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June 30, 2008

why sarah

You've asked me a lot of questions about Sarah in recent weeks, each of them some variation of "Why were you ever with such a lying hussy?" Only you didn't say "hussy." I cuted it up.

Good question. I will now attempt to provide an answer that doesn't make me look like a complete fool.

Anyone who meets Sarah adores her. She's self-effacing, articulate, funny, sparkly, sweetly vulnerable, and genuinely interested in whoever she meets. These are attractive qualities in their own right, but when embodied in a pretty girl, it's a perfect storm. She makes a ridiculously good impression. Male or female, you adore this Sarah, and until November or so, it's the Sarah in whom I religiously believed.

That Sarah was the one who initially opened up to me over margaritas, who bravely told me about all the ghosts that haunt her, about her lifetime filled with fear. Every guy she'd ever been with was downright mean or psycho. Parental neglect, spousal neglect, physical danger, sexual abuse and confusion—it was all covered. Poor Sarah. Poor, poor Sarah. And over the course of that evening, I felt unprecedented feelings of love and protectiveness toward this woman. I vowed to always have her back. She held my hand and cried. We would both later say this was the moment we fell in love.

"Jeeeeeeeeeesus Christ," said Allie at the time. "Why doesn't she just change her name to 'Poor Sarah' and get it over with?"

Months passed. I'd already started to detect whiffs of self-pitying bullshit ("What exactly did Josh do that was psycho, again?" I asked). Then along came The Gender Neutral Physical Therapist and my attendant suspicions. By 2008, I sensed she was hiding things, but she was doing a curious job of it. During an all-too-frequent eruption of self-pity that I'd come to call her Poor Sarahing me, for instance, she said she'd told "Rich who I consider a new friend" all about her ghosts. He'd remarked on how remarkably remarkable she was for having endured all that.

"How charming," I smoldered to myself. "Rich had his very own margarita moment. I wonder how many times she's tapped that particular well?"

That's when the cracks really started to widen. That's when I started to think "Gee, that sounded an awful lot like a lie" with alarming regularity. But I ignored my instincts. I did so for two reasons: 1) I very much wanted to believe in the best Sarah I'd observed, not in the mounting evidence of a worser nature, and 2) I'm a firm believer that trust is an integral part of the partner-vetting process. Yeah, I was starting to suspect that this is a woman who feels entitled to sleep with whomever she damn well pleases, but what of it? Even if your trust is betrayed, well, that's still a successful vetting.

"Never violate a trust you intend to keep," reads John's third law. And so I did not spy on her, even though my instincts (and a few friends) were screaming for me to. I plowed ahead and did my best in the relationship, but I was not naive. I knew she was self-vetting. I knew she was lying. (She's a pro. I actually identified 18 distinct types of lies in her repertoire. I could write tomes about her deception playbook and entitle it the Sarah User's Guide.) I knew she wouldn't leave until she had a warm bed to land in. And she did. By astounding coincidence, it was exactly the bed I'd asked her about, and that she'd denied, the night we broke up.

"You're, like, totally psychic. Got any stock tips?" Allie asks.

Emphatically denying her new relationship to me (in person and by proxy), Sarah paradoxically integrated herself into it as quickly and as publicly as possible. The conflicting motives, I presume, are a desperation that I know one Sarah and that everyone else knows another—a Sarah whose blots like me are erased from history. One thing I know for certain: because I had the temerity to exist when she wanted to fuck someone else, I've become mean or psycho. Probably both.

Make that 19 types of lies. And counting.

posted by john at 04:49 AM  •  solamente