Dear Luv Doc,
I just read your poop column and it got me thinking of a girl I dated in the not-so-distant past. She didn’t drop poop in my garbage, but she did drop a full plastic bag from her cat box in my recycle bin that had been sitting in her car trunk for God knows how long. By the time I noticed the litter and moved it to my trash bin it was a maggot-infested mess and my bins for months smelled like one of those trailer homes where the crazy cat-lady keeps all the strays from her neighborhood. Anyway, I kept dating her for a while after that maybe because the sex was really good.
Aside from being a dog person, I did stop going out with her when I realized that she was an unapologetic Trump fan and wasn’t going to change. Was I wrong for not ending it earlier?
– Dog Person
Sometimes certain Luv Doc questions read like poorly cobbled together works of fiction. This one, however, has an undeniable truth to it so convincing I can feel it in my viscera. Full disclosure: I might also just be experiencing a Pavlovian response to the phrase “poop column.” It probably won’t come as a surprise that many of my friends and relatives have used similar terms to describe this column even though I routinely explore a variety of intellectual and emotional topics without any scatalogical references whatsoever. Is it my fault that poop as a literary device cuts to the quick of human existence more efficiently than any other metaphor? What good would I be doing if I danced around the hard topics with feeble euphemisms just to placate some nebulous, antiquated, Victorian sensibility? Fuck that noise. We are slogging through the embarrassing sewage of human existence every single day. We all have “mud” on our faces. It’s ridiculous to not acknowledge it.
Now, regarding your shit-hoarding, Trump-loving, sexual dynamo, cat-lady ex-girlfriend: I get it. Bizarre combos like that only come along so often. Sometimes it’s just fascinating to watch the shitshow – at least until you realize you’re in the splash zone. (Psst … that last gratuitous shit ref was greatly inspired by the parting jab Muhammad Ali used to throw when dancing away from an opponent: He might be backing off, but he’s letting you know it’s still in the arsenal.) Sometimes you might fool yourself into thinking you’re in control of a situation when you’re really not. Relationships are problematic in that way: There are inevitably two or more heads (depending on your tolerance) involved and often as not they are not always on the same page. You think you have crazy safely locked in a cage and then crazy miraculously produces a hacksaw blade from out of nowhere and suddenly you’re Barney Fife fumbling to open your shirt pocket to retrieve that single bullet Andy gave you, all the while thinking, “Man, if I can’t get this bullet out of my pocket in time, I hope she fucks me before she kills me.” You only need to experience a few of those scenarios before your prefrontal lobe decides to cowboy the situation, kick crazy to the curb, and buy one of those fancy masturbation flashlights.
So, were you wrong for not ending it earlier? I don’t know. I am sure there are plenty of high-horsing advice columnists who would tell you that you should have cut and run the minute you realized your girlfriend was carrying around a bag of cat litter (Let’s just be honest here, shall we? It was probs mostly shit.) in her trunk so long it developed maggots. Now, admittedly, to even the most liberal of minds, that’s a serious demerit – like a bad case of toe fungus or a closet full of trackmarked underwear, but are you going to give up phenomenal sex on the basis of one demerit? Of course not. People routinely put up with terrible behavior for just average sex. Good sex will make you straight up stupid, but nobody’s stupid enough to put up with cat-shit hoarding and Trump loving. That’s just too much. Sex will never be that good. You clearly left when you realized the relationship could not be saved. In my opinion, that’s the best you could possibly do.
This article appears in April 16 • 2021.
