i want to be with someone i can goof with - help?
wherever you goof, there you harr (i am so sorry)
This is Help Wanted, an advice column and the only place that I, a comedy writer with a psychology degree, am legally allowed to give advice.
Want advice? Your question/conundrum/pickle can be SS (super serious) or DAAD (dumb as a doorknob) or anywhere in between. I’ll answer them. I really will!!
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Q: How do I find someone to goof with?
Hey there.
So, allow me to set the stage: I am 23 and single. I graduated college a few months ago and moved to a new city. I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking lately, and many of those thoughts have been about relationships (yikers).
I recently had this realization in my process of thinking about dating/relationships/marriage: I’ve always known I want to be with someone that I can laugh with, but that’s not enough. Instead, now I’m looking for someone I can GOOF with. There’s a big difference. I can laugh with almost anyone, but I can only truly goof with a small handful of people. Goofing brings so much more joy than just finding something to laugh about. Goofing is creating your own things to laugh at with little to no resources.
I feel that it is rare to find a person who truly matches my goof energy. I look back at the girls I’ve dated in the past, and maybe one of them had the same goof qualities as myself, which is a problem.
So here’s where the question comes in: How do I naturally find someone who I can goof with for life when that rarely comes naturally? I think that it’s especially hard to truly goof with someone when the idea of dating them is there. How do I get past that? And how can I bring that out in people?
Sincerely,
A guy looking for a girl to goof with
A:
Guy, you have come to the right place. Before starting BAT, I ran a middling ‘five posts and done’ blog called…yep, “Goofing with friends.” Here’s that blog’s raisin-de-tray:
Whether this makes me the perfect person to help (we both are into goofing) or worst person you could have asked (this guy goofs with friends??? literally the opposite of what I asked for), only our good friend time will tell. Time, tell us would ya?
Allow me to introduce…Dope Guy
We were at Burning Man, the sun was setting. and goof times were had.
The sun also rose, and when it did a DJ named Tycho performed a two hour DJ set atop a giant ‘art car’ loaded up with gigantic speakers.
We danced and wiggled and looked around at all the crazy people everywhere. In the distance, we saw a dude up on an art car dancing by himself, really feeling it without reservation but also without insisting himself upon the world. He was calm. Serene and unwares of himself and fully alive - actualized without meaning to be. Dope.
We started to imagine what Dope Guy must be thinking as he danced: "this music is so dope. the sun is dope,” he'd say looking down at his arms - "my arms are dope."
He'd look up at the sky - "this sky is so dope."
He'd stare ahead lost in his own thoughts - 'the fact that I can describe anything as dope? so dope.'
We spent the rest of the concert diving deeper into Dope Guy lore until an entire philosophy of what it meant to be A Dope Guy emerged.
Heading back to our camp, the jokes flowed like lava. Who was this dope guy and how did he get so dope? Whatever his story, the world needed to hear it. He was our Jesus and we were his disciples, put on this earth to spread the gospel of the dope far and wide.
We got back to camp around 715am. Everyone waddled back to their tents to sleep except for me and Phil and Aurora who stayed up and continued goofing. Everything was funny, each joke building upon the last with effortless ease.
Three hours of non-stop goofing later, everyone woke up and we were still goofing. Nothing could stop us and nothing did.
Unlike the rest of my life where a doubtful critic reigns supreme, for those few hours we could do no wrong. It was impossible to even conceive of a joke not landing. It was, as one therapist called it, a peak experience.
So the answer - with both friends and lovers - must be to find people with whom you can goof the night away, yes?
That’s certainly what I believed in my early twenties and late twenties and even sometimes today. Goofing is my love language, so, just like you, I’ve always sought a goofer-in-crime who would get me like no one else and with whom the jokes would flow like fountain soda with self-serve unlimited refills.
I even had a name for what I was looking for - ‘the firebacker.’
There were lots of people you could laugh with, I explained in high school to my friends who were also all virgins, but rare indeed was a firebacker - someone who ‘fired back’ and kept the joke going.
So did I fish my wish? Is Lauren, my wife my sun my moon my sun again, is she a goofball extraordinaire firebacker par excellenne?
at our local grocer
When Lauren and I are at Ralph’s, I’ll sometimes start half-screaming in a 1950s leave it to beaver voice like “Honey! Honey! Do we have enough spinach honey dear?”
She looks back with a half grin and rolls her eyes, picking up speed to avoid me and so I’ll scream louder “Darling dear?! Shall we make pancakes for breakfast with sliced strawberries” and I’ll put the emphasis on ‘berries’ like strawberries.
This is one of our goofs. And yes I have asked Lauren for confirmation to make sure I’m not being an asshole and she’s said yes it is a good goof I hope she was telling the truth the point is that she is not a firebacker in this situation.
It’d be very weird if she was a firebacker like she’d start talking back to me in a 1950s voice? We’d look like a couple of theater majors having a grand ol’ time at the grocery store christ that’d make me hurl. That is not Laur thank god. Sometimes she fires back, sure, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that she’s someone I feel incredibly comfortable being a goof around.
That’s what I think you’re actually looking for - not someone who can match your goof energy, as you said, but simply someone around whom you can fully be your vulnerable little idiot goofball self who tries to make a joke and it falls flat and that's okay.
Take the Dope Guy Goof-athon. I don't think we were especially funny that morning. What changed was the acceptance of all things as goof. The goof was good and the good was the goof. It was this cosmic sort of 'yes anding' that I get RL Stine goosebumps just thinking about.
So how do you find that person? I have no idea! One thing that might help is to stop looking. I know, it’s cliche but so is love itself and hey, here we are. It’s that daoist thing of ‘do nothing and everything gets done,’ except in this case its ‘goof nothing and everything gets goof.” Otherwise you’re walking around with a giant ‘are you goofy enough’ metal detector at the beach and all you’ll find are people who don’t meet the criteria.
the infinite goof @ Get Yok’d
There’s good news though - the more you let go of control, the funnier things get. That’s literally how comedy works - something defies your expectations and you laugh. So too with goofing. Trying to control the goof creates an environment in which the goof cannot live. It’s like bacteria - trust me.
And the longer a relationship goes, the stranger and more subtle the goofs get.
Take the other day when I took a fat loss supplement the guy at Get Yok’d sold me for 30% off with my protein purchase. It was non-stim, he said. I’d just sweat a little more, he said. He was the closest thing I had to a spiritual guide and he’d never steered me wrong before so sure I took one and went to the gym and worked out. I got home and showered because one of my best friend’s dad and sister were in the area and wanted to come say hi. I hadn’t seen them in five years at least.
Sitting on the couch I realized I was still sweating. Like a lot. Like more than I was at the gym. Whatever is supposed to close up the sweat ducts did not close and I was drenched. My shirt was soaked and so I changed it and they arrived and I spent the next hour profusely sweating from places I’d never sweat from before. My black pants were fully wet like someone had just pushed me into a pool of my own sweat.
The second shirt I’d put on was also wet so I put a waffle shirt on top of it but that did nothing so I quickly fessed up to my friend’s dad and sister and everyone seemed worried for me but mostly okay with the sweat.
I looked at Lauren and she was laughing in that way that said ‘I love you even though you’re an idiot in fact I love you because you’re an idiot.’ It was classic Alex, she told me, and in that laugh I felt okay. In that moment as in any other moment I didn’t want someone to goof with, and I definitely didn’t want anyone to be a firebacker and go “Alex is sweating isn’t that so classic let’s all laugh about it and goof hard.”
I wanted exactly what I had - someone who didn’t make me feel shame but accepted me for the sweaty idiot that I was. What could have been a ‘ugh I suck this sucks’ moment became a goof. This is the way. She was my dope guy and I was hers and thank god I didn’t die from that weird pill.
So how do you find someone to be a goof with when it doesn’t come naturally? Lean into it not coming naturally and tell the awkward truth. Fess up that you want to goof but have a hard time doing so. Pop a couple sweat pills (do not). What happens next, I have no idea, but I have a feeling it’ll be pretty dope.
Want advice? Submit your questions to botharetrue@substack.com.
Comments!
do you like to goof? does your partner?
how important is goofing in love for you? where does it rank compared to other traits???
are there any goofs you do that embarrass your partner?
do you live a life that is considered dope? are you the dope guy?
have you ever taken a pill that made you way too sweaty before your friend’s dad came to see you??
what am i missing here? what else can help “A guy looking for a girl to goof with”?????
I didn't know I was looking for someone to goof with when I met the woman who would become my wife. Lucky for both of us, Christina understood the importance of goofing in a relationship. We've been goofing since 2008, and we tied the goof knot in 2011.
When most people think about marriage, they think about romance, which is important, but really, how much of your day is romance? If you think about marriage in terms of what you both do with your time, it breaks down like this:
1/3 of the time you guys are asleep. of course, nobody ever looks for a compatible nap buddy, but you really ought to think about stuff like whether the other person hogs pillows and blankets, kicks wildly in their sleep because they've got the jimmy legs, or prefers a room that's as cold as an ice box.
Another 1/3 of the time you guys are working. I use work in the broadest sense. Maybe one of you is a nine to fiver, and the other one is a 24/7 parent person, but the point is, you're doing shit that is work shit. Here, if people ask questions about prospective partners at all, they ask, "does this person make a lot of money?" But as the old saying goes, when you marry for money, you earn every penny. A better question might be, "is this the kind of person who has a healthy relationship with what they do, or are they a miserable fuck who will ultimately drag me into a lifelong cesspool of quiet (and maybe not so quiet) desperation?"
Then there's the remaining third of your time. You think you'll fill it with romance, but in reality, you'll find yourself wondering a Home Depot looking for the plumbing section because the toilet in the guest bathroom makes a weird sound, except for when the plumber is there, and he says it's fine, but you and your partner both know better, so you decide to spend Saturday afternoon fixing that shit show before it becomes a SHIT SHOW. Now, it would've been good if you had married for handy-person skills, but you didn't. And honestly, some Saturdays aren't about handy-person shit, they're about cleaning the house, or visiting relatives nobody likes, or taking care of a sick dog who farts a lot. The point is, this is life stuff, and life is absurd. Really absurd. And here's where the goofing matters. Because if you have a partner who you can goof with, you can get through all this absurd stuff with a smile, and that is fucking gold.
Also, Alex, don't let the law stop you. I think you should start seeing patients, podcasting, writing books, and generally giving advice anywhere and everywhere. If the law comes for you, we will do lawsuits. Many, many lawsuits.
That is pure goof and dope that you photographed the sweaty moment. When did the sweat end? Now you can join the Substacks for menopausal women as a token member.