Idiots and pigs, it turns out.
There’s a woman. She works a job among people in an urban area, i.e. she’s not a pensioner working as a night custodian in a decommissioned military base. She gets asked out. Some of the men indicate they expect sex by the end of the evening and she wants to be deferential. At worst it means free lodging.
The problems start when the men call back, which they tend to do. She gets a call on the street. Then while she’s having dinner with another man. Then she gets a call when she’s in bed with somebody and then one more while he’s inside her. She gets quadruple-booked on any given day quicker than she thinks, all it takes is to say yes. She can manage, third dinner is a salad, fourth a peppermint tea, and four intercourses are also doable. Intercourse literally means “between meals”.
What we call complicated is when one of the men says he loves her. He’s aware of her addiction to search and rescue new penises and that there’s no rehab for this, only natural decrepitude. Soon the man pleads with her to stop and embrace simplicity of one accessory body for eternity. She doesn’t, and doesn’t hide it. The man cries, threatens to leave, and calls her names that rhyme with “door” and “shut”.
She says she simply feels frisky from time to time and wants to go with somebody else. He says when he feels like that, he puts on Adidas socks and sticks them in Puma sneakers.
They break up and a year goes by. It’s worse for the man. He’s depressed, wanders the streets, nobody gives two intercourses about him. The woman is also depressed, wanders the shopping malls, but she gets accosted, new men pull her slowly out of her shell.
They bump into each other, or the man calls because he misses her and tells her he’s calling to say he missed her. They jump into bed and it’s just like old times. But then her phone rings, and there’s a male voice on the other side and it’s foreign. Italian is the worst, one can hear the unwavering happy stupidity. The man says goodbye and lets her swim through a sea of dicks while he sits in a puddle of anhedonia.
They bump or call again years later. It’s clear there’s not going to be any bed jumping, so they humblebrag about how good their lives are. The man doesn’t play Solitaire anymore, he watches Solitaire videos. Her life is a calendar filled to the brim with dining, lodging, and therapy.
There’s also the scenario where the man sleeps around and the woman waits mortified at home. There’s also the one where both do both, a real head-scratcher for friends and lawyers.
Billions had this experience, from Mohenjo-daro to Starbase, and everybody tried to cope. Men by going to the pub, war, and Comic-Con, puking, killing, discussing if elves would wear Tommy Hilfiger. Women coped by getting more men, worsening the problem.
My story isn’t even that bad. DODGY LODGY would never go on four dates in a day, more like four in a year (really not a lot even for a taken woman), and I cried only once when I was begging her not to go on a certain trip. She cried with me, then went anyway. It was probably non-refundable.
