queen of the crazies, part 2

As you can imagine, I was shocked and quite frankly, scared.

I immediately text The Ex to tell him and ask him why she would do that and what to do. Here is the background that I was given. (If you hate detail, skip it.)

He met her at a party through some friends sometime in mid-September, and very intoxicatedly listened to her sob stories and made out with her a bit. The week that followed consisted mostly of her following him around everywhere he went, and him not wanting to be an asshole so allowing this to go on (I never said he wasn't a pushover). Eventually he fessed up and told her he didn't feel that way about her.

That evening, as they hung out at one of their friend's houses drinking, she sobbed through self-harming threats and locked herself in the bathroom with a butcher knife she found in the kitchen. With everyone panicking, he finally broke in through the window and found she had been making small, deep cuts in her thigh. Whether or not they were in the shape of his name is still in question.

This behavior continued for a week or so before the whole group of friends unanimously decided she was not ever to be invited to any social function ever again, and she eventually left them alone for the most part, but the suicide-threatening phone calls at 3am didn't cease on his end. He refused to talk to her besides the times she swore she was sitting there with a knife. After awhile, he refused to talk to her, period. So, the phone calls stopped.

'Til one day, a couple weeks later, when he got a phone call from Crazimort (oh! I promised an explanation of her name. All of the girls in his social group were very much into Harry Potter at the time, and after saying 'she who must not be named' every time they referred to her, they came up with something more efficient.) who was sitting outside his front door. Did I mention she lived 45 minutes away? She swore up and down that she was "all better" and holding two bottles of expensive Pinot (I know, never a good excuse, but we learn from our mistakes) pretty much insisted that she come in and "talk."

As I'm sure you have guessed, talking led to drinking, and drinking led to blacking out (worsened by the fact that she hardly drank any at all but poured it very generously for him), drinking led to touching, and touching led to, as he surmised the next morning as he put the pieces together, sex. (If you're not humming Portions For Foxes at this point, something is wrong.) When I say pieces, I mean waking up naked in a bed with a girl (also naked) who's completely obsessed with you, and as you eye the floor frantically for a condom wrapper said girl telling you that you didn't use one, and now she is "worried." And she tells you she'll take a morning after pill. (Boys: If this ever happens, watch her swallow it.)

Five days (I kid you not) go by before she calls him in a panic because she is pregnant. No, really! I had no idea that there were pregnancy tests that could tell you that soon! Ugh. So being a young, naive, terrified 19 year old boy he believes it. As this horror unfolds, he begins to question her, asking if he can go to doctors visits with her or see some paperwork, which she aggressively denies and produces some papers clearly printed off the Planned Parenthood website, respectively.

Which brings us (almost) up to speed, when I met her on Halloween (a month and a half after their first meeting) as she professed her "pregnancy" as loudly as her need for a cigarette. So fast forward to when the Ex and I start talking, and he is telling me this and I'm trying to process it and figure out what to do about the 16 missed calls.

I listen to the voicemail, in which she very sweetly says, "hey it's me! Just calling to say hi. Oh, also I have a question for you. Can you call me back when you get a chance? Thanks!"

So I, fearfully if we're going to be honest here, IMed her instead. She starts unloading her version of reality, fit for a TV movie, where she thought that she and I were destined to become best friends, but now I've betrayed her by liking the guy who has impregnated-and-then-abandoned her, and now we'll never have that chance. Then she's telling me how she's very much in love with him and that he's in love with her too, but he's using me to try to make her jealous; that they have some "issues" to work out but that they're going to be getting back together, no doubt about it. She explains that the pregnancy was on purpose, because they want to start having children together already. Then she transitions into a description of how awful a guy he is and how he's out to lie, cheat and steal (and impregnate, I guess), and how he's plotting to do that to me too. She tells me how needy he is, and that's why she broke up with him. She ends it with a grotesque description of the abortion she's going to get to terminate the fetus he "helped" to create. In short, she goes through every nutcase story in the book, though none of them matched up. Unfalteringly, I let her know that I appreciate her concern but I will figure things out for myself, and proceed to block her screen name. (And also the 5 more she uses to IM me after said blockage.)

He calls me later, and tells me that although he isn't 100% (or even 10%) sure that she was really pregnant, he wanted to do the "right thing" so he met up with her at a coffee shop to give her the $400 it cost for her (fake) abortion that she had supposedly had only minutes prior. He reasoned that at least this way, it was off of his hands and we could be rid of her for good.

Or could we?

Queen of the Crazies (and the beginning of The Ex), Part 1

As promised, a frightening little look down memory lane.

Put simply, I met The Ex 4 years ago through mutual friends. But more specifically, my friend and I had been at a concert, and had very briefly chatted with this seemingly-nice-enough girl who he recognized from Myspace. A week later, when we were out and about partying it up for Halloween, she texted my friend and turned out to be a block away. When we met up with her she was with a group of 8 or 9 people, and one of them was The Ex. I was instantly attracted to him, and after spending all night with them, I had a full blown crush.

Though he was extremely shy, this girl was quite the opposite, and spent the night loudly slurring obscenities, talking to strangers, smoking like a chimney, and being generally sloppy-drunk. Eventually she had to use the restroom. We walked into a house party and they pointed us in the right direction, though there was someone using it. We all waited with her outside the door, when she started yelling to the occupant. "Hurry the fuck up! Pregnant girl out here has to pee!" Of course I was initially shocked (pregnant? after the 1/2 a bottle of rum and the 2 packs of cigarettes? and who would sleep with you anyway? [sidenote: this girl is what some would refer to as an 12-pack on her best night... just being honest]) but when everyone laughed awkwardly I figured it must be a joke and forgot about it.

Sometime during the next week, I found The Ex on Myspace and we started messaging each other back and forth. He asked me if I would be at a mutual friend's concert that weekend in LA (which was halfway between each of us, since we lived a couple hours from each other), which I very quickly affirmed. I was late to the concert and ended up missing the whole show, but my real motivation was to see him, so it didn't matter to me. She was there too (along with all the people from Halloween), and was super friendly to me (and had also added me on Myspace I believe at this point). We all headed over to Toi Thai and I made a point of sitting next to him. We laughed and talked and flirted through the whole meal, and everyone was having a great time.... except for her. Who I will now be referring to as Crazimort, which I'll explain in a sec. She spent the whole meal either A. with her face buried in her folded arms, sobbing on the table; B. checking her temperature with the back of her hand; or C. dramatically getting up and going outside for air. The thing that was really striking was the fact that out of a whole table of her friends, not one asked her what was wrong or paid any attention to her obvious plea for attention.

When we walked out she insisted that The Ex be the one to drive her back to where everyone lived, and all of a sudden seemed to be feeling loads better. She apologized very sweetly to me for her behavior, and explained that she felt like she might be bleeding internally. (Wtf?? Right?) I told her I hoped she felt better and the three of us walked to our cars which were right next to each other. With a big smile, The Ex said his cute goodbyes and gave me a big hug, while Crazimort sat and pouted in his passenger seat.

The next morning, I had a Myspace message from her apologizing again for the way she had been acting at dinner, and telling me how she was so upset she'd wasted that time she could have been hanging out with me (because... all of a sudden we were really good friends? I wasn't aware). She said she was having a very rough time, what with the pregnancy and lots of "other things" going on in her life. She hoped I understood. I told her I did, and didn't comment on anything. She was starting to weird me out.

A few days later, I emailed The Ex and said the following (I never said I wasn't ballsy):

Hi :)
I had a great time last night.
I totally have a crush on you,
but I would never ever tell you.
<3 B

He wrote back and said something about how he thought I was really cute and it was too bad we lived so far apart. We exchanged a ton of messages and eventually moved to Instant Messenger, where we ended up talking until 4am and realized we were very much into each other. We figured out the soonest possible time that we could hang out and excitedly set a date for our first date. We left each other cute Myspace comments (yes, I know, it's totally nerdy, but I was 19 years old so cut me some slack) about how we couldn't wait to see each other and were both completely giddy about the whole thing.

.... And woke up the next morning to 16 missed calls, and one voicemail, from her number.

Dun dun dun.... To be continued. :)

A Lesson in Catastrophe

Sometimes relationships end in total disaster. And I'm not one to stereotype beyond reason, but there are some common mistakes that some of you make in relationships.... particularly girls.

I know, I know... I'm a girl. But that doesn't mean I don't feel like some of our population is giving a whole lot of us a very bad reputation. I'm referring, of course, to the "crazy girl."

You know the one; in the beginning she seems like a cool chick to hang out with. You start to feel a little weird when she starts showing up at your work all the time, but write it off as friendly, until the day you realize she figured out your voicemail password and has been checking your messages. Before you know it, you've got a "crazy girl" on your hands. I think we've all known one of 'em. (More on the "crazy girl" I've encountered later.)

Before I get into details, you'll need the background: On St. Patrick's Day, I went out one time with this guy Coors from OKCupid. It was fun and all, but not noteworthy or second date worthy. Just wasn't really any chemistry. It's important that you note the second comment on that post. (And also the three consecutive, yet different comments on this one.)

The comments were posted over two months after that one unmemorable time we hung out, and I hadn't talked to Coors since. But curiosity got the best of me, and I had to ask what on earth he'd done to this girl to cause so much resentment, so I IMed him. Initially, he wasn't sure who the girl was. He came to the conclusion that it was a girl he'd been seeing and had hung out with a few times, and was (as far as he knew) getting along just fine with her. He told me about the few dates they had in detail (and trust me, I asked every question I could think of), and neither of us could figure out what she was so pissed off about. He said he wasn't going to tell her he'd seen the comments, since he knew she'd laugh it off or have an excuse anyway.

Sure enough, about a week later she sent me an email apologizing for being "dumb" and explaining that she was joking. We exchanged a few emails about what had brought them about, and when she told me that he couldn't "communicate" and she wanted to talk about what they were and if they were in a relationship (eek, after hanging out a few times?) I suggested she just relax and enjoy where it was going instead of over-analyzing it. She wrote back a few emails that I didn't respond to, one of which being something along the lines of, "I hear you keep texting and IMing him, lay off my boyfriend." Funny, since I'd IMed him only that once. I shrugged it off and forgot all about it.

A few months went by, and their messy interaction was the farthest thing from my mind. Then a few weeks ago, as I was checking my email, a G-Chat window appeared from our leading lady. In a complete panic, she begged me to IM him and ask him to talk to her, because apparently they'd gotten in an argument and he had blocked her on Instant Messenger. (Pretty immature, but the guy has the right to talk to, or not talk to, whoever he wants.) I refused of course. I like to think I'm far more reasonable than to get involved in some crazy girl's dilemmas.

She gave me a frantic recap of their fight, and told me how she was so in love with him but he was totally unable to talk about his feelings and communicate with her. So I started asking her what it was about him that she DID like, and she couldn't really pinpoint anything other than the fact that he was the first serious relationship she'd been in for awhile and that she'd slept with him within a week of meeting him. Fabulous. Although I refused to get involved in the chaos between the two of them, I gave her plenty of really tough love. Hey, the girl was talking to me because I write about dating advice. Why not give her what she came here for?

She pleaded with me to talk to him on her behalf, and I finally told her I had to go. I said I'd like to write about the conversation we had, because I think that it's a terrific example of mistakes that girls commonly make, ie coming on WAY WAY too strong.
(Ever heard the soap analogy? The harder you squeeze, the quicker it'll fly right out of your hand.) She panicked and begged me not to.

When I check my email that night, I had the following email from her:
hey go ahead and write the blog..u can even use our names if you would like. he ended up texting me and telling me how hott i was and that he was sorry then i was like ok well can we talk then he says no go fuck yourself. so im done with him and i have a date with another guy tommorow night.


Wow. Really? Thats impressive. So one minute you're obsessively in love with him, then you're calm and want to discuss things, then he tells you to go fuck yourself for no apparent reason at all (totally out of the blue, right?), and now you have a date lined up. How can anyone keep up with that rollercoaster?

Hey girlie,

Just wanted to thank you for taking the time to chat. I ended things with (Coors). I did realize that he was not the guy I wanted to be with.. it was more of the fact that I really liked being with SOMEONE because of the comfort level. It is weird because we ended on a bad note but I am not sad or upset or anything. Maybe just a little bummed which is normal after ANY break up. I actually went out on an amazing date with an amazing guy that i went on a date with about a month ago...so we will see if anything comes from that but I am extremely attracted to him....as for (Coors) ..not so much! Anyways just wanted to fill you in and say thank you!

- Kristen

Wait. You're telling me you're now (less than 24 hours later) totally at peace with the situation, and now you've met a new guy to latch onto? Not only that, but you went on a date with him a month ago (WHILE you were in a relationship that you were desperate to make very serious)? And now you're trying to tell me you weren't attracted to Coors? Unbelievable.

Do you see what I mean? I can't say every girl is like this. I can't even say that every "crazy girl" is like this. But damn, girl. You give meaning to the commonly heard phrase from guys all over the globe; "I'm not looking for a relationship right now."

I wouldn't be either!

Footnote: I emailed him a few days ago, when I rejoined OKCupid (after having deleted it upon meeting/falling quickly for Erwin) and saw he was still on there. I asked, "so, meet any new crazies lately?" He wrote back and told me that she had been making up fake screen names pretending to be me, and kept IMing him trying to trick him into talking to her.

No, I'm serious.


Girls: STOP BEING CRAZIES! Jeez la weez. I know its easy to get so upset and hurt over a guy that you feel like you need to talk to him, but please do not resort to psychotic behavior. You are making the rest of us look bad!

Boys: We are not all like this. NOT AT ALL. So get over your fears of "relationships" and start being open to meeting open, honest, and stable women. :) You never know who you're passing up!