15

DEAR DATING

You and I have never quite seen eye to eye. I’m a romantic person at heart, but when someone has been shit on as many times as I have, it’s hard to let the right people in.

Dating used to be a pretty civilized affair, but I think the Internet has blown that all to hell. It used to be that one person would ask another person out on a date, and then they’d gradually get to know each other. Now, thanks to social media and text messaging, flirting is a series of likes, pokes, and lurking (aka stalking). The result is that you can feel as though you know everything about someone you may never have laid eyes on in real life, much less properly met.

You can write someone off for the stupidest thing (for me, that used to be Radiohead fans who used the word existential too much) or allow yourself to make all kinds of assumptions based on a few photos (maybe that young girl dancing sexy on a pole has never even seen a penis in her whole life).

Here is a piece of advice: With the amount of info that is out there about every single person, you have to exercise some self-control. Do not go on Facebook and look at his or her ex and then obsess about it. Someone’s past is their past—we all have one—and chances are, if you do enough digging, you’re going to end up finding out something you didn’t want to know. Once you know something, you can’t unknow it.

It’s almost impossible to have an honest relationship with someone when you know a lot more about that person than you’re letting on. You will just be paranoid and become obsessed, especially if you can’t stop thinking about some anonymous ex from the past. The fact is, they are not dating that anonymous person from the past. They are dating you. Case closed.

As someone who has been labeled so many different things in my life, I have had to work really fucking hard to get where I am now. I want people to judge me as the person I am today when they meet me, not as the person I was ten or fifteen years ago or even yesterday. My past is shoved in my face daily. I know it’s really hard, but it is important to live in the moment with people. Dating someone for who they used to be, or who you think they’re going to be in the future, isn’t fair and is just going to frustrate you both.

•   •   •

People could save themselves a lot of trouble if they just realized a couple of things: boys are stupid and girls are cunts. It’s really not that hard to please a girl. Just be straight with her. If you’re going out with your mates and you know it’s going to be a late one, just tell her you don’t know what time you’ll be back, so don’t wait up. Don’t lie and say, “Uh, I’ll be back at nine,” and then not answer the phone when she calls at ten because she’s worried that you got run over by a train. When she freaks out over something like this, it’s not because she’s “crazy”—it’s because you went and made a really simple situation complicated.

Girls, don’t be so manipulative. People can’t read minds, so just say what you’re thinking and save both of you the trouble. Don’t waste your time coming up with some elaborate scheme to try to trick someone into doing what you want and then get pissed when they are oblivious to the hints you’re dropping—subtle or not. Men are not nuanced creatures. They will trip over a hint before they ever pick up on it.

For any relationship to truly work, you have to be honest with yourself and with each other. If your boo doesn’t want you to have the password to his phone, there’s probably a reason. If you do have the password to his phone, then it’s because he has nothing to hide and trusts you, so don’t go scrolling through his texts until you find something from eight months ago that you can get pissed about. It’s a little thing called dignity. I know it’s not very common anymore, but let’s all try to bring a little of it back.

I don’t online date, but I’m glad my friends do, because it’s hilarious! They get so many dick pics, and these guys do this without being asked! They’re just convinced that we all can’t wait to see their cocks, when in reality, most of the time we’re showing all our friends, laughing our asses off, and thinking, Put that thing away. One time a friend of mine got sent a dick pic that we swear was taken with a selfie stick! So much preparation for something so embarrassing.

The first time I ever got sent a dick pic, I didn’t even ask for it. It just popped up on my phone at three thirty in the afternoon. I was in a big huge conference room filled with agents from William Morris. This was during the time when Apple was advertising brighter screens and bigger phones, and I looked down and thought, What the fuck? It was from a guy I didn’t even know liked me, and I had to read our text exchange three times over before I finally understood that he had misconstrued our conversation as me flirting. How did he think I was going to respond? “Oh, thank you! That dick pic really got me through that three thirty feeling!”

This was one of those instances where I told myself, Okay, I don’t understand men and I never will. Do they not think we know that this is the same dick pic they’ve sent to twenty-four other women and shot at least twenty-five angles of to make it look bigger? Just like a fart, penises will always be funny.

I think everyone can agree that whether you’re gay, straight, whatever, the worst part about dating is finding the right person. It’s hard for me to find someone I can tolerate for even five minutes, much less twenty-four hours or my entire life. One day, my friend Jen and I were leaving her apartment and passed her Greek landlady, who filled the pool every day with a red hose, even when we were in the middle of one of California’s biggest droughts. As we passed, she called out and told us we looked beautiful and to have a beautiful day, then reminded us to “remember it’s LA. Evvvvvvvvverybody piece of shit!”

Just before we got to the gate, she asked Jen, “You have boyfriend yet?”

When Jen said no, the landlady said, “You wait, I have present for you. It’s gonna help.” She then turned around and disappeared into her apartment.

Jen and I looked at each other in anticipation, wondering what the fuck she was going to bring out that would help us get boyfriends. Padded underwear? A magic spell? Funky Cold Medina?**

TRANSLATION

Funky Cold Medina

From the Tone Loc song, like a love potion

It was a handbag. Specifically, it was quite the ugliest handbag ever known to man. Made of vinyl and fake tortoise shell, lined in paisley, adorned with rhinestones and gold-toned hardware, emblazoned with the word Paparazzi down the side. “Here, this will help you,” the landlady said, handing it over.

Jen was clearly shocked. “Oh, I don’t know what to say,” she said as she accepted it. “Thank you?”

If I didn’t feel like a spinster before, I definitely felt like one in that moment.

Once we left, we discovered a QR code printed on the bottom of the actual bag as part of the design! We scanned it, and the link took you to buy a printer on Amazon.com. Well, Jen and I carried that hideous bag around Los Angeles for an entire day, but still no boyfriends.

•   •   •

Even when you find the right person, relationships are still work. It’s not just fantasy. You can’t just expect glittery romance and rose petals all the time. People tend to think that being in a relationship means never feeling lonely, always being happy, and having someone there to fulfill all their needs, whether that means going to the bar to get them a drink or listening to them bitch about their day for two hours every night after they get home from work.

People are thinking so much about what they can get out of a relationship that they never think about what they need to put into the relationship. It amazes me that people are then shocked when it doesn’t work out. One of my dating rules is to do one nice thing a day for the person I’m with, because they need to feel special, too. It does not have to be grandiose, just something as simple as doing the dishes or running a nice, hot bath.

Another one of my rules is, if the relationship isn’t working for you, end it clean and quick. Don’t dither about, thinking, I feel so bad; if I break up with him, he’ll be devastated, because (a) he probably won’t be, and (b) even if he is, at least you stopped wasting everyone’s time. I’m so guilty of breaking my own rule on this, but after a few messy experiences, I’ve learned that you have to end it when it’s time. There’s no kindness in stringing someone along.

Even though I was lost and unhappy and lonely for much of my life, I still think I had a solid understanding of love. I couldn’t always stop myself from being infatuated with boys. I was still aware of the fine line between love and obsession from an early age.

This is evidenced by my 2001 journal, or my “girlnal,” as I call it. In it, I had written so many poems. Here’s an example of how deep I so clearly was:

As the morning grey sets on another day of cold frosty obsession,

I still search for what I strive to be. Fear of telling and hearing an ear piercing reply.

Tears falling off the round, pillowy cheeks of my face.

There is no reason for it all, but the front door to my life is locked and bolted. Maybe the search for the key will kill me.

Maybe it lies in my fist-sized heart, which beats for my obsession.

I mean . . . in 2001 I was a baby! I didn’t even have a driver’s license yet, but no one could ever accuse me of not being deep as a puddle. I am willing to bet my life I wrote this while listening to Depeche Mode or the Cure after putting on a ton of black eyeliner, as if the more I put on, the more profound I was proving myself to be.

My first real boyfriend dumped me over the phone, and on Valentine’s Day. He was the first boy who ever broke my heart. It was the pain of losing my innocence.

The cuts from a first love go deep, and some of my friends still aren’t over theirs, even though they’ve had twenty years and two husbands to do it. That first heartbreak is enough to make you crazy and is debilitating in so many ways, but am I glad I got to have that experience? Yes. Absolutely. First love is special, but when I look back, this is one of those experiences that meant so much to me at the time but means practically nothing now. I don’t know if that is maturity or cynicism. Most likely, it is a combination of both.

Women always know when men are lying to them; it’s just that sometimes we choose not to believe it. For almost two years, I was dating a musician. One morning, the guy rolled over and, while looking deep into my eyes, said, “I love you. Tell me you love me and I’ll never leave you.”

This was the first time a guy had ever told me he loved me first. So naturally, I believed him and confessed that I was in love with him, too. It was mere days later when I found out that he’d had a fiancée the whole time. That broke my heart and messed with my head.

Amy Winehouse was living with me at the time. As one of my closest friends, she was one of the few people I talked to about it. She taught me so much about love. When it came to giving other people advice on matters of the heart, she was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known.

“Kelly Bollocks,” she said, because she always called me Kelly Bollocks, or Lul, which was what she called her closest friends, “I know this is breaking your heart, but you need to understand that what you had with him, no one can take away, and what you had with him, he will never have with anyone else again. Your feelings were real. I know you loved him, so just leave it at that, and if it’s meant to be, he’ll come back. Then you can decide if that cunt is what you really want.”

Amy was a proper witch. Just as she predicted, he came back, and we went there again for round two (or three or four or whatever number we were on at that point). I was in LA, having a nightcap at the Sunset Marquis, when all of a sudden, someone came up behind me, put his hands over my eyes, and said, “Guess who?” I didn’t have to guess because before he even touched me, I smelled him. At first I was extremely cold toward him, but he worked his charming little ways again and what can I say? He and I were like magnets.

He asked me to come up to his room because he wanted to talk to me about something. He showed me his Mickey Mouse underwear, complete with skidmarks, and the family album of photographs he took with him on tour—as intimate as you can get. After what seemed like hours of flirtation on his part, I was about to go home when out came the cherry on the cake: He and his fiancée were expecting a child. My mind went blank and I froze. Any feelings I had ever had for this man went out the window. He was dead to me.

Needless to say, that was our last kiss good-bye.

As much as I’ve been talked about, you will never hear a story that starts, “Did you hear who fucked Kelly Osbourne?!” I don’t go there with many people, and especially not anyone who is going to blab their mouth about it. As experimental as I was when it came to mind-altering substances, I’ve always been a bit of a prude when it comes to sex (and my vagina is a sacred space, remember?). In London, when groups of girls would get together for a major girl-talk sesh, I was always shocked at how many of them seemed to love doing it in the bum. It was conversation after conversation about bum sex that I could not insert myself into (pun somewhat intended) unless someone wanted to answer my naive questions: “But it’s so small! How do you get anything in there? Do you have a big bum hole or something?”

•   •   •

You’d think that in 2017, people would have stopped thinking that if they just married rich, their problems would be over, but there’s still a whole culture of women who trade off their looks. Hollywood is ground-zero for women mind-fucking—and actual fucking—men to get what they want. In a Hollywood club, you can sit back and observe and it’s like watching the Nature Channel. A girl in a body-con and Blahniks will pick out her prey and go in for the kill. These girls are also more than likely getting paid hundreds per night just to be there. People tend to paint marrying someone for their money as an easy way out, but it sounds hard to me, because it surely involves sucking a lot of dick. To each their own, but that is not the lifestyle for me. As my friend Cher once said, “My mom said to me, ‘One day you should settle down and marry a rich man,’ and I said, ‘Mom, I am a rich man.’”

I have never thought I needed to date anyone rich or famous, but I do want to date someone who has their shit together, who has something going on in their life and wants to make the world a better place. It doesn’t matter what he does for a living, as long as it’s not illegal and as long as he’s interested and passionate about it. Someone who actually wants to work hard. Ambition and willingness to work hard are the biggest fucking turn-ons for me, because I work my ass off to make things better for myself, the people around me, and the world, so I don’t want to date someone who just sits around playing with his balls all day. In England, we say someone’s “lazy as cunting fuck,” which means they’re just there to have sex. Needless to say, I’m not interested in those people.

I like my independence. I’ve worked hard for it, and I intend to keep it, even in a relationship. I want to date someone who feels the same. I can’t stand it when a guy is constantly asking me what he can and should do with his life. Do not ask me what socks you should wear. Make up your own mind. One thing I will never understand about men is how they can act so tough, break bones and not go to the doctor, but as soon as they get a simple cold, anyone would think they have the plague. Do not turn me into your mother, because that, to me, is the biggest boner killer.

Just because you’re dating someone doesn’t mean you have the right to tell that person what to do. You only have the right to say how something makes you feel, and good communication is key. I think we’re often fed this fairy tale that relationships just happen, but the truth is quite the opposite. They take lots of hard work, lots of honesty, and lots of talking. People tend to spill intimate details and problems to their friends because they’re too scared to bring them up with their partner. How the fuck is that going to help anything? Are you going to have your best friend call your boyfriend to tell him how you feel? It’s always good to vent, but if you’re not talking about your relationship with the person you’re actually in the relationship with, you’re not going to get very far.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get married, and to be honest, I’m not even sure that’s what I want. As it is, I’ve worn enough beautiful dresses and had enough moments that were all about me. I guess I’ll just have to keep doing this dating thing, suffer through a few more dick pics, and see where it takes me.

Love,

Kelly O