House of Wax

Long-term relationships are a funny thing. In the beginning it’s all excitement. Heart racing, horny and completely oblivious to any idiosyncrasies this new found love may possess.

As time goes on, and I mean, a lot of time-eventually, (especially if you are dating me), things get...comfortable. It’s inevitable.

One day you’re licking the sweat off of each other and the next--you find yourself going to the bathroom with the door open, sharing a sock drawer and popping zits on each other’s backs.

My beau and I have been in a relationship off and on since we were 15 and decided a year ago to finally move in together. Needless to say, there’s not much he hasn't seen and recently I think we both saw just a little bit too much.

The tough thing about long-term relationships is that you want the best of both worlds-someone to always have your back--and someone to rub it for you.

At first there’s this sentiment, this part of every girl that wants that closeness with someone. She wants the guy who thinks she’s prettiest when she's [wearing]…”sweatpants, hair-tie, chillin' with no make-up on”…And that’s great and I love that, and I have that--but I've found that once you get there, once you really take it there—there is no turning back.

The other night he came home with a surprise from the grocery store. Sally.Hansen.Wax.

I've always jokingly given him a hard time about this patch of hair above his butt, so after he was finished waxing his nose-it was my turn to wax his back.

I think because I’m a woman who knows a lot about beauty products, he automatically assumed I would know how to wax like a professional-I played along, layering on the wax in awkwardly shaped stripes, and excitedly went for my first yank.

We were both expecting this huge piece of wax to magically rip off at once--unfortunately, (for him) it didn't quite work out that way.

It took about 20 painful rips before his back tail bone was patch-free.

And then there he was, covered in left-over wax, a little bloody from the deep-rooted hair, and in this bizarre way, I couldn't help but feeling anything other than love.

A few days later, after I’d gotten onto the notion that I'd try growing a landing strip--I decided the perfect way to accomplish this, would be by waxing--with the skills I had attained the other night.

Beau hadn't gotten home from work yet. So I danced around in the bathroom, layered the wax on one half, let it harden and then got nervous. I tried peeling the end off, so that I could get a good grip-and soon realized just how bad this was going to hurt.  As I'm standing there, with one pant leg around my ankle. My awkward crotch half covered in cooled wax-I hear the keys to our apartment door.“Damnit!”                                                                                                                                   

For the first time, in a long time, I actually felt embarrassed. He immediately started jiggling the bathroom door handle to ask what I was doing. I turned the water on to drown out the noise of my squealing and finally after 10 minutes of him questioning me from the other side I opened the door, with a baby voice I start whining, peaking my head out into the kitchen. "I have a problem!"

After taking a look at the damage, he begged me to let him do the yanking. We played cat and mouse around the kitchen for 10 minutes before he eventually got tired and gave up. He then sat watching from the couch and gave me pointers on which directions to pull and laughed at how pathetic of a job I was doing. 

45 horrifically painful rips later-I had sort of waxed one side.

I showered and shaved my hoo-ha into what is now a very crooked landing strip-which he loves.

And if you ask me, too comfortable or uncomfortable, that is love.

When meeting is cute...

For some unexplainable reason, it’s inevitable that most girls like romantic comedies. It’s like the creator just bundled up the essence of every sweet indulgence, the most comfortable pajamas and the feeling of being kissed for the first time and sold it to us in the form of a cheesy movie with an unrealistically happy ending.

If I was going to pinpoint a reason why girls obsess over this particular genre, I’d say it’s all about the meet cute and the hope they bring. If you don’t know what a meet cute is, then you’ve been missing out and I suggest you Netflix the movie The Holiday. But here’s a quote the movie, so you know what I’m talking about.

“Say a man and a woman both need something to sleep in and both go to the same men’s pajama department. The man says to the salesman, ‘I just need bottoms,’ and the woman says, ‘I just need a top.’ They look at each other and that's the 'meet cute.’” – Eli Wallach’s character Arthur Abbott

There have been times when I’ve been watching these movies and I’ve been thinking “No way, that would NEVER happen in real life.” But I’m here to contradict myself.

Meet cutes are real. I’m a real person with real friends who have experienced real life meet cutes, they aren’t half as good as the ones from the movie and they don’t always lead you to the love of your life but they do exist. So here’s to hoping!

To start off a (hopefully) growing collection of meet cute experiences, I’ll share one of my own.

One day after work, my friends and I decided to have happy hour. We went to a trendy bar in River North and had a few overly priced handcrafted cocktails. Afterwards we made our way north, towards home but stopped in a casual bar in Lincoln Park. Thursday is $5 martini night, so we had our fair share of fruity martinis with names like Je Ne Sais Quoi.

There was a decent looking guy at the bar sitting next to me, he was tall, kind of nerdy, looked kind of like he hated life – my favorite kind. We just casually started talking about work, about college, about NATO, about other things. I was pretty buzzed from the overpriced cocktails and the underpriced Je Ne Sais Quoi’s, and have a tendency to make friends with strangers. Finally my friends decided it was time to go home, it was late for a week night, so we took off.

After I left, he approached one of my friends who had stayed behind and told her “That girl I was talking to might have been the love of my life, I didn’t get her number. Do you have it?”

She didn’t. That was the end of that story. But not really, because we went back to that bar a month later and a very daring friend of mine gave my phone number to the bartender who apparently knew the guy and passed it along to him. I got a text from him the next day.

There really isn’t much more to the story after that. It wasn’t love, but I was definitely flattered and it made me realize you shouldn’t hesitate to talk to anyone. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain.