Beau woes: Boyfriends who just don’t cut it
"Norm Crosby Syndrome" by Lynn Snowden Picket
Sometimes you fall in love, and the object of your affection does something unexpected, and suddenly you feel all the love just drain out of you right onto the floor. Most people can understand this kind of instant change of heart if the loved one did something big and horrible, infidelity maybe, or certainly murder, but occasionally it’s something quite small. Sometimes it’s something so minor you can’t even bring yourself to tell the person you fell out of love with exactly what it was that just ended any thoughts of a future together. Because if you did, you would sound, well, crazy.
I had a moment like this once. I had been dating a man I’ll call John Travolta. Just to be clear, I’m not calling him John Travolta because he actually was John Travolta, I’m calling him that because he was, in many ways, very similar to the guy John Travolta played in Saturday Night Fever. My John Travolta also lived in Brooklyn with his parents, he was good-looking, it was the late 1970s, and his first name was John. The other stuff didn’t match up so well, since he wasn’t a good dancer, and his last name wasn’t Travolta. Anyway, we’d been dating for a year, and he had actually proposed at one point, right in the middle of Saturday Night Fever, which is another reason it makes sense for me to call him John Travolta. He said, “If we’re still like this,” meaning happy, “in a year or two, you want to get married?” Flattered, I said yes, and we went back to our popcorn.
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Years later, I told another woman this story, and she said she had a similar epiphany. Her boyfriend was telling her about something he read in a magazine, but said he didn’t buy the magazine because he was “an invertebrate newsstand browser.” Okay, invertebrate, inveterate, it’s practically a typo. Except this woman could now only picture this man as a giant jellyfish, flopping around, getting the stacks of newspapers soggy. Another friend told me about running under an awning with a man she was dating to wait out a sudden thunderstorm. He made a remark about how much fun it was to look at everyone running through puddles while the two of them stood there, not with impunity, mind you, but with “alacrity.” Her interest in him waned right along with the rain.
None of us told these men the relationship died from what should be called Norm Crosby Syndrome, named for the comedian whose entire act involved malapropisms, so there are probably hundreds of men out there who are confused about the details on why a girlfriend broke up with him. I’m wondering if one guy in particular is sitting at a bar right now telling his buddy that one minute he and his gal were having a conversation about how being divorced doesn’t carry the same stigmata it used to, and the next she was packing her bags! Go figure.
In case you’re wondering what happened to John Travolta after that day in the restaurant, I eventually found out he went on to become a copywriter in an ad agency. So next time you see an ad that’s kind of stupid and doesn’t make any sense and you find yourself wondering, “Jesus, who wrote this crap?” it’s probably written by the kind of guy who thinks a carafe can also be called a crèche. He’s a writer. He plays with words.
Excerpted from "What Was I Thinking? 58 Bad Boyfriend Stories," edited by Barbara Davilman and Liz Dubelman, published by St. Martin’s Press.
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