Your cheatin' heart

There’s not much going on here—aside from the fact that this is Jen’s last week in New York (which is a topic I refuse to discuss or, frankly, accept).

I have, however, been marinating a lot recently on cheating. For some reason it seems to be the topic of conversation this week. I have friends who are trying to date people that are in long-distance committed relationships, friends who are screwing married people, and friends in serious relationships who are screwing someone else. I feel like I’ve given more advice on cheating in the last couple weeks that I ever have in my whole life. Which is especially weird since I’ve never cheated on anyone. Nor have I, to my knowledge, been cheated on. (Unless of course you are counting my gay boyfriend—but in that case we both openly hooked up with other men so no one’s feelings were hurt.) This has less to do, I’m sure, with the quality of my character and more to do with the fact that I don’t really do “dating.” I mean you can’t really cheat or be cheated on if you are just casually screwing someone. Or…say, if you don’t know the other person’s last name.

The drama queen in me can imagine how hurtful cheating is. I think I might even feel worse if I was the cheater than if I was the cheated on. (But I honestly think I’d rather just break up with someone—and I HATE doing that—than cheat on them. I don’t think I could do it.) And, I think, as someone who sees too many movies (and too many Lifetime TV movies, at that!) I can totally imagine myself as the wronged wife or even—in my imagination—as the straying woman but I have spent very little time imagining myself as the third party. I mean how culpable are you if you are the “other woman?” I mean, you know that it is wrong to fuck someone else if you are dating someone, but how wrong is it to—as a single person—fuck someone you know is in a relationship with someone else? Pretty wrong, I know, because we should all “do onto others as we would have done onto us” and because of karmic retribution and blah blah blah… But I actually found myself giving advice to one of my girlfriends this week—advice that I actually believe, I might add—that, if she really likes someone and he has admitted to really liking her and he has a girlfriend that she shouldn’t feel guilty about going out with him because (as a single gal) she’s free to go out with anyone she wants and it is his responsibility to keep it in his pants unless he wants to break up with his girlfriend. I also parroted magazine sexpert advice to another friend who cheated on her significant other with a one-night stand. “Jamie Buffalino says don’t tell your partner if you committed a one-time indiscretion,” I told her. He says that admitting your wrongdoing only serves to make you feel better and less guilty and usually ends up ruining your relationship. But—lest you think I’m some total amoral libertine—I also totally condemned my friend who is fucking the married person. I don’t know. I don’t think I am qualified to give anyone any advice about cheating. All I know is how I’d want to be treated and if I was married to you, you’d better be committed to only sleeping with me. And if I was dating you and you had a one-time fling with someone (and that fling taught you that you didn’t want to ever cheat on me again and you felt terrible etc.) I wouldn’t want to know about it. And if you were my boyfriend and you lived all the way across the country from me and you met another woman you were attracted to and wanted to make a go of things with her—yeah, I’d be pissed off but I’m not sure I really believe in long-distance relationships and I think that you’d owe it to yourself and to us to see if things worked out better for you with the girl who shared your zip code. But again, I don’t really date, so what do I know?

What I do know is that I’ve found the perfect soundtrack for all this cheating talk swirling around me all week. Mothertruckin’ Rilo Kiley. You must forgive me for being so hyberbole prone. I know I get obsessed with one band and blog about them ad nauseum until I find another band that I’m obsessed with. (This became perfectly evident to me when I was checking blogpatrol to see how people found this blog and like 32 people found it by doing google searches related to the Killers or the phrase, “you had a boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend!”) But that band is currently Rilo Kiley and—just like Bright Eyes has, what I think, is the most perfect song ever written about a one-night stand—they have the best song about cheating that I’ve heard in a long time. And the best part is that they surround the story, narrarating from all the different sides of the love triangle. At first you find yourself on the side of the narrator who lives in California and is pining away for this man who lives across the country and is married to her friend. He and his new wife are expecting a baby and run an antiques shop together and seem happy and the narrator is wistfully happy for them—though she is still getting letters from this man proclaiming his love for her. (He says that he’ll leave her and come out to California.) But, by the end of the song, you can’t help but feel bad for this new wife who is shakily trying to make her marriage work even though she knows that her man is being unfaithful with her friend across the country. And you realize that none of them will be happy. I get chills at the last part of the song when Jenny “Hannah Nefler” Lewis sings:

“Late at night
I get the phone
You're at the shop sobbing all alone
Your confession it's coming out
You only married him
You felt your time was running out
But now you love him
And your baby
At last you are complete
But he's distant and you found him
On the phone pleading saying "Baby I love youAnd I'll leave her and I'm coming out to California"
Let's not forget ourselves good friend
I am flawed if I'm not free
And your husband will never leave you
He will never leave you for me”

It gets me everytime. In other breaking show news…. Bright Eyes has announced a New York show (he is only playing this fall in “swing states” as part of moveon.org’s Vote for Change show with Bruce Springsteen and others). He is playing next Thursday at Northsix (one of my favorite venue’s in New York—mostly cuz it’s down the street from my apartment!) as a benefit for the RNC protestors’ legal defense fund. They just announced this show, but it’ll be sold out by the weekend. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Tickets are $15 and the proceeds are going to a good cause.