Liar liar pants on fire

I’m a little bit of an email packrat. I have emails and Facebook messages from people I don’t even remember. Occasionally, when I’m feeling nostalgic, I like to go through them and see my early interactions with close friends. Sometimes I stumble upon some sort of scandal I’ve forgotten about.

This is just what happened the other day when I found an old message I’d sent to a guy a few years ago and made a not-so-shocking revelation: When things don’t go their way, boys lie. A lot. The message said:

Hi, so apparently you have told particular people that I am "all over you" or at least have been in the past. It'd be pretty cool if you wouldn't misinterpret my attempts to be friendly because I thought you were a cool person (which I guess I don't really think so much anymore after learning this) and not make me out to be a shameless slut. No big deal because we aren't really friends, but really, have some respect.

Then I read his response:

I don't know where that came from, and I really don't remember saying or thinking it. Sorry someone told you that, and for the record, I've got respect, I don't think you're a shameless slut, and I am in fact really super cool.

Whoops. It took me a few minutes to figure out what this exchange had been about. When I realized what had precipitated this, I was sucked back into a very eventful evening on a porch.

It all began when I met a guy, let’s just call him J, after getting a tattoo at the shop where he worked. Which should have been my first hint to run away, but hey, I was in college and I thought he was cute. We exchanged numbers and agreed to go out sometime. It turned out that he was very close friends with one of my coworkers, who, when he met with my resistance, decided to call him on my behalf and make plans.

J and I hung out a couple times, but I just wasn’t particularly wowed. He kept telling me about how he wanted to take me on a date to a cereal restaurant. Cute, I guess, but... he was just a very simple guy. I gave him the cold shoulder a little bit, and at some point there was a drunken phone call in which things ended rather badly. I’m not 100 percent certain, but it may or may not have involved him calling me a slut and me calling his friend a “fat fuck.” J was a very emotional kind of guy, bordering on emo — okay, fine, he was just plain emo — and I probably hurt his feelings quite a bit.

About a year or so later, I was talking to a girl I had worked with for awhile when suddenly it appeared a light had gone on in her head. She had never been especially nice to me, but she asked me what my last name was. When I told her, she said “So that’s you! Do you know J? He still talks about you all the time. You should really give him a chance, he’s a great guy and he really likes you.” Though she made a good argument, I just couldn’t do it.

Which brings me to the eventful night in question. I was at a party, standing and talking to people, when I saw someone familiar come around the corner. J. I stopped what I was saying midsentence. “Fuck.” He approached me, and that’s when things started getting dramatic.

“Oh hey Sara. Thanks for just not talking to me. Were you going to say hi?”

“Hi.”

“So I really love how you just never talked to me after I last saw you. You didn’t answer my calls or texts or messages.” I realized he was probably drunk, and he was getting pretty loud. I asked him to go to the other side of the house to talk.

I don’t really remember the conversation that followed, but I know I apologized, told him I thought he was great but just wasn't feeling it, blah blah blah blah blah. It was all very dramatic, and he was crossing over the line into full-blown emo, rip my heart out bullshit, when my phone rang. It was my roommate calling to see where I was because she didn’t have her keys and wanted to meet me, so I stepped away to talk to her.

I was in the middle of giving her directions when J came up and took my phone from my hand. He hung up on my roommate and tried to kiss me. I turned away and shot him a nasty look. “Have you not been listening at all? I don’t like you that way, and you just hung up on my roommate, who is locked out of our house. I was trying to tell her how to get here.” I grabbed my phone out of his hand. I had just turned and taken a step in the direction of the party when he grabbed my arm. I spun around. He leaned in close and lowered his voice.

“You know, D told me you guys hung out.”

“Yeah, we had a class together freshman year and we ran into each other at a party. We walked to his apartment to get his car and he drove me home. We talked about how funny it was that he was drunk because he doesn’t love Jesus anymore. So?”

“Well do you know what he said? He said you were all over him. That you were throwing yourself at him.”

“Well I don’t know why he’d think that, because I wasn’t.”

“Well then you should be careful who you hang out with.”

I was furious. D could misinterpret my friendliness and suddenly I’m some slut who throws herself at everyone, but if I rejected J after he acted like an ass all night and tried to kiss me, I knew I’d hear about what a bitch I was, what a tease.

So I sat down and wrote that message to D. I wasn’t really expecting a response – I figured he’d feel too salty to say anything. I’d caught him! But three days later, I was the one who felt salty. He wrote back to tell me he hadn’t said that at all. That’s when I realized what really happened: J didn’t get his way and was throwing a proverbial tantrum trying to upset me.

And it’s not just some weird, isolated occurrence. How many times has a guy hit on you, only to claim he wasn’t interested once you reject him? J’s little lie was just a glorified version of this commonplace event.

Boys are babies. It goes so far beyond making excuses when they’re wrong. They just flat out lie when they aren’t getting what they want, like that somehow fixes everything! What particularly tickles me is the default defense mode—ooh, let me lie and say someone called you a slut! That’ll get under your skin!

Last I heard, J was living in some other state, living with a girl who’s willing to powder his ass and change his diapers.