by Stephanie Wu
We drove north to Seattle, and were heading southeast through Colorado when we hit an incredibly bad storm. The blizzard was so strong that we could only go four miles an hour in the RV, and we were scared there wouldn’t be enough gas to make it through. We kept canceling stops in between because we couldn’t make it in time.
Indianapolis was the saving grace of the tour, socially speaking. One of the gyms we were working with was the official gym of the Colts cheerleaders. We were finally able to do our first official launch party there, with thirty cheerleaders and an Indy race car driver. Rick and I, the single guys, went out for the first time on the trip to try and have fun.
By late December, we were getting close to the end of the tour. We had gone the whole trip without any more major incidents and were back in Boston when Beth pulled into a street parking spot. That’s when she hit a car with the RV’s stepladder. This would have been fine, except the stepladder got stuck and caught the bumper of the car and ripped it out entirely. That’s when we knew for sure we weren’t getting our security deposit back. Plus, the inside was trashed—the couch was ripped up, the floor was filthy, there was dog hair everywhere.
Our plan was to go home to New Hampshire, where we’d look for an actual office and living space to share. But after sleeping within ten feet of one another for months, everyone was thinking the same thing: if we lived together, we’d probably kill each other.
The tour itself was a success in terms of what we’d set out to achieve. Before the tour we were only working with two gyms, and afterward we had seventy-five locations signed on and had certified more than five hundred trainers. Fitness is very trend-based, and we were part of the new craze. The four of us became very close, and I think that contributed to our success, but living and working together was also incredibly frustrating, and ultimately, that’s why I left.
It was cool to travel the country, meet people, and see the success of a company in real time. Living in an RV for months is something I can now check off my list. I haven’t been in an RV since. If anyone wants to go camping, I’ll have to think long and hard before I do it again.
—N, 26 (M)
THE JERSEY SHORE HOUSE
TWO SUMMERS AGO, after years of hassling, I finally decided to join my friends at their twenty-person Jersey Shore house. The house has been passed down via friends through the years, and we’re very close with the landlord’s family. There’s a real estate agent involved, but it’s a formality. Until the day we tell the landlord we don’t want the house for the summer, it’ll always stay ours. The house has two floors, with five bedrooms, eleven beds, a living room, a kitchen, three bathrooms—one is designated just for dudes, the others are unisex—and an outdoor shower. There’s a patio with a barbecue grill and canopy and kiddie pool. There’s always beer pong going on or something on the grill—it’s a relaxed environment. Some people rage all day long, but we’re a bit older and more chill.
People have bad impressions of the Jersey Shore because of the damn show, but it’s nothing like that. Some think that shore houses are full of deadbeats, but we’re actually all pretty legitimate human beings. The average age is thirty-three, and we have two lawyers, a hedge-fund guy, and financial advisors. Everyone has real jobs. It’s not just a bunch of guidos—there are actually only two or three Italians in the house. There are a few similarities to the show—there’s definitely drama—but nothing that serious. I’ve never seen anyone get into a fight.
This past summer, only five of us came back, so we had a fifteen-person turnover. We struggled a bit with finding housemates, because you have to sign people up as early as March. I recruited a few people from college, so we had about ten people committed before we put our Craigslist ad out, which filled the rest of the spots. We interview everyone before we take their money—we don’t want crazy psycho people. The commitment is from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The full share is $2,000 for the summer and $1,500 for a half share, which covers rent, utilities, the party fund, and a cleaning lady. Some homes operate with half shares that have alternating schedules so that lots of people can come down, but with our house, you can come down whenever. The only reason we have full shares and half shares is because full shares have their own space, with a bed and dresser. Half shares aren’t guaranteed that kind of space when they come down. If a full-share bed is open while they’re here, they have dibs on it. But if not, they sleep on one of five or six couches.
Every member of the house can come whenever they want. Our rule is that guests have to bring a thirty-pack or a bottle of liquor to the house. Some houses charge guests, but we’re very relaxed. You can bring as many guests as you want; some will bring two or three people. I rarely bring people down—I don’t like mixing my worlds. The house can get really full, with people sleeping on the floor without blankets or pillows, or on deflated air mattresses.
Everyone shares rooms at the house. Two years ago, I shared a room with this girl Erica, who I had just met. On the very first weekend, over Memorial Day, she hooked up with my best guy friend, Tim. No one knew they were secretly hooking up for about a month or so. I spent hours and hours on the phone with him every night, talking it out. Fast-forward a year later, and they’re now moving in together. You don’t get to choose who you bunk up with, but Tim thought Erica and I would be a good fit. I met her at the house, and she’s one of my best friends now.
My role in the house is being everyone’s friend. Everyone tells me everything, I hang out with everyone, and I don’t like to cause drama. I go down to the shore house to have a good time. There’s a girl in our house who on the very first weekend of the summer started hooking up with—but not sleeping with—one of the guys in the house. While that was fizzling out, she told me drunkenly that she hooked up with another male housemate back at home in Hoboken. Basically, she started liking him, and he didn’t like her back—it was all very high school, and they often had late-night drunken arguments. It got really drawn out, and he wanted nothing to do with her. On the Fourth of July, he brought two girls back to the house and walked in right in front of her. She had a conniption and stormed out of the house. People tend to avoid going down on the same weekend after they’ve hooked up.
This past summer, I lived with Amy, a thirty-one-year-old divorcée from New York. She decided to do the shore house to meet new friends. I got a weird vibe from her from day one—she is a skinny, pretty woman and I could tell she liked to be the center of attention in front of guys. I didn’t think I would like her.
The summer before, I’d been hooking up with the landlord’s son. I was twenty-nine and he was twenty-five—he’s a cute all-American boy. It wasn’t anything serious, and we even went skiing together in the winter. But I told myself I wasn’t going to get involved again this year, because it was too much pressure. On Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, I saw the landlord’s son and my roommate Amy, the divorcée, at a bar, and I knew the two of them were going to hook up.
Two days later, on Monday, I went to our room and the door was closed. I knocked, and she said, “Just a minute!” I could hear clothes and a guy’s voice. Three minutes later Amy opened the doors, and they were both in there. I turned white as a ghost. They hooked up all summer, and I kept walking in on them because she didn’t lock the door. It could have been weird, but it wasn’t because I’m not interested in him anymore—mainly because I started seeing someone else at the shore house. My guy is thirty-eight, and he’s been divorced for a year and a half, because his wife cheated on him with a guy who was at their wedding.
One Sunday morning, I was in bed with my guy, and the landlord’s son came in and climbed into bed with Amy. The four of us were pillow talking for over an hour. In my head, I was like, What has my life come to? We were sitting there gabbing like two couples.
I broke my no-house-hookup rule this summer, but there’s no drama with us. We actually like each other, and it’s fun. I generally don’t hook up with housemates because nine times out of ten it turns into a di
saster. But what’s interesting is that a lot of romance stems from the house. Off the top of my head right now, I can think of five couples who met at the house who are engaged or married. I’m going to a wedding in two weeks, a couple got engaged in February, and a couple weekends ago, two separate sets of couples who met at the house got engaged. My friends Tim and Erica are moving in together, and there’s no doubt in my mind they’ll eventually get married. They say you can’t find love on the Jersey Shore, but I know many who have.
—K, 30 (F)
THE ROOMANCE
WHEN I FIRST MOVED into a shared house in Toronto, I arrived a day before all of my other roommates. I moved from across the country into an empty room without furniture and slept on the floor on a pile of my clothes. I felt incredibly sorry for myself, because I had no friends yet and didn’t know what my three roommates looked like or what kind of people they were—I’d met them all online through my brother.
The next day, Liz showed up with a U-Haul and her boyfriend. I tried to help her move in, but felt out of place because they were older than me. That’s when Greg, another roommate, came in the door. And I kid you not, it was love at first sight. I couldn’t stop staring at him—he looks like James Dean and is not hard to look at. He had a way of breezing into a room and charming people by being mysterious and interesting. We lived together for two years, and I always felt like I wore my affection on my sleeve a little too much. He had a girlfriend, so I never put myself out there or made it obvious. And he was older than me by five years, which felt like a big gap at the time.
My pile of clothes eventually turned into a mattress on the floor, and that’s how I lived for two years. Greg, on the other hand, had a nice adult room with furniture. The wall that we shared was actually quite thin, and sometimes when I was getting something out of my closet, I could hear him doing the same thing, and it gave me a weird sense of excitement knowing he was on the other side of the wall. I adored him from the beginning. It was as if he could do nothing wrong. I’m the youngest in my family and have always felt like I’m not taken seriously around older people. I felt like he thought of me as a silly little girl. I used to run to the bathroom in my underwear and a tank top, or fly around the house in a whirlwind. I was the girl with three jobs and not a care in the world. There were a few instances while we were living together where I got a glimpse that the crush was maybe mutual. But Greg is very good at holding his cards close to his chest, and it was never enough for me to tell him that I liked him and see what happened.
Once, we were in the backyard waiting for the friends he had invited over for a barbecue. For some reason, people weren’t showing up, and he had bought a bunch of beer and food. It was the two of us sitting around, me pretending to read my book and he probably doing the same. We never shared a lot of words or developed a good rapport.
It was a beautiful day out, and after a long silence, he looked over and said, “Why don’t you go put on a sundress?” I’ve never been spoken to like that before. It was one of those things that makes your stomach do backflips and gets you all hot and bothered. The way he said such a simple thing was really sexy. The book went flying out of my hand, and I ran upstairs and tried on four or five dresses, and came down after settling on a yellow one. But at the same time I was running downstairs to make my little debut, a bunch of his friends showed up, and the moment was lost.
We had these little moments over and over again. Once we were both hungover and spent Saturday morning in the living room, passed out on two couches that formed an L-shape. Our heads were close, and he took out his guitar and played some of his favorite songs for me—it was very intimate.
While in Toronto, I was traveling quite a bit for work—I was gone for a few months at a time on assignments. I remember missing home, and he once wrote me an e-mail out of the blue. When I got home, my roommates teased me about how he had brought me up in conversation several times over the past few months. I kept getting excited that maybe he liked me, but there was no indication from him that he ever did.
Eventually, he was accepted into school in Los Angeles and moved there with his girlfriend, who was a stern older woman. She was a decade older than me, so that was another weird factor. The day before he left, he mentioned that he was having good-bye drinks at a bar and that we should stop by. I was working three jobs back-to-back in a single day at the time, and when I got to the bar, everyone was gone. I went home thinking I’d run into him there and he’d be drunk and maybe I’d finally tell him how I felt before he left. But I got home and nobody was there and it was a big empty house again, because everyone had started moving their things out. That’s when it began to set in that this nice little phase of my life was over. I got bold and texted him that I wished I’d had the chance to say good-bye, and he responded with something stoic and nondescript, like “Oh, too bad.” He’s a man of few words. And that’s where I tipped my hand and said, “Probably better this way.”
Sure enough, he went to Los Angeles and I didn’t hear from him for months. It was about six months later when I found out from Liz that he had broken up with his girlfriend. And in the same year, Liz got engaged to the same boyfriend who had helped her move in.
I was single, still living in Toronto, and going through a series of nonrelationships. I had dated some people, but it never clicked. Then Liz’s wedding came around, and I sent Greg an e-mail to ask if he was going. He wrote back that he wasn’t sure of his schedule. I have a tendency to be jokingly bossy, and I told him he had to come because we owed it to Liz, who had brought us all together, and that it would be fun. And he wrote back, “Okay.” Which you can interpret in a hundred different ways—that was always my struggle with him, that it was impossible to glean any subtext.
We made a plan to go to the wedding together, and the format was that you could either stay at a bed-and-breakfast or at a campsite. I come from a family of campers but have never attempted to go camping myself. I had it in my head that it would be so romantic if the two of us camped out together. I wasn’t thinking of ambushing him with romance, just that it would be nice and quaint and Canadian if we camped together. I asked if he was getting a room or if he wanted to crash in my tent with me—which was a total lie, I didn’t even own a tent. I’d never actually camped before, but I made it sound like I did it all the time. He said he’d stay with me because it was cheaper. So I went to a camping equipment store and bought a tent and the nicest sleeping bags you can get. I was so excited and finally making money at my job, so I went all out with my camping gear. When I showed up, I looked like a pro.
We’d also decided to rent a car, but I didn’t have my license so he was the one driving. We made a plan to meet at the Montreal airport, and I showed up an hour or so early. I’d recently gotten back from a two-week sailing trip, and had a great tan, really blond hair, glowing skin, and was feeling very good about life in general. He came through the double doors in the arrival area, we looked at each other, and neither of us knew that the other was single at this point, but I was assuming so and so was he. He gave me this huge, whole-body hug, and then ran to the car rental counter to start dealing with things. And I popped in my iPod and started listening to Arcade Fire. I was trying to be cool, even though I was hot and bothered.
We were spending the first night in Montreal at our fourth roommate Karen’s place, and assumed she had a guest room. But she just had a twin-size futon that would have only fit a child. It was long enough to lie down on but not even comfortable enough for one person to sleep on. Greg made a hilarious attempt to get comfortable in the armchair, and indicated that he would sleep with his head cocked to the side. I told him we could share the futon, and we wound up very carefully lying next to each other on this twin-size futon without touching each other. We were acting like teenagers who had been forbidden from any sexual contact. Karen had an adorable cat with little mutated mitts—six fingers on each paw. The cat, who had loved to cuddle with me back in Toronto, jumped on the bed and started st
epping over us and remembering us. We were both petting the cat because it was between us, and our hands touched. Then the cat jumped off, and we started awkwardly telling each other stories because we were both a bit too wired to go to sleep. The cat then jumped up on the other side of me and pressed itself against my side, sprawling out and taking up space. So that forced me to move a little closer, and at this point, Greg and I realized we only had four hours to sleep before we had to get up and go. We fell asleep nose-to-nose, forehead-to-forehead, and every four minutes or so we both moved a millimeter in the same direction, so by the time we woke up, his arm had curved around my head and was holding me in a nice way. I woke up before him and peeled myself out of bed. I felt like it was the most intimate sleep I’d ever had, and there was something very familiar about it but also very respectful.
On the drive up to the wedding, we had a friend’s mom with us who needed a ride. I had hoped it would be just the two of us and that it would be an opportunity to find out what happened with the ex-girlfriend, but the fifty-five-year-old social worker in the backseat kept telling us stories about her work and her drum circle. She was lovely, but the whole time I was looking at him for some sign that what had happened to me last night had also happened to him.
When we arrived at the wedding, things were bustling and we had to change quickly. I’d actually brought the same yellow sundress that I wore in the backyard the time he told me to put on a dress, and I wasn’t sure if he would remember. We were in the social worker’s bed-and-breakfast room, and this woman was very liberal, whipping her clothes off and standing around naked. I was trying to be discreet, but in my mind, I was thinking, Great, the first time he sees me with my shirt off is in the context of rapidly changing for a wedding with a middle-aged woman in the room with her breasts hanging out—not exactly romantic.
