Category Archives: Luke

1998, third boyfriend, more friend than boyfriend

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.

Luke’s Smooth Move

Normally I don’t recommend carnivals as good date options. There are many unromantic things about carnivals: food on sticks, piles of sawdust-covered vomit, and carnies, just for example. This story involves a carnival, and it’s a little romantic, but I felt I should give you the disclaimer above before continuing.

Luke gave me moony cow-eyes for a whole summer before we dated. I was completely oblivious. I thought we were friends. I had not yet seen When Harry Met Sally and I didn’t realize that men and women cannot be friends because the man pretty much always wants to bang the woman, even if she’s not hot. This would have been useful information to have when Luke and I started doing friend things together, one-on-one. I was doing buddy stuff like making crude jokes and punching him in the arm, and he was doing I-like-you stuff like…

Well, like taking me to the carnival. I’m pretty sure I tried to get other people to come with us and it didn’t work out. Maybe they were all smarter than me and realized we were a couple, even though I didn’t. In any case, we ended up at the tiny, dusty county fair together with a few hours of free time and a roll of ride tickets, purchased Dutch, of course.

And the ride he wanted was one of those swirly spinny ones with the cars for two people. I was game, so we got aboard. The seat was plenty wide enough when we got in. We were both skinny high-schoolers and there was at least half a butt-cheek width between us. But then the ride started spinning.

Luke had gotten the outside seat and I’d gotten the inside seat, and I quickly realized we were going to have a problem. I held on for a minute, but the centripetal force inched me ever closer to touching Luke’s butt with my butt, which seemed very un-buddy-like to me. Eventually my skinny forearms gave out and I thudded against Luke’s thigh, screaming my lungs out from either the ride or the touching, I wasn’t sure which. Luke just grinned, victorious in his butt-touching scheme.

I think it took us at least a couple more weeks after that to officially be “dating,” mostly because I was still blissfully oblivious, despite my butt having touched his butt. It’s a good thing my life didn’t depend on understanding male-female relationship dynamics. I would have been a goner.

Where Are They Now: Luke

Luke and I didn’t part on the best terms. Basically, I cruelly dumped him and he was heart-broken.

We tried to stay friends, but that doesn’t usually work when one person is over it (me) and one person is still in love (him). I’m sure it was misery for him, and I didn’t set out to cause it. Yeah, I dumped him, but I didn’t want him to keep on being unhappy because of me. So it was sort of a relief when he moved far away. I missed him, of course– he was my best friend before we ever dated. But he deserved a new start, and I hoped the move would give that to him.

For a while, we didn’t talk much. He moved to be with this girl he knew, and they started dating either right before or shortly after. I think they must have dated for something like two years. So, seemingly, it worked. Moved = new start = forget about Ramona and move on.

And then his girlfriend dumped him.

I’m not sure why, but the first person he decided to call when his long-term girlfriend dumped him was me, the last long-term girlfriend who’d dumped him. I tried to be a good friend. I tried to listen. I took his calls on the fire exit stairs of my office building and let him tell me what a bitch she was. I listened to him go through the same “but why” reaction that he did when I’d dumped him. And it was like I was dumping the poor guy all over again. I didn’t like it much, although I have to admit it was nice to spread the guilt around a little. Now I was not the only girl who’d ever broken his heart.

I had hope that it would be a permanent reconnection for us– that we’d keep being friends even after he got over the hurt of being dumped, again; that maybe this new hurt would replace the old hurt that I’d caused him. Alas, no. He lost a bunch of weight, got some tattoos, dyed his hair black, and started dating another girl. He’s married to her now and they seem happy– actually, kind of freakishly happy. So I’m happy for him.

But I miss my friend, selfish as it is. I wonder what kind of catastrophe it would take for us to be friends again, but I don’t want that to happen to either of us, so I just have to be content occasionally stalking him on Facebook and being happy that he’s happy. That’s what a good friend would do, right?

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.

Luke’s Dad

Luke’s dad had a horseshoe-shaped incision in his head, held together with big, black stitches when I met him. He’d just had a brain tumor removed. The stitches scared me, almost more than meeting his dad did. I was not good with other people’s parents. My parents were quiet, polite, and generally non-demonstrative, but in high school I discovered that not all parents are that way, and I didn’t quite know what to do with them. Especially if they had horseshoe-shaped incisions on the sides of their heads.

He started chemotherapy soon after that, so I never knew him when he was not sick. Still, he was spunky and cheerful, and yelled at his wife and sons with gusto. They didn’t mind, so I didn’t either– I guess. Luke confided that he’d been quite a handful as a kid (which I could well imagine) and once tearfully told me that he’d been a horrible son and he wished he could take it all back. It seemed to me that they dished it out on each other and it was all pretty fair and square.

Luke’s dad died in the spring. It wasn’t unexpected, but I don’t think that ever really makes it better. Luke and I did all the funeral stuff together. We took visitors at his house and ate all the food they brought. We stood with the family at the viewing. We rode in the limo to the funeral. I sat with him in the front row of the church. We rode in the limo to the graveside service.

I tried not to cry. I didn’t feel like I deserved to be allowed to cry. He wasn’t my dad. He was Luke’s dad. How could my sadness even compare a tiny bit to the sadness Luke must’ve felt? So I only cried a little, and as covertly as possible when I was with Luke.

When I came home, I would shut the front door, sit on the steps, and weep, sometimes for hours, because I was sad for Luke and his mom and his little brother, and sad for his dad that he wouldn’t get to see his sons grow up, and sad that anyone ever had to experience this completely unfair death thing.

And then I would make myself think about how behind I was on my homework and how I’d missed choir practice at church, and I would get up and do the whole Life thing, even though Luke’s dad was dead. Luke came back to school and made jokes and drew funny cartoons on my notepads, even though his dad was dead. And for a while, everything we did was even though Luke’s dad was dead.

But I guess that’s how it’s supposed to be. Sometimes you have to do things for a while “even though.” And if you do things “even though” enough times, you remember why you were doing them in the first place.

You get better at the Life thing again.

The Worst Thing Luke Ever Said

I have to tell you that Luke never said anything to hurt my feelings. He supported me and agreed with me about everything. It was… disconcerting. He’d get mad and say things about other people, but I never heard a single note of an angry tone in his voice when he discussed anything with me, if you can call them discussions. He mostly just did whatever I told him. It was terrible.

So the worst thing Luke ever said to me? “Can’t you please just give me a reason why?”

The summer after my freshman year of college, I came home broken. I’d taken an ROTC scholarship my freshman year, and the ROTC program had pretty much beaten most of the joy out of me. I’d utterly failed at every aspect of it, had managed to fail one of my classes (my first failing grade in all my life), had failed to get enough of a scholarship for my sophomore year to make up for the ROTC one I wouldn’t be getting anymore, and, oh yeah, I had a boyfriend who was living at home and selling vacuum cleaners part-time, and who followed me around like a devoted puppy.

Perhaps you’ve noticed by now: When I’m down and out, I tend to take drastic measures. I reinvent myself, or I fall in love with some boy I’ve never even met, or I dump the guy I’ve been dating for three years who’s never given me any cause to be anything but devoted right back to him.

So I dumped Luke. He cried. A lot. And then he blubbered, “Can’t you please just give me a reason why?”

I’m not a heartless bitch. There are at least little pieces of heart in my chest, I promise. And that’s why I couldn’t tell Luke why I dumped him. The bulleted list of reasons why was way harsh.

  • You are nearly twenty years old (which, like, is totally an adult, duh) and you are still living with your mom, selling vacuum cleaners, and making lame jokes about how your job sucks… literally.
  • You never ever disagree with me, and it’s kind of true that nice guys finish last. You at least need to stick up for yourself when I bait you on purpose (not proud of that, by the way), but you won’t even do that.
  • I’m in college now and I want to meet new people and see new things and make new friends, and I can’t do that if my high school boyfriend is around all the time.
  • Your idea of a good time is wearing a nerdy costume (usually a super-hero themed one) and driving around town hollering incoherent phrases in Spanish at anyone we happen to drive past.
  • I have outgrown you.

See? Harsh. So I refused to tell him. I may have mumbled something about how it just wasn’t working and it was me, not him. And he would cry some more and beg for an answer again. We spent several weeks in a row doing this.

And then he let go. I’m not sure what happened, but he stopped calling to ask me if we could talk and stopped finding ways to run into me (like, oh, showing up at my house randomly). He let it go.

Maybe he read between the lines and figured out the reasons. More likely, though, he figured out that he deserved better than to devote himself to me, or at least the broken, pissed off version of me. He deserved his own happiness. And he went out and got it, and never sold another vacuum cleaner again.

Musical Legacies

All the boys I’ve loved before have left their marks on me—sometimes in the form of emotional scarring, sometimes in the form of broken belt loops (but that’s a story for another day), and quite often in the form of a musical legacy.

Shane, romantic that he was, sent me a mix tape.

I realize I’m dating myself here, but mix tapes used to be the absolute height of dating demonstrations of love. There was a lot of planning that had to go into the appropriate mix tape. You had to make it something that showed yourself, something that the person you were wooing would be impressed by, and something that got across your feelings about that person. I, personally, was not great at mix tapes. I would generally just start willy nilly picking stuff and when I ran out of room on the tape, I was done.

But Shane’s tape was a work of art. He picked a huge variety of music, from instrumental soundtracks to The Moody Blues. In the liner, he wrote commentary on each song in his fancy handwriting. He put “It’s All About Soul” by Billy Joel on the tape and, in the liner notes, told me that it was the song that made him think of me. I wasn’t sure what to think at first—Billy Joel is a little notorious for back-handed compliments. In the end, though, it became one of my favorite songs… still is, actually. I bought Billy Joel’s greatest hits in large part because my Internet boyfriend from high school put him on a mix tape for me once.

Luke made his own contributions. He was actually in a “band” in high school. But, from what I gather, the “band” mostly just messed around and screamed unintelligible lyrics from time to time before dissolving into fits of mirth.

But, he learned “Crash” by the Dave Matthews Band, and played it and sang it for me. This was a big deal. Luke did not sing for anybody, except to entertain small children and to scream unintelligible lyrics from time to time. He waited until it was just him and me and his guitar, and it was one of the sweetest things he ever did for me. I can’t really tolerate much Dave Matthews Band, but “Crash” is still one of my favorite songs, like, ever.

Matt was a strange one. He was into Irish metal. You read that right. I never could quite get into it, despite the concerts he dragged me—uh, invited me to. He did, however, leave me with a lasting love for The Corrs, who don’t sing Irish metal, but are Irish at least.

My favorite song by The Corrs? “I Never Really Loved You Anyway.” I think Matt may have gotten the short end of the stick on his musical legacy.

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 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.