Oh boy

When I was feeling particularly mentally unstable I'd tell my ex boyfriend he resembled Shrek. He kind of did, looking back; both are hulking, grinning, idiots with bulbous noses and bushy eyebrows. The only difference (besides the green coloring) was my ex waxed, plucked and trimmed his eyebrows. In the beginning it was all love, and very little lust. I'm not very sexual, and he wasn't very aesthetically pleasing but he made me feel safe, and he was a great painter and since we were both jobless (I often … Read more »

My Ex

When the divorce papers were signed I naively thought that was the end of my relationship with my ex husband, but that was just the beginning of a new stage of our life together. At the time, I was living in Boston and my ex had taken off for Los Angeles -- the call of the celluloid. I was left with our five-year old son, a mortgage, and no family to swing shift so that I could have a few free hours. I decided to move to Boston … Read more »

x exes

I've got exes all over. You've just become one. Some come to me like a song for strange reasons I never try to figure out. A smell maybe. Right now, the first that comes to mind is the cheerleader who gave me a footjob on the bus on the way back from a hockey game in Woonsocket. She ended up writing poems about us and shoving them into the slots of my locker door. Thinking of lockers reminds me of Laurinda, who broke up … Read more »

The Color of Change

The first time I woke up next to a woman was in a hotel bed. It was dawn, faint light eking in along the edges of the thick hotel curtains. She was asleep, her body on the edge of illumination. The previous morning, like all the times in my life I had slept with a lover, dawn revealed a man next to me. Now here lay a woman, fleshy arm, shadowy dimples on her thigh, press of breast against the pillow. This contrast was made … Read more »

Mr. Codderman's Children

Mr. Codderman* will tell you himself, as he has often told me and others, about his children; while he considers nearly every decent human being in the world to be family, he biologically has only two children: "one Girl and one Idiot."

Mr. Codderman's Girl is a sweetheart, large and soft and childish, though she's older than I am. She'd had a boyfriend who was a good man. Patient, respectful of her wish to "wait until marriage," sweet, faithful, etc. She was with him for two and a half … Read more »

Brass Tacts

I ran into my ex on the street while I was with my AA sponsor, with whom I had just exited a meeting. I had not seen ex in years. It had only been a few months since I’d had fifty drinks, so I was still hoping never to see anyone I knew within five blocks of an AA meeting. My ex had been a ball and chain secured to an anvil chained to a brass tree connected to the core of the earth. But I had managed to give … Read more »

My Ex Dumped Me for the Buddha

I left Tucson because I was broke, and because the man I loved didn’t want to live with me. He wasn’t ready, he said. It didn’t feel right. We should be happier. He was right, of course, but that didn’t solve anything. I was still unemployed, recovering from an ear infection and a car accident. The relentless sun still seeped through the walls of my cottage, a mile from the road and surrounded by overgrown creosote. My idea of happiness was not to wake up everyday, hair grown out and … Read more »

Swedish Fished

My ex became my ex when he went on a short trip to Stockholm and met the love of his life in a coat check line at a club. Within 24 hours they swore life-long allegiance, and my ex returned home to tell me the news. My response: whaaa???

Amazingly enough they maintained a long-distance intercontinental relationship for five years until my ex could get the appropriate papers to leave America behind and become a Swedish citizen….and they lived happily ever after.

Lesson: there really is such a … Read more »

The Dump of My Life

I was in dire straits. I was working construction and had to lug my tools up the hilly streets of San Francisco as fast as possible, which was rough given my condition (I had to take the biggest crap known to man). I was cruising past my van near my apartment when I noticed not only the street cleaning ticket, but a small package tucked under my windshield wiper. My heart just about hit the floor as I noticed the cutesy hand stamped writing that could only be from one … Read more »

The Big Bang

Nothing worse than being the original breakup-er and then turning yourself into the breakup-ee. Lately, every time I bang my head against the wall I remind myself that the subsequent pain on my skull is just as much my fault as the heartwrenching, nausea-inducing, weepy-eyed, frustrated and scared feeling I have daily. What a total a-hole I am for ever thinking my ex, the same guy I broke up with for rational and legitimate reasons (he’s an irresponsible child with minimal ambition), should ever be the same person worthy of … Read more »

Bloody Red Heart

No one has a better "ex-story" than I do. Believe me, I have seen, done, and dated it all. The thing that brings me to write something regarding this subject is no matter how we label those individuals whom we previously dated, they will always remain someone who has touched our hearts and left an imprint on our abilities to love. Now, I don't mean the one person you went on a few dates with and imagined yourself having kids with. I am talking about the love, in which you … Read more »

The Donut-Cheeseburger Moment

There is a moment in all failing relationships when you know things won’t last. For me, that moment was the donut-cheeseburger.

After two and a half years, I was slowly coming to accept that things were stalled. I wanted more, I wanted to change the past, I wanted things that were never going to happen. I wanted to drag things out as long as possible.

And then there was the BBQ.

BBQ’s in San Francisco are different. Owing to the cold and fog, many of our BBQs … Read more »

A Couple of Times

Have you ever seen those couples who look so unbelievably, so shockingly, so fuckingly sad? Not in the way that implies they’re unhappy or frustrated or even unfulfilled with one another. But more in that way that resembles a heavy mood dripping down the both—the jointed—of them, from top to bottom, in to out. As if they are mourning the birth of the great true love they are right in the middle of. They are so close and so on, and so on, they just can’t stand it anymore.

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Two Degrees

Lesbians really like each other. They must because there are never more than two degrees between them. I would love to pay my Italian cousin to "take care" of my ex---just a little re-location situation. A girl can dream.

So what's a modern lesbian to do who lives in the Bay Area, or any area where packs of lesbians live, have L Word dinner parties, and go to the same two bars on every other Friday or second Thursday? Or who yearns for the yearly dyke march so we … Read more »

If you did it . . .

My ex-boyfriend and I had a dog together. I mean it was his; he had it for about 5 years before I came into the picture. When we broke up because he was not the monogamous type; I definitely did not take the key I still had to his house and I totally did not take the dog and move 500 miles away. I mean I would never do that. It also looked like the dog ran away. I mean the gate was open. So you must have left the … Read more »

My Ex Sang Lead

My ex was the younger-by-minutes, less handsome, less athletic of two identical twins who had chosen, after years of grade and high school together, to attend the same liberal arts college. That’s where I met him, mop-topped and fresh-faced, a sophomore member of the less popular of two all male a cappella groups at school.

I already had a boyfriend when I arrived on campus, but I was a freshman girl seduced by the a cappella “scene.” When my ex invited me to my first a cappella concert that … Read more »

The Wizard of ER

I get to ER a lot. During my most recent trip to the emergency room (OK, OK, it does seem to be turning into a bad habit), I had a male nurse who asked my age and raved about how great I looked. You look 25, he said, which even in my bleary state was tough to believe. When he asked me to bare my breasts, I wondered why more men didn’t go into nursing. For a cardiogram, he added, then circled my left breast with littlestickers.

On the … Read more »

I worked for an evil advertising agency. My last day there, I tied up all loose ends, left copious notes for the replacement that I trained, did my exit interview, turned in my badge and gun. Still, my asshole boss wanted a “complete debriefing” on all projects. ‘Sure’ I said, ‘just gotta go to the bank–be right back.’ I never went back. My ex-cubicle mates said that Bossman checked to see if I came back about twenty times that day. If only I could watch the increasing realization on his … Read more »

My ex weighed 227 pounds and she was proud of it. In fact, everytime after we “did the bump,” as she referred to it as, she would wink at me and comment on how a quarter pounder with cheese ALWAYS went well after sex. Especially if it was bad, which was often.

My ex’s last name was actually the name of this web-site, but that’s not important. What is important is that she got pregnant and then blamed on me, even though I would always pull out everytime wearing … Read more »

A Couple of Times

Man, so what do you guys want a guy to do when he leaves a girl he’s not in love with and doesn’t want to be with any more- who made him miserable for a long time even when he tried to be good to her- who endured verbal abuse and an unloving relationship because he found a great girl who was spirited, fun, trusting, loving, supportive and HAPPY? My ex- who I was with for about 6 years was all the opposite of the qualities I just mentioned above.
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