The New Yorker: Kicking a Virtual Addiction

If we’re talking chronologically, the story of The New Yorker probably should’ve come first. I responded to his ad way back on July 8^th (well before I posted my first ad). It caught my attention because it posed several random questions, which I, of course, love, and because those questions were fairly good ones. (I won’t post them here because he still uses some of them.)

I added a couple questions of my own in my response and included my AIM and a photo. He didn’t reply to the message, but contacted me on AIM. We chatted occasionally after that initial contact, but I found him a little too detached and didn’t think much of our communication (I was put out initially that he didn’t bother responding to my questions, which I thought were damn good and merited reciprocation at the very least).

Then, in late July or early August, he told me a few things that made him much more interesting all of a sudden. The first was something to the effect of “girls your age don’t try to get to know me/understand me.” (He’s a good bit older.) Of course, I love a challenge, and I took it up. (Well played, NY, Well played.) He didn’t like to talk about himself, he’d told me, thereby making “getting to know him” nearly impossible for someone who doesn’t want to spend countless hours prying the tiniest bits of information from while trying not to be obvious about prying information.

Then he told me about The Pretend Girlfriend. Another girl in D.C., about my age (younger?), who he’d been talking with “in a variety of forums for several months.” Those things made him more interesting (why? Because I’m a little twisted, I suppose), but the kicker was when he revealed he wasn’t living in D.C. at all but in NYC*. (Why is he posting on the D.C. craigslist? you ask. He doesn’t like the women in NYC, he claims, and he doesn’t get as many responses. His big plan is to move back to the District, but I think he’s afraid and doubt it will happen.) With this little revelation of unavailability, The Profile became an uncannily remarkable description of The New Yorker, and I suddenly couldn’t get him off my mind. Pretty soon we were in near-daily contact through e-mail, on AIM, or on the phone, and I’d become his other Pretend Girlfriend.

But his unwillingness to offer any topics of conversation that we hadn’t visited a thousand times already eventually got to me. I did the unthinkable: I made a demand of him. I asked that he not discuss three things he used as conversational crutches when I wasn’t providing topics for our multi-platform conversations.

The New Yorker’s response to that? He just didn’t call me. Or e-mail me. Or anything. And it drove me fucking nuts. I’d deleted his number from my phone to stop myself from calling him, but that only worked temporarily (it came in and out of the address book at least a dozen times through all this).

No matter how much I tried to focus on anything but The New Yorker, stupid little things throughout the day would remind me of something that had come up in one of our conversations (or several of them, as he tended to dwell on things), and I’d be thinking about him all over again. It was like when you do cocaine and then you don’t have it for a while. You’ll be going along with your life, doing something mundane and totally unrelated to anything coke, when suddenly you get a whiff of that bittersweet smell, and you can think of nothing else. No matter how bad you know it is for you, how shitty you know it makes you feel the next day, it’s all you want. Yeah, The New Yorker. I knew it was bad when I could equate him to a narcotic.

So, I did what I always did with him; I got trashed and called him. For some reason, he was quite literally the only person under the sun who I’ve ever drunk dialed with any regularity. I do not and have not done this with any other person. The New Yorker, of course, being a very strange bastard, liked it when I drunk dialed. He seemed more alert and willing to talk then than he was at pretty much any other time, no matter how late it was. (He claimed I sounded “soft and girly” when I was drunk. This conclusion annoyed me.)

Anyhow, I vaguely remember telling him he wasn’t allowed to just stop talking to me. That I didn’t find that acceptable. He laughed. He always fucking laughed when I was being serious.

After the drunken talk, I tried to bring it up when we were chatting on AIM one day. I think I said something like the way we communicate has changed. He said the conversation was a turnoff, and that was the end of it.

That night, I called a girlfriend, and we crafted a plan for me to get rid of this guy. I wrote this long ass e-mail intended for Dear John purposes because I was tired of wanting (read: needing) to talk to him, and I thought that, as with any narcotic, getting him out of my system would require detox (in this case, cessation of all communication). He’d told me numerous times before that if a girl doesn’t express interest, he’s not going to pursue her. I thought I could just stop making the effort and he’d leave me alone. I signed it as his ex-pretend girlfriend, and told him two things I wanted him to know if I never had contact with him again.

He responded to my long ass e-mail with the following:

I like talking to you. You have a good mind. I'll keep talking to you.

And that was it. Communication did not cease. In fact, things soon went back to pretty much where they were before I developed expectations (with the exception of me shunning the Pretend Girlfriend title).

We went back to near daily contact. I felt compelled to tell him things (really personal things), and I found myself unhappy when we didn’t talk for a day or so.

At the beginning, I had felt downright fucking giddy over talking to him. All my friends knew him by name, not by his moniker like most of the guys I’d actually gone out with. By the end of it, not one of those friends liked him. I should’ve listened to them sooner, but something kept me going back. By the time of the pseudo-breakup, talking to him had become tedious; it was a chore. I can’t say I didn’t want to talk with him. I definitely did. There was something at the beginning of our communication that appealed to me greatly, and I suppose I kept holding on hoping to get it back (addiction, Belle, addiction).

I kept going back even though I knew things that should’ve made me run like hell. Things about his living arrangements, employment status, and mental health issues (among others) that would be enough to send any sane girl running. But I kept going back for more.

By this point, he had figured out how to push quite a few of my buttons, and he did so with increasing regularity. It amused him and, of course, absolutely infuriated me. I found myself angry nearly every single day because of something he'd said. I became increasingly bitchy and irritable with him, and all that anger and resentment and unhappiness started overflowing into the rest of my life. I didn’t like the person I was becoming, and most of it could be traced back to him.

Then, I met The Pretend Girlfriend (more on that later), and it didn’t take me long to realize that I didn’t want to associate with someone who would associate with someone like her. And that, friends, is what finally gave me what I needed to tell The New Yorker to take a hike. I knew I had to do it on his terms, in a way he would understand, so I merely told him on AIM one day that he bored me and I was over it. Pretty harsh treatment, considering I’d actually found myself caring about this guy I’d never met, but I had to do it for my sanity.

We’ve had minimal contact on Instant Messenger since I let him go (two instances, both very brief with me being very cold). I’ve deleted all his contact information from every source (although I really have it all memorized, at least I don’t have to look at it and be reminded as much).

I actually went up to NYC this weekend for the first time since living in D.C. If it had been several weeks ago, I would’ve done whatever necessary to meet him. As it was, I was free of that desire and had a lovely time with only minimal, fleeting thoughts of him at all.

* I really think that if The New Yorker were in D.C. all along, our conversations would never have progressed beyond the occasional IM, and he wouldn’t have warranted an entry here at all. It’s also probable that if we had met, he wouldn’t have liked me for wearing long skirts or saying “hell,” and I wouldn’t have liked him for bitching at me for wearing long skirts or saying “hell”… or for whatever reason, and communication would have soon faltered or ceased (like it has with so many others).