About 45 days into the Pandemic, I switched up my daily routine of staring blankly at the wall for hours with listening to a long time favorite podcast: “Babe?!” My heroine host Lara was doing a “wellness check” with fellow icon Tierney Finster, full of sugar and spice and absolutely zero vocal fry.
Somehow we (I am including myself on their journey) got on the topic of an Actor who did the early aughts quite well. Super famous. Lots of starlets, papp-ed club exits, un-ironic bowler hats, collarbone cleavage, and a few Golden Globes.
The women were discussing his past wiles and talent, and one was surprised to be reminded of his party boy past. She remembered him more as a quirky character actor with a particularly expressive brow.
No, Lara countered, he really went for it. I’m paraphrasing, but he did the whole drinking, dancing, laughing, falling down, smoking, open-mouthed kissing, tattoos, cellphones, sweating, vomit and blood; a real reign of terror in Lala Land.
Huh, Tierney thought.
Lara elaborated she gleaned some of these insights from said Actor’s ex girlfriend’s glittery memoir.
Then she said “I guess you don’t really know everything about a man until you hear from the women who’ve loved them.”
Huh. I thought.
Huhhhh. I thought again, later.
I was recently on a References Check phone call for an ex co-worker who had reached the final stages of getting a new job. As I droned on about his ability to build out the ideal Marketing Technology Stack for scrappy and efficiently run software sales teams, I drifted back to the Lara’s take.
Navigating 32 as a recently single woman myself, would it not behoove me to be able to access any potential beau’s Ex Files? I mean, wouldn’t that just be the quickest way to understand the potential. I imagine an “Ex Reference Check” could just a part of the Social Contract. And like Meeting the Parents or Cooking Dinner for Two, it presented as a socially accepted milestone that took place after First Good Sex but before I Love You.
How enticingly masochistic.
I ran it by my mother, who scoffed.
“Wha?!” My indignant reaction. “I’d say positive things about my {Ex}. I’d just tell the truth! The truth is good! I can explain why we didn’t work and maybe that will help the next girlfriend.”
She did have a point. Depending on how the whole thing ended and your new beau behaved, the Reference may not be capable at the time of said call to communicate in the manner of reflective and affectionately sentimental.
But that could be the actual gold. Maybe one does not need to send out the ex bat signal to a previous love. The most interesting intel is not about what the Ex has to say, but how your new love tells the story of the past.
To that end, you really should run an intimate swab test reference check, but with your new partner exclusively. The narrative they concoct may tell you everything you need to know.
Son in the City 