the essay formerly known as romcom (act two)

Rom and Com are perfect for each other, but the universe has other plans

Hi yes hello please finish buying refreshments and snacks because intermission is over! Kindly, swiftly, and with great care, please find your seats.

SAME SEATS AS LAST TIME DO NOT FUCK THIS UP.

Last time on…

As you’d do with a pen after jotting some ideas down, let's recap. 

In Act One, Lauren and I met on Bloody Homecoming, the film that keeps winning Oscars. Halfway through the shoot, all of us in the cast and crew went out on the town called Austin, TX.

I then took everyone to a little-known Austin spot called Waffle House. Here’s the two of us and some idiot sound guy who was hitting on her with that The Thinker ass pose I have no idea why I am being mean to this guy I’m sure he was nice anyways let’s move on.

Here’s us at the hip lil spot called waffle house

Lauren and I stayed up all night laughing and kissed the next morning. That was 6am. By 9:30am, I’d ended it with the other girl I was sorta seeing. By 12:30pm, I was back on set, sitting next to Lauren, when I said:

“I ended things with the other girl (who I was just casually dating by the way lol)”.

Lauren snapped her head towards me, eyes wide and expression unreadable.

That’s how Act One ended. A cliffhanger. There we were, hanging at a cliff. 

The good, the bad, and the crit 

Here’s Laur’s take about my telling her I’d ended it with the other girl:

Gulp, he what? I was extremely surprised with the news that Alex immediately went over and ended things with the other girl he was casually dating (and ended in person! What a gentleman?) But it also seemed a little wildly romantic. 

We started to hang more outside of work for the remaining two weeks of the shoot. He took me on our first official date - to a matinee screening of Tree of Life at the Alamo Drafthouse. I was nervous and I think I ordered a side of fruit to eat while he ordered nachos. Afterwards we walked around South Congress, ate lunch from a food truck there, and went into some fun quirky Austin shops. It was a great first date!

By the time the movie was wrapping up, we had really started falling for each other. Alex asked me if I wanted to stay in Austin a little bit longer.

We spent the next couple weeks together until I had to go back to NC. At that point there was no question about it: we were going to be ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’. We knew it would be tricky, but it didn’t seem like an option to not try to make it work. Luckily my mom was a flight attendant at the time, and I got some flying perks from her which made it a little easier for me to come visit Austin periodically. And the rest is history.

Only thing I’d add is that I really laid it on thick by also saying “my grandma waited for my grandpa while he was in the war for three years, so if they could do that, I’m sure we can do this.” Yes, I was saying that I thought of Lauren and I already like my grandpa and grandma even though we’d only known each other for a few weeks. And yes, I also was comparing three years in the army with our time apart trying to be little artists with infinite ways to digitally connectas well as the ability to see one another via 3 hour flight. 

Classic potato, potato¹ am I right folks?

Most of those first few years were spent online. We all take that for granted now, but it’s the real magic of Beyoncé’s internet: no matter how far away you are from someone in real life, online you’re right next to each other. Together.

Across texts, emails, gchats, facebook messages, even a google doc or two, we flirted, fought, and fell in love. 

And thanks to the selfless folks at Google and Facebook (no i will not call you Meta, jesus christ Mark get a grip), most of that digital communication still exists! 

Looking back through it all feels like mainlining nostalgia.

The good (morning)

Lauren lived two hours ahead of me in ‘the future,’ a joke I’d make way too often (‘Now this is time travel’!). 

Except it wasn’t really a joke - she was my future (classic romcom line eat em and weep!²).  

An early bird searching for many worms, I went to bed around 9 or 10pm in Austin, which was 11pm or midnight in North Carolina (that’s called GEOGRAPHY, kids). Lauren, an owl (we don’t need to say night owl, all owls are night owls — that’s called ORNITHOLOGY), went to bed after midnight usually and so, already, we were defying the rules of space and time. 

Every morning, I’d wake up to an email from her, subject line “Gooooooood morning,” which she’d written the night before. I loved waking up to these emails, and I’d always respond so she’d wake up to one too.  

The bad

Besides the cute ass emails, everything else about the distance sucked. 

It felt like playing Relationship on ‘god mode.’ But, we did have one cheat code, and no that does not mean we had a strict set of rules about how we could cheat on each other.

Lauren’s mom was a flight attendant, which meant we could fly to see each other way more than we could afford. Any story about Lauren and I’s relationship does require a gigantic THANK YOU to Allison. Without her, I truly do not know if we’d have made it.  

Those visits though. Intense! Like two emotional teenagers But when we’d have a weekend together after being apart for so long there would be PRESSURE to make it perfect, to make it Big and Meaningful and Memorable which, given the formula for happiness being reality minus expectation, made us unhappy. The expectations were too high! We figured that out pretty quick and committed to making our visits as boring as possible, which was also fun. 

But even the bad was good, and it never felt like we had to work hard to keep things going. Or maybe we did and I’ve blocked all that out? I dunno man! 

This chapter of our lives culminated in us both moving to LA. We both tried to convince ourselves and each other that we were moving for ourselves, for work, but looking back, that was a defensive mechanism. At least for me. I didn’t want to tell people or myself that I was moving ‘for a girl’ and then have the relationship crumble. 

It is here, as is the fate of all things that dare to enter Los Angeles, the real trouble began.

Because it was here, in this city of ‘angels,’ that Lauren and I did the worst thing a couple could ever do: we started feeling secure with one another. We took off our nice clothes and put on sweatpants. We farted, often. And we took each other for granted. The love was just about as unconditional as one could get (see footnote³), and still we’d gone from being each other’s break rooms (relaxing, eat lunch, maybe a lil tv in the corner) to each other’s break rooms (the place you go when you need to release negative emotions).

Meet Crit

Now’s a good time for y’all to meet my inner critic, Crit (an actual name that’s somehow RISING in popularity).

Crit’s been with me since the beginning - a real day one sorta vibe, for better and mostly for worse. Most of that time he spent criticizing himself (me), but soon he learned there was something way easier and better feeling: criticizing those close to me.

There’s nothing Crit likes more than a healthy, strong, almost unconditionally loving relationship where he can stop criticizing himself (painful) and start criticizing others, which unlike me, Crit actually really enjoys. 

And as I matured into a man who was living with a woman named Lauren in LA, Crit had found his next obsession. 

There were many things Crit focused on, so let’s take one as an example. Pre-Wilder, Lauren loved hanging in bed. An ideal morning for her would be to wake up and lounge in bed for an hour or two, scrolling or reading or dozing back to sleep. 

I’d see this and would – I am ashamed to admit – get upset. Crit believed that if I ever relaxed, I wouldn’t be successful. Ergom people who did relax were persona non grata (persons not good at grating cheese). Crit was full of judgments of anyone who spent time in bed. They were lazy, unmotivated, sloppy, even! I’d watch as negative dark thoughts sped through my mind like trains going in all directions, these opinions masquerading as capital T Truths about the world. 

Imagine all of the below speeding through your head, half with the voice of Jim Carrey on speed and the other with the slow gravitas of James Earl Jones. 

• who is this person who stays in bed all day! 

• that right there is all that is wrong with america right now people just being lazy on their phones eating junk food

• can i really be with someone like this?

• doesn’t she see how bad this is?

• why doesn’t she want to do more stuff?

• does this mean the relationship is doomed?

With those raw ingredients, Crit would spawn an offspring. A super compact little ball of indignant rage. A demon seed. A critter. 

That critter would get stuck under my skin suit for the next hour, day, week, etc. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, like an injustice I not only saw but had to make right. Had to investigate. Had to find out what was going on. Had to Solve The Problem.

But of course there was no problem to solve. It’s not like I was running into the bedroom saying, ‘Hey Laur do you wanna go for an all day hike that ends at the top of a mountain where I’ll have a picnic ready for us and all our friends will be there and it’ll be amazing’ and she would just say, ‘no.’

Here’s a dramatic reenactment of what one such incident might have looked like (please note I AM pitching this to Netflix so do not steal it):

Meanwhile, Crit is already presenting a new argument in the courtroom of your mind. With the poise and chutzpah of Julia Roberts in Erin Brokovitch, Crit would say, “It’s not that Alex wastes so much time online that’s the problem, no sir. The problem, your honor, is how much time Lauren spends on her phone!⁴”

Give Crit a few years to do his thing and you’ve got a mind full of these little critters crawling around, muttering under their breath the injustices of poor Alex’s life living with his girlfriend in LA.

My worries about me not being smart enough became, “Why don’t we have smarter books in the house?”

My anxieties about me being fat became, “Why doesn’t Lauren want to eat healthier food?”

My self flagellation that I’m not spending time with our son became, “Why do they watch so much TV?”

It is much easier, it seems, to stare into one of those two-way mirrors that, rather than show you your own face, show you someone else's. 

The romcom part

The critter who thinks about Lauren being in bed is, I am happy to say, dead. The story of his death is so stupid that it could definitely be in a rom com. 

About a month back, I was listening to Tim Heideker’s podcast Office Hours. I can’t listen to it often, because it's one of the many creative suns that, if stared at directly, would destroy me. 

There I was, listening to Timmy H and his Office Hours crew, all of whom are so so funny, when Tim starts talking about how he spends most of his day in bed. It’s the most comfortable place in the house, he says, so why wouldn’t he be there when doing his writing or on calls or whatever else. 

Fuck. My hero...lounges? My hero is a chill-in-bed-all-day sorta guy?? 

I am not exaggerating when I say that right there, in that moment, I was born again. Gone, and I’m talking truly gone, were all of my fears and judgments about it. Well if Tim Heideker does it, then it’s cool and obviously Lauren can do it too and she’s not lazy and all is great in the world. 

This being pathetic makes it no less true. 

I hate that I couldn’t have figured this out on my own, but I am glad that I figured it out at all. 

Also, I shit you not, while writing the very paragraphs above, I had to go to a commercial callback audition for a fast food pizza chain. 

A callback is like a second round 2 part deux interview. It means that it's down to you and a handful of others. In other words, you’re closer while still being infinitely far away. 

I walk in and awkwardly say hello to the people who are making the commercial: producers, agency people, and, I shit you not, Tim motherfuckin Heideker. He was directing the commercial. 

I messed up a few times in the audition – we were supposed to be eating food, and I pantomimed the eating which, longtime BATheads know, has been heretofore my acting downfall – but after that, I think I did a pretty good job.

I did not get the part in the commercial. 

It was as if the romcom lords were trying to really make sure I’d gotten the hint about Tim Heideker in the Office Hours pod, so they brought him back at the audition. Nice. 

Then Lauren got a job working on Tim Heideker’s alt-comedy On Cinema Oscars Special and I screamed “I GET IT!” in the backyard and also on several busy intersections around town.

There have been no incidents since.

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✍ Comment:

Let’s talk about it.

1. Do you know Crit?

2. Who is your hero and do they lounge all day? if so are they tim heideker?

3. Have you ever been in a LDR? how’d it go?

5. Did your grandma also wait for your grandpa while he was in the war for three years? seems like a p regular thing back in the day

1. we NEED to figure out how to pull this off in written text

2. I didn’t say there’d be NO rom/com

3. They say you are supposed to love one another unconditionally, which is horseshit. If Lauren robbed a children’s hospital and then, high on crime, went to a family restaurant to eat some pasta primavera, and chose NOT to sing Happy Birthday for someone at the next table over even though everyone else in the restaurant - dems, repubs, librarians even, all losing their shit singing happy birthday, well I’d obviously have to rethink things.

4. Everyone in the jury turns their heads at the same time, an audible gasp but not because people believe what I said but rather they are shocked and appalled that I would dare make such a claim.