Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,25

married. I do everything a wife would do to make a comfortable home for us. I am approaching middle age, and I want the security of marriage. Should I wait for him, hoping he will change his mind, or should I move on and find someone who would like to make a commitment?

What does “get along perfectly” mean if there’s a big glaring blockade like “I want to get married and he doesn’t” in the way? Why do people willfully ignore these giant logs scattered across their roads to domesticated bliss? Oh, I know, sex. But seriously, though, why??

I feel like just reframing how you see your relationship would shift your entire perspective. What if you just said, “He says he loves me but the problem is he won’t commit and I need that”? Then you’re done, right? You can easily walk away! I have been accused of being cold and unromantic, but this isn’t that, I promise. I have often listened to the words a person I was in love with said to me and ignored what they actually meant, to instead project onto them what I wanted it to mean. That shit will keep you in a weird emotional death spiral for the rest of your relationship until you shake yourself out of it, and you don’t deserve that. I know that self-delusion can feel protective, but, ultimately, you’re going to do what we all do at some point: cycle through all that old shit he said, and all those red flags you ignored, while chuckling softly at your na?vety. You believed you could change a person who was telling you exactly what they didn’t want, and now the reality is setting in that you can’t. Don’t feel dumb; it happens to the best of us.

There are dozens of anecdotes to illustrate this in my own interpersonal-relationship canon, but the first is always the worst: my first real relationship, at twenty-one, was with a man ten years older. We met at a house party where he was, OF FUCKING COURSE, the DJ. I didn’t know anyone except the friend who’d brought me along, and I hovered in the kitchen like a creep, watching other people have fun. To this day, this is my preferred approach to partying. Anyway, later in the evening, the DJ came over and pointed out that I didn’t look like I was having a good time, and in a panic to prove him wrong I drank a tumbler of gin in one gulp and went home with him. (Other stuff happened also, but you get my point.) The next morning, when he dropped me off, he said, very spe-ci-fi-cal-ly, “This was fun. I’ll call you. I don’t want to get into anything serious,” and pulled off in a haze of SUV exhaust before I could even close the passenger-side door all the way. I proceeded to spend an entire calendar year convinced I was in a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship with a not-serious person, who then did everything he could to prove that he was even less serious about me than he’d initially warned.

I couldn’t be mad at anyone but myself when it finally dawned on me what an idiot I was being. (Okay, yes, I was bitter and I blamed him, too, but this is not the time to deconstruct my immaturity.) My problem was that I had hoped that I could do enough stuff to convince him I was worth his undivided attention. I mean, I wasn’t doing “wife stuff” like you are, but I was making him cool mix CDs and lathering myself in the finest Bath & Body Works scented lotions before he came over for sex. So, yeah, pick up what he’s putting down. He’s probably not your future husband, and that’s okay.

Also, what does “a wife do”? You know what my wife does? Asks me three times in a row if I’ve e-mailed the HVAC company yet, and moves my shoes to places where I can’t find them and then calls that “cleaning.” If that’s what you’re doing, I understand his hesitation. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Anyway, he’s not a bus—stop waiting for him. Catch the next one!

I am twenty-five and have been with my boyfriend on and off for five years. I love him very much. I often overthink