Ex-Boyfriend Greatest Hits: The Party Guy

If you missed the All My Highschool Boyfriends post, I'm recapping my dating history now that I'm set to get married (sometime in 2016, when I get around to planning a wedding), a la High Fidelity. This was FoN's idea, and I suggest you steal it, because I don't want to be the only person standing here looking like a ho, okay?

Shortly before I graduated high school, I started dating the Party Guy.

Party Guy was fun. Party Guy had parties. Party Guy was, well, a party unto himself. Party Guy was popular.

Party Guy did entertaining things like entice large groups of people to wear ridiculous costumes in public for no good reason. He bought dry ice to put in drinks just for the novelty, had the biggest stereo system on the block, and had a beach volleyball court in his backyard. Party Guy made me mix tapes and called me the "perfect person". He helped me paint my first car plaid.

Party Guy was also 7 years older than me and already owned his own Party House. I'm sure my parents were horrified, but they held their tongues. At least until I declared my intentions to move in with him. Then they felt the need to lodge a protest, to beg me to promise them that I wasn't going to blow off an education and catch The Pregnant, or anything.

I scoffed. DUH. I wasn't planning to do that at ALL, I was in it for the party. So I packed up my teenage stuff and moved into Party House.

Turns out? Actually living in a Party House makes it much less of a party. Party Guy hosted Thursday Night Live each week, where people would regularly stay until 5 and 6 am. You know, about two hours before I had to be at WORK, now that I was living in the real world. People played beach volleyball all weekend and never left. Party Guy also had to keep a roomate around to supplement his lifestyle and his choices were...eccentric, ranging from a Greenpeace worker (and, generally, all of her friends) to a born-again Christian who had recently been dumped by her boyfriend after he'd discovered she had faked her pregnancy.

So, after about a year of living in Party House, the party was over for me. I told Party Guy that I was going to move out, and since I was doing that anyway, it was probably best that we break up.

Apparently, performing 24-7 as Party Guy leads to a lack of emotional growth, because Party Guy suddenly became a lot less fun. He drunk-dialed me regularly, and showed up outside my parents house at 3am wailing my name (my father very kindly drove him home and explained the facts of life to him, probably not as kindly). He called me and implied that he was committing suicide. Because I'm not totally soulless, I drove to his house in a panic and found him passed out, an empty bottle of pills in his hand.

The EMT guy told me, after I dialled 911 and brought the whole reponse team out, that Party Guy hadn't actually taken anything. He was just drunk.

I solved the Party Guy situation the only way I knew how - by moving away to college. Where I stayed single. The whole damn time.

But hey - I learned how to Party.