10 Reasons Cohabitating Sucks

The thing is, when you move in with your boyfriend, you’re not just lovers: you’re roommates. Which means everything that ever bugged you about living with someone—the dishes, the electric bill, the volume of the TV in the living room when you’re trying to sleep—nips at the heels of your relationship.

Here are ten (real) reasons cohabitating sucks…

[from my pseudonymous column at The Gloss]

Do Women Mature Faster Than Men?

The guys shook their heads. Most of them were still single, still incredibly unaware of their not-yet slowed metabolism. Living with a woman was akin to surrendering to whatever that feeling was that that made them want to curl up for a nap at the lake, or quit cigarettes, or lose interest in their flip cup tournaments. The feeling that had taken over the women. At this moment, it was unnecessary. It was unimaginable.

[from my pseudonymous column at The Gloss]

Meeting the (Grand)parents

I should have introduced him to my grandparents.

Of course! Adorable relics of Jewish New York, my Grandma and Papa are favorites among my friends. They love afternoon cocktails, gossip, and their grandchildren. They gamble with loose change in weekly canasta games. They sit by the pool with their senior friends who skipped Florida this summer. And, like most grandparents, they adore bragging about their family to anyone who will listen.

[from my pseudonymous column at The Gloss]

The Breakup Registry

My friend recently broke up with her boyfriend of four years. She wasn’t emotionally devastated. She slept at night. But she was sad. The relationship had blossomed over doctoral dissertations in California and began to lose momentum after a long, arduous fall into modern domesticity in New York.

It happens to the best of us. It happens even under the loveliest of good intentions…

[from my pseudonymous column at The Gloss]

The 15 Worst Ways to Dump Or Be Dumped

Breaking up is hard to do, so don’t make it worse for both parties involved. In case you’re confused, consult my handy list of the 15 ways to not to break up with your girlfriend.

1. Don’t break up with her using “your art.” Don’t write a song for your girlfriend and tell her you’ve moved on in the chorus. What if that song gets stuck in her head? Put your guitar away and break up with her the old fashioned way: unaccompanied.

2. Don’t break up with her via a text message. This is only appropriate if you’re in junior high—the technologically au courant way of note-passing—and even then, no twelve year old should be given an iPhone. They should be forced to run around a playground until they all give each other the cooties and it cancels out of societal taboo, like HPV or feminism.

[from my pseudonymous column at The Gloss]

Romance Isn’t Dead

Romance isn’t dead.

Romance is on a respirator, hooked up to a few IVs and pissing into a tube. A little machine next to Romance beeps steadily, and a larger one hums.

Someone leans over Romance and talks into its face. “Do you know where you are?”

[from my pseudonymous column at The Gloss]

Downstairs

I have to go to the cafe—it’s in my own office building and sometimes it’s pouring and I want a cup of coffee and, I don’t know, nothing else because quite frankly I hate their pre-made sandwich menu and salad options and pizza on flatbread at at a fast food cafe in New York is just stupid. I usually get a small soup and a slice of warm wheat bread and I sit with my work badge and my BlackBerry and sip the hot tomato bisque slowly not because I’m afraid of burning my tongue but because I’m afraid I’ll spill the creamy red soup on my dress and have to be that asshole with stuff on their clothes for the afternoon meeting I’m not prepared for. And then not only will I be the person who is noticeably—that’s the thing—not prepared, I’ll be unprepared and dirty. Ugh. I should have just gone out last night instead of staying home and watching tv. Then, at least, I’d be hung over and all of this could be blamed on the liquor and not my own general dissatisfaction for my job and what it feels like to be a bored 26 year old in an industry that maybe, just maybe, I really don’t belong in. But then my BlackBerry buzzes and I take the rest of the soup to go, upstairs, back in the cold unrelenting air conditioning and the next four years of my life.

Make-ing Up Is Hard to Do

Later, my boyfriend came stumbling down my hall drunk and looking for me. I could hear shouting. When I opened my door, he leaned against the post and smiled.

His face was covered in makeup. His cheeks were coated in pink rouge and his lids were smeared with silver charcoal paste. Mascara was smudged below his eyes. His mouth had a layer of cherry lipstick.

My jaw dropped. “Are you wearing my roommate’s glitter?”

“You bet your pale ass I am.”

[from my pseudonymous column at The Gloss]