There’s this unfashionable1 saying: A gentleman never kisses and tells.
So—not to accuse anyone of ungentlemanly behavior, though that is exactly what I am about to do, I don’t think T has ever heard this saying. And T’s verbose.2 It’s his verbosity that makes me think I shouldn’t be surprised at his cavalier kiss-then-tell M.O. But excusing that, then going through the list of situations in which a kiss may be told of and gentlemanhood still retained—and I have, though it is a long list—and then finangling his situation into those situations, you’ll find there are more tells than excuses. Case in point, T has told of a kiss while it was still in progress. He once answered his phone with, “Hey, I’m making out with my girlfriend right now. What’s up?”
Duly noted. Thanks for the update, chief.
What the hell? How are you supposed to respond to that? My first instinct was to straight up walk away from the phone, which was maybe the point of his TMI greeting. But if that’s how it’s gonna be, then why not, like, not be an asshole about it and just let the call go to voicemail?
So maybe unsurprisingly, T’s not too good at healthy romantic relationships. He went through a messy breakup a couple years ago, but his current position relative to that particular ex is unique in that they still hook up regularly. (Again, for emphasis: this is two years after the fact.) It’s not obvious at first what his feelings are for this girl. On the one hand, you can ask him about her (while she’s not around, obviously), and he’ll launch into a faintly misogynistic diatribe on how he doesn’t “get” women.3 On the other hand, he is Jell-O when he talks to her. He gladly goes out of his way to see/do something for her. And this would be sweet in a naïve puppy-love too-eager-to-please way, except this is T we’re talking about. If you catch him after he has a hookup with this girl, and if he happens to be talkative about the matter (which is way more common than you’d expect, even by T standards), he calls her a bitch and swears he hates her, and the sense I get is that T (who is, I won’t lie, probably a total goddamn psychotic) does this just so he can tell everyone that he hatefucks her biweekly, and when he says that the ex is only using him, the hypocrisy is choking.
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1 I don’t think it’s any less true these days, mind, but it’s definitely an old person saying, and I’ll bet any youngster who says it dresses in tweed and has one foot in the grave.
2 For example: You can ask him a question re.: a certain popular YA fantasy novel, say—although given the sort of topics that come up when T is in the room, that’ll really be a video game question—and rather than getting a brief and reasonable summary (“A kid finds out he’s a wizard and goes on wacky wizard adventures.”), T’ll give you a full description of every little detail (“And the kid knows he’s different because every day strange things happen around him, like when he’s at the zoo for his cousin’s birthday party, the glass on a snake tank disappears suddenly while the cousin’s nose is pressed up against—oh, by the way, the snake is from,” etc.), and if you were to keep a written transcript of this section of the conversation (and honestly this bit is often the conversation killer because T’s verbosity makes further discussion seem exhausting and unappealing), you’d end with with what almost amounts to the CliffNotes of this particular work of fiction. (Except critical analysis of themes/symbols/etc. would be absent because T is logic oriented and comp sci besides, and so he’s convinced that all of that English stuff is a crock-pot of bubbling horse shit. Which is not to say that Harry Potter means much beyond a rollicking good time, but that’s really not the point I’m trying to make.)
3 Not sure if he means “become physically intimate with” or “understand the emotions of”; he rants for minutes, but he somehow never makes it completely clear which. I never feel like asking him to clarify.
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