Three years after we broke up, my ex-girlfriend sent me this email:
You’re nothing but a lying, manipulative loser.
She knew that the worry that I was a loser had been a major facet of my life since I was a child, so her use of that word was itself manipulative. No one is as reliably correct as a hypocrite.
A crazy woman, this ex-girlfriend of mine. The entire time we were together, she badgered me to use the machine, even though, right there on her arm, were written the words BADGERS PEOPLE TO PUSH THEM AWAY BUT IS STRONGER THAN TERRORISTS. About two years after we broke up, so about one year before she sent me this email, she sent my mother an email that said:
I’m really offended that you’re not my friend anymore just because your son and I are no longer having sex.
Here I am not lying, but I am manipulating you. This is the line I always use when I want to demonstrate to someone beyond a shadow of a doubt that this ex-girlfriend is crazy. When I tell that story, I can count on a gasp, and if you get a gasp when you want a gasp, you know you’ve made your point, particularly if your point is that a woman is crazy, which is something people tend to want to believe. But the truth is that I had done lots of things to make my ex-girlfriend crazy. I had told her I wanted to stay friends, then did not return her calls and emails; I had told her I needed a break from talking and would contact her in a few weeks, then did not contact her for months.
Now I’m trying to manipulate you again. I’m trying to demonstrate to you that I’m self-critical, that I’ve reformed. Confession is basically manipulation, at least for me, and since I’m the only person whose consciousness I have access to, I have to assume that everybody else thinks the way I do.
I cheated on this girlfriend many times while we were together. She was going to school in Boston and I was living in New York, so I had plenty of opportunity. Mostly, I was just miserable with myself, stuck in a cubicle job I despised because I knew I was perfect for it; it was an ideal job for a man who didn’t really want to do anything. I didn’t even really want to cheat on her, but after all, a man has to do something. On the bus to visit her, I would strike up a conversation with a girl—something I was not usually good at doing—and I would tell her that my girlfriend had used the epiphany machine and was trying to coax me into using it as well.
“You shouldn’t use that thing,” the girl would say. “The epiphany machine is a cult.”
“I know,” I would respond. “But my girlfriend says that I shouldn’t judge the machine without using it first.”
“That’s insane! You have to join a cult to figure out whether it’s a cult?”
We would argue about this back and forth, and I would manage to get the girl’s number and meet up with her back in New York, or in Boston when my girlfriend had a class. Once I got a handjob right there on the bus, underneath a blanket the girl had packed. Another time, I had sex in the disgusting restroom of the disgusting Chinese restaurant where the bus stopped. My girlfriend used to react with mock-horror when I told her that I had eaten at the buffet. “Ugh, I can’t believe I kissed you after you ate that.” So I took particular pleasure when she said this after I had licked that girl’s clit (or at any rate the general vicinity of her clit—in my defense, we only had a few minutes and she hadn’t shaved). There was an entire year when all the energy of my soul was focused on cheating on my girlfriend in the sleaziest, most soul-depleting ways possible.
Now I’m manipulating you and lying to you. None of what I just said about cheating was true; I’ve never cheated on anyone in my life. A few weeks after she sent me that email about me being a loser, my ex-girlfriend sent me an email apologizing. She was mad, she said, and she was trying to hurt me. But buried inside that email was the accusation that I had cheated on her several years earlier. I responded, truthfully, that I had never cheated on her, and she responded that she had no reason to believe me, since I had admitted to her that when I was a teenager I had been a pathological liar. This was infuriating, in part because it was, in a twisty way, entirely fair.
I’ve gotten back at her just now, sort of, by lying to you and saying that I did in fact cheat on her. And really, it’s disappointing, after you’ve broken up with someone, never to have cheated on them. If the relationship doesn’t work out, you might as well have had some exciting cheating sex. Or at least I assume cheating sex is exciting. I’ve done a lot of lying, which is the worst part about cheating, and the only part I know.
The way I actually spent those bus rides was reading, by which I mean staring at a page while thinking. “Thinking” might be too exalted a word for the scroll across my brain: WHY CAN’T YOU BREAK UP WITH YOUR GIRLFRIEND, YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT? WHY CAN’T YOU BREAK UP WITH YOUR GIRLFRIEND, YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT? Finally, she broke up with me for being too passive and for needing too much reassurance. She begged to get back together with me after she moved back to New York, because other men in New York were so much worse than I was. After my relationship with my next girlfriend followed exactly this pattern, I decided that maybe I should use the epiphany machine after all.
By this time, I had come to a point in my life when what little integrity I still sensed in myself felt like it was slipping away, so submitting to the machine did not seem terribly unreasonable. I used the new model of the machine, the one that actually works, the one that’s connected to your Internet history. Obviously you can see my epiphany, and even if you hadn’t seen it before you came up to me on the street, you probably could have guessed it just from the story I’ve told.
Now when I date, I date with this tattoo. It’s not a great tattoo to have in the winter, because I’m bundled up and the tattoo isn’t immediately apparent when I’m first talking to a girl, so I have to make a decision about whether I’m going to mention it up front or whether I’m going to wait until we go home together and I’m taking my shirt off. Either way, it tends to kill the mood to discover this tattoo on the cute-ish guy you’re either considering hooking up with or in the first stages of hooking up with. Summer’s much better, because everybody is showing their arms anyway, and these days there are usually at least three or four epiphany tattoos in any given crowd, usually more, and since almost all of them sound bad, none of them really sound bad. My tattoo can be a conversation starter rather than a conversation ender.
That’s even more true with Epyfa. The girls who see my tattoo on that dating app and then contact me are interested in how I deal with the tattoo; they tend to be the best girls, smart and curious and with low self-esteem. I can make some self-deprecating jokes about my craven, caddish past, and about how I’ve moved on and have committed to not lying anymore. I get them home, we have a great time, and I go on a date with a different girl the next night.
Some Saturdays I have two dates, one for brunch and one for dinner. Then I’ll say I had a great time, I’m totally going to text you. And if I feel like it, I will. If I don’t, I’ll say my mom’s dog got sick and I went home for the weekend to help her take care of it. Then, weeks later, if I feel like seeing that particular girl again, I’ll text her that my mom’s dog died, and I had gotten really close to it, so I had been grieving and that’s why I hadn’t been in touch.
See, when most people get an epiphany as bad as mine, they try to contort themselves to change. They try to be different. I, on the other hand, have embraced who I am, and I’ve discovered that there are ways to really enjoy your life when you’re a LYING, MANIPULATIVE LOSER.