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Mr. Butternut | Jan 12 2004

I’m trying to remember if I talked to anyone today. I believe I thanked a few people and said “hello” and “excuse me” several times. At the bodega I ordered coffee, saying, “Coffee, black, no sugar.” After the guy gave me my coffee, I thanked him and wished him a nice day.

This isn’t talking exactly, but I did exchange some emails with a friend, Alisa. The emails were about a guy named Charlie L. who many years ago borrowed Alisa’s copy of A Lover’s Discourse. Recently Alisa asked for it back, and Charlie L. said, very irritated, Well do you need it? Alisa was frightened and didn’t reply. A few days later she read a quote on my website from Roland Barthes—“I am like those children who take a clock apart to find out what time it is”—and this made her realize she’s afflicted with a love curse. A love curse meaning a curse that prevents one from having love. The curse began when Charlie L. borrowed her copy of A Lover’s Discourse. Alisa told me all this in an email, and then she wrote:

What do I do? Should I buy a new copy? Should I go to the gypsy fortune teller and bring this new copy and for $100 they will do something to it to remove the curse? Bury or burn it, I imagine?

This guy lives in New York now with his longtime girlfriend, so there’s no curse on him.

What do you think?

For some reason people like to ask my advice about their romantic problems. Given my own romantic history, this is both strange and, to use an overused word, ironic. Nonetheless I always take these queries seriously and try to craft a thoughtful reply.

Here’s what I wrote:

Knowing just one thing about Charlie L., I feel safe in saying he’s a bad person. Thus I recommend that you buy a new copy of A Lover’s Discourse and put Charlie L. behind you. One way I’ve changed over the years is that I don’t hesitate to drop stuff that isn’t working. Stuff like Charlie L.

Mr. Butternut[1] goes in the same category as Charlie L. Or rather, he goes in a similar but different category, since, in contrast to Charlie L., he’s not a bad person. Still, he’s not working, so I say drop him.

Knowing nothing about Charlie L.’s relationship with his longtime girlfriend, it’s hard to say if he’s cursed or not. That aside, I don’t believe in curses. You get what you pay for. Or not. But there are no curses.

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[1] Mr. Butternut is my name for the man who last month brought Alisa a bowl of soup at a party and talked to her a lot. The problem with Mr. Butternut is that he’s really nice. At first Alisa had some hope about him because he kept seeking her out and bringing her food as gifts. But now she realizes he’s just nice and isn’t interested in her romantically, although he acts like he is. When she was confused about this, she asked if I would ever bring a woman a bowl of butternut squash soup at a party for a neutral reason, and I said absolutely not. This reminded me, just then, of something Choire Sicha once wrote, because it struck me that maybe Mr. Butternut was romantically interested in Alisa but was operating from an idiosyncratic model of what a romantic relationship is. As it turns out, I was wrong. Mr. Butternut isn’t romantically interested in Alisa. I know this because Alisa subsequently flew to Utah for the holidays and wrote to Mr. Butternut about a rodeo she went to, having always dreamed of going to a rodeo. Mr. Butternut showed zero interest in this rodeo—not the bareback riding, nor the steer wrestling, nor even the barrel racing—and merely asked her to keep him on her mailing list. Here’s what Choire Sicha wrote: “My idea of a dream relationship is where we meet once a week, minimum, at an appointed time, do some deep breathing and maybe some stretching to warm up, then we each get five minutes to talk, uninterrupted. After that, we do some responding: ‘I heard you say this, and this…’ And then maybe we hug. The houseboy brings in raspberry leaf tea, and we talk about everything from sex to finances to communication. Afterwards, we eat some pancakes and sausages and smoke cigarettes in a giant claw-footed bathtub.”