This is a story about love. It is also a story about sub-zero temperatures, eclectic indie rock, almost having sex, playing Risk at two in the morning, former Boston Red Sox closer Keith Foulke, licking your keys and having your tongue stick, pick-up basketball games, getting elbowed in the throat, a one-night stand who steals your Chris Chellios jersey and ex-girlfriends who don't return your phone calls. But, primarily, it is about love.
The Pitch
Like all of my best ideas, this one was motivated by revenge. More specifically, revenge against the girl who broke up with me a few weeks ago, after five months of a complicated, on-and-off romance that benefited neither of us and yet somehow managed to inadvertently define my existence from October through mid-January. It was an unhealthy, unproductive relationship and we both knew it, yet that still didn't stop me from considering the logistics of chopping off my hand and mailing it to her after things went south.
Instead of self-mutilation, I decided on the next most self-destructive course of action: a first-person account of my own adventures in the world of modern dating. I would spend two weeks exhausting every channel in an attempt to find true love by Valentine's Day. In doing this, I hoped to gain some interesting insight into the intricacies of modern relationships. Also, I wanted to get laid.
Match.com Is a Cold, Dead Place
The world of online dating was an ideal spot to begin my journey. It seemed to provide an ideal mix of the desperate and of the lonely, which I thought would make my job easier. Thus, I made the decision to sign up for Match.com
The first thing you should know about Match.com is that it is a lot of work. The sign-up process took me nearly three hours to complete. During this time, you answer a barrage of multiple-choice questions about yourself and what you would expect out of a potential mate. I suppose somebody with a better sense of self could breeze through everything in about 30 minutes, but for me, the process was paralyzing. I have no idea what my best feature is, and I'm not sure whether my hair should be classified as dark brown or chestnut. I also have no idea how many children I want or what my second favorite color is.
By the time I reached the end of the battery of tests, I was strung out to the point where I refused to answer questions, and when I did answer them, I chose snarkiness over sincerity. When asked to list my favorite nightspots, I responded, "Authentic blue-collar Wisconsin bars, such as Crave and the Angelic," and when asked to describe my goals for life, I said, "To become dictator of a medium-sized country and then retire and achieve total domination over time, space and matter."
Signing up for Match.com is a lot like buying a car. You get the basic model, but along the way, you can sign up for increasingly bizarre accessories. For example, for only an extra $5 per month, you get an automatic e-mail sent to you every time somebody reads your profile. Also, Dr. Phil has his own special program called the "MindFindBind" program, a name that somehow is even more confusing when you actually find out what the program entails.
The stereotype that people who use online dating services are sad, awkward and desperate creatures is incorrect. In truth, online dating is meant for control freaks who can't handle the randomness and uncertainty of relationships in the real world. I've always felt that the best part of being in a relationship is gradually uncovering all the little quirks, but Match.com isn't geared for people who like unexpected quirks: Match.com users want control and direction in a relationship. They want love, but on their terms. The ideal Match.com customer is somebody who needs to control all aspects of a relationship, including bedtimes and dietary habits. It seems designed to give hope to people who have isolated themselves on a romantic island because they insist their partner must be a vegetarian in a string quartet who can carry on a conversation in Tagalog. I might be in trouble, but I'm proud to say I haven't reached that point in my life yet.
As it turns out, I am unable to continue my process of judging the Match.com clientele, due to management's decision to terminate my account, citing that my presence on the dating website was "not in the best interest of our member community." On the bright side, they did tell me that if I wanted a more detailed explanation, I would have to file a subpoena.
My first reaction to this is to think that somehow the battery of tests I went through revealed that I had the same psychological profile as a noted serial killer. Then, I became convinced Match.com was some variation of the CRS from "The Game" and that they were trying to convince me I wasn't a member so that when I fell in love, it would be surprising and organic.
It turns out I was wrong on both counts. Match.com just felt like we needed to see other people.
Real Loneliness Versus Fake Loneliness
Upset over the fact that my online dating service had essentially broken up with me, I decided it was time to go out and look for love in the real world. My friend Mike tells me that Joshua Radin is performing in Madison, and this strikes me as a perfect opportunity to go and try to win the heart of a haunted, fiercely independent woman who appreciates the subtleties of alternative-folk music.
What Mike neglects to tell me is that this concert is being held in the same bar where my ex and I first met. In my life, I have made it a practice to avoid attending intimate concerts where the performer sings songs about loss and despair in the very same room where my newly minted ex-girlfriend and I had our first kiss, but it seems like tonight I have very little choice.
Radin's songs are capturing my mood perfectly, but they don't seem to be speaking for the room. In fact, I would say everybody in this room seems pretty happy. There are no single women with shadowy pasts for me to approach. Instead, the crowd is largely made up of couples who are here to revel in the fake loneliness. Feeling sad enables these people to feel deep and complicated, even though they have somebody by their side. It's not Radin's fault his music is being co-opted by happy couples, but for somebody like me, who is feeling real loneliness, it is all just too alienating. I grab my coat and head out the door, reminding myself that people who are already sad don't need sad songs to remind them of that fact.
It is at this point that I make a curious decision. After a 10-minute walk back to my apartment in -30 degree temperatures, I decide that the wise thing to do would be to lick the metal key fob I've been holding for the entire walk. Not surprisingly, my tongue sticks. Unfortunately, I undertook this action before unlocking the door to my building and now I must wait with my keys attached to my face for one of my neighbors to come home. And suddenly, I remember why people get into relationships in the first place: It's to prevent things like this from happening. Relationships keep us sane.
The Metaphor for a Game Without Metaphor
On the sixth day, I do not go out looking for love. Instead, I play basketball with my friends. I realize there have been many examinations of the relationship between love and basketball, most notably the 2000 film "Love and Basketball." It should be noted that other pieces of modern entertainment have dealt with this relationship in subtler, more creative forms, including the scene in Cameron Crowe's "Singles" where Seattle Sonics forward Xavier McDaniel pops into Campbell Scott's head as he is tagging Kyra Sedgwick and starts giving sex tips.
The consensus seems to be that the controlled chaos of a well-played basketball game is analogous to the equally chaotic process of falling in love. I don't see this. Really, the only tangible connection I can see between sex and basketball is that you have a much better chance of doing either if you're 6-foot-4.
Four seconds into the game, I take an elbow to the throat and find myself gasping for breath and unable to speak for the next day and a half. The effect of the elbow to the throat is two-fold. First, it probably helps our team since it renders me unable to complain to the referees, thus reducing the risk of picking up a meaningless technical foul just to inject some unneeded tension into an otherwise friendly game.
More importantly, the whole elbow-to-the-trachea incident brings me to a moderately sobering realization — one which really crystallizes the fourth time I take myself out of the game to go cough up blood: I have become a horrible basketball player.
This might not seem like a particularly noteworthy revelation, except for the fact that as recently as two years ago, I spent about 75 percent of my waking life playing basketball, watching basketball or thinking basketball. For an extended period of time (like, say, nine years), the game of basketball was one of the three most important things in my life. And now, I am an absolute mess: I am not strong enough to fight bigger players for rebounds, my jump shot is porous and I'm not quick enough to bounce off of screens.
And in this, I've suddenly found out the connection between relationships and basketball. No matter how good you think you are at either one, no matter how much you devote yourself to a relationship or a game, there is always going to be a faster gun. It can be a guy who's got a better 3-point shot than you, or it can be a guy who is more willing to talk to your girl about country music. It doesn't even need to be another person — sometimes, time is what gets you. And, if you're not careful, one day you may wake up and find yourself unable to make a left-handed layup or saying anything of interest to the person you thought you once loved.
Risk, or How Keith Foulke Got His Groove Back
On the surface, my bringing a girl back to my apartment to play Risk while she wore only a Chris Chellios jersey may seem totally unrelated to Keith Foulke's future as a legitimate fantasy baseball weapon. But I promise you, they have everything to do with one another.
Allow me to explain — while you may never think anybody who gets his tongue stuck to his keys could ever be cool, you will simply have to take me at my word that there was a time when I was considered cool. Such was my coolness, in fact, that my friends were inspired enough to nickname me "Keith Foulke" after the journeyman relief pitcher who, for two years, happened to be the second-best closer in baseball. When I got the nickname, Foulke was an integral part of the Red Sox team that won the 2004 World Series.
I guess the idea behind the nickname was that, like Foulke (circa 2002-04), I knew how to close. Women, school, sports — it didn't matter. I was a finisher. Needless to say, this gave me a personal identity I had been lacking for some time. I was Keith Foulke.
But then something strange happened. Keith Foulke quite literally lost his fastball. After 2004, Foulke could rarely get his ball to clock in over 84 miles per hour. His arm was dead. While the real Keith Foulke was losing his literal fastball, the fake Keith Foulke (me) was losing his metaphorical fastball. I couldn't close anything. At first, it looked like a slump, but I had to question whether I was as washed up as my spiritual mentor.
But then it happened. After the washout at the Radin concert, I went out with my friends a few days later to see whether the traditional bar scene could offer true love. Almost immediately, I was taken in by a girl who I would later find out had the same name as a color. She was drinking a rum and Coke and quoting the same Queen lyrics over and over ("Take care of those you call your own, and keep good company"). It took me nine seconds to fall for her.
I'm not going to go into all the details of what happened over the next two hours, but we end up going to my apartment to play Risk. And then things progress, and she complains she can't play in the tea-cozy she calls a dress, and I end up lending her a Chris Chelios jersey, which does little to change her luck, and she ends up finally giving up Kamchatka at 3:56 Central Standard Time. She then gives me her number, puts on a pair of my sweats and leaves.
So, with this in mind, I would like to tell all fantasy baseball owners out there to look for Keith Foulke as a solid late-round sleeper. I am predicting between 25 to 30 saves and an ERA around 3.35. Somebody told me he's getting his fastball back.
Why We Lionize Our Exes
We're nearing the end of the journey, but there's something left for me to do: I need to contact my ex-girlfriends. This is an important part of this article — probably the most important part — but I have no stomach for it. I can't do it.
I've tried to hold off talking about my ex-girlfriends as much as possible, partially out of respect for their privacy, but also because I didn't want this to turn into one of those stories where the sad-sack writer contacts all the great loves from his past. I realize that stories of visits from girlfriends past are now a legitimate literary sub-genre, but nobody is going to do it better than Nick Hornby or Chuck Klosterman, so what's the point?
When I line up my three serious ex-girlfriends in mind, the similarities are amazing: All were ambitious, petite brunettes who worked too hard, shopped at J. Crew and loved Ben Harper. If forced to list my all-time top 10 days, five of them would probably involve these women. For a brief period of time, they all enjoyed spending time with me, and then eventually, the charm of watching somebody snowboard through his life wore off. They didn't understand how I could allow myself to be defined by my relationships with them, and they couldn't see themselves with somebody who lived his life remembering past glories or imagining future ones. After we broke up, none of them could understand how I managed to idealize relationships that didn't work.
And now we've come to the central point about ex-girlfriends — and women in general: As guys, we hold on to the memories because they allow us to seem better than we actually are. We compartmentalize and hold on to our memories and sentiments about the people we used to love not because we can't move on, but because holding on allows us to remember the times we were at our best. We hold on to the memories not because we can't let them go, but because they are reminders about our own capacity for greatness.
Last Words
Obviously, I don't have all the answers. I guess you could even say my little expedition was a failure, since all I did was find a drunk girl who was willing to play board games with me. But I think I now understand the secret behind modern love: There is no secret. What you have to do is keep putting yourself out there, over and over again, and hope to find a taker for your lonely heart. It's a process full of pain and humiliation, but everything in life worth getting requires some kind of effort. There are no quick fixes, and anybody who says he has one is a liar. Better instead, I think, to lay claim to your life and meet the world with clear eyes and an open heart.
Ray Gustini is a sophomore majoring in English and journalism. Are you the mystery girl who ran off with Ray's Chellios jersey, or do you aspire to be that girl? E-mail him at [email protected].
