Dategirl

I want to challenge you to a duel. I'm responding to your comment a few weeks back: "Frankly, no one wants to read about your well-adjusted love life and how much mind-blowing sex you're having." I wanna challenge you on that. It's not that you're not speaking an urban truth here; it's that I reckon, with the right crappy, negative, anxious, urgent attitude, people will wanna read about the fights and the sex and the babytalk that goes on in so many twentysomething monogamous relationships evolving in the city every day. ---

Here's the duel: Give me space to write a column for a few weeks, chronicling my own steady, so-bad-it's-good relationship with Golden Boy. I wanna write about how Golden Boy smells of B.O. all the time cuz he wears polyester shirts that give him away as the California mountain boy he is at heart. I wanna write about the fight we had the other night that ended in me sobbing outside his door at 4 a.m. and the globules of blood throughout the apartment that were still there the next afternoon.

But I also wanna write about early-morning conversations that start with "morning you little Chinese mushroom" and end in saliva-soaked sheets and pathetic separation issues. I want to write about ending up in bed with our two best friends after a night of whiskey and the next morning discussing deflation issues over coffee.

Monogamy is everywhere in this city. I challenge you date girls to rocky, steamy, awkward, hearty monogamy. If I rate reader-worthy, we'll have smashed open another urban truth.

How 'bout it?

Emma, aka Love Guts

First of all, inviting your best friends into bed with you kinda puts the kibosh on the whole idea of monogamy, don't you think? Never mind how, ahem, intellectual the next morning's convo over coffee was, there's still four of you fucking the night before. But we'll just ignore that little digression in favor of more pertinent issues.

Though you didn't ask me for advice, I'm going to give you some. A boyfriend who referred to me as a fungus whilst employing babytalk would be escorted to the door so quickly his polyester-induced body odor would have to sprint to catch up. Then again, perhaps I'm just a widdle intolerant. However, I think any sane person would agree that fights ending with "globules of blood" spattered about should be an immediate breaker. You shouldn't be writing about your relationship; you should be in therapy five days a week figuring out how and why you got into it in the first place. And then you should get out.

If you feel you must natter on about your extremely dysfunctional love life in a public forum, I suggest you get yourself a blog. Make no mistake, there are tons of funny, smart and interesting blogs out there, but don't let that stop youthere's always room for another rambling retard in cyberspace. I'm currently addicted to this young Williamsburg doofus' page that I stumbled upon quite by accident.

Meester Heepster (who shall remain anonymous because I'm nice) is extremely self-important and given to yammering on about how much he looooves women and adores sex, but at the same time how tortured he is by his incredibly high standards (obviously not shared by the women who deign to bang him). He waxes pathetic on how much awesome sex he could be having with that chick with the bangin' ass if only she were pretty enough for him. (Poor her!) Boyfriend is approximately as deep as a rain puddle in the Mojave, yet consumed by a ridiculous angst that it would seem he cultivates only in a lame attempt to make himself appear vaguely interesting. And even though my upper lip rarely uncurls as I scan his latest vapid entry, I keep coming back. Why? Because of the feeling of snide superiority I get each time I read it. (It's the petty little things that make me happy.)

What I'm getting at is that your blog could provide a great service to the single women of New York City who might occasionally feel a little bad about the fact that they don't have a significant other willing to get into knife fights with them. I know that tomorrow morning when I wake up to the sound of jackhammers across the street breaking ground on yet another ugly new apartment building and my cockatiel going mental, I will recall that you wake up next to some douchebag who gurgles endearments to his little Asian toadstool. I will turn my head to the left in order to ascertain that the space next to me in the bed is still blessedly empty, and then I will drop to my knees and thank the Lords of Darkness that I'm not you. And I'm certain I won't be the only bachelorette performing this ritual. Because though we might not have boyfriends, at least we got us some standards.