You may find this difficult to believe, but this past March in the year two thousand and eighteen, the year of our Lord, I, Ryan Thomas Dunn, entered an agreement to live with a woman for an entire month.
Now, to get some of the obvious questions out of the way…
One) No, there wasn’t any money exchanged in this deal. Both parties agreed willingly.
Two) Yes, this woman does have a functioning brain. She is quite smart.
D.) No, at no point during the month did she attempt to physically harm, maim or inflict any sort of bodily harm upon me.
What Woman Would Agree to This?
This woman’s name is Geraldine and she is truly one of the greatest human beings I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. She is smart, funny, kind, loving and incredibly proud of her Puerto Rican roots.
I do say she is “smart,” but she’s either really brave or really stupid for agreeing to live with me.
It should come as no surprise if you’ve read my stuff for the last year, but I’ve never lived with a woman before. Unless, of course, you want to count my once-every-six-months shuffle out the backdoor of a strange South Boston apartment. Other than that, zero female cohabitation experience.
Extreme Confidence
Despite my lack of real-world experience, I came into this experiment SUPREMELY confident with the few things I did know.
I walked into the apartment and immediately put all the seats down. Apparently, this is just supposed to be a toilet thing. I guess it’s so that the woman doesn’t fall into the bowl when they wake up to pee in the dark in the middle of the night after having a few glasses of wine at their girlfriend’s house during Bachelor Monday. You can never be too careful, though. To be safe, I made sure all of the seats in the house were put down. The wooden ones around the kitchen table, the leather ones surrounding the couch. Geraldine never mentioned anything about this. And yeah, she had her own bathroom. But she also never fell in the toilet, so you tell me if this was a success.
After putting all the seats down in the house, I ran out on day one to buy flowers. On the surface this seems like a genuinely nice gesture.
Wrong.
These weren’t flowers. They were insurance. I don’t know much, but here’s what I do know. You spend $25-30 on flowers and it buys you upwards of $500 worth of mistakes. It’s not so much a play for that day. It’s an investment in your future.
I’ve never once claimed to be smart. That’s definitely not me. But I am self-aware. And knowing myself, I know that over the course of an entire month I’m going to royally fuck up in some capacity upwards of 5 times. And that’s setting the bar low. We can all lie to ourselves and say that the flowers were a nice gesture, but they’re weren’t. They were a future apology.
Things I Didn’t Know
The list of things I did know ends at the above two. They list of things I didn’t know about is much, much, much longer.
Women are clean –
Well, at least Geraldine was. And it made me cleaner. I think I was terrified of leaving anything messy in the kitchen or living room, so as a result my bedroom was an absolute war zone. Dirty dishes, leftover food, wet laundry, women’s underwear, decaying bodies, etc. It all just got tossed behind my door and then I closed it and triple locked it. Out of sight, out of mind.
Voila. Clean house.
Women are nice –
95% of the words that come out of Geraldine’s mouth are making fun of me, but compared to some prior male roommates, she was a saint.
SHE EVEN ASKED HOW MY DAY WAS!!
Granted, it was in Spanish. So, I’m not entirely sure if she was saying, “How was your day?” or “you left the seat up you classless barbarian,” but for the sake of this we’re going to go with the former.
Women check in on you –
You know, simple things like “hey, you alive?” after stumbling out of a bar alone at 3AM. Or, “the living room really stinks, are you sure you don’t need me to pick you up any Pepto Bismol from the pharmacy?” When my dad was in the hospital, she even asked how he was doing. The attention to me and my family’s well-being was certainly a welcome change.
Thankful for…
A few other things that I’m not sure I can thank all of woman-kind for, but I can at the very least thank Geraldine for.
- Not letting me spend $150 on a bar tab. Financial responsibility. So important.
- Telling me my cooking is good when it isn’t. Guys have very fragile egos.
- Taking out the trash because I was simply too stubborn and lazy to find out where to put it.
- Allowing me to work out in the living room and sweat all over our couch.
- Leaving me daily Spanish lessons. Although I almost always just plugged them into Google Translate when she wasn’t around.
I’m sure there are dozens of other things I’m missing. I’ve never lived with a woman before. And it’s hard to say if anyone will ever be crazy enough to try it again, but if and when that time comes, I’ll put those toilet seats down so fast it’ll make your head spin.
One whole month. I survived. She survived (barely).
You’re a brave soul, Geraldine. Thanks for the lessons.