday of all time. I take it very seriously.”
“But what if I get back together with one of them? I can’t just toss out tokens of our past. How cute would it be if I still had the menu from the very first restaurant we went to?”
“Didn’t you say you’re always the dumpee? If all these guys broke up with you, why would you want to get back with them?”
“Don’t you think he kinda looks like that shark from Finding Nemo? With the teeth?”
I clutch my stomach in a burst of evil laughter. Where has Trevor Metcalfe been all my life when I needed someone to trash-talk my exes?
“You keyed his car?” “I’m not proud of it. But I was fifteen years old,” I point out. “I went full Carrie Underwood.
I’m tempted to ask for the identity of the woman who wields the power to make Trevor Metcalfe smile like a little boy, but I refrain.
People love to say exes are exes for a reason, so they don’t have to dwell on the past. But personally, I’ve always thought second-chance love stories were the most satisfying of them all.
Screw the exes. Date the roommate!!
ROOM-ANCE
I wheeze at the thought of dating Trevor I-don’t-subscribe-to-love Metcalfe, of all people.
His Hollister-model looks, pot addiction, bare-minimum personality, and staunch hatred for anything mainstream may have charmed my eighteen-year-old self, but at thirty, I just feel a bizarre maternal urge to give him my coat and some life advice.
I’m really not cut out for the nine-to-five. Thinking of starting a nonprofit. Or getting into the beekeeping business.” No health insurance is my only takeaway from that statement.
He’s basically a human boomerang, bringing every topic back to himself sooner or later, which I blamed for the demise of our relationship.
“You were great. We had a lot of fun together. But you were . . . a little . . .” “A little what?”
“Clingy. A bit of a stage-five clinger.” “Stage-five clinger?”
“You know what they say. The hotter the girl, the crazier she is.”
I want to poke a pin in his inflated head with a hundred-point list of all the reasons he’s in the wrong here,
Lucky or unlucky for me (not quite sure which), the one ex I don’t have to social-media-stalk is right here in the room.
In the rare event that I have to interact with him, he regards me like a chore, like that one drawer in your house piled with junk that you’d rather not deal with.
That’s the thing about workplace romances. The initial dating makes for juicy gossip. But the breakups, no matter how civil, are gold mines of scandal.
He acted smug, like he was the “bigger person” for handling our breakup so seamlessly, with zero emotion, of course.
After all, overt feelings are for unhinged women.
Watching Seth fall into another relationship so quickly, as if the years we spent together were simply an unfortunate blip, was a whole new level of gut-wrenching.
“I wanted to know, for research purposes, why exactly you broke up with me. You never really gave me a proper explanation, other than telling me you couldn’t handle me. And I thought it might be nice to know what I could do better going forward.”
Trevor brought me straight here after discovering my lifeless body star-fishing on the living room floor.
“You need to eat. I need you alive to cover half the rent. Come on, I’ll bring you wherever you want to go,” he’d promised.
My stomach turns when I think about how I skipped around campus, fancy-free like the human version of a heart-eyes emoji, ignoring the signals entirely.
Had I known he considered me to be a total nutjob, I never would have wasted my time on him.
The warmth of his thigh grazing mine sends a zing down my spine. I’m now hyperaware we look like one of those cute couples who sit on the same side of the table at restaurants because they can’t keep their hands off each other.
“My parents had their first date in a McDonald’s,” I tell him. When he squints at me in suspicion, I make sure to add, “Don’t worry. I’m not trying to date you.” It feels necessary to point that out.
Every good playboy hero carries a secret torch for one woman his entire life but refuses to do anything about it until the eleventh hour (probably when she’s halfway down the aisle at her wedding to another man).
“In fact, he said, and I quote, ‘The hotter the girl, the crazier she is.’ He even tweeted about it. Hashtagged #CrazyExGirlfriend.”
“You can rest easy knowing he only got three likes, one of which was him liking his own tweet.”
“Do you think I’m crazy?” “I wouldn’t use the term ‘crazy.’ But . . .” “But what?” I snap. Do I care whether Trevor thinks I’m hot and/or crazy? Certainly not.
Instead of taking responsibility for your own behavior, it’s easier to screw us, write us off as loons, and forget about us.”
“Please don’t put me and romance in the same sentence.”
