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by Matteson Perry

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  For my wife, who somehow managed to be nothing but supportive of a book about all the women I slept with before I met her

  PROLOGUE

  I Dated a Manic Pixie Dream Girl

  ACT I

  We lay next to each other in bed, sweaty and breathing hard. My air conditioner was doing its best to chase away the heat, but the New York City humidity hung in the air. Moonlight from the window illuminated the tattoo of a phoenix covering the left side of her torso. I traced it with my finger, from below her armpit, over the speed bumps of her ribs, to her hip bone. I had only seen tattoos like this in the movies, never in person, never this close, never in my own bed.

  I had found my very own Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

  The Manic Pixie Dream Girl has become the ingénue of millennials. Nathan Rabin coined the term while writing for The A.V. Club to describe the love interest in Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, but the character type has existed through the ages. Think Natalie Portman in Garden State or Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Go back further and find Esmeralda from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Admittedly, she had mixed results in snapping Quasimodo out of the doldrums of life, but still, she qualifies.

  The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, more a collection of quirks than a person, is the perfect love interest for the sensitive male protagonist. These weird (but always beautiful) girls appreciate shy, sad, creative boys and teach them to enjoy life again through sex, love, and various activities done in the rain.

  Though often perky, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is frequently troubled. She straddles the narrow line between quirky and crazy, mysterious and strange, sexy and slutty; she is perfectly imperfect. And imperfection is the key. A Manic Pixie Dream Girl must be messed up enough to need saving, so the powerless guy has something heroic to do in the third act.

  I met my Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Kelly, in a sketch comedy class where, on the first day, she wore a bright red dress and cowboy boots. She had a look a guy might describe as “exotic,” though she’d punch him in the arm if he used that term. She had a boyfriend, so we couldn’t date, but we began chatting online, learning about each other’s lives while trading YouTube clips of Saturday Night Live sketches.

  One hot summer afternoon, we met at a bar with the intention of writing sketches together, but our plans changed, as they often do with Manic Pixie Dream Girls. We never opened our notebooks and instead went on an impromptu bar crawl. Each stop found us a bit drunker and soon our knees were touching under tables and our shoulders brushing together as we walked. The night ended with a drunken attempted kiss, by me, which she ducked.

  “I can’t cheat on my boyfriend,” she said. “Even if things aren’t going well and he doesn’t understand me.”

  Not going well. There was hope. And I understood her. I understood her so bad.

  We hugged goodbye and our skin, sticky from a day of sweating, stuck together slightly as we separated, a physical attestation of what I hoped we both felt. Turned out I was right. Within a month she broke up with her boyfriend, and not long after, she and her tattoo ended up in my bed.

  ACT II

  I’m not a socially awkward nerd by any means, but I’m not cool in the classic sense, either. For example, I secretly enjoy doing my taxes. Kelly, though, she was cool. She could instantly procure a drink at a hopelessly crowded bar and talk her way into invite-only parties. Being cool seemed so effortless for her and being around her made me feel cool by proxy. She was my human VIP pass.

  My Manic Pixie Dream Girl was either all in or all out on everything she did, so things moved quickly. We spent that summer acting out our own “They’re falling in love” movie montage. We lay in Central Park and stared at the sky; ate moules-frites at a dimly lit Brooklyn restaurant; tasted the salt on each other’s skin after a night spent dancing; listened to the rain from bed (unfortunately there are no barns filled with straw in New York City, or we could have gone full Nicholas Sparks).

  But it wasn’t a blind “everything’s perfect” love. Things about Kelly bothered me. I much preferred the Kelly I got when we were alone to the one who emerged at parties and bounced from person to person like a coked-up politician trying too hard to impress. She had a propensity for being late, suffered panic attacks, and had a streak of jealousy. She was my opposite in so many ways—impulsive, erratic, electric. But I loved Kelly anyway and this, for me, was a sign I’d found “true love.” Kelly wasn’t perfect, but she was perfectly imperfect. Within a year we moved to Los Angeles together.

  ACT III

  “What will happen to them if we break up?” Kelly asked. We were in a CB2 store, home of modern furniture that looks better in the showroom than in your house, discussing dining room chairs, our first big purchase as a couple.

  I laughed off her question.

  “I’m serious,” she said.

  “We’re not going to break up,” I said with a hug, “and if we do, what happens to these chairs will be the least of our worries.”

  Kelly wasn’t convinced. On the ride home she played with her iPhone case, taking it on and off, on and off, as she stared out the window. We’d barely carried the chairs inside when the tears started. She paced around our mostly empty new apartment listing the reasons our relationship was doomed, why we shouldn’t be buying things together.

  The fight lasted several hours. Kelly attacked the soundness of our relationship while I defended it. My arguments were rational, while hers were rooted in emotion. Eventually, I logic-bullied her into surrender, convincing her that her emotions were wrong. Of course, a person’s emotions can never be “wrong,” even if they can’t “defend” them, but for the moment I’d “won.”

  “I’m sorry about last night,” she said the next morning. “I love the chairs and I love you.”

  “It’s okay. I love you too,” I said, before following up with the rallying cry of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl’s boyfriend—“Everything’s going to be all right.”

  Her smile said she believed me. It felt like I was “rescuing” her, and she seemed to like being “rescued.”

  As per the script, my Manic Pixie Dream Girl saved me from being a square in Act I, bringing excitement and coolness to my life, but here in Act III, it was my turn to do the saving. Being strong for her made me feel stronger. This feeling, of “fixing” someone, is the true gift of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

  This is the moment when the movie usually ends, right after the man has told the Manic Pixie Dream Girl everything will be all right and fixed her with his love. Then the credits roll, pausing the story in a moment of eternal joy.

  What makes movies magical is not that incredible things happen in them; incredible things happen in real life too. No, what makes movies magical is they end right after the incredible thing happens. They stop when the war is over, after the team wins the championship, after the boy gets the girl. But life keeps going, even when it’s inconvenient for the narrative.

  ACT IV

  (The Act You Don’t See in Movies)

  Our relationship carried on for another two years and it was, for the most part, happy. I got along with her family. We had good sex. I made strides toward my goal of being a professional writer and Kelly had exciting things happening in her career. We got a dog too, at Kelly’s prompting.

  While jointly owning a dining room set terrified her, the idea of raising a living creature together didn’t seem to faze her. We named th
e adorable beagle puppy Murray (after Bill Murray), and I felt like the three of us were a real family. Thanks to the healthy cynicism regarding marriage any child of divorce should have, I wasn’t in a rush to get married, but I could see us heading that way someday.

  But “Happily Ever After” is too boring for a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

  The blowups became more frequent. Small incidents like my not getting a sketch she wrote or asking an (I thought) innocent question about a job interview would set her off. The fights often escalated into an indictment of our entire relationship. As we approached our three-year anniversary, things got worse. Kelly was laid off from her day job and when employment leads dried up, a bout of depression set in. I paid extra bills and tried to stay positive, but telling her “Everything’s going to be all right” no longer worked. She became withdrawn, quiet, and cold. We stopped having sex and she took up smoking cigarettes for the first time since I’d known her. But I didn’t consider breaking up. I held to the belief that her reservations were about her insecurities, not our relationship. This was “true love,” which meant every pain was worth enduring, every issue worth fixing. Even if one of the issues was my partner telling me she didn’t want to be with me. I wouldn’t let something subtle like that dissuade me. I just needed to love harder, to fix more.

  But we hadn’t hit rock bottom yet.

  One night, I awoke at 3:30 a.m. to find Kelly hadn’t come home or called. She wouldn’t pick up her phone and with each call I grew more upset, vacillating between worry and anger. I hated Voicemail-Greeting-Kelly for acting so perky when she KNEW I was incensed. The real Kelly, clearly drunk, finally answered at almost 5:00 a.m.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” I asked.

  “I forgot,” she said and offered no further explanation.

  “Do you want me to come pick you up?”

  “No, I’m still having fun, I’ll just crash here,” she said as she hung up.

  I didn’t know where “here” was. As I put down the phone, I realized I’d been hoping she was in trouble—at least then I’d have a problem to solve. But she didn’t need or want my help.

  The next morning she came home around 9:00 a.m., and her lack of balance revealed she hadn’t yet crossed from drunk to hungover. I questioned her about her night, but I was more disapproving parent than angry lover, playing my role of the rational, square boyfriend. She offered a perfunctory apology and went to sleep.

  This pattern repeated itself often. At night she played the Manic Pixie Dream Girl for other people, during the day I got the Hungover Depressed Pixie Nightmare. She explained her behavior by saying she was going through a rough patch and needed space.

  At the end of the summer I went on a camping trip to Lake Powell with friends, thinking it would be good to have a little time apart. Before I left, I wrote Kelly a letter in which I acknowledged for the first time that our relationship might be unstable. But I also asked her to consider that this could be a temporary rough patch worth riding out. I ended with this paragraph:

  I know this letter won’t fix anything. Change will take time. But I still needed to write it, to let you know how much I love and care for you. I know my love can’t fix what’s wrong, but I want you to know it’s here just the same, and it always will be.

  I left the letter on her desk with a bouquet of flowers.

  * * *

  I spent the half-day drive to Lake Powell waiting for her to call, but the phone sat in the cupholder silent for hours and hours, miles and miles. Late in the afternoon it finally beeped—not a call, but a text message. She thanked me for the flowers but didn’t mention the letter.

  When I said in my letter that my love couldn’t fix her depression, I was lying. I TOTALLY thought my love could fix EVERYTHING. That letter was my Grand Romantic Gesture, the one that saves the relationship and the girl. It was my Lloyd Dobler moment, holding a boom box over my head and blasting “In Your Eyes.” In the movies the romantic gesture always works, but it failed me in real life. This was like Diane Court coming to the window only to shut it so she could go back to sleep. I gave her my heart; she thanked me for the $12.99 flowers.

  I drove back to LA a few days later smelling of campfire and knowing my relationship was probably over. When I got home, Murray ran up to me with her tail wagging; Kelly barely looked up from her movie. I stood at the door, bag in hand, waiting for her to say something about the letter. If it couldn’t save the relationship, she had to at least acknowledge it existed, right? But she said nothing. A week later, Kelly still hadn’t mentioned the letter and neither had I.

  “What’s going on with us?” I asked one morning while she made coffee.

  “I told you,” she said, “I’m just having a hard time right now.”

  She tried to leave the kitchen, but I stepped in her way.

  “That’s not a good enough answer anymore.”

  She stared at me with her big eyes, the same eyes that had been filled with so much affection three years earlier when she’d told me she loved me for the first time. Now they just looked tired.

  “I’m going to move in with my brother,” she said.

  “Temporarily?”

  “No.”

  “But we got a puppy together,” I said.

  I let the statement hang in the air, as if it explained away everything. We’d only gotten Murray four months earlier—who gets a puppy with someone they want to dump? A puppy’s not like a child; you can’t have one by accident. No one has too much wine, pulls out late, and ends up with a puppy. A puppy is a choice. As recently as four months ago she’d CHOSEN for us to get a dog, which meant she’d believed in there being an “us.”

  The problem with this logic was that Kelly didn’t abide by logic. She’d wanted a puppy so she’d gotten a puppy, and now she didn’t want to be with me so she wasn’t going to be with me. I was trying to explain away her emotions, but the ploy didn’t work anymore. No longer all in on me, Kelly was all out. She left that day. My love couldn’t “fix” her, and even worse, she didn’t want to be fixed. Needing to be fixed is rule number one for being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl—how could she ignore it? I don’t know, but she did, leaving our story to end not with credits rolling, but with crying and the division of possessions. I kept the dining room chairs and puppy; she kept the old-timey typewriters.

  * * *

  We’ve all had our heart broken. This book is about what happened to me after that heartbreak. And brunch. This book is also about brunch.

  Part I

  * * *

  YOU TOO CAN BE A CASUAL DATER

  1

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  A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY LOVE LIFE

  At the age of thirty, I was single for the first time in three years, though it might as well have been a decade. Here’s a brief look at my dating history to show you what I mean.

  Age: 0–13

  Girlfriend: John Elway (Quarterback for the Denver Broncos)

  Description: Prepubescent and blissfully uninterested in sex or girls, my attention was focused mainly on my sports hero. It was a very clearheaded time in my life.

  Length of Relationship: 13 years

  Age: 13–18

  Girlfriend: My Hand (and Various Pillows)

  Description: I discovered masturbation. It was spectacular. I had few dates, fewer kisses, and no girlfriends, but my friend masturbation was always there for me.

  Length of Relationship: 5 years (Admission—we still see each other quite a bit.)

  Age: 18–22

  Girlfriend: Maria (First Love)

  Description: We met during college orientation and dated for all four years of school. She was my first girlfriend and it was a wonderful relationship that only ended because neither of us wanted to marry the first person we’d dated.

  Length of Relationship: 3.5 years

  Age: 22–23

  The Slump

  Description: I didn’t date or have sex with anyone for over a year. I’d gotten a girlfriend in colleg
e so quickly I hadn’t figured out how to interact with girls well.

  Length of Slump: 1.5 years

  Age: 23–25

  Girlfriend: Samantha (The One I Wasn’t Ready for)

  Description: Samantha was beautiful, kind, and a good girlfriend, but I was too immature to be a good boyfriend. I moved to New York City without her but didn’t have the courage to end the relationship. We did long-distance for six months before I broke up with her over the phone because I had a crush on someone else.

  Length of Relationship: 2.5 years

  Time Single: Three weeks

  Age: 25–27

  Girlfriend: Ann (The Rebound)

  Description: My crush on Ann finally made me end my relationship with Samantha. We dated for over a year and a half without saying I love you once (more on this later). I stayed in the relationship six months longer than I should have because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

  Length of Relationship: 1.5 years

  Time Single: 72 hours (seriously)

  Age: 27

  Girlfriend: Melanie (The Friend)

  Description: I’d known Melanie since high school and there’d always seemed to be a mutual attraction, but we were never simultaneously single. Three days after I broke up with Ann, while back home for Christmas, Melanie and I hooked up. Our passionate, but rocky, three-month, long-distance relationship ended with her dumping me because she loved me as a friend, but not romantically.

  Length of Relationship: Three months

  Time Single: Three months

  Age: 27–30

  Girlfriend: Kelly (Manic Pixie Dream Girl)

  Description: You know ALL about this one already.