Category Archives: Joe

1995, the first love, blonde and brawny

Runaway Girlfriend

You’ve seen that movie Runaway Bride, right? Julia Roberts plays an adorable, but damaged woman who keeps getting engaged to “the perfect guy” and then leaving him at the altar. This is all supposedly because she morphs herself into what she thinks the guy wants her to be, but in the end, she (somewhere in her psyche) realizes she’s not being true to herself, and runs away.

I sort of wonder if that plot sounds far-fetched to some people. It doesn’t to me. Because I’ve done the same thing, many times. And it went beyond how I liked my eggs.

The Joe Me

Before I met Joe, I had consciously decided to re-invent myself. I was fourteen years old, just about to start high school, and had just moved across the country with my family. To cope with the potentially crushing change, I decided that this was my chance for a clean slate. I could be beautiful, and popular, and desired. I practiced my smile in the mirror. I convinced my mom to let me wear this pair of ridiculously tiny white shorts. I experimented with make-up.

And then Joe appeared, just at the height of my confidence in my new identity. I was coy, not shy. I was mysterious, not quiet. I was classically pretty, not frumpy. He bought it. I almost died of shock.

So, really, The Joe Me was more my construct than his, but he helped perpetuate it for the ten months we were together before he went off to college.

The Shane Me

I sort of created a construct for myself on purpose with Shane, too. Before we knew each other, really, we played a role playing game together (ugh, I know) where he was this badass Indiana Jones type and I was an even badder-ass lady smuggler with red hair and an attitude problem.

The thing is, it turned out that Shane really was kind of a badass Indiana Jones type– I mean, as much as a 15-year-old can be. I guess he just assumed that I was more like my character than not, too, so he treated me that way. He sent me a card once that he said made him think of me:

I want a sensitive man… One who’ll cry when I hit him.

This was about the time in my life, too, when I decided that most emotion was unnecessary. I stopped crying over sentimental things– and, truthfully, mostly openly scoffed at them. “Nice” became the most hated label anyone could apply to me (although it was still applied often). I desperately tried to be the badass Shane thought I was.

The Luke Me

Luke and I were best friends for a long time– like months (that is a long time in high school)– before we started dating, and I was drawn to him because he was wide-open funny. You know the type: They’ll do anything for a laugh. He was perfectly willing to make a complete fool of himself just to make you smile. He memorized full scenes of funny movies and could repeat them back verbatim, with voices. Everyone absolutely loved him.

When we started dating, I knee-jerk resisted being labeled “Luke’s girlfriend.” No. I would not be nameless girlfriend. I would be funny in my own right. So I developed my own brand of humor. Sure, I’d indulge in silly costumes and general tom-foolery with him from time to time, but my style was understated and acerbic, compared to his wild shenanigans. But I was funny. And as far as I know, I managed to avoid the “Luke’s girlfriend” label fairly successfully.

The Matt Me

Oh, dear Lord. The Matt Me is probably the me I wish I could have avoided being. By then, I was this weird mix of leftovers from the other mes (a little coy, a little badass, and a little funny) plus the real me, which was a huge dollop of awkward and insecure and a whole lot of sensitive, squishy mess. When Matt swooped in, he brought with him the drama of growing up in a dysfunctional family, where you yell and shout and call names and say horrible things to each other, all in the name of love.

In order to defend myself, I yelled back. The drama swallowed me whole. I got moody and mopey and angry, with not a small amount of argumentative thrown in for good measure. I snarled at everyone for even the smallest infractions. Imagined slights became gaping wounds that had to be avenged.

So who did I end up being?

In the movie, Julia Roberts takes a break from relationships and figures out who she really is. It’s all very neat and clean. She likes the kind of eggs she likes, and she hates all the other kinds. The end.

In real life, it’s not quite that simple, I think. Because there are parts of those versions of me that will always be me. I will always default to mysterious when I want to be desirable. I will always swing toward badass if you cross me. I will always crack a joke to try to make myself memorable. And, though I hate to admit it, I will probably always snarl defensively if you hurt my feelings, even slightly or by accident.

Does that make me Not Me? No, but I think it makes all my exes part of me– and that will never really go away.

The Wives

I’ve recently learned that all four exes are married. It took a little stalking on my part, but hey, nobody’s perfect.

Joe married Skipper and they created a spawn, as you know. I am regularly subjected to Facebook posts of their baby doing things like slinging food around and picking her nose, and this is supposed to be adorable.

Luke, as you know, married his weird hipster girlfriend and also spawned. There are very few pictures on Facebook of this spawn. They’re probably all on Instagram instead.

Matt married the first girl he dated after me, which I guess I can’t fault him for. (But I sort of do.) And now they have twins. Pretty much the only time he posts about them is when they are vomiting, so you know, I don’t find them that adorable.

And I just found Shane. Yeah, in a dick-move, ex-girlfriend, full-on stalk, I found him on GooglePlus, clicked on all his contacts, and pieced together that he is married. To a PhD. A pretty one. Goddamn it.

I will admit here that I don’t particularly like any of The Wives. They are physical manifestations of everything I failed to be. They are perky and adorable and thin and smart (well, some of them are), and they are, I’m sure, better wives for my exes than I would have ever been. If I were a charitable human being, this would probably make me happy and peaceful. Since I am me, it makes me sort of snarky. Not bitter, exactly… just… vaguely itchy in the hate corner of my heart.

Joe’s Smooth Move

Honestly, Joe wouldn’t have had to be all that smooth with me. I thought he was the best thing in the world. I was completely smitten. It didn’t matter that he had a dumb sense of humor, wrote awful poetry, and once popped a zit on his leg in my presence. I didn’t care– he was perfect.

But, despite my already thinking Joe was the best thing since… well, since my last crush, he still managed to execute some smooth moves designed to make me fall even more madly in love with him.

He went slow with me when we first started dating. I think he could tell I was a little… we’ll say skittish. Basically, I probably would have screamed, scratched him, and run away if he’d made a move too fast. I was fourteen and had never so much as held a boy’s hand before.

Joe was smart, though. He worked with it. He always had a ton of cats running around at his house, so maybe he learned the technique from them. After all, cats are pretty good at the whole scream, scratch, run away pattern. He’d wait until I made a tiny move. Then he’d make a tiny move. And before I knew it we’d be snuggled up next to each other and he’d be grinning in his victory.

He did this once in the back seat of a car when we were driving home with a group from some church function. He convinced me to sit in the middle next to him instead of leaving the middle of the bench seat open. We rode along for maybe twenty minutes or so just holding hands, and then he pulled the stretch-and-yawn and left his arm on the back of the seat behind me. It was so contrived I almost laughed.

When we hit a bump, his arm came down around my shoulders. When I started nodding off, he inched me toward him until my head was on his shoulder. And just like that, I was sleeping like a kitten on this boy who made me so giddy and nervous normally that I could barely stop fidgeting when I was with him.

That? Is a good talent to have.

The List

I wouldn’t say I’m given to fits of romanticism, really. In fact, I’ve been described as a realist, or, if you want to think of it that way, even a pessimist. So I never had really firm expectations about my boyfriends.

My list of nonnegotiables for a mate has always resembled something like this:

  • Kind to animals
  • Literate
  • Heterosexual

Everything else can pretty much go either way. I’ve dated guys with long hair and short hair, shy guys and outgoing guys, nerds and jocks, college-bound and not, funny guys and serious guys. It never seemed to me that any of that stuff was really a big deal, in the long run.

Still, certain things came along by chance, and they are memories I never want to give up.

  • Joe’s great shoulder massages.
  • Shane’s beautiful, eloquent letters in his fancy handwriting.
  • Luke’s cartoon drawings of us as lions or fish or whatever creature he decided to make us that day.
  • Matt’s made-up silly songs about every part of life imaginable.

None of those are things I could have put on a List of Things My Future Mate Must Do, but they were awfully nice.

In hindsight, I can see I might have needed a slightly longer list of requirements. Maybe should have added:

  • Non-smoker
  • Good relationship with preferably non-crazy family members
  • Not too clingy or needy
  • In close enough geographic proximity to actually, you know, see once in a while
  • Confident…
  • But not overbearing or controlling
  • Totally into me (not into me as a curiosity, or into the me that he may someday be able to turn me into)

That’s probably really not too much to ask for, but I never thought to look for it. I never thought, “Hey, I deserve a guy who is totally into me,” or, “You know, I don’t think I can make this work if we’re never going to see each other.” These are valid thoughts. I just never had them.

And I can’t decide if I would have been able to come to a list like that on my own, or if I had to go through the crap first.

The Worst Thing Joe Ever Said

Let’s be honest. Sometimes we say things we regret. Sometimes other people say things they regret. And I’m just going to give the guys the benefit of the doubt here and assume that they regret these things that they said. That’s not going to stop me from writing about them, though.

“I was actually going to ask Bianca out. But then you came along.”

Oh, heartbreak of heartbreaks. Bianca was absolutely my nemesis in high school. She was tiny and cute and had long hair that she made funky braids in. She could pull a damsel in distress act like no one I’ve met before or since. And she repeatedly tried to steal Joe.

She had known Joe before me and, apparently, when I arrived, I messed up the entire youth group dynamic, and Joe was the only person who understood! She explained all of this very woefully to anyone who would listen and then she’d drag Joe off for private heart-to-hearts. I don’t know what happened in those private heart-to-hearts. I can only hope they weren’t private someotherbodypart-to-someotherbodyparts. In any case, all of the blame, in my mind, was heaped upon Bianca’s head, despite Joe’s obvious participation.

So I wasn’t a big fan of Bianca.

After we stopped dating, Joe came back a few times, and attended a few youth group functions. One in particular I remember was a “lock-in,” which was basically a coed slumber party for teenagers. I snuck off to take a nap around dawn and Joe found me and we got to talking. And he said the infamous, “I was actually going to ask Bianca out. But then you came along.”

I didn’t stab him in the eye. I probably deserve a medal or something.

Where Are They Now: Joe

I was 14 when I met Joe. It was long, long ago. I was a freshman in high school and he was (gasp) a senior. He was my first boyfriend, my first kiss, my first little taste of heartbreak (although the real heartbreaks would come later). He was blonde, beautiful, confident, lovely.

We broke up, sort of unofficially, when he went to college after he graduated– went to college in California, about as far away from my East Coast city as he could get. We didn’t talk much. I was busy with school. He was busy with school… and other things. We wrote a few letters. Not that many. And things just sort of faded away. It was gentle.

He came back that summer and we went out once or twice. He drove me around in his car, too fast, and we saw a movie. I wouldn’t let him kiss me, even though he asked.

The next summer it was the same. Except he showed up at the front door, all white teeth and blonde curls, and asked me if I wanted to “hang out.” I turned him down. I’d started dating someone else.

And then we never saw each other again.

Fast forward, years later. Through the grapevine, I heard that a friend of mine, Skipper (not her real name), had gotten married. Skipper and I worked together for a few summers, but we weren’t ever really that close. She was, frankly, a little too dippy to hang out with on a regular basis. I think my response to the wedding news was along the lines of, “meh.”

And then I saw a wedding picture.

It was Joe. Maybe 75 pounds more of Joe, but yes, it was Joe. Standing next to the bride, wearing a tuxedo, being all groomlike. I hadn’t really even known that they knew each other.

Facebook stalking ensued. (What? I’m not a saint.) Joe was a copy machine repair man, moonlighting as an improv comedian. I was not really surprised. I’m pretty sure that a fairly accurate Beavis impression can only get you so far, and as I recall, that was about all he had in his bag of comedian tricks.

A couple of months ago, I got an invitation to Skipper’s baby shower. I got this invitation in email, but upon further examination, saw that it was an email notifying me that the invitation was via Facebook. The title was, “Baby Shower!!!!!!!!!!!!” Skipper was the host of the party. Yes, she was hosting her own baby shower and sending improperly punctuated invitations out to 500 of her closest friends via Facebook. My sister texted me, “Where is this girl’s mother?”

So, my first boyfriend Joe and his dippy wife Skipper have produced offspring. The baby is due in August.

And that’s where Joe is now. I’m sure he’ll teach his daughter a Cornholio monologue as soon as she can speak.

Let’s Still Be Friends

Someone, one of the two people in a relationship, always wants to be friends when it’s over. It’s usually the person who did the dumping. Therefore, it was usually me.

I didn’t set out to be a heartbreaker. My first “breakup” was really more of a non-breakup. Joe went to college, I stopped calling and writing letters, he slept with some girl, and we never got back together. It didn’t really hurt my feelings, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t wallowing in self-pity while he was banging what’s-her-name.

I wouldn’t have minded staying friends with Joe. He wanted to stay friends with the possibility of benefits. I flatly turned him down and we never spoke to each other again.

I definitely dumped Shane, although he brought it up first, so it was kind of me being a weenie about dumping him. Honestly, the whole long-distance Internet boyfriend thing was cramping my style a little. I did really want to stay friends with him, but when you rip out someone’s heart and stomp on it (intentionally or not), they sometimes don’t want to keep emailing you regularly. This mystified me for many years.

Shane and I spoke to each other once a few years later. He told me he’d never really loved me anyway and so, in that case, our break-up really hadn’t been that big of a deal and I was forgiven. I didn’t feel much like keeping in touch after that, either. I guess if I’d been a friendly ex, I would have been happy that he’d managed to cobble back together the pieces of his broken heart, but instead I was just pissed.

I dumped Luke, too. Poor Luke. A few months after I dumped him, an acquaintance of his asked me about him, and I told him we broke up.

“Dude,” the friend said, looking almost as heartbroken as Luke had when I’d done the deed. “That must have torn him out of the frame.”

Guilt: I haz it.

Apparently, this you-dumped-me-and-now-I-hate-you thing has no statute of limitations either. At age 29, a good ten years after we broke up, Luke came back to town for a visit. He invited all his old friends out to meet him for drinks via Facebook—I mean, pretty much all his old friends, even the ones he never talked to in high school, but then friended on Facebook years later. All his old friends except for me—the girl who was his best friend forever before we dated, and who was exclusively with him for three years. Yeah, he didn’t invite me.

I almost unfriended him on Facebook for that.

The First Tongue Is The Deepest

I’m no Pollyanna, but I think we’d all like to believe that the physical part of a relationship is not the most important part. We’d all be wrong.

My first kiss with Joe was my first kiss ever. He took me out to our high school football field at night to “look at the stars.” (Yes, we’ve already established that I am stupid.) When we got down to the track, he abruptly stopped, gave me this weird look that I thought meant he was about to puke, but actually meant that he was about to kiss me.

It should have been great. I mean I wanted a swelling trio of violins and light from heaven and sparkles shooting out my toes. I wanted a kiss. Instead, I got a fat, ashtray-smelling tongue shoved not so delicately into my mouth, and amounts of slobber which I still cannot fathom today.

So I stood there and let him swirl his tongue around in my mouth for a while before I, like, faked a hug so I could turn my head, wipe my mouth on his letter jacket, and tamp down my gag reflex.

And the sweet nothing Joe whispered to me was, “You’ve never done this before, have you?”

I couldn’t very well defend myself. I was fourteen; he was seventeen. It was a catch-22. If I claimed innocence, I was a rube. If I claimed experience, I was not only a slut, but also a bad kisser. I went with innocence.

He took that to mean he should give me lessons, so I had to endure another twenty minutes of his overzealous saliva. Shortly, though, his charming friend Kevin pulled up in his shit-can of a Thunderbird and honked the horn. Joe walked up to the parking lot to talk to him and left me on the track, hidden in the shadows. I stood there, by myself, for probably fifteen minutes, wondering if I should stay, or walk up and say hi (although I really didn’t like Kevin at all), or maybe do a lap or two around the track in the dark.

Joe came back grinning—the ass. When I asked him why, he said that Kevin had asked him if he needed any condoms.

I nearly died on the spot, and then when I didn’t die, I wished I had.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my first kiss.

The Art of Courtship

I think we, as a society, should go back to the way things were in those Western romances I used to read. You know: when a guy wanted to date a girl, he’d go ask her pa if he could court her. Then they’d sit in the common room with her parents and sisters and visit with each other, or, if they were really naughty, they’d sit out on the porch together with glasses of lemonade while Ma watched out the kitchen window and Pa glanced over his shoulder from the barn every now and then.

Ah, the bliss of a simpler time. When you take the physical aspect out of the dating phase, you get to the stuff that really matters a lot faster. Hey, call me old-fashioned, but I speak from experience.

Shane (ex number two, for clarity’s sake) and I had a very western romance courtship, actually. Except, instead of sitting on the porch together with lemonade, we wrote letters and emails. Yep, we were a long distance couple. Internet lovers, if you will. Anymore, a lot of my friends are in long distance relationships, but back in high school, it wasn’t all that common of a thing. (How are you supposed to make out with your boyfriend under the bleachers if he lives in Montana, hm?)

Anyway, the beginning of our relationship had no physical aspect at all. Just words. That’s not to say it wasn’t sexy. Even at the tender age of fifteen, Shane could turn a phrase like you wouldn’t believe. His love notes were beyond compare.

It was those words, I think, that made me feel closer to him than I’d ever felt to Joe, despite the fact that Joe’s tongue had been down my throat regularly for the full ten months of our horny little tryst. The thing is, when you’ve got someone’s tongue down your throat, it’s hard to talk about your hopes and dreams and all that.

The downside of getting all that Hopes and Dreams stuff out there so quick is that you find all the skeletons in the closet a lot faster, too. Shane knew a lot of my faults even before I realized I’d let them out of the Bag of Bitchy.

Oh come on, you know you have a Bag of Bitchy. It’s full of all that stuff that you sort of stow away during those first few months of a relationship, whether you mean to or not. Then, quietly, the Bag of Bitchy comes open just slightly and an itty bitty bitchy escapes. But then the little bitchies left in the bag get all agitated that their friends have tasted freedom, and before you know it, the Bag of Bitchy is wide, wide open and all you can see is your guy’s hind end retreating as fast as it can.

And you wonder why he dumped you.

I wonder what happens to the Bag of Bitchy when you’re single for a really long time. Do you get so used to not hiding stuff that eventually you just don’t have a bag anymore? Or do you collect so much bitchy that by the time you meet a new guy and it’s time once again to bring out the Bag of Bitchy, the bitchies you’re trying to hide won’t all fit?

The Power of Love on the Internet

I met two of my four exes online. I know; I’m totally a child of the Internet age. I have no idea what it’s like to only meet guys at school or church or (ugh) in bars. Of course, the Internet is kind of one giant bar, and you never know exactly what you’re walking into.

I wasn’t actively looking for a boyfriend when I met Shane online. I met him in a role-playing chat room. For those unfamiliar with role-playing chat rooms, they’re just like regular chat rooms except everyone is playing a character… so, kind of, they’re still just like regular chat rooms, except you make no pretense about pretending to be someone you’re not.

This particular role-playing chat room was a Star Wars themed one, I think. It pains me to say that, because I want to convince you (and myself) that I was eventually able to shed the weirdness of middle school and blend with normal society. But I didn’t really tell anyone about the Star Wars role-playing chat room, so I was half-way there anyway.

My character was a gorgeous, red-haired, kick-ass smuggler with a great ass and a bad attitude—basically, everything I wanted to be and wasn’t. His character was a suave, good-looking adventurer—and I will admit that he actually did turn out to be suave and good-looking, especially for a 15-year-old.

Admittedly, it didn’t take much to impress me with boys at fifteen. Joe had been fond of writing crappy love poems in rhyming (kind of) iambic pentameter, so I was actually pretty impressed with any human male who could string words together without trying to rhyme “love” and “gave,” and “mine” and “kind.” Shane was considerably more talented than that.

Our characters actually fell in love before we did. Yep, my character and his character were kind of an Internet item, at least in our little Star Wars-ified corner of it. He read my crappy fan fiction and I read his less crappy actual fiction, and a bond formed.

Internet dating before match.com. That’s how it happened.

Now, Matt I actually did meet on match.com. Well, kind of. I had a profile up there, he stalked me, but he hadn’t paid for premium service, so he had to find out my IM name in some other creative, stalkery manner instead of contacting me through the website. Stalking as a demonstration of love: it actually usually works. At least if you’re me.

Jesus Wept

My family moved from one coast to the other the summer before my freshman year of high school. I was crushed, naturally, but resolved, too. I was going to shed the image of the pee-scented overalls and the wackadoo haircut and be cool. Beautiful, even. I’d grown my hair out and cut my bangs to match my cooler friends’ bangs, and I had some really short white shorts that made my legs look long and thin. When I looked in the mirror, I could almost imagine the woman I was going to be, and that the awkward girl was gone.

That was the summer I met Joe.

I met Joe at church. You’d think this would be a good thing. Church is generally a good place to meet wholesome gentlemen. But Joe, I knew from the start, had a streak of bad hiding under those long, blonde curls. He was like an angel, all white teeth and gold hair and big arms—except I knew he wasn’t really an angel because I didn’t meet him until halfway through the summer, when he actually decided to show up to church one week.

Also, he was seventeen. My mom didn’t like that he was seventeen. My dad didn’t much care, as long as he was allowed, finally, to tease one of his daughters and embarrass her horribly in front of every boy she ever brought home. Lucky me; I got to go first.

Joe and I spent the rest of the summer circling around each other. For my part, I thought this would be another one of those unrequited love things. I would sit back and admire from afar, he would never notice me, and eventually he would go away, or I would go away, or another boy would come along that I could fall in love with instead… from afar, of course.

But when the school year started, Joe asked me out. I honestly, truly never saw it coming. I thought he was teasing me. I think I may have actually laughed. But he wasn’t kidding. And I fell headlong into a relationship with the not-really-an-angel from church.

Jesus wept. I imagine my mother did, too.

The Opening Lines

Joe, 1995, age 14:

“I can tell you like me.”

To an incredibly stupid 14-year-old like I was, who’d had a crush on the beautiful blonde Adonis all summer long and had been expecting it to be nothing more than unrequited love, “I can tell you like me,” was akin to a proposal of marriage. I was his.

Shane, 1996, age 15:

“Did you seriously just say ‘kiss me, you fool’? Because I can. Unless you were kidding. Were you kidding? Do you really want me to kiss you?”

I was actually kidding. “Kiss me, you fool,” was a line from a commercial my siblings and I thought was extremely hilarious and I just assumed that Shane would have seen the commercial, too, and also found it hilarious. But then after he got all flustered and couldn’t tell if I was serious or not, I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d been kidding. So we kissed.

Luke, 1998, age 17:

“Does this mean what I think it means?”

Luke and I had been flirting all summer. Well, he’d been flirting and I’d been being stupidly oblivious to the whole thing. Mostly. Actually, truth be told, I’d sort of been leading him on. I thought he was cute and funny and I enjoyed spending time with him, but I never really meant to take it further than that.

But, as we stood in my parents’ foyer and I realized I’d been hugging him a little too long and resting my head on his shoulder, my “holy shit” moment came. In the span of 3 seconds or so, I convinced myself that I did want this relationship to be more than a friendship, and so I affirmed Luke’s suspicions that this meant we were now something more.

Matt, 2001, age 20:

“I usually don’t do this on the first date, but I feel like we have such a connection.”

You’d think by the time I reached the age of maturity (20, of course), I would have recognized the line. Luckily for me, he wasn’t just trying to get in my pants and he actually meant it, in his emotionally turgid sort of way.

As you’ll note, the theme in all these encounters seems to be, “Ramona is stupid.” It’s not a flattering picture. Every time I’d just begun to get myself under control after months or years of a roller-coaster long-term relationship, a new opening line would pop up and I’d go right back to Stupid Land.

I know lots of people who take good, long, healthy breaks between relationships. I know teenagers who have never been on a date in their lives. They are perfectly normal. I was not. At age 20, I hadn’t been single for more than a few months since I was 13.