How (Awesome) I (in No Way) Felt When He Blew Me Off for Another Girl

By Dani Katz

Blown off for another girl – younger, prettier, thinner – the reasons are irrelevant, it smarts just the same whether she’s slutty, stupid, stacked or successful. It’s tempting to compare – like, really tempting – and to tally up all the reasons why I’m a better woman, or to beat myself up for not being good enough, but the truth of the matter is – he didn’t blow me off for her. In fact, none of ‘em have blown any of us off for another girl, ever.

That’s just a story we concoct so that we can feel sorry for ourselves, and collect a big batch of attention to soothe the sting of our relationship’s inevitable end. Because they all end – whether it’s death that does us part, or the imagined allure of a curvy redhead who laughs like a hyena, our every romance will, at some point, dissolve.

Four years into my last big bout of monogamy, the Swedish Playboy posing as my boyfriend had a tryst with an actress – a pretty blonde who was my polar opposite every which way and then some, what with her tiny WASPy waist, her fair skin, and her wide-eyed, soft-spoken sweetness. I took the low road, branded her a tarty slut, and hated her for years synchronistically colored by an overwhelming handful of chance run-ins.

Two years later, she’s still his main squeeze and, on this end of the ordeal, I actually like her. She’s clearly a better match for him than I was. He didn’t leave me for her, he left because of what I wasn’t giving him, which she just so happened to have in spades. The reality is our relationship was on the rocks and full of holes, and that’s why we fell apart. That another woman slipped into our mess before we were officially finished is merely a convenient way for me to avoid responsibility for my part of our crummy dynamic, and to point the finger and justify the drama of my woman scorned role.

Throughout the years, there have been plenty of others who’ve slipped away under the auspices of opting for another woman. There was the astrologer (Scorpio) who hooked up with a yogi named “Honey Pot” at the Harmony Festival, and the acupuncturist who avoided me for weeks and then showed up on my Facebook news feed arm-in-arm with an equine-loving trust fund baby (lesson learned: hide your lovers, or don’t friend them at all). But, the truth is that if we were meant to be, we would have been, bendy animal-loving distractions, or not. Still, the splits hurt, and the ouches are only exacerbated when I know that “my” man’s cuddled up in the arms of another – but, it’s just a ruse, and to keep my focus on her only drags out the ouch of unbonding.

These days, I look at it this way: if he transitions away from me by way of another woman, then that’s one less despondent ex-lover bumming out the planet, and given the chaos that’s currently coloring our world, I can only really be grateful.