Anonymous Mailbag

You guys are sending me incredible anonymous mailbag questions. Seriously, I can’t thank you enough for the quality of email submission we’re getting here. It’s honestly making it hard for me to pick. But they’re all great to read. (If yours doesn’t appear the week you sent it in, it doesn’t mean it has been rejected. I’ve built a folder with the best emails and I’m trying to mix and match like the master anonymous mailbag DJ I am.)

I think it’s fair to say that the anonymous mailbag is here to stay.  

So let’s dive right in:

“So I had a party at my house for the Super Bowl and on the main floor there’s only one bathroom that was being used by everyone. Before the game even started, someone took a dump in there and clogged the toilet.  Was it wrong of me to turn off the TV until someone owned up to it and plunged the toilet? Because that’s exactly what I did.  Became REALLY awkward when it was my friend’s girlfriend (they’ve only been dating for 2 months) that she did it and began crying as she admitted to it.  

She ended up breaking up with my friend yesterday because, “(Name) is an asshole and he embarrassed me,” so now my friend is mad at me.

Thoughts?  I think I did nothing wrong here.”

Being caught in a poo mishap in public is essentially every young woman’s worst nightmare. (Once you get married and have kids your entire life becomes one big poo mishap, so there’s a definite irony here). Women try to pretend they don’t crap for the first six months they date someone. Like literally they don’t even want to use the bathroom on a date for fear of a disaster ensuing.

So this is probably the worst possible situation for this girl. She’s mortified to have to face all her boyfriend’s friends after she was outed as the bathroom clogger at a Super Bowl party. Every girl reading this right now is cringing in shame. The girl who clogged the toilet had to be in there thinking, “Holy shit, this is my worst nightmare.”

I’m not sure there’s any easy way to solve this issue and I actually think turning the Super Bowl off was as Solomonic of a move as is possible within the context of a bathroom clogging. You probably assumed it was one of the guys who did it. I certainly would have. 

In retrospect you could have been a bit more gallant and said this in the room, “Okay, someone clogged the toilet. It wasn’t me and there’s only one bathroom for the Super Bowl. So we’re all screwed right now. I am going to leave the room and allow all couples to discuss this between themselves. If you did it — you and your boyfriend or girlfriend have to go clean it up together.”

That way there’s plausible deniability. That is, the boyfriend will know — which is embarrassing enough for his date — but at least everyone else doesn’t know it was her. And if the boyfriend is a bit gallant he might go ahead and cop to the responsibility saving his girlfriend from shame. Most guys would just shrug off clogging the toilet. Hell, some guys would brag about this. 

I am also not surprised that the girlfriend broke up with her boyfriend of two months. If she wasn’t going to be with him long term this is probably the best possible exit strategy. Clog a toilet at the Super Bowl, have to clean it up while everyone waits, and then bail.   

“When moving to Nashville, I stayed on my friend’s couch for a couple weeks before my apartment was ready. At the time, he was post-breakup with a long time girlfriend and in a ‘sleep with any girl he could find’ phase; my temporary residence on the couch was certainly not going to get in the way of his pursuits.

We were returning from Midtown borderline blackout one night (as you do) and one person heavy as he’d landed his quarry for the night. Thinking nothing of it, I promptly passed out on the couch, leaving them to their business. On any other night, that’s where the story would end. However, this night I was awakened by the sudden need to expel the contents of my stomach. Trying to be a good friend, I started out in pursuit of the toilet. The only problem was that his bedroom door is right next to the bathroom door. In my stupor, I opened the wrong one and walked in on them going at it like rabbits. (what follows is with help filling in the details from my friend) We all looked at each other like deer in headlights…and then I vomited all over the floor. And I mean really vomited – high volume and dispersion. Whether it was because of my surprise at the situation or I just ran out of time, I don’t know. Either way, having accomplished my goals, I returned to the couch. According to my buddy (again, I can neither confirm nor deny), he then asked if I was ok, and, upon getting what was a satisfactory answer, he resumed business as usual (in hindsight, I admire his focus).

Mercifully, he had left to take the girl home when I woke up. I cleaned up to the best of my abilities (eventually footing the bill for professional carpet cleaning) and apologized when he got back. He said it was no big deal, and that at least we got a good story out of it.

My main question, among many others, is how many guys would have gone ahead and finished in that situation? What about two girlfriends in the same situation? And who was this girl that just went along with it? How many one night stands would’ve just gone along with it? Am I the only one who feels like this would’ve ruined the night if the roles were reversed? My buddy maintains it was not a big deal.”

First, only dudes would leave puke on the carpet all night long. So the immediate answer, I think, is that if this was the girl’s place and her friend puked in her bedroom the more sober of the girls would have cleaned it up and been mad at her friend about this for the next 87 years of her life. Would the mood have been killed after a prolonged period of puke cleaning? Perhaps.  

I also think most girls wouldn’t have frozen in the headlights, she would have turned and gotten out of there quickly, probably not throwing up in the process. I also think girls are more likely not to confuse the bathroom and the bedroom because they’re more aware of avoiding awkward social situations. So I think this is less likely to happen with girls. But if it has happened with girls, send it into the anonymous mailbag.

(By the way, why didn’t you pull the trigger before you went to bed? If you had too much to drink, the pre-bed puke is an incredibly underrated move. Don’t fight off the puke, embrace it and get the alcohol out of your body). 

As for continuing, wouldn’t the puke stink really bad and be a major turn off? Women have a much stronger sense of smell than men do — my wife can walk into the house and immediately say, “Why’d you leave your dirty gym shorts in the office?” eight seconds after she enters. So I’m impressed that this girl just shook it off Taylor Swift style and kept going.   

I love that your buddy maintains it wasn’t a big deal. 

Speaking of funny walking into the bedroom stories. One night in college my buddy — who will remain anonymous but later played in the NBA — and I were playing Tecmo Super Bowl on the Nintendo — aka the greatest sports video game of all time — and drinking at my parent’s house. Yeah, it was a wild night. We were bad asses. 

Anyway, we finished playing games and went to bed.

The next morning my dad comes into the kitchen and says that my drunken buddy mistakenly wandered into my parent’s bedroom trying to go to the bathroom and my dad had to walk him to the bathroom at five in the morning.

So for the past 15 years I’ve been claiming my buddy tried to sleep with my dad.  

“I’m in a bit of a tight spot. My life long friend was set to get married to his high school sweetheart, but she got cold feet the morning of the wedding and called the entire thing off. It was a destination wedding so all the members of the wedding party had rooms for the night (myself included). That night my buddy’s bride-to-be shows up at my hotel room door. She was obviously tipsy, had been crying and wanted to talk to me (we had been family friends since grade school). She goes on and on about how “he’s the only guy she’s ever dated” and “what if he isn’t the one and it’s just all I’ve ever known”…typical BS. 

Before I know it she leans in and tries to kiss me! Like…really aggressively. Obviously, I stopped her advances (she’s a hard 8, but you know the saying) but now I don’t know what to do! Do I chalk it up to her being an emotional wreck and keep it from my bro or do I tell him and put the burden of truth on him? She says if i tell him about that night she’ll say I came onto her. The wedding is back on so I don’t have much time! Please help & keep me anonymous!”

This may be the toughest question we’ve had in the anonymous mailbag so far. 

I honestly have no idea what the right response is here. If you tell your buddy and she claims you hit on her first then you put everything on your buddy. Either he has to believe that one of his best friend’s tried to hook up with his fiancee on the night she called off the wedding or he he has to believe that his fiancee tried to hook up with one of his best friends on the night she called off the wedding. Either one is awful for him. The moment you talk to him you’re basically setting off an explosion with no idea if you’re going to survive or not.  

I think lots of people get nervous right before they get married and I can only imagine what in the world that girl’s life was like if she called off a destination wedding and then drank that same night. She had to be a total emotional wreck. Why is she on her own? Her friends should have kept her from the public that night. After calling off a wedding and drinking she has a serious conversation with someone she’d known for a long time about her future and she turns that attention into a feeling of intimacy, which leads to the attempted kiss. Basically, I’m saying she’s such an emotional wreck that night that she isn’t making logical decisions. 

Here’s the bigger question, what’s changed in her mind since she called off the last wedding? Why is she ready now and she wasn’t ready then? What’s the harm in waiting and then getting married without making it a huge production? If a girl called off a wedding with you, would you hold another big wedding with her? I wouldn’t. Our next wedding would be just the two of us in some remote locale. 

And here’s what I would have to decide if I were you — is she good for your friend? That is, do you think they make a good couple that could spend the rest of their lives together and this whole thing is just a strange and odd interlude that isn’t reflective of any major issues for them? If the answer’s yes, then I probably wouldn’t say anything at all. If the answer’s no, then I’d tell my buddy. Because once you tell him, you have to have made the decision that they shouldn’t stay together. 

You may have also made a surgical strike here by submitting this question to the mailbag, knowing that your buddy may read it and think it could be him. Meaning you got your story to him before his fiancee does. If that was your goal, Frank Underwood approves. 

It’s also possible readers disagree with my advice here. You can always weigh in in the comments with your own advice.  

“Hey Clay,

While on a date the other night, I was flat-out asked how many people I have had sex with. As most people do, I low-balled the number and moved onto the next topic of conversation, but it got me wondering… What is the over/under on number of people you can sleep with as a girl before it becomes concerning (or as people like to so eloquently say, you are a “slut”) and is it different for men and women? I say averaging two or three partners a year is acceptable, especially considering the commonality of sex now, but I was hoping to get your point of view on this subject.”

If I were a girl, no matter my age, I’d lie and stick to single digits in the early stages of the relationship. I would just say, “Single digits.” The guy you’re with shouldn’t care, but he probably will. Single digits allays most of his concerns.

As for the respective standards for the sexes, if a guy actually likes a girl, he’ll cut his number too. I don’t think there’s a double standard anymore, I think both couples are incentivized to keep their numbers lower than they actuall are. (Within reason, of course. I mean, for the girls reading this right now, if you were dating a thirty year old successful guy and he said he’d only slept with two women in his life, you’d think he was really lying or something was wrong with him, right? So be smart about it. You might need to revise upward).  

Of course you can always just be brutally honest and make that your thing. Just look him right in the eye and say, “Every girl lies about this, but I’m telling you 100% that I’ve slept with (insert number here).” If you want to give him the actual number and it’s something like “74,” you could follow it up by lying and saying, “But your penis is by far the biggest of any I’ve ever seen.”

…

You guys are killing it with anonymous mailbag questions.

Total anonymity guaranteed. Fire away at clay.travis@gmail.com