“When I think of my wife, I picture cracking open her skull, unspooling her brain, trying to get answers. The primal questions of any relationship: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other? What will we do? My parents loved to present me as an obedient, useless, weak man. A parasitic blessing. Their Only Child. But I grew up as a reflection of them. Who they projected me to be, not who I was. And then I met my beloved. A cute, adorable girl who played the same obscure horse games I played. A heartwarmer who needed me. My Love. I love you, I love you, I love you. Everything about me was perfect to you. But then, it wasn’t. Everything came crashing down. An illusion. I wanted to be the perfect boyfriend, the Cool Guy.

Women love the nonchalant charmers, don’t they? ‘He’s so handsome and cool.’ Being the Cool Guy means I am a hot, brilliant, witty man who likes to pamper, pay for stuff, drives a bike, and smells good, who can fix anything, knows all about the food he eats, loves to take and to be taken (but mostly to take) and walks and talks in perfect posture and cadence, as if he knew about the average women’s heart, and doesn’t dress-up like a playboy. He hits the gym three times a week, and plays soccer or volleyball and the guitar and the piano, he cooks and cleans, and is genetically blessed for being around 5'9 and 7'0 tall, and packing well, because Cool Guys are above all hot. Hot and charming. Cool guys never get angry; they take a deep breath and talk in that stern, caring manner and let their women cry in their arms begging for forgiveness for being oh-so-emotional. Go ahead, tell me it isn’t true, I don’t mind. I’ve always wanted to be the Cool Guy.

Women beg for this guy to exist, but when they realize the clock ticking, they decide to settle for the bare minimum. I used to see women – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful performative men, and I’d want to sit these women down and calmly say: You are not dating a man, you are dating a lying, opportunistic parasite who’s going to say what you want to hear because you were sold a prince charming delusion when you were eight. I’d want to grab the poor girl by her shoulders and say: That dog doesn’t give a fuck about your nails or your hair – only other women do! And the Cool Guys are even more pathetic: they’re not even pretending to be the man they want to be, they’re pretending to be the man a woman wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not Cool Guy, I beg you not to believe that your woman doesn’t want the Cool Guy. It may be a slightly different version – maybe she’s a vegetarian, so Cool Guy loves seitan and is great with cats; or maybe she’s an emo loner, so Cool Guy is a lanky, tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves obscure comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, she wants Cool Guy, who is basically the guy who likes every fucking thing she likes and doesn’t ever fail. (How do you know you’re not Cool Guy? Because she says things like: “I like pathetic men.” If she says that to you, she will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like pathetic men” is code for “I hate pathetic men.”) For a long time, Cool Guy offended me. I’d rage against it. I’d think, ‘I’ll never be like that.’ But then I started to pay attention to myself. Why can’t I be like that? I can be that guy. I can be the fun, Cool Guy. And to be desired and loved, I was willing to be the perfect boyfriend. But after a while, I started to get angry at myself for not meeting my standards, for forgetting parts of myself to make myself appear good. And then I realized... I can be anything now that I’m dead. Technically missing. Soon to be presumed dead. Gone. And everyone will regret not having showered me with endless love, trust, and praise before my demise.”