Being Playful

Note: This essay was originally published in 2019 in The Honeypot (which has since moved to Substack)

You’re a hardworking lady. You live in a huge city and you spend your days commuting miles from jobs, to shows, to rehearsals and back. Then, one morning you wake up and realize that for the first time in maybe a year, you have a Saturday night and a Sunday morning with no plans. Which means you have a proper weekend night to have FUN. And hey, you’re a FUN GIRL!
 
True, you haven’t felt fun recently. In fact, you’ve felt kind of anti-fun. Not because your life with all the things isn’t enjoyable, but because when you do have the opportunity to do the FUN THING, you kind of forget how. Take this Saturday night for example. All you want is to MAKE OUT with someone, like a FUN GIRL, but where, and...how? You deliberate for hours and ultimately make plans to see two separate sketch shows at two separate theaters full of people you already know. Of course you do.
 
After the shows, despite exhaustion but because of determination, you take a look around. Unsurprisingly, you don’t want to make out with anyone there. Everyone who is fabulous seems to be coupled off with someone else you think is fabulous. Everyone who is okay also seems to be coupled off with someone fabulous. But then, a good and unexpected thing happens. The boy you hooked up with last year is at the theater for a midnight show. How perfect! You made out a few months ago and, sure, your DMs to hang out again have gone mostly unresponded, but tonight is different, it’s FUN. He walks over to talk with you and tell you about his set and ask about the musical sketch show you just saw. He does music stuff too so you hope this is interesting to him. You ask what he’s working on. It’s a Christmas show. Cute, fun! You’ve complimented his work many times before. You’ve performed in a short piece he wrote and directed, showed up to see two of his solo shows, hell, responded to his Instagram stories with emojis like . That, plus the fact that you’re a Sagittarius and a FUN GIRL, might be why you feel confident throwing your hair back flirtatiously and saying —
 
“I may go see your Christmas show. I want to but I’m also trying not to go to the shows of white cis dudes who don’t come to see my shows.” You laugh. You’re being playful!
 
He looks like you’ve slapped him. “Woah. That feels bad.”
 
“Oh, I’m just joking. I mean, I really am trying to do that, but, um, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.” It is hard to keep yourself from turning bright red, so you dig your heels deeper into what you said. “I mean, come on, you’ve never come to any of my shows! You don’t think that’s gross?”
 
He’s upset. Genuinely unnerved by this suggestion of his misbehavior. He goes on to tell you that if you had a big show, like a really big, really important show, he would go to it. Not like your weekly improv shows. Not like the two sketch shows you wrote with other people over the last six months. “If you have a show that you, like, work really hard on and you take the time to personally invite me, I will probably go.”
 
You stare at him for a long time. He is a very pretty boy. You’ve told him this before. Actually, you’ve been nice to him a lot. But he’s looking at you like you’re a monster and you feel like one. Not least because you’ve been told in the past that you can be a little too blunt and biting with men you could really like.
 
“I think you just make me really nervous.” This is true. But, you’re nervous in a bad way — in a “really, really bad” way. Still, you say it like it would be said in a romcom when the lady lead admits that she isn’t as strong as she acts. You say it like it’s the moment when she lets down her guard and admits to being powerless in front of, say, Ryan Reynolds. You do this perhaps in part because usually this is also the moment the guy falls in love with her.
 
That’s in the movies. In real life, this guy tells you not to be nervous. He suggests that being nervous comes from being uncomfortable with yourself. He quotes Prince. This guy LIKES MUSIC.
 
You stand in painful silence for a long time. You cannot decide who is in the wrong and you hate apologizing when you’re not sure you should. You don’t want to set a bad precedent. You want to break the cycle of women apologizing to men. But, you kind of understand what he’s saying. And you’ve hurt his feelings. Or you’ve made him feel bad. Is there a difference? The silence continues and then he says “You know I don’t go to a lot of shows. They put me in my head. It’s not personal, I just don’t like going to see comedy.”
 
It occurs to you that under other circumstances this would be a point of understanding. You get it. When you saw his last solo show you spent the following week worrying you would never have the confidence to write one yourself. You want to tell him he is not alone in his anxiety, but to say that would feel like admitting you were wrong. And despite the look on this pretty boy’s face, you don’t think you are. But, just to be sure, you do the fast math ladies do all the time. You add it up: The fact that the first time you hooked up was the night of the sketch he directed you in. The fact that the last time you made out was the night you went to his solo show and stayed at the bar late. The fact that you invited him over only a few weeks ago and he said “Really busy but I’ll see you soon!” The fact that despite knowing him for over a year he has never, not once, come to anything you’ve been in. The hardest, most intolerable fact that if and when he does attend a show of yours, you’re now going to be so far in your own head wondering if he thinks it’s good, if it’s clear to him you “worked really hard,” if it is good enough to ask him to face the existential crisis he encounters every time he sees other people do comedy. You add it all up and say aloud the most honest thing. Radical candor in exchange for his vulnerability.
 
“You have more power than me.”
 
“I’m not sure that’s true. I mean, other than the privileges I have. But power is in how you feel.” He looks up the Prince quote on his phone for you to read.
 
The two of you talk about Prince for awhile. You want to change the energy before he leaves. You are so not going to have that fun make out tonight. You’ve ruined that. In the wrong or not, you definitely could have behaved differently to get THE THING. You could have just asked him about his show, bought him a drink, and invited him over. You could have gotten what you really wanted which was to kiss the funny, pretty boy. But also maybe you couldn’t have. Maybe your anger is leaking so fast from places you are not even aware until it slaps the boy in the face shocking you both. Maybe you are no longer capable of FUN. Maybe you work too hard and feel too ignored for things to not come out sideways.
 
You talk for five minutes about nonsense and then you hug goodbye. You can’t be sure, but when he leaves you hear him mumble something that sounds to you like —
 
“I hope you learned something.” You tense up. Maybe he said “we.” Maybe he said nothing. But, you’ve done the math and you can’t be sure. You’re not sure at all.