Misguidance Counselors: Venmo Love Story
by Marilyn Haines
Hi, campers!
Welcome back. We’re making our way through Scorpio eclipse season, which means we’re moody, brooding, and ruminating on past transgressions. How is this different from any other day for us, you might ask? That’s unclear! We hope you’ll enjoy coming along for the ride, though. This issue, Marilyn takes us back to 2016, AKA: the Time of Not Knowing Any Better.
Thanks for getting lost with us.
LYLAS,
Your Misguidance Counselors, Sam & Marilyn
Just a few days before the Northern Hemisphere and New York City entered into the summer 2016 solstice, I Venmo’d a guy. The transaction was for $15 to fully subsidize an Uber home from a breakup that took place on his building’s stoop. Did I live within walking distance? Yes. But the idea of walking home with my pathetic, now outlawed plastic grocery bags of belongings in tow? Too humiliating.
“I’ll pay for a car home for you,” he said.
“Cool, I’ll Venmo you.”
Outwardly, I brushed it off as if it were a benignly bleak inevitability, going for cool girl insouciance. In reality, I was tangled up in the black-and-white landscape of polarities. Me: good and moving on! Him: bad and missing out! My aloof response dripped with a nonchalance that suggested we were concluding a casual brunch – wouldn’t it be simpler to put it all on one card? I’ll pay you a bit more since I got the overpriced bloody mary.
It was possible his offer to pay was actually out of goodwill, but I took it to mean he understood he was in arrears with me emotionally. It was proving difficult to come to terms with the fact that he was simply too romantically bankrupt to make the payments. He had added mentos to the Coca-Cola of my psyche and I was spewing carbonated shrapnel all over Brooklyn.
“Oh, you dodged a bullet,” friends predictably but sweetly reassured me over gallons of cheap rosé drank on the definitely-not-up-to-code roof of my crumbling Bushwick apartment.
I nodded in agreement, lifting my coffee mug of wine to the sky after a long gulp that signaled to my friends and to the universe that I agreed! Amen! I was definitely a mentally strong, hot, independent 27-year-old who didn’t need to be tethered to a chronically underemployed, over 30-year-old dumdum. No way, no how!
“He was such bad news!”
Except…I loved bad news. Bad news didn’t stifle me in a Murphy’s Law cocoon. Bad news felt both familiar and exotically indulgent. I resented it and yet I cultivated it and luxuriated in it. Even though I spent cumulative hours dissecting all of the badness in a futile effort to understand it, I also cozied up inside the cadaver because it felt like home.
Plus, I was still hung up on that last Venmo transaction.
I sent the payment request with the memo “¯\_(ツ)_/¯” because I wasn’t sure what one was supposed to notate when invoicing for indirect post-breakup expenses. I guess I could have told a story in emojis – cab, broken heart, money with wings – but I felt more compelled to keep up the ruse that I was very “it is what it is” about the whole thing. Like, “No worries! See ya down the line!”
I think it’s now widely understood thanks to mental health memedom that those of us who invoke “no worries!” as a go-to exclamation are, in fact, riddled with worries.
I worried on the subway. I worried in the shower. I worried in line at the post office when, inexplicably, “Wicked Games” by Chris Isaac played in the background and I couldn’t bear the thought of making eye contact with anyone (if you were in charge of the Cooper Post Office playlist in 2016, please DM me to discuss this choice).
When I wasn’t fixated on my anxieties, I kept busy by pretending they didn’t even exist. Swiping on Tinder, buying new running shoes, watching 90210, and ordering too much delivery food when I could scarcely afford any of it – spiritually or literally. Something would always thrust me back into reality, though, and I would wince at my own predictable pathetic-ness. This was before I was in therapy, so feeding myself any crumb of kindness or compassion wasn’t on the menu. Those things were in direct opposition to my Midwestern proclivity of brushing it all under the rug.
“I’m a huge cliche and I hate myself for it,” I lamented to my roommate over plates of Indian food and a bowl of indica in our kitchen.
“You’re just negotiating between your heart, your head, and your genitals. It’s bound to feel basic and complicated at the same time,” he said.
I rolled my eyes into another universe and willed myself not to be the kind of girl who pinballs between extremes. Bloated with self-importance one moment and then taking on all the effervescence of a day-old, wilted latex carnival balloon the next. Sure, I might feel buoyant enough to work out, but I would inevitably encounter only young lovers with iced coffees on my running route, rendering me both depleted with sadness and energized with resentment.
What I wanted more than anything, of course, was to move on.
After about a month, I stopped noticing exclusively happy couples on the street. Instead, I started noticing just how many attractive people there were. I took it as a sign that I was progressing.
It was also my cue to Get Back Out There. And so, in the spirit of progress, I began going out. A lot.
I was a yes woman and no invitation went unanswered. Getting my groove back with every late dinner, early happy hour, or midday aura reading that came my way. I was behaving as though I had just spent 20 years trapped in a passionless marriage with a man who forgot I was special and cheated on me with his dental hygienist. The lack of depth in the relationship forced me to behave like a stereotype, but I was still luxuriating in the shallow end of it all. The water was just fine.
The final days of July arrived swiftly, and with it, the urgent need to spend one last month wringing any amount of fun out of the summer. Even if going out was just a distraction, it felt more fun than being sequestered away in isolation. Left to my own devices, I would usually smoke too much weed and indulge every curiosity that came to mind, re: where it all went wrong with this relationship. If it was ever right to begin with.
Going out also made me feel like less of a loser when I was feeling really, really losery. I couldn’t seem to break the bad habit of shaming myself for feeling like such a loser.
It was soothing to see the shrug of my breakup Uber payment request move further and further down in my Venmo history, replaced by transactions from friends of a martini glass and cheers-ing beer emojis, “sexual favors” payments for things that were not remotely sexual, and requests to pay up for things like “drake concert!” and “marg timez” or “ya know…”, ya know?
One Friday night, I got a text from a girlfriend to join in on a girls’ night out. I was friends with only two out of these probably eight women. In retrospect this sounds like a nightmare scenario but, at the time, a girls’ night out felt like the liberating equivalent of living out the midnight margaritas scene from Practical Magic.
I had recently returned from my hometown in Kansas with a souvenir of a poison ivy rash on my ankle from hanging out at a riverbank (another tale for another time). Not even that deterred me. “Can't wait to take my poison ivy out on the town tonight! Look out, New York!” I tweeted with enthusiasm.
Like any respectable Girls’ Night Out, the group became restless after several drinks at a Brooklyn rooftop bar and demanded it was TIME to DANCE!!!!
We traded the picturesque view of the Manhattan skyline for a postage stamp-sized basement dance floor of a South Williamsburg bar. I was near the bar upstairs clutching a tequila soda and yelling over the music in an effort to have what I’m sure was a very important conversation with my friend Samantha. Meanwhile, the rest of the girls were swallowed up by the dance floor fog machine haze of the staircase to the basement.
In the darkness, I made out a trio of men crossing the threshold of the bar’s entrance. It only took a beat longer to realize I recognized one of the faces. When you’ve seen someone’s face in the dark of your own bedroom several times, it’s really not such an impossible feat to identify them in a low-lit bar.
The blood rushed to my knees. I gripped Samantha’s arm with the hand that wasn’t occupied with a sweating cocktail.
“Did you see who just walked in? I’m pretty sure it was…”
She knew who I was talking about as an active member of the chorus of voices who sang of this guy’s inadequacies.
“No, it isn’t. He never goes out. There’s no way it’s him,” she quipped back without even a second glance towards the men at the door, cementing her stance on her feelings about him.
“This will be my chance to exact the kind of revenge you only get from your ex seeing you’re doing better than he is!” I assured her. I can only assume it was all dripping with desperation that she saw right through.
I was drunk on tequila but still manic with clarity from the dopamine hit provided by the universe’s sense of humor. The polarizing feelings swirled through my nervous system and practically propelled me over to him.
Samantha reluctantly followed me, and we descended the staircase to the cramped dance floor to discover she was wrong. I was sickened with elation. Her eyes narrowed.
“Hey!” I said to him with a smile.
The subtext, though, was “can you believe our breakup hasn’t fazed me at all? I’m so well adjusted that I can totally approach you in a public place just six weeks later and be fun and funny and charming and also very pretty!”
He found it a pleasant surprise to run into me, my smile in stark relief to Samantha’s unflinching, pointed glare at him. At some point, she must have given up on me, as did the friends he came in with because we ended up finding ourselves unchaperoned. Unfortunate, as I usually respond well to shame and could have probably been shamed into leaving.
That’s not what happened.
He left my apartment at 4 PM the following afternoon after I agreed to what he called a “friendly sleepover.”
“I relapsed,” I told my roommate as I flung myself on his bed, tangled in the space between self-hatred and vindication.
For being so concerned with being painfully typical about this breakup, I sure was following a predictable path!
Can you guess what happened next?
Did the ex-boyfriend realize he made a huge mistake dropping a one-of-a-kind gem, such as myself?
Absolutely not!
I didn’t hear from him for weeks.
I found myself making friends with my rage, poisoned with more anger towards him than myself for once. Regression had salted my wounds. Wounds that I had willingly unstitched and opened up, begging to be brined.
Finally, he broke his silence with a text message. The flash of his name on my phone gave me the same jolt of dopamine that coursed through my body when I saw him that night the month before. Nervously, I unlocked my phone.
“Hey. Had you slept with anyone between us breaking up and the night at Black Flamingo?”
He was referencing the location of our cursed chance meeting.
“Um, no lol. I was actually making jokes recently about how I rebounded from my ex w/ my ex so…”
Of course, I was “making jokes”! Haha! Lol!
I wondered why he asked this question. It only took one second to fabricate a zillion theories, all of which confirmed he still loved me! And confirmed I was not progressing nicely. I was limping along at best.
At this point, he cut to the chase. He told me he tested positive for chlamydia and suggested I get myself tested as well.
I got tunnel vision but resisted the urge to begin berating him. I recalled the sage advice of my grandmother: “save your breath for dyin’ on.”
“What brings you in?” the nurse at my gynecologist asked.
“I want to be tested for everything. I just got the fun surprise that I’m not the only girl in this guy’s life.” I half-lied. I must have just wanted sympathy. I felt like a victim but was still wrestling with the “it takes two” aspect of the situation.
She gave me a look that conveyed a kind of understanding. One blood test and one urine sample later, I was on my way.
Immediately following my appointment, I texted my cousin who shares the self-deprecation gene.
“You can’t spell disappointment without M-E-N!” she texted back. I half-chuckled and swam through the Soho humidity, boarded the J train, and went home.
I used the subway ride back to Bushwick to sulkily listen to Beach House and contemplate how I could feel so disconnected from the person I was just a few months earlier. I couldn’t decide if I knew this heartsick 27-year-old woman at all. It was starting to feel like I was nestled safely in an AMC, my Levi’s leaving an imprint on the velvet, watching the story play out with my hand in a $13 popcorn bucket, and wondering if I’d met her before. I see her meet this young man at a Halloween party and urge her not to go home with him – “how are you supposed to glean anything about a person when they’re in costume?!” I might yell at the screen.
Not even 48 hours later I got the email alert that my results were ready in the patient portal. Still in bed with only one eye open, I fumbled to enter my login creds from my phone, my thumbs feeling overgrown and useless for typing. But once I accessed my results, they were all there in clinical green Courier font: negative, negative, negative…
At this point I did what any scorned woman would do: I screenshot the results and texted them to my ex with no context. He apologized profusely. The dopamine surged again.
“Seeing that something bad happens to me anytime I see other girls is making me wonder if I made a really dumb mistake…idk my life’s in shambles” he texted.
The high horse I was on grew by 13 hands in that moment.
After nine months of sweet and vicious back and forth, I finally heard what I was so desperate to get out of him. I was elated and miserable. Foolishly, I was still sick with optimism. With the hope that maybe he meant it. But I was, at last, smart enough to realize he was probably just telling me what he thought I wanted to hear.
“Yeah well it cost me a $75 copay”
A few minutes later, my phone vibrated with a notification. A $75 Venmo payment from him with the memo: Not the 👏🏼!
I texted him again.
“Thanks for that. But you know the clap is gonorrhea right??”