Failure and fallout

The smartest women are inherently goal-setters. We set goals for everything – for our careers, for our family, and for our relationships. And once we’ve gotten to our mid-twenties, we’ve likely seen some achievement of our goals. We’ve established patterns for how we go about meetings our goals, and we’ve figured out how good planning often leads to better results. This goal-setting, planner-filling tendency is one of the reasons why it’s so damn hard for us to not only find a guy, but figure out whether or not the one we’ve found is worth keeping around.

For now, for me, the goal isn’t marriage or kids. It’s just to have a relationship that lasts for more than six months. I’m 26 and I’ve never spent a Valentines Day with a boyfriend. I’ve never brought anyone home for Thanksgiving. I’ve never had a guy I’m dating bring me chicken soup and tissues to ward off a nasty cold.

Which brings me to Peter, my most recent candidate for long-term, chicken-soup cooking, Valentines-Day-Card-Making, parent-meeting boyfriend. The only problem is that he didn’t quite fit “the plan.” Until Peter, I’ve always been attracted to older, more accomplished men. Most older guys don’t have the ego-centricity that men revert to in their 20s. They’re less and less concerned with getting a piece of ass and more concerned with having the same ass in their beds night after night. They are better, more giving lovers.

So when Peter told me he was pushing the tender age of 23, everything else about him became a warning sign of relationship disaster. Peter is so good looking it hurts (flag!). Every part of him is attractive. He could very literally be an underwear model(flag!). He’s smart(flag), ambitious(flag), and close to his family(flag flag).

Normally, these would be good things. I’d love to be dating a hot, smart, moralist. But I’d like that hot, smart, moralist to be at least over the age of 28. And the truth is that I was excited to date him, but I also felt like that cat looking at the steak underneath the primitive box-and-stick trap. I saw the steak. I saw the box. But I didn’t see the connection quite yet.


One night a few weeks into our relationship, he admitted to me that he’s pretty much happy all of the time. This admission came after a particularly bad day I’d had. It was so bad in fact, that it took five calls to my friend Katie and two hours to get out of the house. When I finally saw him that night, I timidly looked for comfort, for some empathy, and I ended up with, “I’m just happy all the time.”

Hardly the get-well card I was hoping for. And of course, fodder for more (perhaps) irrational conclusions about him. Peter had a fantastic upbringing. Not perfect, but filled with a lot of love. He was valedictorian and prom king. He still keeps in touch with seven friends from high school. Everything he’s done professionally has been a success, with the exception of his writing. Peter’s writing professors actually told him he needed to go out and experience the “cruel world” and then pick up the pen (which although that may be a bit harsh, may have some validity to it).
It was immeadiately apparent, at least in my mind, that because Peter had no tragedy, no heartbreak, no darkness in his life to speak of, that he wouldn’t be able to help me out with mine. So although he hugged me and kissed me and told me he was glad to see me, I couldn’t help the raised eyebrow reflex from working overtime.

We continued to have what he later characterized as “great dates.” He would come over and play scrabble. I would go over to his house to watch the Wire. We would go out with friends. And every time these dates ended, he would leave, or I would leave, and all I was ever sent home with was this throbbing sense of doubt.

I couldn’t figure him out. So I turned to the one place where you can’t hide your secrets. That’s right, Google. I googled Peter every which way I possibly could (and just so you know, I got an A in library science, where all we did was learn Boolean operators and how to use metadata), and was rewarded with more of nothing. What kind of person has NO results on Google?

I started to see the sickly green lining to this cloud right around New Years. After returning from his Christmas trip home (during which he called me almost daily), we had three more “great dates” in a very short period of time. During one of these GDs, he told me he had told his co-worker that his “girlfriend” had gotten him this great DVD for Christmas.

Really? I asked him. Yeah, he replied. But I think he was talking more about the story and less about the new pronoun.

Ok! Shit! I thought. Now I’m completely disarmed. Wait, don’t I want him to call me his girlfriend? He’s hot, check. He’s smart, check, He’s ambitious, check, but what the hell else is missing?

For the days of and around New Years, I went up to Lake Arrowhead with a bunch of friends. Peter was supposed to come up the day before New Years, and stay until New Years Day. The day before he was supposed to come, he left me this sad message about how he hated to deliver bad news, and that there was no way he could come up because of work. I was sad, sure, because everyone wants someone to kiss on New Years, and it’s so much better if that person is someone who calls you their girlfriend.

“I’ll call you on New Years Eve,” he said.

New Years Eve came and at 12 am, there were no missed calls on my phone. I called him, and caught him taking a bathroom break.

“Um, Happy New Year,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“I’m downtown at a party, in the bathroom. How are you?” he slurred.
“Great. It’s so wonderful up here. I’m sad you couldn’t make it, but I’m glad you’re celebrating. I thought you were going to call?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re a better dater than I am,” he replied.
“Um, what? Yeah, OK, I guess I am. Anyway happy new year, and I’ll talk to you when I get back,” I said.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said.

I snapped my phone closed and threw it on the bed. Still not right. Something was still not right. He should have been happy to talk to me, and more importantly, I should have been happy to talk to him. I should have called him not because he didn’t call me, but because I wanted to genuinely wish him a happy year.

From there, things went so far downhill so fast, I thought maybe I'd had a concussion. He didn’t call me on New Years day, or the day after New Years Day, or the day after that. I was starting to make up stories about the cause of the descent almost daily. He found someone else. He gave me an STD and didn’t want to tell me about it. He’d had a traumatic brain injury, and forgot we’d spent time together naked.

After a cancelled date, I attempted to break up with him. If we’re postponing the inevitable, I texted him, better to just get it over with now. No, no, he assured me, it’s not like that. Fine, OK, I thought, not at all reassured.

A week later, I finally saw him. It had been two weeks and a lot of unreturned phone calls since we had had any face to face interaction. We met for drinks, hung out with my friends. For a moment, we were a normal pair. He bought me a drink and played with my hair and talked to my friends. I asked him what he was doing the next night, and he said he’d call so we could meet up after 9.

Well, as you can probably predict, 9 came and went with no phone call. So did 10 and 11 and 12 and actually, the whole of the next day. Finally, on Monday, I called him and left him a message:

“Hi Peter, It’s Amy. I don’t know what happened, but whatever it is I’d really appreciate an explanation. So if you can possibly find it in you to call me, that’d be great. Thanks!”

The next night, his number came up on the phone. Although I spent a lot of time lecturing him on how he needs to maintain his relationships despite the fact that his job keeps him busy, once we got down to the meat of the conversation, all I got was this:

“I thought I was being nice,” he said.
“By not calling me back? You thought you were being nice,” I said, incredulous.
“No, by um, telling you it was work,” he responded.
“Are you kidding me?”

In the end, he wished me luck, I said thanks, and we both decided we’d see each other around. It hurt, sure, the way that all rejections hurt. It’s that hollow feeling that burrows deep in your chest and just aches. It’s the thing that makes you want to give up your plan, and make a new plan, something that doesn’t involve other people. Peter was a mystery, but only in the way that I couldn’t identify him as an asshole right off the bat. I couldn’t figure out whether or not it was me, or it was him, because so much of him seemed to be right.

But I guess the great This American Life epiphany of this whole ordeal is that it’s not really about having a plan, or changing or plan. It’s coming to terms with the fact that this goal, unlike all other goals in your life, is only going to be achieved through incredible, gut-wrenching, heart-punching failure. And the real challenge of it all, especially for us, the ranks of ambitious, smart women, is how we accept this failure as a necessary part of our lives, and not hate ourselves for it in the morning.