Funny Story

September 18, 2026

I think one of the things I like most about myself is my ability to laugh and make others laugh. I love to laugh. I love going to comedy shows. I love that feeling when you send a Teams message and someone uses the little laughing emoji reaction. I love making people giggle during serious meetings. I love saying something silly to diffuse tension or remove stress from the air. I love that feeling when crying turns into laughter – you know, when you’re telling your bestie a story over a cocktail and you start to ruin your expensive makeup with tears and she says something that gets you right in the giggles. I was crying while texting my friend a few weeks back and I said something about how a man named Tom that I had been dating viewed my Instagram story but hadn’t texted me for two weeks. In a second flat, she fired back “YOU HAVE A PEEPING TOM!” In a span of two seconds, I went from crying to laughing and then back to crying again. Human emotions are such a wild, fun ride sometimes.

I’ve always been able to make light of most situations. It’s no secret to you, dear reader, that I’ve been through the wringer on this journey to find the love of my fucking life or whatever. I’ve cried myself to sleep many a night over my struggles. But I’ve also had my friends and co-workers in stitches more time than I can count, regaling them of the tales of my unfortunate dating adventures. I’ve told some of these stories so many times that I have absolutely nailed the timing and can enthrall an entire happy hour crowd in my recanting. Here are a few bangers:

• The time a guy lost his tooth while he was hitting on me at Jackson’s. The tooth flew out of his head, and every man in the vicinity came to his bat signal and immediately turned on their little phone flashlights to search for the tooth on the floor. One man found the tooth, picked it up off of the sticky bar floor with his bare hands, handed it back to my gentleman caller, and HE PUT IT RIGHT BACK IN HIS MOUTH. Then he took a swig of his beer and asked for my number. I GAVE IT TO HIM. And he ghosted me shortly after.
• The time I saw a man at the bar who looked like Daniel Craig. I walked up to him and asked him to join me and my friends because he was alone, and when he smiled to accept my offer, I saw that he only had about 7 teeth left in his entire head. At one point in the night, I told a crass joke about religion and he walked out of the bar in ire.
• The time I sent a shot of Jameson to a man at a bar, and he received it, took a look at me when the bartender pointed me out to him and then immediately turned back to his conversation. The bartender brought me a free drink and loudly announced that it was from her and not my Jameson sweetheart. I started to tear up from the rejection and embarrassment, and then another man appeared from no-where like a pop-up book from hell and kissed me on the forehead and told me it was going to be okay. My friend screamed the word “ASSAULT” and the man vanished back into the sewer from which he spewed. Side note: the Jameson man in question did thank me for the shot at the end of the night and he was most definitely gay.
• The time I met a guy from Deloitte who told me his wife had died of cancer 2 years prior and left him three children to raise. He ghosted me after a couple weeks and sent me an email on the Deloitte system to tell me his child had thrown his phone into a creek. I did a little internet sleuthing and discovered that his wife was very much alive.
• The time I met someone I actually liked and he announced after about a month that he was moving to SAUDI ARABIA. He met the love of his life there.
• The time a date came over to watch a movie on a third date but wouldn’t stop mansplaining my HVAC to me for long enough to turn the movie on. He also said he “wasn’t a pet person” and asked me to lock Maudie in a room upstairs.
• The time one of my exes posted proof of him cheating on me on his Snapchat story and his sister showed it to me while I was helping her shop for school clothes for her kids. He also brought me his laundry to do and I found a double D bra in the laundry basket that definitely wasn’t mine. LOL?
• The time I got dumped by a guy who told me he was probably moving away from the DC area. It’s been 3 years and he still lives 15 minutes away from me.
• The time I had a first date with a guy who told me he wasn’t allowed to gamble in the state of Maryland anymore and that he goes to Delaware to do it. Then on the night we had planned date two, he didn’t respond to my texts and I saw on Bumble that he was….drum roll…in Delaware. He came back a few weeks later and wanted another shot and I mercifully turned him down.
• The time I met a man at a bar and he asked me on a date for the following day. The next day he told me he was too sick to go out, and I ran into him later that night at the same bar after he made a miraculous recovery. I now see him at that bar about once a month. He never remembers my name, but always apologizes for being an asshole and asks me why my friend hates him.
• The time I had a one-night interaction with a man with Stage 4 colon cancer. He was lovely and I really liked him. I brought him flowers and watermelon for our date (which he couldn’t eat because chemo made him too sensitive to cold food), and of course he ghosted me the very next day. I legit repressed this memory for 3+ years until my friend brought it up at Mile 20 a couple weekends ago and I almost had a stroke when the memory came back to me. I was making such a racket, the bartender even joined in our convo. I found him on social media and he’s still alive, still battling horrible cancer, and somehow got married since our special evening.

When each of these events were happening, I probably shed a few tears. Hell, I might have curled up in my bed for a whole weekend to mope away the bad feelings. But it doesn’t take me long to start to see the humor in these things and then I turn them into ammunition I can fire and forget on the next date. Nothing breaks the tension on a first date like some bad dating stories! And better yet, I can keep the masses rolling at happy hours and friend dinners galore, while my married friends chuckle and say “thank goodness I’m not still out there.” Thank goodness, indeed, Max.

I wrote a little bit about my most recent heartbreak before. The net-net of it all is that I was very interested in someone, and I held on all summer to watch it play out. In the end, he ghosted me completely. That story is pretty boring, and I know what you’re thinking, dear reader! “Onto the next!” “You’ll find what you deserve!” “He was intimidated by you!” You know, all the lies you probably say to your single friends when they lay this stuff at your doorstep. It’s been a couple weeks now, and I’m on my mental health journey and all that woo woo shit. I keep trying to reach for that familiar defense mechanism – humor. If I can turn it into a funny story, then it’s not so scary, is it? If I can laugh about it, I take away the power of the story and the person in it to hurt me. The only problem? I can’t seem to find one funny thing to say about this.

It’s just not funny. I’m really hurt in this profound way that feels new to me. Sure I’ve been ghosted by people before (see bullets above), but never by someone I had grown to really care for and certainly not by someone to whom I had been committed. It feels like more than rejection, it feels like betrayal. It feels like not only was I not chosen by this person, I also wasn’t worth the effort of communication. I feel discarded like trash that you throw in the bin hastily so you don’t have to look at it. And that’s not funny. Feeling like trash isn’t funny.

Now when I go on Instagram, the fucking algorithm knows what I’ve been going through. It fills my feed with videos about “how to make an avoidant miss you” or “how to heal from being ghosted” or “how to recognize the signs of an avoidant”. It makes me want to scream. Are there videos on his feed right now on “how to not be avoidant”? Ads for therapy and coaching for how to not ghost a kind woman who showed you affection and invited you into her home and bought you a baseball ticket and cooked you dinner multiple times and bought you gifts and tried to communicate with you carefully and thoughtfully? Probably not, right? Because, chances are, he isn’t sad about this at all. I may be wrong, but I doubt it. He may be out with his new love interest as I write this, having a jolly good time, while I’m here fighting for my life to not go to bed early and cry myself to sleep. And that’s not very funny, is it?

When I first met him, we spent a whole evening laughing together and he told me I had the most rewarding laugh he had ever heard. And now I’m having trouble laughing and it’s because I let this situation with him steal that away from me. Ironic, right? I look at my list of funny stories above, and I honestly just feel sick looking at them because they represent years of trying the same shit over and over, expecting different results. Years of begging men to treat me with any basic amount of decency. It starts as one funny story and then two, and then all the sudden a single ghost is the tipping point from comedy into tragedy into full blown trauma. That’s not his fault. The ghosting is really bad behavior, but the rest of this? The responsibility is with me. I’m the one with the track record of accepting less than I deserve. I’m the one who held on all summer even though holding on was hurting me every day, he didn’t ask me to do that. I’m the one who puts my trust in men who have not earned it or even asked for it, time and time again. And that’s not funny either.

So I repeat my affirmations. I am stable even when the people around me are inconsistent. I am building a relationship with myself that is safe. I deserve consistent love. I will find my way back to humor and joy and color even when life is gray and decidedly not funny. Maybe not right this second, but I will find my way back to it. I can break this cycle and laugh again, and maybe, just maybe, it won’t always be at my own expense.