Excuse Me, You Have Egg Yolk in Your Chest Hair

Sometimes you need to see something very gross to know the relationship is over.

Sometimes you see an image so alarming that the rest of your life snaps into place in an instant, like when a roller coaster jolts to a stop and your neck does that scary little snapping thing. It happened to me on a punishingly hot day in Palm Springs, when the sun became a deranged stalker. Even inside with jacked-up air conditioning, it had its nose pressed up to the window, staring. Hot.

I was at a very hip Palms Springs hotel because I had decided treat my on and off again boyfriend M to a weekend away for his birthday. It was a dumb decision. Very dumb.

M and I had been in an dysfunctional relationship vortex for about five years. Our interactions were a mishmash of the silent treatment punctuated by earth-shattering sex and screaming arguments. We had zero business in being in a hotel room together.

But worse, a few years prior to this ill-fated weekend, I got knocked up by accident and ended up having an abortion I was initially unsure I wanted. Ultimately it was the right decision, but the prelude to the whole ordeal consisted of M screaming at me in a Denny’s, telling me I would be a terrible mother unlike his ex-wife, whom he suddenly and magically decided was an incredible mother. He sent me emails so vicious that my friend Kristen cried when she read them.

After the abortion, when I was recuperating on my sofa binge-watching Criminal Minds and eating buckets of peanut butter and chocolate ice cream, I promised myself that I would never speak to M again. But because love and attraction and insanity sometimes get all mixed up into a impossible mess, like a delicate gold necklace at the bottom of your jewelry box that will never ever be untangled, I did, indeed, speak to him again.

We both jumped right back into our old patterns, which included his disappearing for weeks at a time. But I zombied on, ultimately deciding on this fateful Palm Springs weekend.

Our reservation required us to cancel seven days prior to check-in to get a refund. Knowing that M had a history of no-contact, I made one rule clear: “Listen, you cannot disappear after the cancellation date passes,” I said over coffee. “You have to keep talking to me during the week before we check-in.” M looked up from the New York Times, “Don’t be crazy. I always talk to you.”

But because the Universe or God or whoever is out there handing us lesson after lesson after lesson has a sense of humor, M spoke to me right up to the last day I could cancel, and then: crickets. This sent me over the edge. I called. I emailed. I texted. I called the hotel and begged to cancel, but no dice. Finally, I logged back into my Facebook account and sent him a message there, knowing that I would at least be able to see if he read it.

What the actual fuck…? I started off, before I tap-tap-tapped out paragraphs about how ungrateful and horrible he was. In response, M simply wrote back: What time should I pick you up?

I spent the whole drive to Palm Springs sulking and silent. Later, M would tell me that he could feel the hatred and anger emanating off of me, swirling around the car. When we got to the hotel, M apologized over and over, claiming his behavior had nothing to do with me and everything to do with his crushing depression, which followed him around like a shadow no matter what drugs he took or how many therapists he saw.

I knew M suffered from depression, but I didn’t believe this was the reason he went radio silent. Ultimately I decided I was too tired to talk about it, and sucked down two lavender mojitos which made me feel better. In the morning I generously wondered whether all my anger was unjustified. Maybe I was premenstrual and my hormones were trolling me, and M hadn’t been so bad after all.

We spent Saturday by the pool, under a white-hot sun. Sweating from under the brim of my hat, I started to notice M from afar. He had gained a lot of of weight, which doesn’t bother me in general (I like ’em chunky) but there was something off about this — a humongous beer belly, without the rest of him catching up. His swim trunks sat way too low, butt-crack peeking out, making him look old and disheveled.

He looked like depression. He felt like depression. His weight was not the result of someone enjoying life and indulging in it, sopping up olive oil with french bread and spending Sundays napping in the sun. His weight gain was from detachment and sadness. He was detached from health, detached from the world. Floating away, the opposite of robust. An archetype of having thrown in the towel.

Nonetheless, the sex was surprisingly good the first night. But the second night was a different story. After the abortion debacle, I started using the sponge while I bided my time trying to convince M to get a vasectomy. But for some reason, every time I would ask M if I should go to the bathroom to contort myself into a pretzel and put in the sponge, he would freeze. The decision-making process was just too much for him. He literally could not commit to a sponge.

On the second night, M couldn’t answer the sponge question. So I rolled over and started reading Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll. The protagonist had endured a violent, traumatic event but covered it up by creating a perfect, beautiful, elegant life: perfect outfits, the perfect fiancé. I was mesmerized, until I felt something poking me.

Despite not being able to commit to whether I should put in a sponge, M was trying to have sex with me anyway. There’s no other way to say this: M’s half-hard dick was just poking away at my lower back area. No discussion, no foreplay, just poke…poke…poke.

I deserve better than this, I thought, as I was reading about the protagonist’s perfectly decorated apartment. I moved away, and he got mad. “I’m reading,” I said, exasperated. He turned over and started snoring.

The next morning, I experienced what I call “The Disqualifying Event.” We ordered room service and had breakfast on the patio, an innocent seeming decision. M was wearing shorts and no shirt, sweating profusely. He took a large messy bite of his eggs benedict, and suddenly a glob of hollandaise sauce and runny egg yolk was on his chest, caught in his chest hair, just…dangling there.

All of a sudden a line was crossed. Enough. Hollandaise sauce and runny yolk dangling in a sweaty guy’s chest hair while he was talking and chewing with his mouth open was simply a bridge too far. His half-hard dick poking my ass was too much. The swim trunks that showed his butt crack was too much. I was done with all of it.

Malcolm Gladwell once described a similar phenomenon, called “the disqualifying statement.” The basic theory is that you can be romantically interested in someone, even deeply so, but if they say something uniquely annoying to you, the relationship is over in an instant. The key to disqualifying statement theory is that the statement cannot be something everyone would hate, or something that everyone would find innocuous.

Saying “I hate Democrats” wouldn’t count, because a lot of people would find that offensive. However, saying “I don’t know if I could breed in captivity” when you drive past a zoo on your first date might fit the bill. All of a sudden, you hate the other person but you can’t explain why. Currently my disqualifying statement is the usage of “LOL” in text messages. I can’t explain why. My juices just immediately stop flowing.

While I can forgive M for not calling before our trip, because he was obviously muddling through a bout of depression, the image of runny yolk in his chest hair is simply unforgivable. I assume this image is my version of a disqualifying statement — people do gross stuff all the time and it’s forgivable, even loveable. But it’s years later and I can’t get the image out of my head.

I want the opposite of hollandaise sauce in chest hair. I want a man in my life, but I also want an elegant and vibrant life. Like the protagonist in Luckiest Girl Alive, I want beauty and elegance to surround me, no matter that she used beauty and elegance to distract her from remembering a violent past.

Even if this means there is never a man again, so be it. My friend Kristen, the one who had cried when she read M’s emails, and I joked about this idea using Ikea furniture as a metaphor. If the only coffee table you can afford is from Ikea and it’s cheap and horrible, just decline to have a coffee table at all. (Don’t get me wrong: I love Ikea. But sometimes the particle board just becomes too much). “This is why I’ve never actually decorated my apartment,” Kristen said solemnly.

But as gross as the image of M’s breakfast sliding down his chest hair remains in my memory, I’m grateful for the visual. It snapped me out of a relationship that was a trap for both of us, one that we continued to go back to out of fear of the unknown. I only hope I won’t need another disqualifying event to get me out of the next dysfunctional relationship. Next time, I’ll just head for the door before the hotel cancellation period expires.