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Photo: Eric Strauss

Last Friday night I realized I was dating an emotional train wreck. My FBF (Finance guy Boyfriend) was trying to get the group to play a drinking game called “F.U.B.A.R.”. Unable to comprehend the nuances of the game in my intoxicated state but not wanting to reveal this, I quickly seconded someone else’s suggestion of Kings. My FBF lost it. He began whisper yelling at a volume audible to all. “How could I not support him?!?!”, “How could I disrespect him like that in front of his friends?” Whoa. The role of hysterical overacting female in this relationship is supposed to be played by yours truly.

I had trekked all the way to the Upper West Side to see him (indicative of my devotion as I consider anything above 14th Street a long distance relationship) with high hopes of some alcohol induced uninhibited sexy time. Instead, I passed the night crying while he berated me for – of all things – not supporting his quest to play some college drinking game.

Needless to say, I was frustrated. I had abstained from whatever lesbian experimentation girls allegedly do in college, but was starting to doubt the wisdom of that decision. If I couldn’t depend on my FBF to be emotionally stable then sacrificing good communication skills no longer seemed worth the trade-off. Plus, I had just gotten out of a relationship with another finance guy whose behavior had become similarly erratic and I really thought things would be different with this guy.

I woke up that next morning puffy-eyed, emotionally drained and needing to talk. Naturally, I called my bestie. My hopes of monopolizing the conversation with tales of my own relationship woes were quickly shattered when her phone was answered by what I initially identified as an asthmatic pig. In between her tears, I was able to piece together the demoralizing story of her own relationship.

“LC, you got it from here?”
“Yep, Megs”

As you may have guessed, I was the asthmatic pig. It all started with a phone call from my dad. He informed me that after 27 some years of marriage he and my mom were calling it quits. The news was devastating and I justifiably fell apart a bit. My FBF (Finance guy Boyfriend), just couldn’t deal. I wasn’t looking to him to fix it, I only wanted him to sit with me and tell me it would be OK, but he just couldn’t. Instead he focused on his work problems, saying he had had the worst day ever. A deal that he had been working on for the last year had fallen through, so he couldn’t talk about my parents’ divorce. He needed to go home and catch up on Gossip Girl (seriously).

There were some tears, I pouted. I decided I was dating a total a-hole completely undeserving of a glamazon such as myself. Fortunately that’s when my petite-azon bestie, Megan called to talk me off the ledge. It took two hours of psycho-analysis and brunch at Market Table for us to come to the realization that our FBFs’ recent bad behavior and sudden lack of basic manners had nothing to do with us, it was the recession.

Sure they were being complete jerks, but really, in the end, we felt bad for them. They had sacrificed their Friday nights in high school to take SAT practice tests so they could get into Ivy league schools. They passed on keg parties in college to get positions as analysts at the most prestigious investment banks in the world. They sacrificed their early twenties to getting promoted.  Now, just when they were finally poised to reap the benefit of all their hard labor, the recession reared its ugly head. Their entire careers, livelihoods, and income were disappearing, and their self-image as successful Wall Street men was under siege.  Given all that, can I really blame my FBF for leaving snotty-nosed-me to go watch Blake Lively tousle her I-just-had-sex hair?

Although we empathized with what they were going through, it didn’t take the sting out of their actions.  We felt our relationships were being victimized by the economy and there was nothing we could do to stop it.  Not knowing what else to do, we did what enraged yet articulate people have done since the beginning of time. We started a blog.

Bisoux,

DABA Girls Extraordinaire