{"id":174172,"date":"2026-06-25T10:00:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T14:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=174172"},"modified":"2026-06-23T14:13:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T18:13:18","slug":"the-mudder-the-lawyer-the-prince-and-mr-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/06\/25\/the-mudder-the-lawyer-the-prince-and-mr-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mudder, the Lawyer, the Prince, and Mr. Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Glowing tree mold photographed after the October 1968 eruption of Kilauea volcano in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY 2.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

In 2015 I was dating three fellows at once. A mudder, a lawyer, and a prince.<\/p>\n

The mudder was Greek and on weekdays he did something with computers in a sealed room where dust meant ruination, and on weekends he\u2019d train to race in this extreme obstacle course where you had to crawl under barbed wire through mud and then jump on a bicycle and wild turkeys attacked you. He kind of looked like a flatworm. The most attractive flatworm on earth: lithely muscular, bendy, slippery. I wanted to lick him. Yet, can you believe it, he said yes to mud and barbed wire and turkey attacks but no to fooling around with me?? And for such a reason! His reason was this: \u201cMy judgment regarding our future compatibility is clouded by physical attraction. I don\u2019t want to get broadsided by darkness.\u201d<\/p>\n

What the hell! We\u2019re not a hundred years old! It\u2019s not the future! It\u2019s right now. We\u2019re on a date. These are our bodies on earth that we drag around everywhere. I thought getting broadsided by darkness was what everyone longed for \u2026 to have the burden of self, the responsibility of existence, temporarily annihilated by tidal wave. To be helpless. I thought (still think?) that\u2019s what sexual love is: the closest you can get to death and still live.<\/p>\n

He seemed to want a love both convenient and long-lasting? What?? And I don\u2019t know how he thought he was getting closer to finding such a thing by simultaneously refusing to either accept me or reject me.<\/p>\n

His house was absolutely bare<\/i>, like one of his dustless computer rooms. It was a warehouse, really, with no wares. Except for three giant shallow wooden candle bowls with giant ball candles in them that he said he bought to reassure women that he was human. I felt very comfortable in the house. And yet I said nothing nice about it, and verbally assaulted the candle bowls. His candle bowls were really none of my business, but I could not rein in my ire. The same for when he returned an article of clothing at L.L. Bean and got a refund after a year of wearing it because that is their policy. Even though I, too, am a stickler for holding companies to their fine print. Likewise, he was incensed about my prepper plans for an underground bunker even though he had the same exact dream. Because we did not act physically, we picked on each other metaphorically.<\/p>\n

We were quite similar, actually, in our mix of the hyperclean and disjointed (maybe autistic?) and the hyperdirty and animalistic. We spoke the same language: awareness of a broadsiding darkness. I thought when you meet someone who speaks the same language, you have to speak it. I thought we were two halves of one of those flatworms that impregnates itself, and the worm you\u2019re looking at today is the original worm, a million years old, or a clone of it. Every single one of our iterations along the way carried out the contract of replication. Until now, for the first time since the dawn of flatworm, one half worm balked, and refused his destiny. It was pretty shocking! No wonder I picked on his candle bowl.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The prince and I picked at each other too, but it was not as fun or hot. He was a German prince. I never did find out what his job was. I think being a prince is a job. I think it carries a lot of responsibilities that I wouldn\u2019t understand. But I am very irresponsible, so \u2026<\/p>\n

I made a joke to the prince about his nationality being known, romantically, as prompt, efficient, and frugal, the joke being that that\u2019s not romantic. But he said in fact that is very<\/i> romantic, very alluring, and Goddamn if he wasn\u2019t right. If someone somehow manages to arrive at the date site at precisely<\/i> the hour, minute, second designated, it makes you wonder what else they could be precise about, like on your body. Alas \u2026 he quickly waved the red flag of \u201cwanting to get to know me better.\u201d<\/p>\n

I said to him, \u201cKnow what? When did this start?\u201d<\/p>\n

People didn\u2019t used to \u201cget to know\u201d anyone. Now everybody\u2019s doing it. I don\u2019t want to know anyone. I certainly did not want this prince to know me!<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not even possible,\u201d I said. \u201cIdentity is not static. Plus we all lie, especially on a date.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWho\u2019s not romantic now?\u201d the prince countered.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m romantic!\u201d I protested. \u201cJust about life, not any one person.\u201d<\/p>\n

But my prince was no mystic, he did not believe anything was beyond his scope of understanding, and was determined to pin everyone and everything down. Whatever I said about something or someone, he put it into his computer mind and came up with a diagnosis. One friend of mine he decided had a personality disorder; another was a grifter. He was right, but so what? What good does being right do?<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The lawyer, on the other hand, was<\/i> pretty mystic, surprisingly for one of his profession. He had a science-fiction-y mind. He was very interesting to talk with, alluring even, yet I couldn\u2019t focus on him. Not at the time, and not now while writing this. My mind just keeps slipping to the Greek and his negative attitude and his positively charged body, which, if ever he had allowed me to lick it, I bet would be like sticking your tongue into an electrical outlet.<\/p>\n

One time the lawyer canceled our date at the last minute because he came down with the flu and didn\u2019t want to give it to me. If he\u2019d really wanted to see me, I believe his body would have forestalled that flu for one more day. I believe the body gives the yeses and noes that our mind is not stalwart enough to come up with.<\/p>\n

Either that or he could have used his flu to make me sick too, and then, as he would have recovered first, he could have taken care of me. Instead, he was considerate, realistic, didn\u2019t make me sick to begin with. Imagine if Heathcliff had said to Catherine, \u201cYou\u2019re making yourself ill by not eating for three days. I\u2019m sorry I stressed you out, especially when you\u2019re married to someone else and in your ninth month of pregnancy. I\u2019m going to stop coming around, and I wouldn\u2019t even dream of hanging Isabella\u2019s dog.\u201d<\/p>\n

Too, a previous date with the lawyer had been canceled by me, due to my babysitter becoming unavailable. But just as I believe the body creates or annihilates obstacles according to its true desire, so, I believe, does life itself. If the fates had wanted me to see the lawyer that night, the babysitter would have showed up. I think it\u2019s egotistical and disconnected, late-stage capitalistic, to believe we decide our course all by ourselves.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I was dating those three to distract myself from my true love, the combustible businessman Mr. Wrong.<\/p>\n

While looking up psychological definitions of all the diabolical things Mr. Wrong may have been doing to me at the time, I came across a list of the characteristics of love-bombing. It soon became clear that the love-bomber was me! Shit. I had too much energy, an obsessive personality, and a job with flexible hours, which allowed me to overwhelm Mr. Wrong with my roller-coaster texts and to overwhelm myself with moods. Thus the need to dilute my huge obsession with many little obsessions with my various dates. I loved Mr. Wrong so much I hated him. And he me. One time we left a Bob Dylan concert I\u2019d invited him to before Dylan could perform even one song because my businessman had worked himself up all day into believing I\u2019d been in a porno. The actress was Mexican and had a mole over her lip, which my true love claimed was a prosthetic (and that I\u2019d gotten a spray tan). He made his accusations during Dylan\u2019s opening act (Elvis Costello) and my denials sent him into such a frenzy he rushed me out of there to drive me home and on the way threatened to drive our car over the rail into the river and kill us both. I knew he wouldn\u2019t, but the stomach-dropping thrill of finding someone as messed up as me in the same way was just \u2026 I mean, it was a delight. I knew how stupid it was. I was trying not to be thrilled. I was trying desperately not to marry him. But in 2016 I gave up on my dates and he became American Husband No. Two.<\/p>\n

My therapists think my love troubles come from a childhood wherein I was trapped with a violent psychopath and had to learn how to find that charming if I wanted to be a happy little person at all. And I did want to be happy. And now that\u2019s my big skill: finding ways to be happy in spite of the psycho I\u2019m yoked with.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s probably more accurate than the theory I\u2019d come up with, that my preference for racing toward the railings at the edge of the road over sitting through a concert I\u2019d paid good money for developed from reading Georges Bataille at too impressionable an age. Still\u2014be careful.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think advice works, ever. So no one\u2014not a friend, not a book\u2014could have saved me all those years of chaos and energy wasted. I don\u2019t think any action comes from knowledge. I think knowledge comes from action repeated enough times to where you finally get bored with it and for the first time can see what it really is. There is no shortcut! Action is instinct. You can\u2019t mess with instinct. You can only let it play out. That\u2019s the one way I\u2019ve seen abusive relationships end\u2014with people, with food, with substances, with work, with money. It\u2019s when it gets boring. For me, the end of the destructive romances that dominated my life was hastened by menopause. What a release! What a blessing! It should be called pause-o\u2019-men.<\/p>\n

And what do you know but Mr. Wrong\u2014we divorced years ago\u2014is here in my house this very minute, friendly and reasonable, building me a bathroom downstairs? He has been released from the darkness, too. I\u2019m leaving my dog to him in my will should I go first. That\u2019s how steady and kind a person he has become.<\/p>\n

But now what? Now that I, too, am steady and kind? What do I do with that? I\u2019ve only got one gear in love\u2014downhill. I don\u2019t know how else to do it! I don\u2019t speak the psychodrama language anymore, but I don\u2019t know any others, so I say nothing.<\/p>\n

It sure is quiet.<\/p>\n

In the middle of Pilates, someone asked the instructor how her mother was. While we followed a series of instructions to put our legs behind our head and all sorts of other places, she told her mother\u2019s story: After a traumatic childhood, the mother tried all her life to heal. It was pretty chaotic, according to our Pilates instructor. In her sixth decade, the mother finally felt she was better and able to enjoy herself out there in the regular world. Then she got dementia. She became combative with her caregiver and had to be given medication that subdued her. She begged to be taken off<\/span> the medication, so they tapered it slowly, but by the time she was herself again<\/span>, the dementia had advanced to where she thought she was a little girl again<\/span>, and all the things that happened to her then were happening again<\/span>, in her mind. But this time she was not okay with it, she did not know anymore how to be happy within such travesties of love. She became violent, and after a few agonizing meetings, the decision was made to put her back on the subduing medication, full-strength until she dies.<\/p>\n

This feels like a warning that there may be a narrow window indeed for me to put down my darkness-surfing boogie board and actually walk the earth, be where I am, before dementia or just regular old age brings me down. All my life I\u2019ve been in love on fire. Being in love felt like lava, or that I\u2019d swallowed light, or had eaten something that didn\u2019t agree with me. And I was always in love.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019m not. Not with any men, not with new places, not even with writing anymore (!). Functioning day to day with lava or light or rotten food jostling around in you may sound difficult, but it was just how I lived, it was how I knew to live. I don\u2019t know what people do with feeling okay, with just being human. Not a god or an alien or a villain or a sacrifice. No role. I have renounced my delusions of grandeur and come home, to my wee, destructible, lava-less body that gets tired, that gets its feelings hurt, and I have not learned how to steward it or enjoy it or \u2026 I don\u2019t know what people do with their day. With my dating trio, I was distracting myself from Mr. Wrong (and so on with other dates and other husbands before and after), but with Mr. Wrong I was distracting myself from life itself, the heavy responsibility of living. Now I\u2019m not distracted. I\u2019m just living. And I don\u2019t know how! Do you? Can you tell me?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lisa Carver published the nineties zine\u00a0<\/em>Rollerderby. Her latest book is\u00a0<\/em>Lover of Leaving, and her Patreon is called\u00a0Philosophy Hour<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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