already do." Even as I said it, I wondered why I was still talking to a guy who'd just said that men don't want to date women as smart as they are. | felt like a bad feminist.
"Oh, you shouldn't tone yourself down!" said Mr. Ambition. "It makes you attractive... Attractive intellectually, I mean."
I sighed. "Yes," I said. "Intellectually.”
"I'm sorry,” he said again.
"I'm going home," I said.
"We're still friends, right?” he asked.
"Yes, but give me some time to get over this," I said. "Probably about a month.”
"What do you mean?" He came after me as I walked to the door. "Like, you don't want to see me at all for a month? You don't want me to call you, or reach out to you, or anything?"
I looked at him, again, for a long moment. I regretted his stricken expression. Again, I spoke as gently as I could. "Maybe in a month."
He offered me a ride, which I declined. My fifteen-minute estimate was almost on target: twenty minutes later, I stepped into my bedroom, leaned back against my door and burst into tears.
te Kk ok
I ran into Richard the next evening, and we spent the night together. Richard put a fair amount of effort into convincing me to talk to Mr. Ambition.
"It sounds like he didn't actually mean to break up with you," said Richard. "It sounds like the conversation got away from him. He didn't start that conversation intending to break up with you; maybe he was looking for reassurance, and you approached his questions too logically, and he concluded that you don't care. You really like him. It seems like it's worth trying to make it work."
You may have noticed that both of these men tried hard to convince me that the other man cared about me. I decline to analyze what that means about me and my current approach to relationships.
However, I will say that I tried giving Richard more emotional feedback than I have in a long time; I even told him I missed him the next time he went on vacation. And I did try talking to Mr. Ambition again, and he acknowledged that he hadn't exactly intended to break up with me.
But then Mr. Ambition and I had several of those encounters that I think of as "post- breakup talks." I hate that shit. Every evening ended on a confusing, inconclusive note. He kept saying that he was "confidently ambiguous." We weren't dating, we weren't not dating. It reminded me of a phase I went through with a college ex-boyfriend, back in my monogamous days: my ex and I spent several weeks post-breakup being "exclusive but not together." So preposterous. People are so broken.
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