Your Ex-Boyfriend Will Hate This (2015)

Chapter One

The Commitment Vacation

I honestly believe every human being, male or female, needs to spend at least one year of his or her adult life in mandatory “singleness” (an awkward word but useful for our purposes). Call it a “commitment vacation.” Whenever I mention this idea to my friends, I always receive a certain amount of resistance.

“What? No dating? No sex? For an entire year?”

Before you start to hyperventilate, I’m not suggesting you give up any romantic interaction. Your sexual needs are yours to explore as you see fit, but don’t indulge in any serious relationships. You’re banned from anything that even winks in the direction of a committed relationship. “Love at first sight” (an insidious juvenile fabrication we will address later) isn’t only banned from your kingdom, it will be shot if found anywhere on the premises.

If that seems unnecessarily punitive and you honestly can’t imagine yourself without someone, I’m tacking on an extra year for you. Generally speaking, people like this are serial monogamists who haven’t gone more than two months without a boyfriend since the day they first discovered the recreational usefulness of their lady parts. They need an enforced commitment vacation more than anyone, and one year usually won’t do it. They have spent so much of their maturation process defining themselves by their significant others that when their partners are gone, almost no “self” remains…until a new “love” comes along to redefine it.

Two years, serial monogamists—no appeals, no parole. It’s time you found out more about yourself than how much you’ll tolerate just so you won’t have to be alone.

This doesn’t mean there is no value in monogamy. On the contrary, it’s the very reason you’re reading this book, right? To find that special someone who you can spend a lifetime with? So it may sound like an impossible contradiction to suggest true commitment must be preceded by at least some period of absolute aversion to it. But think of this as a series of directions, a map whose ultimate destination is you. If it leaves out key details, or details that might change completely, the map is useless. Even if you gave the map to exactly the right person, he or she couldn’t find you for a simple reason.

Even you don’t know where you are.

Describing this year (or years) as a commitment “vacation” is a bit of a paradox in itself. On a normal vacation, we choose to abandon (albeit temporarily) the world we know in order to go “off the grid.” However, the whole point of your commitment vacation isn’t to escape, but to try to find your way home to the starting point—i.e., you. When you were ten, you didn’t worry about relationships, at least not romantic ones. You were still learning what it means to be a daughter, a friend, a student, and a good person; you were still dreaming about what you want to be when you grow up—just beginning to draw your map, as it were.

(If all this seems simplistic, bear with me. Your patience will be rewarded with more wisdom and more wryly vulgar humor ahead.)

A widely-accepted tool of modern psychology is to try to help patients get in touch with their “inner child.” The belief is that, by reconnecting with our much younger selves, we can unlock past trauma and free ourselves from the self-destructive patterns that haunt our adult lives. It’s an idea that, however fanciful it seems, is fundamentally logical and relates well to our “map” analogy. It’s no coincidence that chronically unhappy people quite often describe themselves as “lost.” Maybe you’ve used that word to describe yourself at some point during your life too.

If you’ve ever gotten lost on foot or by car, you know that one of the first things you do is to try to retrace your steps back to where the surroundings are familiar. Inner child therapy operates on the same principle: going over the path of your former life to figure out when, where, and why it turned away from the destination you once envisioned—presumably a place of happiness, belonging, peace, and self-fulfillment. I’m giving a necessarily less sophisticated description of this type of therapy, since I’m not a psychologist. My education on the subject is limited to the research done for this book: my own therapeutic experience and the same two psych classes most of you took in college. For a more detailed description of inner child therapy, try Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child by John Bradshaw.

There was a time in our youth when a simple act gave us joy, contentment, and a sense of gratification, whether it was riding a bike, playing games, or just doodling in a notebook. The simplicity of these activities was an essential part of what made them so gratifying. You didn’t jump rope to improve your calves (so that mini-skirt would look better on you); you did it simply for the joy of jumping rope.

Before I began the graduate writing program at the University of Southern California, I had the opportunity to interview filmmaker Kevin Smith (writer/director of Clerks and Chasing Amy). As a fledging author, I asked him how I could be a successful writer.

“Don’t read the trades,” he answered.

The “trades” are the two daily magazines that cover the business side of the entertainment industry, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. They cover insider news, a good portion of which is reporting sales figures for new script sales and the rights to intellectual properties like novels or magazine articles. (So and so was paid $500,000 for a certain script or $1,000,000 for the rights to a certain novel, for instance.) I didn’t fully understand the significance of Smith’s advice until I worked at NBC and found myself skimming through the trades on a daily basis. The effect of constantly reading about others’ financial windfalls made me want to change how and what I wrote about for the sole purpose of getting paid.

“If you write for any reason other than you love to do it, you won’t last,” Smith had advised me. “Even if you get rich and famous, you’ll burn out. You’ll lose the whole reason you started writing in the first place.”

Smith was right. After I sold my first movie script and went through the gauntlet of constant rewrites for a gallery of producers, actors, and directors, I was burnt out. I spent so much time trying to appease other people in order to get a big paycheck that I lost any love I had for writing. When my script stalled out due to problems with financers and the film didn’t get made, I was so embittered that I didn’t write anything substantive again for five years.

Eventually, I regained my former love for writing, and the result is this book. Writing is something that gives value and meaning to my life—not only now, but presumably for the rest of my days. What does that for you? What in your life gives you joy just by doing it? It doesn’t have to be artistic. It could be working out (if you truly love working out, you lovable masochist), camping, playing tennis, continuing your education, or just reading about a favorite subject. When I describe these as “simple” activities, I don’t mean rudimentary or dumb. I just mean activities you can access easily that are relatively immune to financial circumstance.

Some of you might offer sex as the favored activity, but I’m excluding it from the discussion because the enjoyment of it is so dependent on your partner. If you can enjoy sex equally with every nameless person on the street, then you probably don’t need this book, at least not yet. You need to be exceptionally vigilant about safe contraception and maybe think about keeping a separate apartment for your liaisons. One sociopathic stalker can sap the fun right out of an otherwise fruitful life of casual sex, as can one STD. I’m not recommending this lifestyle choice, but I won’t condemn it either. Many men live like this, and I believe in fair play.

Just be careful.

Let’s go to back to the question of what gives your life pleasure and meaning. Ideally, we aren’t discussing a passing fancy (like that winter you learned to snowboard, then never picked it up again), but something that will be a comfort to you for the rest of your life. Discovering a source of bliss that has permanence is important, because here’s what will change from the present to the end of your life:

Everything.

Every aspect of your life—your friends, your job, your family, your lovers—will almost certainly change. If you’re married, your marriage may also change some day. (Your author can’t guarantee a 100 percent success rate, no matter how irrefutably brilliant his advice is. Your author’s modesty is beyond reproach, however.) Why do I bring up such a sobering truth? I do it to underline the importance of this period of unencumbered self-discovery. After the world has thrown its worst at you, what part of you will remain?

Answering the question about who you are makes answering the next question so much easier, namely, “Who should I be with?” Failure to do so will make you powerless to find the right person and can make you susceptible to all sorts of romantic lies.

Speaking of romantic lies…