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  Your Ex-Boyfriend Will Hate This

  Blue Sullivan

  Your Ex-Boyfriend Will Hate This

  Copyright © 2015 by Blue Sullivan. All rights reserved.

  First Print Edition: April 2015

  Limitless Publishing, LLC

  Kailua, HI 96734

  www.limitlesspublishing.com

  Formatting: Limitless Publishing

  ISBN-13: 978-1-68058-043-3

  ISBN-10: 1-68058-043-4

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication

  This book would not have been written without the love, support, and insight of many remarkable women, including Dr. Patricia Guest, Leslie Meadows, Stephanie Forrer, Amanda Crean, Carmen Mann Hampson, Kim Traff, and Kim Wolfe. Special thanks to Amanda McCoy for providing additional research, to Audrey O’ Shaughnessy for her brilliant counsel and editing advice, and to Stacie Robbins, whose affection (romantic and otherwise) for me continues to be a source of great pride and regular bewilderment. Finally, I want to thank the people who inspired not only every page of this book, but everything in its author’s entire life worth celebrating: my parents, Grant Sullivan and Carol Dean, and my brother, Jody.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Prologue

  Getting To Know Each Other,

  Plus Awful (and Awfully Instructive) Dating Story #1

  If you’re reading these words, it’s for one of two likely reasons.

  Reason #1: You’re a lover of finely crafted, impeccably-reasoned non-fiction that allows you to laugh, contemplate, and gather pearls of universal wisdom from a brilliant new author. Though you no longer participate in the dating “scene” (due to marriage, a serious relationship, or general indifference to modern mating rituals), you’ve come to bask in the dazzling wordplay and blinding insight found herein. To you, I offer my heartiest salutations and commend you on your superb taste. If a friend’s recommendation brought you to this moment, hug that friend tightly the next time you see him or her. They clearly love you and seek for you the best this life has to offer.

  Reason #2: Your dating life is crap. I imagine more of you are here for the second reason. For you, dating is a thankless endeavor. Your romantic past is a bombed-out, post-apocalyptic wasteland, littered with the bones of relationships gone bad. Your personal skeletons are so abundant that they couldn’t fit in the closet of the Sultan of Brunei, much less your own. To you, love is an elusive mirage, a poison pill, a bitter bait-and-switch propagated by a deity who views your love life as a cruel TV sitcom.

  Why me? You cry to the heavens. Why must I be so unlucky in love? Just contemplating the injustices you’ve suffered causes your fingers to curl into a gnarled ball. Maybe you even want to punch something, or kick it if punching isn’t sufficient. Just thinking the name of that last terrible ex has you considering an act of arson on a certain sports car that the bastard loves more than he ever loved you. In fact, you probably know exactly where it’s parked right now and the opportune time to vent your resentment against it.

  Revenge is a dish best served with a well-applied lighter and a Duraflame log.

  I’m citing an extreme example, obviously. Maybe your experience hasn’t been so dire as to contemplate felony vandalism. Yet the scenario I created isn’t a flight of fanciful imagination. It actually happened to my brother Jody, because of a girl I set him up with. We were in our early twenties, and he’d just moved to Los Angeles to live with me. Jody and I grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, which has a population about one fiftieth the size of Los Angeles. In addition, the sort of women one encounters in Los Angeles is not like one finds in Montgomery. The women of Montgomery are lovely, kind, God-fearing ladies who revere principles like fidelity and the institution of marriage. The women in Los Angeles are quite different, with their vibrant, independent, stunning sensual physicality forming a direct (and often highly persuasive) counterargument to all those principles.

  I mention this to explain the sort of culture shock my brother experienced after his move. It also is worth mentioning that, at that time, my brother bore a pretty close resemblance to a young George Clooney. A universe of sexual discovery lay before him, a veritable constellation of attractive, willing partners for whom commitment was just as undesirable as it was for my brother, if not more so. During the three years I lived in Los Angeles prior to my brother’s arrival, I never met anyone my age who was even in a serious relationship, much less married.

  You can, therefore, understand our confusion when the first girl I set him up with, whom he dated for a sum total of about three weeks, responded ungracefully when he suggested they shouldn’t see each other anymore. So badly, in fact, that on New Year’s Day 2002, she scaled the fence of a parking garage and set his Lexus on fire, nearly burning down our apartment building in the process. This happened even though she was booked for trespassing and vandalism earlier that very evening, after fortuitously smashing out his car windows with a fire extinguisher.

  That’s how she later got the Duraflame log into the car.

  She bought the offending log at a Publix supermarket on the way back to our apartment after being charged and released from the police station. (We know all this from the cabbie that chauffeured her entire night-to-day orgy of criminal madness.) After setting the car on fire, she escaped on foot into our neighborhood. The police found her hiding in a set of juniper bushes about two blocks away. She’d torn her dress during her flight, leaving her left breast exposed. When they brought her back for Jody to identify, it was safe to assume by the almost rabid look on her face and the wild state of her hair that she’d not gone quietly.

  After the fire was safely extinguished, the police took her back to the station and booked her for felony arson. This time she wouldn’t be released. Guess who was the first person she called from prison? My brother. She told him she’d never forgive him for getting her arrested, for “forcing her” to nearly burn down an apartment building and all the inhabitants therein.

  So I’ve told this story to countless women in the intervening decade since it happened. Do you know what first response I get most often?

  “What did he do?”

  Not what did Jody do afterward, mind you. But “What did he do to make her set his car on fire?”

  If you can imagine any reason other than domestic abuse or the murder of a beloved pet as an acceptable reason for criminal pyrotechnics, you need more than just this book. You might also need a capable and understanding therapist.
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  Perhaps your parole officer could recommend one.

  Honestly, I can’t really blame that mindset on unhinged lawlessness. For twenty years, daytime talk shows and the Lifetime Network have been advocating that sort of deranged disproportionate response to everything from infidelity to leaving the toilet seat up, all in the name of female empowerment. Now, I have a roots-deep love, respect, and admiration for the female gender. The seeds of this book came from observing the many beautiful, intelligent, and loving women in my life suffer time and again at the hands of selfish, uncaring buffoons masquerading as men.

  This book is for them, and for all the women who can relate too well to the stories you’ll read here. I told my brother’s story because it’s instructive, and given enough distance from it, amusing in a black-comic sort of way. (By the way, I received his blessing to tell it prior to this composition.)

  The key lesson I derive for you, beloved reader, is this: no man is worth that kind of madness. None. If you find one and can convince me of his all-superseding greatness, I’ll switch my life-held sexual allegiances and compete with you for his love. Until then, let’s turn the focus where it belongs—on you. What do you want? I don’t mean only your romantic preferences. What do you want from your entire life?

  For that matter, who are you?

  If I were sitting across from you right now and asked you to describe yourself in five minutes, could you? If so, how long would it take to do it in a significant way? Let’s say we’re recording the conversation for posterity, so that there would always be a historical record of who you are for future generations to study and marvel at. Would the description be meaningful enough to conjure up a real sense of who you are?

  If the answer is no, your counter may be that the problem is a failure of articulation, rather than the lack of an essential self to articulate. Maybe you just aren’t “good with words.” Linguistic research has repeatedly demonstrated the essential corollary between language and the way we experience the external world. It is such a powerful connection that one study[i] showed that people who spoke Russian as their primary language actually see more colors than their English-speaking counterparts. The reason? The Russian language has an additional primary color. Russian test subjects could actually differentiate between two colors that English speakers saw as the same. So, if you really want to know if your outfit matches, ask someone from Moscow.

  Let’s go back to the recording. Imagine you’re analyzing a transcript of your self-description as if it were a legal deposition. What is missing that would help you really understand the person being described? Is there no reference to your desires, your dreams, who you love, what you’re passionate about, or your core values and beliefs? All of these questions are important, and if you don’t have at least some idea how to answer, you might need to do some personal exploration before seeking out a partner for life.

  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 in
sider 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.