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Brandeis University's Community Newspaper — Waltham, Mass.

Sexiled: Oops, I did it again

Published: February 1, 2008
Section: Opinions


Do you want to hear a joke? There were two girls and a guy. Keep your pants on. It’s not what you think.

The two girls were best friends. Don’t unbuckle yet. They flirted with each other more often than the guy. Move your hands. He didn’t know which one he liked. He picked them both. Only one of them knew that. Here’s the punch line…I wasn’t the one that knew.

I don’t know if I believe in second chances.

Maybe that was a weak joke. Want to hear another? This time, only one girl and one guy. Sorry gentlemen – you might want to get used to it.

He fell in love with her. She didn’t feel the same way back. But she told him she did. The guy moved out to live with her and a year and a half later, moved back home. He called the girl he used to date, her friend, and told her he had always liked her.

I was the girl he called. And I believed him. That’s the punch line.

Ok, I get it, my jokes are bad. I’ll stop. But there’s potential, don’t you think?

He was the whole package. When we were dating, if you can call it that because there were no actual dates involved, I was that girl. The one that giggles at stupid things and has nothing to say and hardly ever talks and feels constantly, constantly intimidated. I certainly wasn’t making the hilarious jokes I am right now.

I don’t blame him for not seeing the real me. At least that’s what I keep telling myself. I keep saying that I put him in an awkward position. Several times. I get no pleasure out of saying that I thought I wasn’t worth it, that I was his plaything.

If life were a giant ball pit, I’d be the one he peed on. But I didn’t think I deserved any better. I was happy just to be included in the game.

A little voice inside my head, or maybe that’s the editor’s voice, told me I shouldn’t be talking to him. She told me that I am making it hard for him not to use me again. In other words, I’ve come full circle and I have aroused in him the same feelings as last time. Like I said, his feelings last time never spread to his heart.

So what am I supposed to do? Part of me doesn’t trust him. I bet you can guess which part. And part of me, the bigger part, wants to think he’s changed. Wants to think that he managed to do what every woman innately believes is possible: that I could change him.

I hope his feelings for the other girl have gone flaccid. I hope his feelings for me are firm. I hope his actions speak louder than his words. I hope his words speak louder than the past.

Now it’s time to decide what I’m going to do. Now it’s time to realize that he is two thousand miles away. That he fell in love with my best friend. That I am, in fact, a rebound.

Or maybe it’s time to realize that he finds something about me stimulating; that I find something about him worth reproducing the ache from last time.

When I day dream, it’s always about sex. I used to think I was the only one tackling people instead of homework during class. The only one sucking on my pen out of sexual frustration. The only one chewing on my straw in Usdan. And then I started writing this column and I grasped that the moaning and groaning wasn’t always about school.

I find that exciting. We all fall victim at least once when it comes down to it. We obsess over sex – the presence or the absence of it – we look for that person, we pick the wrong ones; we go down when we’re least expecting to.

My story is simple. He called. No, not even that now that I think about it. He texted. Even worse. Apparently, with me, that’s all it takes. Contact…one time, and now I can’t live without him. Shit.

This is my last article for a while. Maybe not forever, but at least for now. I spent a long time thinking of what I wanted to say. My climactic moment and this is what’s at the tip of my tongue:

I think I’m falling in love. I’m falling in love with a second chance. It’s stupid. It always seems to be. But you have to admit, the positions I get myself into can sometimes be funny. It is all about how you choose to look at things. Love is not blind, it just blinks more often.

I don’t have a grand finale, because I’ve never finished. I want to go out with a bang. But I’m willing to wait.

This is the joke I’ve been dying to make my entire life:

A guy comes into a barr…