You had a great date. Good conversation, good dinner, good sex (depending on how slutty you are). Or so you thought. The obligatory three days go by, three days becomes two weeks and so you give up and send him to a faraway land filled with Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and other naive childhood dreams gone bad. Like milk, cheese, and other dairy products, there is an expiration date on when it is acceptable to contact a person in this situation. Men, and OK I'll admit it, women too have a tendency to give prospective significant others false hope. I'm about to tell you about the times I have been strung along and why this is not OK.

1) I met a guy, let's call him Ned. He filled my head with false promises. "We'll still be talking when we are 70 years old," he said. "What would I do without you?" he asked. "If you had to write a book about your life, you would write about how we met one summer and fell in love." Yes, you read that correctly. So you can imagine my surprise when it turned out he was hooking up with someone behind my back. I wrote him one of those e-mails. You know, the one that you write and never send (or should never really send) only I really sent it. Ned's response was to not address any of the issues that I wrote about. He did, however, sign his lame ass excuse for a response with "You admirer." Why did he even respond? Why did he sign it "your admirer?" Why did he ever say those things? WHY, WHY, WHY???

2) Freshman year I dated a guy, let's call him Murry. He didn't have time for me and I wasn't a priority. He preferred Disney movies and math to spending time with me. I pick such winners. It took about a year but I managed to get over him. We still talk, however. We are never going to be together due to the fact that there are many states separating us and the minor issue of his serious girlfriend. He still likes to im me though and talk about how he wants to visit me, he still has feelings for me, he regrets the way he treated me, yada yada yada. WHY? WHY? WHY?

3) I lost my virginity to a guy who we shall call Raul. I always felt like we had this force connecting us. Despite the fact that I hooked up with one of his friends and he made out with a skank in front of my face, we kept coming back to each other. Then he moved to cow country and promised we would hang out because he comes to L.A. all the time on business. I have yet to hear from him.

4) I went on a date a few weeks ago with a guy, let's call him Jeronimo. I love to give guys that suck unappealing nicknames. It makes me feel better. For instance, if you're dating a guy named Mike but refer to him as Milton, and then you say "Milton hasn't called me," it's somehow less depressing. Or maybe it's more depressing because if your name is Milton then you really should call. You can just ignore that last statement. I'll get back to the point now and the point is Jeronimo. We had a good time. Or so I thought. The obligatory three days went by. Three days became two weeks. I had sent him to a far away land filled with the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, Ned, Murry and Raul. Then BAM, I get an e-mail from him saying that he did in fact have a good time, he was sorry for taking so long to get in touch but he was taking the LSAT. He ended by saying he would call later in the week. That was Monday. This is Saturday. I hate to break it to myself but someone's gotta do it. Jeronimo aint calling.

So the question that I would like to ask is WHY????? Why did he bother to take the time and e-mail me strictly to say that he was going to call and then not call? I had given up. I was over it. Well, I was sort of over it. But I surely would have been over it by now if he had not done that. Why did all of these guys fill my head with lies and false hope when they could have just let the milk go bad and throw it away? It's not fair to refrigerate the milk if you know that you are not going to drink it. Milk has feelings. THROW IT AWAY.

In conclusion, I acknowledge the fact that no one likes confrontation. No one likes rejecting someone else or feeling like a jackass. But the point I am trying to make is that you are a bigger jackass if you string someone along. If you are not going to call, don't say you're going to call. If you are hooking up with some skanky ho on the side, well first of all don't be hooking up with some skanky ho on the side, but if you are doing that then you are already an asshole so you don't need to sugarcoat anything by saying things like, "If you had to write a book about your life you would write about how we met and fell in love." And so I will end this with a quote from a song that brings me back to my high school days and summarizes what I have been trying to say.

I'd rather you be mean
Then love and lie
I'd rather hear the truth and have to say goodbye
I'd rather take a blow
At least then I would know
But baby don't you break my heart slow