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Among my friends it’s known as the boxer story—the day I ripped a wide hole in the crotch of an old pair of boxers, pulled it over my head, and wore it to the mall with a girlfriend I was desperate to dump. Of course I lacked the courage to break up with her, and of course it seemed easier at the time to wear old boxers as a shirt in a public place, with my arms through the leg holes and the waistband clinging to the top of my stomach. It seemed easier than telling the truth; truth being I no longer cared about anything she had to say, and no amount of sex made her company tolerable.
This was back when I believed compatibility could be discovered like a trail overgrown with vines and brush, and if only we both kept hacking away, one day the path would reveal itself. We had almost nothing in common. She liked music from the _4 A.D. _label and I was strictly a _Sub Pop _guy. She was into tall blonde men and I was 5’8” dark-haired Jew (technically I still am all those things but my dark hair is turning gray). I considered Beringer’s White Zinfandel the best wine I’d ever tasted and she liked anything that got her drunk, as long as it worked quickly and didn’t burn on the way down. But we stuck it out anyway, joined by decent times in bed and a secret affinity for George Michael. George Michael! A chaser to anything grunge, and at one time the heir apparent to Hall and Oates. In 1994, everyone secretly liked George Michael. Trust me on this. Even guys wearing _Ride the Lightning _t-shirts would turn up _Freedom ’90 _if alone in their cars.
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Back to the boxers. Wearing boxers as a shirt might be the worst break-up plan ever invented but I was convinced the humiliation would force my girlfriend’s hand. That she would stare at the boxers, ask what the hell is wrong with me, and demand I take them off. I would refuse, and accuse her of not accepting me for who I am, which happens to be a guy who wants to wear boxers as a shirt. An argument would ensue, and it would be just enough to snap our fragile bond.
But it didn’t work out that way. She pulled up in front of my apartment and I ran out to greet her, wearing my ridiculous plaid boxers as a shirt. She stared for a moment, smiled, and said:
“Get in.”
And so I did. And we drove to the mall, me in my boxer-shorts-turned-half-shirt, a battle of nerves beneath the surface of our small talk. She knew I wanted to dump her, and she knew I didn’t have the guts. She must have known. How else to explain the nonchalance? The refusal to acknowledge my preposterous outfit? My punishment—rightly deserved—was a stroll through the mall. With my head stuck through the ripped crotch, my stomach exposed, and my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend waiting for me to crack.
We shopped. Well, she shopped. I simply tagged along, midriff bared, head poking through a ripped boxer’s crotch. People stared. I expected security to grab me by my bare elbows and usher me out of the mall. But no one said anything. No one approached me. I was a guy wearing boxers as a shirt, and who the hell wants to mess with that?
I stated the obvious over our food court meal of Buffalo-style chicken fingers. Our relationship is over, I told her. It’s not fun anymore so it’s over. It’s better for both of us to move on.
She nodded and said:
“Yeah, I kind of figured that out.”
And just like that—a statement, an agreement, no heartache, no regret—we were done.
It’s some small comfort that my legendary inability to break up with girls is part of larger phenomenon. You know that statistic about 75% of divorces being initiated by the wife—what the statistic doesn’t show is how many husbands fall into passive-aggressive mode, forcing their wives to make the final break. This runs counter to societal roles. Men are supposedly decisive, women are supposedly fretters. Men supposedly remove emotion and make cold decisions, women supposedly suffer from empathy and feel sorry for everyone.
Only it doesn’t seem to play out that way. My wife, Rachel, made a clean break from her first marriage. She initiated it, despite admitting her husband had checked out long ago. Once she decided the marriage couldn’t be saved, she ended it. Not without anguish and regret—is a clean break ever possible without collateral damage?—but once she knew what she wanted, she moved quickly.
I compare that to my boxer story. My girlfriend and I had been dating for a few weeks. There were no ties that bind, no shared history, no mutual friends. Breaking up was the easiest thing to do, and yet…I couldn’t do it. I figured wearing a pair of old boxers as a shirt was easier. Add that to my collection of bizarre break-up stories: I once told a girlfriend I was moving to Tokyo for seven months; I once told a girlfriend my shady past was catching up with me and I needed to “drop out” for a while; I once told a girlfriend I’d been in a car accident and needed rehab, which meant my next few months were booked solid.
A move to Tokyo, a criminal past, a serious accident; I painted a life of adventure and tragedy, completely opposite from my real life: a junior in college, living in a basement apartment and majoring in Medieval History. It would have been easier to just break up. But I couldn’t. I thought it would be too painful, that lying or falling into passive-aggressive mode was somehow better that treating my girlfriends with respect and giving them the truth.
Years ago, before Rachel and I were married, we had one of those scary arguments. Where battle lines are drawn and the heavy artillery is rolled out, and both parties know the end result might not be who is sleeping on the couch that night, but who is moving out that night. I got that old feeling again, the terror at breaking up, the urge to invent some wild excuse for leaving, the urge to force her hand and become someone different than who she thought I was.
I was more than a few years out of college, but I still hadn’t learned. I underestimated women’s intuition. Rachel knew what I was thinking, just like all my ex-girlfriends had known. At the end of the night, both of us battle-weary, Rachel smiled and said: “You know, if you want to leave, then leave. I’ll be sad, but ultimately, I’ll be okay.”
Our greatest loves are also our greatest paradoxes, and here was mine: it had been too difficult to break up with all those women I no longer wanted to date, yet the one woman I didn’t want to leave was now making it easy. Six months later we were married. I haven’t worn boxers on my head since.
And she’d rather listen to _Ride the Lightning _than anything by George Michael.
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