Q. I’ve been seeing a girl and she wants to get serious, but I feel like my career is my priority at the moment. What should I do?
Ruby says: You should be thanking your lucky stars that there’s a girl prepared to sleep with you and stop trying to milk this career nonsense. Don’t kid yourself. Is your lame office job – where you just count stuff and write boring, badly punctuated emails – really that exciting?
Men complain about women not knowing what they want, but I bet if this chick ditched you, you’d spend the next month eating cereal and watching old episodes of Scrubs, whinging to your mates about how sad you are, like they give a shit.
If some nerdy guy with bad hair and bad shoes told me that “his career was his priority”, I’d be out of there so quick. And I’d probably shag his best friend just to teach him a lesson.
Unless he was super-rich, in which case I’d probably stick around.
Reuben says: Once, I had a job, I had a girl – I had something going. But I can trace the unravelling of it all back to that one Christmas when she bought me a model train set.
I became obsessed. Even while my supervisor at the lumber yard berated me, all I could think of was getting home and polishing its little wheels.
When my girl slammed the front door on her way out for the last time, I was preoccupied with gluing fake trees to the landscape I had crafted from green felt.
As the other men at the shelter slept, I sat up, testing and tightening the connections between the carriages.
Now, at night, after lights-out, I still hear the clatter of its wheels in the low thrum of the guard’s cudgel along the bars; I hear its cheery whistle in the squeals from the next cell as a new couple consummate.
Take care, my friend, for our deepest desires can destroy us.
» Got a sex or relationship worry? Email dearreuben@tntmagazine.com
