by Sarah Fuller
I could have said ‘I absolutely fucking mind,’ but that would have made me an asshole mother. These lessons were about her development, not my own frustrations. I couldn’t refuse to take her to the lessons, even if I had been duped into this whole thing. Why can’t we have lessons at a music school like normal people? I thought about buying a piano just to shove it to him, but I hate dusting furniture.
Week after week, I brought Eleanor over to my ex-husband’s house and sat there during her lessons while he eyed me from the corner. Strangely, he was always working from home on the days she had lessons.
George didn’t get that he was trying to keep me close even after letting me go. He firmly believed he was only offering his daughter convenient lessons in the comfort of home. I knew better.
I didn’t want to stalk my ex-husband on social media; I wanted to get as far from him as possible.
“Every time George messages you about something, you scowl,” Jane said to me one day.
“Well, it’s usually about something revolting, like how Eleanor mentioned she can’t find the stuffed animal his girlfriend gave her,” I answered. “‘Sarah, where’s the stuffed wolf? Did you get rid of it?’” I did my George voice, which was filled with frustrated sighs.
“You stiffen up before you even view the text message he sent,” Jane observed.
“I’m just used to the drama. He likes to scold me for my bad behavior.” Again, I used my George voice and said, “‘Eleanor says you let her sleep in your bed. Is that because you allowed her to watch Jurassic Park? She needs to sleep on her own.’”
“Well,” Jane began, “why don’t you change his profile picture on your phone to something that will make you laugh? That way, when he messages you, you smile instead.”
That was a brilliant idea.
The next time George messaged me, a picture of a horse’s ass popped up. I laughed, immediately more relaxed than before. Then I read his message: “Are you still walking Eleanor into school? She’s in second grade and can do curbside drop off.”
I was planning on holding her hand and walking her into school until she was twenty-one. Hell, if the kid still fit in my Ergo child carrier, I’d have her strapped to my chest.
George had gone out of town for a while, meaning I didn’t have him stalking me while I was at his house for Eleanor’s lessons. It was nice.
Then one day, we walked up to the house, and I unlocked the door.
“Hey, ladies,” a bodiless voice said.
I looked around, recognizing George’s voice. He was nowhere to be found. He was supposed to be out of town. Immediately, I wondered if he was hiding in the bushes, upping his stalker game.
“I’m up here,” George said.
I looked up to see one of those Ring video cameras, peering down at us.
“Oh,” I said, putting this all together.
“I got this so that even though I’m not there, I can still sort of be there,” he stated.
“How nice,” I said, keeping the frustration out of my voice.
“Well, and so criminals don’t steal my Amazon Prime shipments,” George added.
No, I didn’t give a fuck what George was doing on social media. I needed more time away from him, not more information on his life. It was bad enough that I had to sit around in his house and wonder whose scarf was hanging on the coat rack, or why he had a pink yoga mat.
When my ex-boyfriend and I broke up, I blocked him on social media immediately. That seemed like the easy solution. I’d never really looked at his profile much, since he paid for Instagram followers.
This has become a serious epidemic with the dating world. Seriously, I don’t think I have enough followers to get a real catch of a man. Maybe only enough to get like a four on a scale of one to ten. I don’t want to date an ugly guy, though. And guys who are tens are only dating women with over ten thousand Instagram followers.
Instagram is even hooked into the dating app, to make stalking easier. Now, not only do I get to see a man’s horrible choices for profile pictures, but I also get his Instagram account, which includes the number of followers and pictures of every meal he’s eaten at some dumb gastropub.
Cool, you had buffalo cauliflower and short rib tacos like every other pretentious hipster in this city. Glad you took the time to document it.
I was at a bar the other day with Pelé. Because she can easily talk to a man, she asked one for his Instagram handle.
“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked. “He’s right here in the flesh and blood. Just talk to him.”
Neither of them was interested in my reasoning.
He pulled up his profile on his phone and handed it to her.
“Wow, you have less than a hundred followers,” she stated, reviewing his profile.
He blushed. “Well, it’s mostly just my family and friends who follow me. I’m not on there very much.”
She gave him a punishing look like he’d just said he didn’t vote or pay his taxes.
“How many followers should I have?” the guy asked.
Pelé pulled up her own profile on his phone and showed it to him. “That’s a healthy Instagram.”
His eyes widened. “Whoa, you have thirty-five thousand two hundred followers?”
She tapped the screen, making it so he was now following her. “Thirty-five thousand two hundred-and-one.”
I had so much to learn from this woman. All I cared about were brains and abs, but apparently, I needed to be qualifying prospective partners based on their social media presence. No wonder I was divorced.
There are so many things an Instagram profile can say about a person. When I thought about it, I realized that my ex-boyfriend’s profile was mostly pictures of himself. That should have been a red flag right there. And then there were all the click farms he used.
One day, he offered to hook me up with the service, and I shook my head. “That’s okay,” I stated. “I don’t pay people to like me.”
Unfortunately, I know for a fact that my exes don’t have the same policy about not stalking me on social media.
One day, Connor called me. “Hey, I noticed in the background of your picture on Instagram that your shelf looked different.”
“I dusted,” I stated. “It was horrible. I think I’m just going to throw out the shelf next time to make chores easier.”
“Oh, I was just wondering what happened to the knick-knacks and stuff that I got for you that you used to keep there?”
I chewed on my lip, wondering how best to respond. “Look, I got rid of that stuff. I really needed to move on, and that seemed like the best way.”
“Oh,” he said, the devastation heavy in his voice.
‘I hate clutter’ would have been a better response, but I have no tact.
If there were no social media, this wouldn’t be a problem. Back in the day when a couple broke up, people had to go to great lengths to stalk each other. They might go through each other’s trashcan or hide in the car down the block from their house. Now everything was out there so that anyone could find anything about anyone.
“I don’t know how to keep my ex-boyfriends from stalking me on social media without being weird,” I told Zoe. “I feel like I can’t post anything because I worry about hurting their feelings or their mother seeing it, or one of our mutual friends.”
“Your problem is real,” she said with a sigh. “Just blocking them isn’t enough.”
I shook my head. “We’re all connected, and I don’t mean in the etheric, awesome way.”
“Well, what you really want is for him to leave you alone, correct?” she asked.
“Yeah, exactly,” I stated.
“Okay, well, why don’t you do what you used to when you wanted him to leave you alone? Give him a real-world problem, and he’ll get a stomachache and be out for a week. How about that?”
I smiled at my friend. “I only wish it were that easy. That only worked when we were together.”
“
Yeah, I always admired the way you got guys to leave you alone when you wanted to marathon Vampire Diaries,” she stated.
I’m a problem solver, but I don’t know how to deal with my exes on social media. I’ve just decided it’s a free country and let it go. They might get their feelings hurt when they see me with someone else, but their emotions are no longer mine to manage. We aren’t together, and I’ve moved on.
“The worst is when you date a guy from the app, and then things don’t work out and you go back on there,” Alissa said.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Did you match with your ex again?”
“No, but his profile came up, and before I swiped left, I read his bio,” she explained. “He had all new photos and described himself as ‘a man looking for a long-term relationship.’”
I shook my head. “And that’s a bad thing?”
“He broke up with me because he said he wasn’t ready for a long-term relationship,” she replied.
I let out a sound like I’d been burned. “Damn, that’s low.”
Social media is a mind-fuck when it comes to dating and relationships.
I’m not a total asshole, even if I describe myself that way. I care about George and our working relationship. I often say sharing Eleanor is like we share a car. We may not get along, but we need to coordinate on car repairs and maintenance. Many times, I worry if he’s off-roading with my baby or going to bring her back with her fuel low and her tires bald.
It isn’t easy sharing a child, but the alternative is totally not acceptable, and I think that for all my complaints, George and I do pretty well in getting along. I didn’t want to do anything to sabotage that, so when I started writing this book, I called George up.
“Hey, I wanted to tell you something.”
“You’re writing a book about your dating life,” he said.
“Oh, so you saw?” I asked.
“Yeah, on Instagram,” he answered.
Of course, the stalker did. “Yeah, well, it’s really about me and how I’m an asshole. I don’t mention you much.”
“Much?” he inquired.
“There’s a small mention of Hooker Shoes and how I’m a ruthless bitch and divorced you,” I stated.
He sighed, as he always did when I mentioned the ex-girlfriend.
“I know it’s got to be weird for me to have my life, our old life, out there for others to read about, but I want you to know I’ll respect anything you want to keep private.”
“It’s okay,” he said after a long moment. “Our lives have become transparent, it seems. What’s the point in hiding it?”
And right then, I realized that social media had done me a favor. It had desensitized my ex to everything. If it weren’t for the things he didn’t want to see already being on Instagram, he might not have been so amenable.
It’s weird to date in a day and age when so many have access to our lives. However, I want to believe that it means that out there is the right guy, who portrays himself on Instagram in a way that doesn’t make me want to puke. This guy would have only a couple of pictures of himself on Instagram; mostly, his profile would be snapshots of his dog and the elderly he reads to on the weekend. He’d have zero photos of his food, but dozens of pictures of the books he’s reading. And his Spotify profile would look pretty much the same as mine. I really need to be with someone who shares my obsession with mellow West Coast indie music but doesn’t have a beard.
Maybe I was looking at this all wrong. Maybe having access to Instagram profiles gave me the ability to disqualify the losers and bad decision-makers faster. Like, if I would have seen my ex-boyfriend’s profile in the beginning, I would have found the slew of selfies, known he was obsessed with himself, and moved on.
And then there was the surgeon on Bumble. On his Instagram, he had a ton of selfies set in the operating room. Uhhh…is it sanitary for you to be holding your phone next to that open body? My mother would have said to overlook that and encourage the surgeon to put a ring on this finger. However, his bad Instagram decisions told me all I needed to know. Swipe left.
Just like the guy whose Instagram was full of “throwback Thursday” pictures. Dude, no one needs to see all your baby photos. You’re obviously living in the past. Thank you, Instagram, for saving me from that nostalgic freak.
I’m not giving up on this dating app, or the rat-race that is dating in LA, but I might be outsourcing.
I’ve found that all my married friends are absolutely obsessed with swiping through my Bumble, and I have taken to loaning out my phone to them at dinner parties. They love me. They know me. They want what’s best for me. I feel like they should be able to match me with a reasonable guy.
At the last party, my friend Mike and his mother sat on the couch, swiping through my dating app, trying to match me to the perfect man. A wonderful mother and son activity.
It was a bit mortifying, but I had to let it go. This was what I had come to.
And it wasn’t so bad; I’d met a lot of fun people because of the dating app. I hoped to meet a lot of even better people. Ones who were right for me. Better for me than the ones I had met, than the ones who hadn’t worked out. Not that there was anything wrong with my exes, but they were that for a reason.
Why was I moving forward if I wasn’t going to improve? Find the person who was more compatible with me as I aged, unlike George. Find the one who I wanted around all the time, unlike my ex-boyfriends. I needed to find the man who didn’t make me want to drink.
Although the guy who said that he wanted to take me day drinking on our first date might be my soulmate. We will have to see.
“Oh, Sarah!” Mike said excitedly from the couch, his mother cuddled in close to him as he swiped through my phone. “I think I found the perfect guy for you. He’s into physics, art, and books.” He turned the phone around so I could see the picture of the guy, who I recognized.
It was the Italian—or as I called him, Seth Rogen. A match I’d been there and done that with. He had a new profile picture and had added to his bio: “Looking for a religious woman who doesn’t mind if I fall asleep on her couch.”
I’d forgotten that I told Rogen the crucifix above his bed scared me. It was mostly because I was afraid of getting impaled by it during an earthquake, but he’d taken religious offense.
I laughed. “Yeah, swipe left,” I told Mike. “I know Rogen.”
He and his mother gave me a confused expression.
“He’s nice, but we’ve moved on from each other,” I said.
Thanks to social media, I knew that Rogen was still out there looking for his Ms. Right. And I’d helped him to figure out what he didn’t want. I’m grateful I could do that for so many men.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Can I Pay To Do Your Job?
It is more expensive to live in LA than on Mars. Okay, I get that this is a bit of an exaggeration, but still, you get the point.
There are more expensive cities in the United States to live, but still, LA remains right at the tippy-top.
For that reason, you’d think that Los Angelians would be squirreling away their money, preparing for the next housing cost spike. However, the reality is that the hipsters spend their barista tips on things that no one should pay for, the rich housewives throw money away on fake experiences, and even I have been known to be duped into giving my hard-earned cash away for something fucking ridiculous.
The other day, I paid someone so that Eleanor could brush their sheep. Yes, it’s true. Afterward, I was like, Wait! I fucking paid so my child could be a farmhand?
I’d taken Eleanor to this commercial “family” farm outside the city. On the weekends, the city folk line up for tractor rides and fruit picking. I’ve gotten conned into that fruit-picking shit way too many times.
‘Great, you want me to pay you extra so that I can get eaten up by bugs and pick my own damn strawberries?! Where do I sign up?’
At this place, the farmer literally said during the tour,
“Most of the good strawberries have already been picked. You can buy those at the general store as you leave. But if you want the chance to hunt around just for the experience, then exit to the left.”
Every fucking moron on the truck stood up. Including me.
After picking tangerines, which I couldn’t eat because they weren’t allowed on the Keto diet, we went and pulled up some beets. I also wasn’t going to eat the dirty beets, because I’m not allowed to eat foods that grow under the ground. However, Eleanor wanted the experience of pulling up beets, so I paid for it. I did pick my own head of lettuce, which I could eat. However, I knew that was going to go to waste too. I only eat the prewashed stuff that’s already chopped up in a bag. I’ve found that if I have to wash my vegetables, they just sit in the refrigerator. I don’t have the patience to bathe my food; I hardly wash my own hair.
It wasn’t lost on me that I was paying high prices to do the chores that my ancestors used the “help” for on our southern plantations.
Because nothing is too good for my princess, I paid for her to ride the pony, buy food to feed the horses, and then brush the sheep. It was at about this point that I realized I’d shelled out forty bucks to come onto this property and do the farmers’ damn work.
Fuck! These farmers are brilliant.
The only thing that made me feel better was that there were loads of dumbasses like me trudging around in goat shit in their fancy shoes, buying slop from the farm to feed to the pig.
My friend Sue, who lives on one giant farm called Wyoming, keeps threatening to send me one of her goats. It’s kind of an intriguing offer because I could make a fortune with just a few of the dirty animals. Hipsters would shell out big bucks to do yoga with them. They don’t even care that the goats are going to piss all over their mats; that just makes the experience more fun. And since most of the goat yoga places in Malibu offer a glass of wine, I’m going to sell the hipster a can of Rosé, but label it “Farmer’s Zen Concoction.”
