The Kind Of Woman Every Man Needs… But Won’t Admit To

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May 12, 2008

Girl in mask This is yet another brilliantly insightful, funny article from Dan Kennedy (again, not the marketing guru)… and the more of his stuff I read, the more I’ve come to realize I really like what this guy has to say.

The Back-Burner
by Dan Kennedy

She’s smart, she’s beautiful, she laughs at all your jokes, she knows your darkest secrets… and your girlfriend has no idea she exists. She’s your back burner - your plan B. The one you keep waiting in the wings. And your life wouldn’t be the same without her.

I bet you have someone on the side. In fact, I know you do: someone who will flirt back at your mere off-the-cuff flash of wit or listen, rivited, to your stories of recent semi-daring adventure. A woman who makes you feel like you’re still, how do I put this… appealing to the opposite sex, ten years younger, dangerous, infinitely charismatic, yet also a man of restraint and very strong principles, like a sexy cross between that guy from Scrubs, Bono, and the pope. She’s your back burner - that “friend” who just happens to be female, just happens to be someone you could see yourself dating if it weren’t for the small fact that, well, you’re already in a relationship.

I have a back burner, too, and I’d be with her now if I hadn’t, eight years ago, somehow conned my beautiful, intelligent, well-traveled, funny girlfriend into committing to me. But what I’ve learned after years of being in a serious relationship is that a man needs a woman to help him not feel like an ordinary, everyday, Advil-taking, TV-watching bore. And that woman cannot be your girlfriend.

When I first met my first back burner, Tammy, she was a young actress, by which I mean she bartended and modeled leather and vinyl corsets for a small regional fetishwear catalog. She was the perfect contrast to my girlfriend at the time, a suburban, sensible 28-year-old fitness instructor convinced I had the potential to become a well-organized vegetarian with long range goals and a more optimistic outlook on life - an agenda that concerned me because it seemed to leave little time for drinking excessively and sleeping in.

Tammy always seemed to be killing time at one of my favorite downtown hangouts, waiting for me to share a story or joke. And when I did, she’d laugh hard, like she’d just heard it for the first time, because, well, she had. (Unlike my girlfriend, who was, I imagine, starting to feel like the road manager on a Catskills comedian’s never-ending tour.) Any anecdotes I shared with Tammy seemed to come out of my mouth in a casual and cavalier fashion, free of the realities, constraints, and little indignities of day-to-day living. These anecdotes were about a life that sounded so good - even to me - that they somehow let me feel like the man I’d always pictured myself to be but was pretty damn sure I wasn’t.

Allow me to illustrate. Guess which exchange I had with Tammy and which one I had with my girlfriend…

Exchange 1

Her: Hey, how are you!

Me: Great… just got back from skiing in Sun Valley for a week. Yeah… [long stretch that probably comes off as luxurious and athletic] we got lucky, just, like, seven powder days in a row… just basically ski all day, then go to awesome dinners at night with some friends from L.A. who had flown in to ski with us…

Exchange 2

Her: Are you okay?

Me: Yeah, it’s just… Goddamn, my knees are killing me from last week. It kind of freaks me out a little bit.

Her: Why didn’t you take Advil?

Me: Honey, I can’t go taking Advil every time I go skiing, as if I’m 90 years old or something. [trying to stretch back and legs] Plus, I don’t even think it’s from skiing as much as from having to carry the gear from baggage claim all the way to the rental car shuttle. Do we have a heating pad? Didn’t we buy one when I did my hamstring thing at my softball game?

Now, I was never the cologne-soaked desperado calling home at five to play the working-late card so that Tammy and I could sadly dry hump our way through a Coldplay CD. On the contrary, my back-burner relationship remained innocent. Okay, maybe innocent isn’t the right word. The truth is, no matter how much I told myself I wasn’t going to do anything wrong, there was always some seediness below the surface. A moment when, even though I was armed with the most gentlemanly intentions, I’d look at my gorgeous back burner from across the table at lunch and suddenly realize I’m thinking things like “If one thing goes even slightly wrong at home in the next six months, I’m going to see if I have a chance at getting on top of this woman and not rolling off until we’re smoking post-coital cigarettes and talking about how we took too long to finally get to this.”

I would even fantasize about pushing the envelope with a terrible conversational joke that I would probably later find every reason to feel guilty about, the one that starts with my back burner asking me about how my girlfriend was doing, and me responding with something like “She’s dead, actually. Yeah so she’s just…” [I use my hand to make a sort of "out of the picture" gesture]

But none of that ever happened, thanks to a system that kept me platonic, kept me from caving in. Whenever my mind drifted from harmless flirtation toward actual temptation, I summoned a few sobering facts: “She’s eight years older than I am, and she evidently reached that age where she can spend an entire afternoon slamming pitchers of draft beer in a tavern and showering strangers with photos of her old (i.e. dead) cat while doing her ‘happy crying’.” If those two facts failed to cool things down in my head, I simply pictured her smoking menthol 100s in an old terry-cloth robe. This was the perfect system, imagining her this way. This was how to quell any urges that might exist, I told myself.

As time passed, the system ultimately gave way to something else - the natural shelf life of the back-burner relationship. Sooner or later, the funny, daring, super version of you has to make an exit before the real, day in, day out version shows up and ruins the whole thing. Tammy and I are proof positive that you can’t maintain a back burner forever. Both of our ordinary selves showed up around the same time and ended it all. We were talking on the phone when she told me she had “rescued some malnourished kitties” that had been hanging by her place in Harlem, where she had been living with the idea that saving money on rent meant she’d be able to pull together enough cash to renew the registration tags on her car. Tammy’s yammering about her impounded second-hand sedan and calcium-deficient strays wasn’t exactly phone-sex material. But in all fairness, I wasn’t helping when I went on about how my girlfriend and I have been stressed about money, trying to save up so we can put a down payment on an apartment in the city.

You could really hear the fizzle.

Tammy led to Kathleen. After that lost its luster, I met Leanne. Back burner begat back burner. So why did I even need the attention of another woman? I mean, I know we’re genetically hardwired to think about mating with as many females of the species as possible during our all-too-brief time on earth. But the fact is, there’s only one woman I truly want to spend my remaining days with. I love my girlfriend. She makes me laugh; we can still stay up all night talking; when we travel, she wants the aisle and I want the window; at home we like watching the same movies and shows. All signs of true love, as I see it. And there’s maybe the biggest sign of all: two people slowly realizing that over the years they both made the decision to stay together, even after the opening-night dazzle had begun to fade.

The back buner is just a place to feel like you can still be the more mysterious and exciting version of yourself. If it were to ever go beyond that, well, that’s reality, and that’s a whole different ball game. I’ll always have those benign, fleeting moments of fantasy about taking it to the next level with the back burner, because its natural to want to feel like you’ve still got it and that if you were out there again, you could still get it.

…which is why I’ve got a lunch coming up with my current back burner. I’m not planning on having an affair or breaking up; I’m just saying, you know… maybe something happens to the woman in your life and you’re forced to have sex with other women. Maybe she leaves you to join the Peace Corps. Maybe she falls for the trainer from her gym who is a professional surfer in his spare time. You would obviously, basically, have to move on to sleeping with several other women totally guilt-free.

Listen, it could happen.

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