Being Mean For No Reason

I love Sundays. For me, Sundays are all about sleeping late, brunch and A Guy’s Story – what’s not to love?  This week’s Guy’s Story is by my good buddy Tom Miller, aka Tomfoolery (his blog is guaranteed to make you smile, NO JOKE).

Being Mean For No Reason

Everyone’s been the bad guy in a relationship one or two times. Sometimes we justify our actions as protecting ourselves or not letting someone get away with something. But generally, it’s spite or malice or vengefulness or willful negligence that makes us do crummy things. Despite being a largely well meaning and genial fellow, I’ve been spectacularly mean on a few occasions and I don’t care for it one bit.

Back in college, it seemed like there was an art to being mean to a girlfriend and it mostly had to do with looking cool in front of your buddies, it was the summer of 1998 and no one knew any better. I had the feeling that it was just a power dynamic and nothing I really wanted to get into. But years later I dropped a very douchey and mind game-y hammer on a lady I was dating seriously.

We’d entered into what I would call a relationship low-swing. When we were apart, which due to physical distance was often, she got a little clingy and wanted to check in pretty regularly. In her past were a bunch of hardcore lamebots when it came to boyfriends, so she felt a need for vigilance and I wasn’t always sensitive to those needs. In fact, I felt those dick-o-sauruses had caused her to play judge, jury and executioner without provocation. I spent a night at a club with some friends, many of whom had lady parts rather than man parts. We got boozed up and danced our faces off (that’s not a drug reference, I didn’t have a face for 12 hours). I checked in with a “good night” text and thought everything was okeedokee.

The next morning, at the crack of 11 AM, I was fielding a lot of very accusatory interrogatives, declaratives, exclamatories and imperatives. I almost felt guilty for just hanging out. Feeling parched, faceless and like my brain had swollen to Tarantino-esque dimensions, I fired back, hard. Having a massive ego, I decided that rather than talk it out, I was putting my old lady on a 24-hour timeout. I punished her concern and discomfort by cutting off contact for a day. I did need to put the conversation on ice as I was too hungover and she was too mad to talk about it, but killing discourse for a day was mean. The texts came after a few hours of cool-off time. They started consolatory, moved to apologetic and took a hard turn into frantic as the day wore on. Because I had a goddamned chip on my shoulder, I didn’t want to reach out and accept the apology and offer an olive branch.

When we did talk at 11:01 the next day, I found that the cruel power play worked but I didn’t feel like a victor, I felt like a grade-A asswad. There’s something inherit about shifting power dynamics in a relationship, and bullies tend to use mind games to stay on top. Probably very few people see themselves as bullies. They’d label themselves as assertive or, if mostly self-aware, as aggressive. No one who has ever met me would classify me as either of those things, but I took someone’s love and esteem for me and used it as a weapon against her. While I plan on never doing that again, I’m not sure I wouldn’t do it again if given the chance, if that makes sense.

While I’m sure that’s not the meanest thing I’ve ever done in a friendship or relationship, it’s one that’s eaten at me since it happened. There’s a great David Cross quote that I can’t find about not being able to psychologically afford regretting or lamenting some of the things we say or do, so I’ll have to save the really rotten things for my personal judgment day. One way or another, there’s always a reckoning.