Good Things Happen to People You Hate

by Rebecca Fishbein

  Once you’re seated opposite someone who’s traveled from the Upper West Side to Prospect Heights to buy you shots, it’s hard to send them home without some sort of thoughtful thank-you. We ordered more shots. We talked about bagels. We made out, because it seemed like the thing to do in the moment. When I asked, in my whiskey-and-wine haze, where we were going next, he said, “Your place,” which now seemed fair. It was a long train ride home for him, after all, and considering the state of the NYC subway system, it would be nothing short of a local crime to direct him to the nearest stop. Also, he had shelled out for shots.

  Ian called a cab to my place, and from there the night went pretty much as expected. There was some middling foreplay, intercourse, a mishap with a condom or three, some flailing around and teeth crashing. We’d both had so much whiskey there was about a negative 8 percent chance of either party reaching a climax. I passed out somewhere between “Do you mind if I just grab my vibrator real quick?” and the third snapped condom. In the morning, he texted me offering to pay for Plan B, and five days later I called in a prescription for UTI drugs. We never saw each other again. A beautiful relationship, indeed.

  * * *

  I am, as you’ve likely surmised, no stranger to bad sex. I had mostly bad sex in my early twenties, and considering the collective catharsis Women of the Internet experienced after Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” short story came out in The New Yorker in 2017, it wasn’t just me. As evidenced by the young protagonist in “Cat Person,” bad sex isn’t necessarily violent or coerced, but you tend to have it just because you think you should, regardless of whether you want it or think it might feel good.

  I was a late bloomer, and when I graduated from college with only a few drunken notches on my box spring, it seemed I needed to catch up. I didn’t know how to, say, switch positions without kneeing someone in the chest; or to gracefully excuse myself to pee post-coitus to avoid the dreaded aforementioned UTI; or how to be on top without gyrating someone out of me; or frankly, even how to make sex feel good, for my partner or for me. Indeed, my early sexual experiences were at best boring and a little wet, and at worst downright excruciating, like someone was ramming a broom into my cervix.

  Sex ed classes teach you that sex will riddle you with diseases and unwanted babies, but conveniently omit a lot of important stuff, like how to make it feel the least bit pleasurable. Pop culture teaches you that sex is a writhing, leg-twisting, candlelit thing you want, but doesn’t explain why (or whether or not anyone observes fire safety by blowing out the candles when it’s time for sleep). When I was young, the message I gleaned from teen comedies like Superbad and EuroTrip (an underrated early aughts masterpiece) was that men want sex and women want men to want them. Like many millennial women, I came of age watching Sex and the City reruns on E!, and thus was taught adulthood consisted of a rotating crew of short-lived relationships and one-night stands, with a couple epic romances tossed in for the sake of drama.

  It was with this messaging burned firmly in my frontal cortex that I approached adulthood. Not that I felt like I was anywhere near it.

  I am just under five feet tall and love Pixar films, and so I am literally childlike. I spent my first few years on the New York dating scene feeling childlike as well, while everyone around me grew up and got boyfriends and did sixty-nine without kicking someone in the face. But at twenty-two (and twenty-three and twenty-four and twenty-five, and sometimes at twenty-eight), I was still shocked that anyone who wasn’t a registered sex offender would even want me to take off my clothes. To combat that, I decided to find out how many strangers were into seeing me naked.

  At the time, dating apps like OkCupid and Tinder were starting to become popular, which made it easy to trick men into meeting up with me. Each date would go thus: I’d hit up a bar on the way to the chosen date spot for a shot of liquid courage, then make my way over, racked with terror that my prospective paramour would run once he saw my stubby legs slide off a barstool. Once we were trapped together, I’d pull out all the stops to force my date to fall in love with me. I’d crow about his favorite director, ask him questions about his hometown, pretend to care about his job, maybe touch his arm if I was feeling daring. Did I like him? Did I like any of them? It didn’t matter. That wasn’t the point. I was the dumb, useless child with something to prove, not them. They needed to want me—the rest we could work out along the way.

  First and second dates were chaste, but if I made it to dates three and four, I had to psych myself into sleeping with these people or dump them. Those were the rules, after all, and if I broke them, my date would be disappointed, and I couldn’t have that. I dumped most of them, but sometimes I didn’t, in which case we’d go to dinner or to a comedy show, or we’d watch a movie at his house, and I’d drink heavily in preparation for fifteen or so minutes of clumsy, emotionless sex. Then I would leave, or if my date happened to be at my place, I’d make him leave. To spend the night with someone would require me to talk to him in the morning. I didn’t know how to do that without revealing that I was a fraud. My dates thought I was sexy and experienced, just like them, but I was nothing but a child. These men were for practice. They were the experiences that would close the chasm between Girl and Woman that made me feel like I’d been left behind.

  The thing about sleeping with people you do not want is that your body rejects them, something I revisited each time I woke up still smelling like a stranger’s skin. I’d spend the next few hours drenched in shame over exposing myself inside and out to this person I didn’t know or want, wondering if I could stand to let them touch me or even see them again. Over the following week, they’d weaponize my phone, attempting to will me back to them with cute texts I’d ignore. I rejected more than one by blocking his number. It was immature, but so was I.

  Maybe I would have liked these men, had I known them. I wasn’t trying to know them. I was trying to count them. In order for me to play with the big girls, I needed to rack up numbers and experiences, even if those numbers and experiences had me hyperventilating each time my phone pinged. I hadn’t yet figured out that I didn’t need to trick any strangers into liking me; that I could leave a date after half a beer if I wasn’t into it; that no matter how confident, sexy, and experienced everyone else seemed, they were just as lost trying to mash their body against another body as I was. Instead, I assumed I was doing what everyone else was doing—putting myself out there, accommodating, dating.

  This type of dating got me in trouble a handful of times, sometimes comically, sometimes not. Once I brought a date back from the Upper East Side to my apartment in Bushwick, but was so tired by the time we got there that I fell asleep before anything could happen. He left at three a.m. and took the train all the way back to Manhattan. He did not try to contact me again. Another time, a date could not, uh, perform, then collapsed on top of me in shame. “I have to be up really early,” I said after ten minutes or so spent crushed beneath his torso. He took a full glass of whiskey with him when he left, glass included.

  Once, almost on a dare, I brought home a man I met at famed Williamsburg hookup bar Union Pool. My roommate at the time paired up with the man’s friend, and once we were back at our apartment, they retreated into her room while my chosen creature and I went into mine. When the lights were out, I realized I was alone with a stranger who was a lot bigger and more powerful than me. He didn’t smell right. He didn’t sound right. He hurt me when he handled me, and I didn’t want him to be there. Unfortunately, he didn’t want to leave. So I bit him, and not in a sexy way. “There’s something wrong with you,” he growled at me right before he fled. He left his muscle tank in my room, and the next morning I picked it up with a Swiffer handle and threw it in the public trash bin down the block.

  These “dates” made up the majority of my sex life, until one day I discovered something spectacular: it is possible to have sex with people you like. Not only that, it’s enjoyable. I made this discovery when I found myself in bed with a good
friend whom I loved platonically, but maybe even a little more than that. The fallout from that encounter was messier and sharper than what I’d experienced with the strange men, but once I had good sex, the bad sex was much more difficult to tolerate, let alone welcome in.

  A fun thing that happens when you stop letting yourself have bad sex is that you have much less sex altogether. A dry spell sucks at first—a few months into your newfound celibacy, you start thinking about banging your boss, your best friend, the big chair in your living room—but after a while your sexless life settles into a comfortable new normal, and there’s a lot of good TV to keep you occupied. Six months and seven seasons of Mad Men later, you assume you’ll never need to worry about a late period again. Then, following a few drunken hours at a dive bar, you’ll find yourself on an express train going local and decide to pass the time by making out and subsequently going home with your travel buddy. The sex is good, so you keep doing it, and then you’re dumped, fast as it started. Now you’ll have to start all over. And that’s how you end up on a Sex Date.

  * * *

  Other people seem to enjoy one-night stands or taking lovers or having neighborhood slam pieces they call up when the mood strikes. It is fine to be one of those people, but I am not and I never will be. One of the few things worse than no sex is sex you don’t care about. But one of the things I didn’t know, back when I welcomed bad sex, was that I didn’t have to have it. Single women are constantly made to feel like their lives are missing something if they’re not getting any, which is one of the things that tricks us into having sex without first asking ourselves if we even want it. Not to mention single women are reminded all the time that they can’t find love because they’re not open enough, or they’re too picky, or they’re not putting their best foot forward, which is sometimes how you get stuck (literally) letting a person in when you’d rather shake hands instead.

  A friend of mine who got out of a four-year relationship asked me recently if Tinder was still “sex crazy,” because the last time she was forced to date around, it was hard to get out of sleeping with someone if she didn’t want to, since that was the going market rate. To go four dates without banging a prospective paramour risked them dropping you for someone more obliging. To say no was to risk their not liking you. To turn someone down—because you didn’t know them, because you weren’t sure you wanted them, because five drinks weren’t enough to make you ready to take your clothes off in the dark—meant you weren’t trying hard enough, and so the fact that you were single was all your fault.

  In theory, women have agency when it comes to dating and sex. And it is still (theoretically) a crime to force someone to sleep with you when they say no. But it is hard, when you’re in the moment, to remember that you don’t have to kiss someone when they ask or lean in for it, or get in a cab with them because they bought you shots, and that pulling away from someone you do not want does not mean you will pull away from someone you do. You are not single because you will not settle for a night of bad sex with a stranger. You are not falling behind. The sexual revolution liberated women, but liberty is being able to say yes or no to sex with whom you please, not having to fuck every man who swipes right so you don’t die alone. Dying alone is better than signing up for a lifetime of Sex Dates.

  * * *

  It’s been four months since the Sex Date, which means I’m four months into my current bout of celibacy. I’ve managed to pass the time by watching The Great British Baking Show, and mostly I’m doing just fine, save for a rather elaborate occasional fantasy involving a barista at my local coffee shop and his mermaid tattoo. No sex and/or dating leaves me lots of time to get to know myself better, like what dinners I prefer to microwave or which vibrator setting will put me to sleep. You save a lot of time and money not worrying about shaving or showering, or about having to wash your sheets.

  The other day, though, I opened up one of my dating apps out of curiosity, or maybe habit. I discovered something shocking: my winter Sex Date had just sent me a message. “Hey, how’s ur summer going?” he wrote.

  He had no idea we’d met.

  He’d been inside me.

  He’d forgotten me.

  We are all each other’s pawns in this game of broken condoms.

  Don’t Cry Over Spilt Milk, Have a Full-on Breakdown

  I was nineteen the first time I lost my mind.

  The summer before my sophomore year of college, I worked as a counselor at a day camp for rich kids. Two months of breaking up sticker-book fights in the baking Westchester sun had bleached my hair golden, and when exactly one (1) man on the street shouted, “Hi, blondie!” at me, it became clear that lighter hair upped my attractiveness level from Little Jewess Annie to Person of Perhaps Fuckable Age. This hypothesis was verified in the fall by the thicker-than-normal throng of collegiate boys clamoring to make out with and summarily reject me. But all things must die, even already dead cells, and by early spring, my hair had returned to its normal unremarkable brownish red. I, of course, was devastated. So one sunny day in April, I decided to spray a friend’s Sun-In in my hair and spend the day outdoors.

  For those of you who are lucky enough to be unfamiliar with this demon product, Sun-In is a popular hair lightener from the hair-healthy days of the 1980s. According to the sales pitch, a few quick sprays of the chemical concoction will “bring out your natural highlights just like the sun—only faster!” In reality, Sun-In is pure hydrogen peroxide, and about as good for your hair as pouring gasoline on your head near a campfire. The smiling blond model on the front of the bottle has clearly never touched the stuff, because when I washed it out of my hair that night, ready to be dazzled by my newfound resemblance to Reese Witherspoon, I discovered that my typically turbulent curls had deflated to a sad stringy, frizzy mess. They were also orange, a color that didn’t pair well with my face, which turned fuchsia the instant I started screaming.

  After a half-hour tantrum, I went to sleep, hoping my now-frazzled hair would settle overnight. In the morning, it actually looked worse. I googled “how to fix Sun-In,” but as anyone familiar with Yelp reviews can attest, the internet is where the sadists of the world go to freak out everyone else with worst-case scenarios. Instead of finding helpful tips for hair resurrection, I found horror story after horror story documenting other people’s Sun-In disasters. “Sun-In made my hair snap off!” one person screamed in a product review. “It’s been a decade since I used this product, and my hair has never been the same!” shrieked another. “I HAD TO SHAVE MY HEAD AND WEAR A WIG,” bellowed a third. It now seemed that Sun-In had affixed itself to my genetic code, cursing any and all of my descendants with ruined curls.

  The hair forum deep dive tipped me from freak-out to full-scale mental breakdown. I could not sleep. I could not eat. I could not concentrate on my final exams, which took place only a week or so after the Sun-Incident. I took hundreds of photos of myself from all angles, checking to see how my new hair measured up against its pre-Sun-In iteration. I read even more message boards and product reviews detailing horror stories about triple-split ends and damaged follicles. I compared virgin strands of hair I found stuck on my sweaters to the Sun-In-fried strands on my head. I researched wig shops and doctors who did hair transplants. I wrote a treacly ode to my hair for a poetry class and dramatically read it aloud to the other students. “I watch my hair swirl down the drain / As I dream of straight, silky hair I’ll never have and never know,” I intoned. My classmates said the poem was “very funny.”

  To me, my hair looked like it belonged atop Julian Glover’s decomposing corpse at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but to everyone else, my appearance was more or less the same. My friends were baffled. “You look fine,” they said as I sobbed on our dorm room couch. My parents, unsettled by my hysterical phone calls, drove from Manhattan to Baltimore. They took me to a famous crab-cake place and tried to get me to eat. “It’s just hair,” my mother said, watching me dissect soft-shell through tears. �
�Nothing a good deep conditioner can’t fix.”

  But rationality couldn’t set my brain right or stop the spinout. Which, as it turned out, was imminent. In fact, the building blocks for a full-on breakdown had been quietly stacking for months.

  * * *

  The thing about losing your mind is that it happens when you’re not paying attention. Depression is like a bedbug infestation—you keep waking up with bite-sized welts of self-doubt and sadness that at first you rationalize away, tricking yourself into believing you’re not sleeping enough or are undercaffeinated or just have a teeny case of the blues. Then one day you can’t get out of bed. That lasts for a week. Now you’ve got a problem.

  * * *

  My brain’s slow collapse began, as all bad things do, with adolescent heartache. The fall after my hair turned blond, a boy I liked made out with me for two months before dumping me for a friend of mine. She had been offering counsel on this tenuous relationship before sweeping him off his feet. This kind of betrayal is bad enough, but it was coupled with some minor psychedelic drug experimentation (this boy liked drugs, so I did, too), and while I have no idea if the strange chemical concoctions we took actually screwed with my brain, for a time they did seem to reorganize the way I saw patterns—on the ground, in the light, and most important, in human behavior.

  Some experts say gut feelings come from your brain recognizing patterns faster than you can consciously process them, instead squirting out a few drops of dopamine so you can sense irregularity or danger before it takes corporeal form. My newly sharpened mind had me convinced well in advance that the girl who stole my make-out buddy was going to do it.