The Real Magic Was the Friends We Lost Along the Way

On moving on

Jenny was one of my first online friends. My girlfriend was jealous of her, and she had cause to be. I talked to Jenny on the phone way too often for her taste, to the point of neglecting the actual IRL human who shared my bed four or five nights a week. My girlfriend and I would get in fights that had nothing to do with Jenny, who she never once brought up. She knew I loved Jenny more than I did her, that she was a placeholder for this girl who lived across the country and who I’d never met, but who understood me better than she ever could.

I would sit outside on the porch at night and look out at the mountains and talk to Jenny on the phone for hours at a time, knowing my girlfriend was upstairs and miserable and letting her unhappiness roll off my back as if her usually metaphorical but occasionally real tears were water and I was a duck. I was twenty-two, and did not yet connect cause and effect.

Actions have consequences, though, and eventually my girlfriend got tired of it and left me. I kind of shrugged my shoulders. I had Jenny, after all. Then Jenny started dating Brian, and that hurt so much I stopped talking to her for a little while.

It didn’t last, though. I moved down the east coast, back to the city where I’d grown up, and started dating Liz. Liz was a long, lean dancer, like Jenny, with waist-length, pin-straight hair like Jenny’s. That relationship was my first lesson in the difference between the What and the Who, that the ingredients that make two humans can be largely the same, but the cake that comes out of the oven never, ever is. I tried to put the way I felt about Jenny into Liz, and Liz, a practical girl whose education in the ugly reality of bad boyfriends began long before she met me, proceeded to run rings around me for a few months before dyeing her hair blue and going off with a guy who raced motorcycles professionally.

The first person I called in my grief, of course, was Jenny. She seemed pleased to hear from me, and we picked up where we’d left off.

After a few months of moping, I started dating her best friend. Lynn was nothing like Jenny; she was giggly and bubbly and perpetually upbeat, whereas Jenny was incisive and quick-witted and often seemed sad. Our relationship was almost entirely based on sex, and when it was over, our entire friend group had had enough of me, and I them. From my point of view, Lynn had screwed around on me. From hers, I had been a big meanie who hadn’t understood that she loved everybody equally. From that relationship I learned about differences in people’s expectations, the importance of clear communication, and that the friendships women have with other women and the friendships they have with men are based on entirely different things.

I moved again, this time to a different neighborhood, and started dating Francoise. I will match the horror stories from the eighteen months I spent with Francoise with any bad relationship story you’ve ever heard. She stole from me, she abused Adderall, she erased my lecture notes and papers for school in fits of pique. I only discovered that she was turning tricks after we had co-signed the lease. A few months after we moved in together, my doctor told me I needed to go on supplemental testosterone; Francoise was bullying me so badly that I had developed a hormone imbalance. But Jenny was there, and she talked me through it. She kept me sane until I could escape.

I moved again, to a rooming house in a neighborhood in which the nights were occasionally punctuated by gunfire. My landlady’s son, a stocky, affable ex-convict, lived in the basement of the rooming house, where he and his friends made porno movies on the weekends with girls who worked at the local strip clubs. I spent my days working out; I rode my bicycle for hours every day, building up my body and learning the city with the intention of becoming a messenger. I had a part-time job at a bookstore and no real responsibilities beyond the thirty remaining credits I needed to earn my undergraduate degree. It was one of the happiest times I can remember.

I think it’s only fair to point out that I didn’t get around to reading the work of Neil Strauss until recently. Even all those years ago, I only learned that there was a community of men who had systematized the things I had learned independently from reading books about psychology and mirror neurons and body language after the dust had settled. I met other pickup artists and pieced together how that world worked IRL, not online. But when I met Laurel, I didn’t know about PUAs. I was just trying to do things differently than I had always done them, because what I had been doing wasn’t working.

I was on my way to a party when I stopped in the coffee shop where I met Laurel. She was sitting at a table alone, reading a book. I sat down across from her, gave her my best winning smile, and said, there’s a dozen empty tables here, but I’d rather sit with you. Laurel laughed out loud at the sheer audacity of it. I spun her a line of outrageous bullshit about being a part-time superhero, and she gave me her phone number. I didn’t actually think much of it; by that point I got a lot of phone numbers, and I was focused on going to the party, where I hoped to hook up with one of the host’s many ex-sorority-sister friends.

I called Laurel and asked her out a couple days later, almost as an afterthought. It only hit me when she showed up at the bar to which I’d invited her that she was the most phenomenally gorgeous woman I’d ever seen in my life, let alone gone on a date with. She was so beautiful that at one point our waiter walked into the back of another customer’s chair and had to apologize to them because he couldn’t stop checking her out. And for some inexplicable reason, this radiant demigoddess was sitting across a little table from me, twirling her hair around her finger absently with her chin in her hand and this happy, goofy expression on her face, hanging on my every word. It was terrifying.

You can teach an arrogant, self-absorbed nerd to act like Casanova, but there’s a fundamental conflict between Nerd language and Casanova presentation. Nerds are shitty people to a degree that normies don’t always appreciate. The ones who learn to be bullies are the worst kind of person, and right now society is run by them. The man who taught me The Rules was not a bully, so I did not become one. But while nerds who learn to be heartbreakers are less destructive to society as a whole than the nerds who learn to be bullies, there’s a kind of contemptible, entitled meanness to them that is in its way worse if you have the misfortune to find yourself in their orbit.

I’m not saying I didn’t have my reasons for being what I was; I did. There’s a shed in the neighborhood where I grew up with a padlock on the door, and part of me has never left it.

Nevertheless, Laurel saw that meanness and self-absorbtion after only a little while, and she walked away. The brush-off was gentle, but final. I listened to Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker on repeat for a month, and then I called Jenny and asked if I could come visit her. I’d only met her twice in person, once at a get-together when she was dating Brian and once when I was dating Lynn. Sure, she said. She told me excitedly about how she was running her own business, and how she had made all kinds of new friends. Uh-huh, I said, and started bashing a guy we’d both known in our old friend group in an effort to get her to side with me; the most reliable method nerds have to establish group cohesion is throwing their friends under the bus. She sighed and changed the subject.

In retrospect, Jenny must have known it would be the last time; women understand the rhythms of relationships intuitively in a way men often do not, and unlike even men who do learn to listen to them, they are never unaware of those rhythms. By contrast, I thought it was the first of many visits. I thought I was finally going to take my rightful place with the girl of my dreams.

Jenny’s smile seemed forced when she picked me up from the airport. She had other things on her mind, she said, she was moving, and she hoped I’d help. Sure, I said, of course. Her parents were on hand to help her, as was her sister, who looked at me oddly. When the move had been accomplished, Jenny and I sat on her couch. I opened a couple of beers and handed her one. I clinked them together, smiled, and leaned in to kiss her. She pulled away.

What’s wrong? I asked, mildly offended.

You don’t get it, she replied. You never got it.

What do you mean? I asked. What the hell do you want?

She waved her hands in frustration. Muscles! she exclaimed angrily.

She got up from the couch, walked into her new bedroom and closed the door behind her. I looked at my not-insignificant biceps, puzzled.

I went home, convinced that I had misunderstood, that Jenny would change her mind. When next I called her, the way she spoke to me had changed. She wasn’t angry, but she seemed focused on trying to steer me, to manage my behavior in a way I found off-putting. Every call turned into her trying to change me. And it pissed me off. The calls turned into fights, and I said things that I should not have said, and then tried to apologize for saying them. She took it for a while, and then one day, after I had said things about her and me that bordered on a distortion of reality, she told me I needed to stop calling her for good.

Nerds live in worlds of their own construction. Sometimes they form cooperative worlds with other nerds. The rules of those worlds are agreed upon collectively, and they are designed to accommodate the preferences and requirements of people who cannot get along with everyone else, who cannot live in the real world. Sometimes those worlds are based on marginalism, the idea that society should be run for the benefit of those who have been excluded. Other times those worlds are based on elitism, the idea that those who have the most (money, knowledge, education, etc.) are entitled to rule everyone else.

Jenny had stopped being a nerd when I wasn’t looking. When our social circle fell apart, a process that began with my split with her best friend, she went out and lived in the world. It was an adventure, but one that required patience and real bravery. She was on the spectrum, and she took the leap from a simplified reality in which everyone claims victimhood, and there are no real consequences for treating people like shit because everyone does it, into a big, complicated place where everyone is different. The real world is a place that does not cater to the biological handicaps of autists, such as our vulnerability to sensory overload, and what she did took immense courage. I think she had hoped I had, too. But I hadn’t. Not yet.

It was a long time before I understood that a gift for reading people and an understanding of what makes them tick is not enough, that you have to also live in the world everyone else inhabits. In the end, I made the leap and learned to live in the world, too. But by then Jenny was gone.