What Was I Thinking?: 58 Bad Boyfriend Stories

By Macmillan Publishers

The stories you are about to read are true. Often hilarious and always relatable, they all describe the moment when good sense and simple self-respect triumph over the human need to be loved—or, at least, the need to be with a particular man. The relationship may not last beyond lunch, or it may linger for weeks, months, or even years. But inside, you know: it's over.

What Was I Thinking?58 Bad Boyfriend Stories includes contributions from:
Francesca Lia Block
Bonnie Bruckheimer
Cindy Chupack
Kate Coe
Melinda Culea
Carrie Fisher
Wendy Hammers
Nicole Hollander
Maira Kalman
Lisa Napoli
Lynn Snowden Picket
Mimi Pond
Rachel Resnick
Penny Stallings
Laurie Winer
Amy Wruble

Whether the story is funny, sad, poignant, sweet, or just plain psychotic—we bet you can't read just one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Feb 3, 2009
• ISBN: 9781429958820

Book preview

Introduction

It all started out innocently enough: a group of women at an office trying to console a coworker the day after her boyfriend of three years gave her, for her birthday, a gift certificate for a massage.

Now, many might consider that a fine gift. But after all they’d been through, this woman wanted, and expected, and needed, something much more personal from him. Like an engagement ring.

We, her colleagues and friends, dutifully dragged out the well-used bag of excuses to explain away the boyfriend’s insensitivity, or at least his poor taste in gifts. But she refused them all. She was done. As far as she was concerned, the relationship was over.

And then an interesting thing happened. We shifted from rescue to recovery. We started sharing stories about our own previous relationships, describing that moment when we knew it was over. Not only did everyone have such a moment, but each of us remembered hers quite vividly—sometimes better than the relationship itself.

And so a book was born.

What Was I Thinking? is a collection of personal essays written by women describing that moment in a relationship when, no matter how much you think it should work or want it to work or need it to work, it becomes clear to you that it’s not going to work.

It can be anything—a word used incorrectly, an insensitive comment, a glimpse of bad personal hygiene or moral weakness or breathtaking selfishness, or just an ugly sweater. In any case, the genie of disillusionment bursts out of the bottle, and there’s no putting it back in.

Which is to say, this is not necessarily the moment of the actual breakup. Rather, these stories describe the instant when logic, common sense, and simple self-respect triumph over the human need to be loved—or, at least, the need to be in a relationship. The relationship may not last beyond lunch, or it may linger for weeks or even longer. But inside, you know: He’s going to be an ex.

Using the Internet as our global watercooler, we put the word out through Craigslist, Facebook, and MySpace. We contacted writing programs and talked it up at cocktail parties. We found that our community was the size of the world—and that everyone had a story.

And then another interesting thing happened. The stories that started coming in were not aren’t-guys-stupid? stories or are-men-necessary? stories that might conclude, however wistfully, with No, they’re not. Rather, they were stories about women looking back at themselves—poignantly, humorously, maybe sometimes in disbelief—to see how and why they got involved with the guy in the awful sweater in the first place.

We, as editors, as readers, and as women, want to express our extreme gratitude to, and respect for, all those whose work appears herein. Women who poured themselves a drink and then opened their diary, their heart, and even some old wounds, in order to share the stories that led to that moment when they had to ask themselves: What was I thinking?

—BARBARA DAVILMAN and LIZ DUBELMAN

Los Angeles, 2008

What Was I

Thinking?

A Bullwhip?

Carrie Fisher

Ihappen to be the possessor of a very big personality. And so when I meet someone, that’s where we hang out. It goes on for miles, the great outdoors, we romp around in my personality. And in my big sprawling personality, where this new someone is now, I love him. I love everything he does. I love being with him, I love sex with him, I’m charmed by him.

And what is love if not a state of enchantment? You meet someone and it puts a charm on the world. Everything looks better when you love someone and you know you’re going to see him later. Everything between now and that later is so much fun to do, because you’re going to get who and what you want at the end of the day, so anything’s possible when that’s up ahead.

Now, when the person that this happens with is someone like Paul Simon, then we’re not just hanging out in my big personality. He has one, too, and they overlap in a lot of places. And that’s when it’s really kind of golden, when you can find someone who speaks your bizarre, bizarre dialect of a language of the smallest country in the world that hardly anyone ever visits, but they never forget having been there. Paul and I did share that, so when we got enchanted, the enchantment lasted a long time. But the problem is that, even at its best, enchantment just can’t sustain.

When I date someone, I generally have about three months of a personality available and then I finally come to the end of it. I need to refuel, I short-circuit. And then whoever I’m with shows up, and a lot of the times I don’t like him so much. Now wait, I just got a little quieter and what’d you just say? You didn’t read this? You’ve never seen that? You don’t know who that is? You really think that about me? He bothers me—not that I’m so great, but the enchantment wears off, and then the sleeping giant wakes up and says, Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of someone dumb.

And once that starts, it’s like a case of measles, where you get just one itch one day, and then that itch spreads and spreads and spreads. And what feeds it is that he sees it happening. My face is like a Richter scale of every quake inside and outside of me, so it all shows up somehow. And if I turn the full beam on him of how much I like him and who he thinks he is, with everything that I am, if I shed that much light on him, and then that light starts diminishing, diminishing, diminishing, he notices. And I can’t stop it, and the more I try to stop it the more it looks like I’m trying to stop it, and that light gets fainter and fainter and fainter until everyone’s in a dark room.

I remember it specifically happening when I was going out with this guy Jesse. He was actually smart, and the enchantment was unbelievably great. I remember once we were making out at Disneyland—I was that into him that I was just publicly making out.

One night we were at my house and I was watching television, and Jesse was rubbing my back. And apparently I wasn’t turning the full beam on him, because it went from zero to a thousand in a nanosecond. He said, and not nicely, What does somebody have to do to get your attention? Wrap a bullwhip around your neck?

What? It was like, how did we get here? I don’t remember what I said in response, probably some smart-ass remark, and he put on his cowboy boots and split, drove off in his car. And I knew, I knew down to every cell of my protean body, that I would never be able to be with this guy in my life. No matter what pretzel shape I tried to bend myself into, no matter how much I tried to rationalize away what he just did, I wouldn’t be able to do it. He’d just made it completely impossible for me to know him. Because some absurdities aren’t funny, and you want to back away from those like they’re radioactive. And I was sorry to see this cat go, because he had a nice

Reviews for What Was I Thinking?

[Jessica · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Wow. Most of the men written about in this book had lucky escapes. The writers mostly come across as variously psycho, selfish, whiny, materialistic, snobby, shallow, judgemental, professional victims, vaguely racist or just unpleasant. One actually admits to breaking into an ex's house, the vast majority focus on money, some want to be accepted but refuse to do the same to a partner. All hugely emphasise how sexy and irresistible they are. It's as if this was written by a focus group of misogynists to undermine women. I'm embarrassed for the writers.

[winstondog-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a great pallett cleanser. It made me smile and laugh. Just what the doctor ordered.