Eight Months With Ethan

I cannot and will not be held responsible for how pathetic First Love made me. If you are related to me please don’t read this.

Ethan wasn’t technically My First Boyfriend, just the first that I’ve Loved and therefore the first that I count when I reference My Boyfriends. I met him the summer I decided to stay in London between my third and fourth year at Western, because going home for the summer meant getting a summer job and I already liked the part-time food runner job I had at McCabe’s.

Earlier that year, I had been diagnosed with ADHD (I’m exactly like other girls) and prescribed adderall to get me through exams. The thing was, I had more adderall than I did school work (I was stretching my 3 year program over the course of 5) so most of my drugs and the methy hyper-focus they gave me could be allocated to being the best damn food runner McCabe’s had ever seen. 

And I really was. You should’ve seen me there on a busy night, organizing chits and filling up ramekins with a focus, passion, and fervor that would likely traumatize a dog or a small child, but impressed the hell out of my fellow staff. It was the most productive and meaningful I had felt since being a dancer in high school. Sad as that sounds, when you’re an aimless, friendless, budding alcoholic on amphetamines, doing a good job at your role as the lowest ranking employee at the 7th most popular university bar has the ability to create meaning. 

Needless to say I was pretty lonely at that point in my life, even before all my fellow Western students migrated home for the summer. I had only gotten the job during second semester because all of my peers had become more invested in school and less invested in me, for one reason or another. 

This is my roundabout way of saying I didn’t really have friends. Keep reading, you’ll see why.

I was spending much of my plentiful free time watching stand-up comedy. I had heard of the male Greats prior to this point but none of it spoke to me until I saw Amy Schumer, who happened upon me like an epiphany. Horrible women can do this too? Sick! That’s right, in case you were looking for more crimes to prosecute her for, you can add the inception of my career to the list.

I believe it is a young person’s prerogative to discover something which is new to them but not new in general and then to aggressively project the meaning it instills in them onto others; the instant that revelation strikes for them, it should strike everyone else concurrently. 

Do you know what I mean? Like, how the second that a young person learns about injustice they act like the injustice is only happening for the first time, right now, and as if they themselves were personally the one to discover it; as if no one else was previously aware of injustice. Furthermore, anyone who isn’t aware of that injustice is ignorant, and anyone who is aware of it but not as emotionally struck by it is morally vacant, or at best apathetic.

Anyway, that is the attitude by which I alienated the few remaining people in my life. Sure, like any other 21 year old, I did it with social justice, but I extended that same insufferable and condescending passion in the way that I talked about stand up comedy, which is so much worse. I couldn’t even talk about funny in a way that was fun or light hearted because again, I was extremely on adderall. I could only pontificate. Talk ad nauseum about how stand up was a God-send; the ultimate art form that could make people laugh while also making them think (cringe); acknowledge human abjection while containing brilliant cultural commentary (lmao); and even entertain while affecting change! (😂😂😂😂😂) 

I was blown away even by mid-tier iterations, thrusting B minus amateur sets onto the unwilling with my very chill and not at all aggressive disposition. Yes, force, the perfect circumstance under which to consume comedy!

I romanticized stand up comedy to such an extent that it’s no wonder I welcomed Ethan into my life with such open arms.

Me and Ethan met when I was scheduled to train him on the expo station on a light night, permitting us to talk about things other than which food items were accompanied by which sauces. I learned that Ethan was an aspiring stand up comic who had been to acting school and participated in one single open mic. I thought that was so cool. I won’t say I was immediately in love but I will say it was the first time I had met someone with a shared goal and affinity for comedy, which made the connection - at least on my part - instantaneous.

Later that week, we went out drinking with our colleagues and he slept over (we didn’t fuck) but after he left my house in the morning, I texted him to come back to my house and fuck me. 

He did, but afterward he told me he’d wished that we hadn’t. He only told me after the fact that he was a Christian trying to practice celibacy; that his relationship to God was also in opposition to his comedy goals. He was struggling with how his goals in comedy would interfere with his goal of getting into heaven. Right before moving to London he had stuck his prized position - the complete Louie boxed set on DVD - directly into the trash.

I was a prototypical 21 year old libtard whose values couldn't have clashed more. I thought everything he was saying was insane. I didn’t appreciate his implication (which he did explicate) that I should keep my legs shut. I didn’t appreciate feeling solely shamed for what we had both done, together. I didn’t appreciate being put in the position where I needed to defend myself, but I did, telling him I believed casual sex was both possible and empowering for women. The irony here is that this encounter with Ethan was actually my first experiment with “casual sex” and I fell in love with him the second he left my body. And that, ladies and gents, is my excuse for having tolerated such a tempestuous post-coital convo. Letting it proliferate into a real relationship, on the other hand, cannot be excused. Keep reading, you’ll see why.

I’m sure it was largely the female chemicals doing that attachment thing that they do, but zooming out now, I think there was more to it than that. I think that Ethan represented stand up as a symbol and before I knew how to pursue it, I pursued him; I made him the vessel for my unexecuted passion.

And despite all of our differences, it really was amazing to finally have someone to talk about stand up with, even though he couldn’t find an appreciation for my then role model Amy Schumer, because talking about sex candidly was heretical, though cheating on me rampantly was afoot. 

Though he had only ever been to one open mic in Toronto where he performed drunk and bombed, it was a story I'd have him tell over and over again like it was a fairytale; like it was a moment in history that he’d been there for and a part of. I’d lie on his floor-bound mattress, kicking my heels as he recounted it for me, begging him to perform some of his bits.

The only joke I remember was an impression: 

“Come on in you guys, Come in! Please, I insist! You come in here, too! Everyone please come in here, yes, you too!” 

Then he dropped the high-pitched voice and announced: “that was my ex-girlfriend”. 

You’d hope I’d have just stared at him dumbfounded, maybe never talk to him ever again, but no… I was enamored. No, I was enchanted. Despite the fact that the punchline was hack, slut-shamey, and sexist (an aberration to my principal values at the time) it was a punchline nonetheless. To me, at that point, a complete joke of any kind was magic, and the fact that he had both created one and been able to perform it earned him my undivided adoration. 

I loved leafing through his notebook, taking in his scattered thoughts and the method by which he organized his setlist. It was formatted like a flowchart. It is the format I would instinctively adopt when I started going to open mics a year and a half later, and it is the format I still use to this day. 

I thought Ethan was the funniest person I had ever met but in retrospect I think he might’ve just been on the edge of his sanity. He didn’t live in London because he went to Western, but rather had moved from Mississauga because he couldn’t stop drunk driving his parents’ car. He didn’t want to start a life in London, he just wanted to escape his substance abuse and toxic on-again-off-again relationship with his ex-girlfriend. I wonder if he was surprised when he found the exact same things again in London. 

I don’t remember how or when or honestly if we became official. But even if it had less establishment than my previous relationships, it felt realer than them because I actually felt something for Ethan. Up until Ethan, I always wondered how girls could get played so hard, how girls could get hurt so bad, how girls could be made to look like such fools. Up until Ethan, I felt like I had all the control in my relationships because I didn’t actually love them. Up until Ethan, my boyfriends consisted of whoever requested to be my boyfriend. Ethan did not want to be my boyfriend. He didn’t even want to have sex with me, but he was weak and I was desperate and for all these reasons we ended up together, despite the fact that he was disgusted by me; even pitied me.

I encouraged him to walk all over me if it meant being in his company. One summer night, after drinking until last call, I knew he’d be hitting up an after party with the other partiers in our entourage and so I offered up my place as the second location. I stayed up with them until 5 or 6 before I needed to go to sleep, and though I immediately passed out, I was awoken soon after by the shrieking of Ethan from the other room. When he was drunk, he would perform, and he would not drop the bit, no matter fucking what. It was freakish. I asked “them” to keep it down, even though it was only him being loud. I retreated to my room, frustrated, hearing the guests tell Ethan they were going to go home. He barred them from leaving, even blocking the door. He started making more noise than ever before, singing, doing impressions, pulling out the bells and whistles to coax them with his relentless entertaining to stay longer. I tolerated the noise for a bit longer until I emerged from my room again to see that he had spilled out and crushed up all my adderall to cajole the squad into staying. I kicked all of them out except for Ethan.

Ethan came into my bed and I felt relieved, as if the problem was gone, as if the problem was everyone else, as if the problem wasn’t the guy I felt happy to have in my arms. So, so happy.

The feeling of first love is incredible, it really is. Blinding as it is, devastating as it was, incorrigible as he was, it was just nice to finally feel so much. Sometimes I miss that sort of love. New love, first love; it hits you with a chutzpah that outweighs all of the material factors and so it doesn’t even matter how mean, broke, or on drugs he is; you Love him and aren’t you just so lucky to get to feel that way?

…

When I got to work the “next day”, around 3pm, my manager who previously loved me was giving me the cold shoulder. When Ethan showed up for his shift at 7pm, he summoned us into the basement, confronted us about our relationship, and told us that either one of us had to quit or we had to break up.

If this ultimatum was presented to me in 2023, I promise you I’d ditch the guy and the job, but it was 2015 and he had just asked me to choose between the only two things that I had in my life. I burst into tears before my manager and a guy who had literally tried to break up with me two days prior, a guy who needed this job, a guy who had moved cities for this job, a guy who didn’t want me at all. 

My manager, understandably uncomfortable in the face of my total despair, told us we could let him know by tomorrow, and so I spent the entire night researching labour laws and writing the most adderalled-out “I don’t think so honey” email to my manager that ended up keeping me the job, but eliminating all of the workplace praise that had meant so much to me.

Ethan broke up with me, anyway. 

And I dealt with it the same way I dealt with the threat of my dismissal from McCabe’s: I simply wouldn’t allow it.

I really don’t know how I did it - but I managed to hang onto this guy for 8 months entirely against his will. That’s why I can't really paint him as a villain, because the entire relationship was basically unconsented to. Many times did he try to break up with me, many times did he tell me he didn’t want to be in a relationship. Yet still I would show up at his door, not quite sure what else to do with my undying love for him. 

If anyone here is a victim, it’s the two roommates that had to come back in September to my absolute hurricane of a relationship. My roommates who were my best friends, who are not any more, because of all this. 

How many times did Ethan show up post after-party, maybe six or seven AM? His most psychotic and manic point of the day, just pounding on my front door for a full hour while I bawled my eyes out and screamed at him to leave because I had told him his “last chance” to come was at three? 

They comforted me the first few times before realizing that this was a constant, that they were going to be losing sleep simply because I couldn’t respect myself.

Their final straw with me was after calling a roommate meeting to show me Ethan’s Tinder profile. I interrupted the meeting to call Ethan about it, which he explained was “a joke”, an excuse I bought wholesale, and my roommates gave up on me entirely. 

Every attempt I had to make him better backfired. Ethan had an affinity for jiu jitsu, which he expressed through restraining me in submission holds, mercilessly holding me down beyond when I’d tap, beyond when I’d scream, deep into the territory where I'd be crying and begging him to stop. 

My solution was buying him a 10 pass to a local martial arts studio, so that he could expel this inclination onto more willing participants. I’d drive him back and forth like I was his mother, and the result of all this was him more frequently and more skillfully holding me in submission poses (to “practice”).

I was always encouraging Ethan to come sit in one of my lectures, I told him he’d blend right in amongst the two hundred or so Philosophy 101 students, but he never did. I told him to come to the library with me, I would do my homework and he could write stand up jokes. He expressed a vague interest in doing so, but never ever would.

Until one day, after yet another sleepless night of trying to track him down, he finally texted me back at 10am saying that he was at the McDonald’s across from the bus stop I took to campus. He messaged me exactly as I was arriving at said bus stop, and I crossed my fingers that he was just there because he knew my schedule and was grabbing a regular breakfast before finally coming to campus with me. But I knew better. 

When I saw the way he stumbled out of the McDonald’s, shooed by a furious looking employee, my worst suspicions were confirmed. He was fresh off an after-party, the drunkest and highest point of his last night was now, in the late morning of today. I tried to duck from his vision and hurry onto the bus, but he spotted me, and in his coked-out fervor Ethan sprinted across the street and onto the bus, bellowing a Frank Sinatra song upon entry. He beelined for me, forcefully shoving sober students aside, singing drunkenly through the consumption of an Egg McMuffin. I watched as my peers observed him with expressions of disgust and dismay. I was utterly mortified, though somewhat relieved to have found him after a lachrymose night of fearing that he had finally (and fairly) been murdered by one of the homeless people he had a habit of harassing.

After a humiliating bus ride in which he would exert some of his most racist impressions to bus patrons of aligning ethnicities, the bus pulled up in front of North Campus building and I sprinted out, weaving through the hordes of students like I was dodging a bullet, which metaphorically speaking, I was. I sprinted until I got into my classroom, not even pausing for a beat to look back, just in case I’d see him running behind me; just in case he’d catch my eye and yell my name and everyone around me would know that Olivia was the one responsible for this psychopath sprinting through campus in a McCabe’s uniform. I held my breath for the first 30 minutes of Computer Science, terrified that at any minute he’d explode into the room and ruin whatever was left of my reputation (not much) but thankfully he never did. 

We took a break - as we always did - halfway through class, and so I emerged into the corridor, slightly trepidatious but confident that Ethan had worn himself out looking for me, started to feel hungover, and headed home to sleep it off. 

Just as I began to breathe easy, believing that the worst was over, Ethan came sprinting around the corner of the other end of the building. 

Two seconds later, four campus police officers rounded the corner, chasing him at the same speed. Ethan caught my eye and began screaming my name as he sprinted, making my nightmare from an hour ago come true. He eclipsed the hundred or so meters between us with his shrieking, captivating everyone who stood in between. I rushed towards him to close the gap and by the time I approached him there were tears streaming down my cheeks and in my delusional distance from reality I tried to explain the situation to the campus cops as if any of it was justifiable; as if everything I had to say didn’t make it worse: “… he just followed me here… he doesn't actually go to Western… he’s just really drunk right now…”

Apparently, what had happened was that he did in fact find a Psych 101 class, a large lecture hall he could’ve easily blended into he had wanted to, but of course he didn’t want to; blending in was never his prerogative, it was instead to get attention by by making people laugh, and if that failed, to get attention by pushing buttons. Instead of waiting his turn at an open mic to do that (like every other guy I’ve met like him since) he exerted that impulse onto unwilling participants, nonstop starting fights with strangers based on his surface level understanding of a talking point he’d picked up from some right-wing grifter’s podcast. 

Apparently, that’s precisely what he had done in Psych 101, in a classroom full of 200 first year students, not relenting until campus police were summoned to remove him, only upon their arrival making a run for it, thus landing us in the exact moment we were in now. The campus cops told him that if he ever stepped foot onto the Western campus again he’d be arrested by the real police, and after two of them escorted him outside, the other two asked me why on earth I was dating this guy.