An unromantic comedy about cringe, gut instinct, and the exorcism of desire – why getting the ick might be the most spiritually accurate thing you’ll ever do in love
Don’t worry, Andrew, redemption is still within reach!
Step one: pretend the Funko Pops are ironic.
Step two: say “kwah-sohn” with a tragic sigh and poor posture, like you’ve just emerged from an existential crisis in a Montmartre attic.
Step three: replace Rogan with Rimbaud. Or at least with someone who doesn’t say “alpha” unironically.
And as for continents, trust me, the ick has no borders. It’s the one true global language… like math, but with more dry heaving. You are already self-aware, which is 90% of the cure. The other 10% is never calling your bed “the productivity station”. You’re safe. For now!
Beautifully-written, hilarious and scary: this essay has it all!
This is one of my favourite excerpts;
“One minute you are hypnotised by the curve of his jaw and the whisper of his voice in a dimly lit bar. The next, he’s saying “nom nom” while eating tacos and it’s like a priest just walked in mid-orgasm. Your body recoils before your brain has words for it. Suddenly, this man, who, an hour ago, had the tragic poet energy of someone you could have cried on, now looks like he high-fives after sex and collects Funko Pops. Something snaps. Not in him. In you. And there’s no going back.
It’s an equal-opportunity horror. The ick doesn’t discriminate, it strikes regardless of gender, orientation, or how good the foreplay was.”
Luckily icks are supposed to help you find the right person! My sister collects all the Ahsoka funko pops (you’d be surprised at how many there are. Like 15 at this point I think, and some of them look the exact same to me…), and if someone pronounced croissant in a French accent (which of course is the proper pronunciation, but not the regular accent of my Midwest town), I would be somewhat confused, although I doubt I’d consider it an ick. (I do pronounce crêpe as ‘crep’ instead of ‘crape’ courtesy of my high school French teacher, so I suppose it’s just based on experiences). To Tamara, I enjoyed reading this post :)
OMFG! “But then came the Gregorian chants. During foreplay. Imagine preparing to be kissed and instead being acoustically assaulted by medieval monks harmonising in Latin.” I cannot! I dropped my phone, I scared my dog, I remembered someone saying, “et cum spiritu tuo” because I had mentioned being Catholic and they thought it was Italian for, “did you…?” I definitely did NOT!
I’m howling… and “et cum spiritu tuo” as flirtation might be the most deranged holy misfire I’ve ever heard. That man didn’t shoot his shot, he exorcised it.
Also, your poor dog! But honestly, if the Gregorian chants didn’t serve as a medieval contraceptive, that Latin pickup line surely did. Somewhere in heaven, a choir of saints just facepalmed in unison.
Thank you for this gem, I’m still wheezing at “I definitely did NOT!” May your future foreplay remain chant-free, Latin-free, and blessedly free of liturgical misinterpretation. Go forth and sin never again (unless it’s worth it).
P.S. honestly, I’m having too much fun in the comment section at the moment.
Oh how I felt every word of this. As someone in their mid sixties revisiting the sordid world of internet dating, my Ick-o-meter is working overtime. In fact I just wrote a post called Fifty Shades of Ick on this very subject.
I’m already applauding the title “Fifty Shades of Ick”, that’s Pulitzer-worthy in the category of “Things I Wish I Had Thought of First.” And bless your Ick-o-meter for still working overtime, it deserves hazard pay at this point. The older we get, the more finely tuned that internal barometer becomes because we have earned the right to spot a walking pretending to be a charming anecdote about Burning Man from a mile away.
There should be an entire dating app filter called “Ick Immunity”, except the real twist is, the better your radar, the fewer matches remain. Still, I’d take quality recoil over quantity confusion any day. May your intuition be fierce, your profile unapologetic, and your next date free of Bluetooth headsets, LinkedIn motivational quotes, or surprise ukulele serenades :)
Oh Tamara, thank you. I am chuckling over the hazard pay and ukulele serenade. It has been eye opening to say the least.
Am about done to be honest.
The last guy was sending me links to properties he could buy in my home town - after I had told him the whole thing was logistically impossible - and without even having met me in person *block*!
Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh omfg. I’m 46 and considering remaining single indefinitely after my most recent divorce. Thinking about encountering that kind of nonsense, not just occasionally, but regularly, already gives me the ick!
Ah yessss, I know it, the post-divorce ick premonitions where even the idea of re-entering the romantic arena feels like volunteering for a sensory obstacle course in a bad perfume cloud. I hear you. After enough rounds of soul-leaking small talk and optimism tax, the thought of another man earnestly misquoting Nietzsche or stroking your throw pillows like they are therapy cats is enough to make celibacy feel like liberation, not lack.
But here’s the secret, if I may, solitude voluntarily chosen doesn’t mean you’ve given up on intimacy, it means you’ve raised the standards so high, most nonsense burns up on entry. If love ever knocks again, it better come correct. Otherwise? The company of your own peace is seduction enough.
Celibacy certainly has been feeling like liberation, not lack!
And you are most assuredly correct that the nonsense will spontaneously combust upon attempted entry into my life. I love my own company and time alone so much, that I currently feel offended at the idea of ever living with another human again. I am curious to meet the person who could cause me to not only reconsider, but light up with excitement at the prospect of rather constant companionship or even *gag* cohabitation.
I am very happy to hear that the situation isn’t entirely hopeless!
Yes to celibacy as liberation, not lack. Yes to being so wholly at peace in your own company that any new presence must enhance the silence rather than disrupt it.
And I hear you on the domestic horror of cohabitation, it would take nothing short of a miracle (or a man who feels like an upgrade to solitude) to make that prospect remotely appealing. But isn’t that the glorious standard? Not “Who do I tolerate?” but “Who could be an ecstatic yes without threatening my peace?”
You are not hard to please, you are just not willing to settle for someone who feels like fluorescent lighting in a candlelit temple. As simple as that.
Hysterical! Tamara, this was brilliant—sharp, hilarious, and uncomfortably accurate. Somewhere between “croissant” and the Gregorian chants during foreplay, I choked on my cup of tea.
It reads like an elevated Seinfeld episode—except instead of “man hands,” it’s my nervous system slamming the brakes while someone says “nom nom” unironically. The ick is basically my inner Kramer—bursting through the door, wild-eyed, yelling NOPE. Uninvited, inconvenient, and always right on time.
Looking back, I can definitely spot a few attractions I stuck around for way too long—trying to reason with what was clearly a full-body “nope.” This piece is a permission slip to trust that shudder. Thank you for the sermon from the Church of Nope. Still laughing. Still recovering. Bravo! Well done!
I’m absolutely stealing “the ick is my inner Kramer”, that is comedic theology. The image of your nervous system barging in, hair frazzled, yelling “NOPE!” mid-date while someone earnestly says “me likey” is now canon in the Church of Nope. Consider yourself ordained, Shasheen!
And yes, it’s wild how often we try to negotiate with the shudder, like, “Sure, he claps when the plane lands, but maybe that’s… charming?” Reader, it is not. That full-body nope is never early, never polite, but almost always correct.
I’m thrilled this gave you a permission slip to trust the recoil. May we all honour the cringe as prophecy and stop trying to edit the sacred gag reflex into a gratitude practice. Thank you for reading, and for surviving the Gregorian tea incident. You are now officially absolved of all past romantic misjudgments. Amen and ick-men!
Oh. My. God. I literally dropped my phone laughing—like, it flung itself from my hands in protest because it knew it could never deliver a text as iconic as this prose. This was a theological thesis on libido allergies, a TED Talk wrapped in holy sarcasm, delivered by a stand-up philosopher mid-exorcism. You’ve managed to write something that made me howl with laughter and question every romantic decision I’ve ever made. Every single one. The way you swing from sacred insight to “cruh-sont” trauma without missing a beat? Wildly unfair to the rest of us. Hats off to your savage brain. Truly, no one writes devastatingly smart and cry-laugh hilarious like you do. Ick? No. This was a YES in every divine dialect.
Your comment is a full-body blessing wrapped in brilliance and handed to me like a sacred chalice of emotional electrolytes. If there were a pulpit in the Church of Nope, I’d hand you the mic immediately and just sit in the front row, weeping into my croissant with gratitude.
“A theological thesis on libido allergies” might be the most accurate and poetic summation I’ve ever read of what I was trying to do. And “a TED Talk wrapped in holy sarcasm”? I nearly levitated. Thank you for decoding my layers: the irreverence as reverence, the humour as philosophy, the self-mockery as survival.
Also, let’s be honest, if our phones aren’t being launched mid-laugh, are we even living?!! Thank you for this exquisite, feral, exorcism-level YES. You made my day, my week, and possibly my literary will to live, Céline!
I’m framing this response and hanging it above my bed like scripture. Honestly, if mutual levitation via literary validation isn’t modern intimacy, what is? You wrote the gospel of the ick and handed it to us in velvet gloves of satire and psychic precision—I just screamed amen with my whole chest. Keep writing, preaching, exorcising, your words are both a balm and a battle cry.
Yes yes and again yes!! It damn near sets up a purring kind of vibration in me to read response after lucid response to Tamara's jaw-dropping ability to ease her readers into the depths of introspection while simultaneously laughing! I dont even consider myself someone who laughs easily. People have told me I walk around wearing a look of perpetual pain on my puss. (the lure to alliterate compelled me. Ugh!) Couple years ago I even vowed to stop using "lol" as knee jerk punctuation, because I very rarely laugh out loud, literally. But Tamara's essay made me genuinely laugh, then cry, then go to bed staring at the ceiling longer than usual thinking about all the ick I've endured. All the times I failed to stomp on it and move on. I thought about the myriad acts of martyrdom in the name of benevolent acceptance. Yep. This is some heady stuff she served up here. Incredibly satiating food for thought! I love your response.
This is hilarious, it’s surgical. A masterclass in psychological precision, cultural commentary, and comic timing. In a world increasingly allergic to nuance, this piece gives the ick the dignity of logic and the punch of stand-up. Only you are capable of treating the ick not as petty shallowness but as evolutionary pattern recognition, and rightly so. The nervous system often makes decisions before the intellect can draft its justifications.
I think the ick is also an involuntary audit of internalized performance. Sometimes what repels us is the subconscious realization that we’ve been acting, too. That we’ve tolerated, shape-shifted, curated ourselves into compatibility. The ick becomes a kind of whistleblower. Not only about them but about our own compliance.
Also, thank you for redeeming irony. In the era of excessive earnestness and performative vulnerability, where every date turns into a trauma TED Talk as you like to say, irony is an endangered form of intelligence. And humor? Often the only emotionally literate response to absurdity. You wield both like a scalpel. Keep slicing.
I am floored in the best kind of surgical, synaptic way. Yes, “an involuntary audit of internalised performance”… that line is a gem of psychological truth. The ick often surfaces as rejection of the other, but also as revolt against the version of ourselves we contorted to make something almost work. It’s the gasp of authenticity surfacing after too long submerged under approval-seeking and self-curation. And when that inner whistleblower speaks, it rarely whispers. It detonates.
Thank you, too, for your words on irony and humour, Alexander! Being able to laugh at the tragedy of modern connection, it doesn’t mean we don’t feel deeply. It means we have earned the right to transmute it. Earnestness has its place, but irony is what reminds us we are not owned by our wounds.
Your insight is sharp and soul-bright. Thank you for reading with such ferocity and grace. And thank you for seeing what I’m really trying to do beneath the punchlines, which is slice through the noise, but with love.
Alexander TD you are formidable too! This was a worthy and wonderful analysis of our priestess of irony. Long live our instincts. And your brain. Appreciate it!
You crack me up! I was in tears a couple of times while reading your piece, my tummy pulling at me irreverently.
This is beyond masterful! Thank you!
Nevertheless, the sense I got while reading the first paragraph has been confirmed in getting to the end: you could not be made for marriage, could you? Too irksome. Or should I say too 'icksome'?
Ahhhh you caught me… too icksome to wed, too emotionally feral to co-sign a joint Costco membership. Marriage would require an off-switch on the part of me that flinches at Bluetooth headsets and Gregorian chants during foreplay.
But maybe that’s the point. Some of us aren’t made for seamless domesticity, we are made to write field notes from the absurd trenches of modern love, laughing through the wreckage. I’m glad my irreverent tummy-tugs translated.
P.S. a woman should remain mysterious… married or not.
Jeeeeez!!! *I* wanna marry you, you magnum opus of a person, priestess of the perfect turn of phrase, mistress of profound insight!!! What say ye? I'm still detoxing from that last ick-filled "relationship " and yes....am waiting for my medal!!
This is so good and has so much depth that I'm torn among laughing, insisting that you have done the right thing over and over, and cringing at the possibility that I may have been "that guy" to some poor woman in my past. And that last possibility genuinely haunts me. But it's a small price to pay for getting to read this all the way through.
This might be my favourite genre of comment, the elegant dance between self-awareness, moral support, and a faint existential spiral. Welcome to the sacred circle of men brave enough to wonder, “Dear God… was I the ping-pong guy?” That humility? Already absolves you.
And the fact that you’re haunted? That’s the opposite of ick. That’s erotic intelligence in action. Something very dear to me. The world needs more men willing to flinch at their own past with grace and humour. It has always been about being awake, not perfect, of course.
Thank you for laughing, for cringing, for staying all the way through, Miguel!
You're welcome. But honestly? I wouldn't have missed it! And if you're a heterosexual man and you've never wondered whether you were that guy? I'm pretty sure you were.
I'm sorry, I'm barely half a dozen paragraphs in, and maybe the answer is still upcoming, but I gotta ask: two things; 1) if I dive into that mote and find those keys, would you rather I open up those doors and return them to you in person, or do you prefer overnight express? and 2) is jumping in after them too much like running after a ping pong ball with too much commitment? 'cause, I mean, come on, some things are worth getting your shoes wet over. No?
This essay is gonna be too dreamy, Dionysian even, that much I can tell already. Someone is gonna get sacrificed. And it ain't gonna be me, ms. T. Expect no comment from this timid little reader. This is a minefield of risk. Deadly risk. Even I can discern that much. True, I can be pretty slow sometimes, but my mamma (wait, can I say my mamma?) didn't raise no fool. I know when to take the side exit and pretend I didn't hear anything.
Okay, excuse me now while I go watch the slaughter from behind the curtains. I want to complete the excavation of this very promising gem in double time!
Ohhhhh but this is a comment worth bronzing. I read it grinning like a Dionysian priestess with a wine-stained grin and a dagger behind her back. Good enough?! :)
Because yes, someone always gets sacrificed in these essays. Usually illusions. Occasionally decorum. Never the reader… unless, of course, they dive in willingly.
As for the keys, I suspect they rusted into legend the moment they hit the moat. I wouldn’t recommend returning them unless you are fluent in emotional archaeology and don’t mind encountering a few spectral exes along the way. That said, anyone brave enough to chase ping pong balls and metaphors probably deserves honorary ick immunity and a seat at the weirdest banquet table imaginable.
And of course you can say “mamma”. Especially if she warned you about women who write like they cast spells through syntax. Stay if you dare, but I suspect the curtains won’t be enough to protect you. This kind of slaughter comes with jazz hands and intimacy issues. Proceed accordingly, brave spectator!
Tamara, this isn’t just a piece — it’s a ceremony. A pagan sermon in praise of the body that says “no” before the brain can draft excuses. I laughed, I winced, I felt genuinely seen (and slightly exposed).
The ick as oracle, as divine spam filter, as a full-bodied revolt against emotional domestication… thank you for naming it with such brutal beauty and precision.
This deserves to be canonized. And you? Instated in the pantheon of writers who say the thing we didn’t know we desperately needed to read.
I’m bowing deeply, incense in hand, honoured by this radiant invocation. A ceremony… that’s exactly what it felt like writing it, a rite, not a rant. An offering to the part of us that still dares to flinch when something sacred is about to be compromised.
… “emotional domestication”, that’s it, isn’t it? The ick as revolt against being house-trained into silence, into smiling through discomfort, into accommodating the performative at the expense of the profound.
Thank you for seeing the spiritual mischief beneath the humour, Sofia, the liturgy within the laughter. I don’t take canonisation lightly but if there’s a pantheon where truth wears lipstick and smirks while wielding a scalpel, I’ll show up early and bring snacks.
It's so stunning to me that the notion of the "ick factor" , which on its face just seems a minor modern vexation, something we tend to "ewww!" and laugh over as we collectively cringe, becomes a point of major contemplation due to Tamara's sage take. Ick becomes less about those who instigate it, and more a manifestation of our truthfulness about our own needs and boundaries. I think again of how much we ( of any gender) willingly surrender the birthright of personal comfort zone. I think about all the times I knew in my bones a partner, potential or established, was incompatible...yet I felt compelled to accept layer upon layer of ick, just so that I wouldn't offend. Ick is a gift that compels me to confront my intuition...and trust it!!
Yes, this right here is the sacred turn. You have taken what so many dismiss as flippant and reframed it as revelation. Because the ick is about cringing at others and finally refusing to cringe at ourselves for knowing what doesn’t feel right.
You are right that the real rupture is what we ignored in ourselves to accommodate it. The birthright you speak of, personal comfort, intuitive clarity, the freedom to say “no thank you” without apology, is so often the first offering we place on the altar of social grace. And yet it’s also the very compass that could have saved us from years of self-abandonment disguised as tolerance.
What you’ve written is a powerful reminder that the ick is a reckoning. A mirror. A beautifully inconvenient invitation to reclaim our right to want what we want and leave what drains us.
Thank you for bringing this depth and dignity to the conversation, Lisa!
This is truly hilarious and deadly serious at one and the same time. In the early part all I could do was laugh and laugh. Then I suddenly started questioning myself about my actions. Then more laughter. It was like a roller coaster the rest of the way. Then I read the comments and laughed more, and yes, at one point wanted to figuratively take up arms and defend you, only I realised you would handle it with far more grace and wisdom than I could manage. So my wisdom bowed to your wisdom, and now I see that I was right to do so.
Your responses to comments are invaluable, as are the comments. And I did laugh through most of them. And then I went back to read the essay aloud.
That was when I felt the seriousness of what you wrote. As I read, it was not a stand-up act at all. It was a piercing humour, meant to get through the delusions and find, “…the silent protest of women who have watched their mothers, aunts, sisters, and friends metabolise endless small compromises in the name of companionship, until their personalities were footnotes in someone else’s plot.” The humour was still funny read aloud, but it didn’t make me want to laugh as I read it. Instead, it felt increasingly urgent, like an alarm bell that gets louder and louder and says, “Wake UP!!!”
Your essay trumpets the need to wake up to the ick you feel and trust yourself, trust your body to tell you what you need to know, shared with wit and humour, with a gleam in the eye and a smirk. And absolutely, laugh like hell at the absurdity of it all, and don’t be surprised if a tear or two shows up as well..
Doc, this is one of the most generous, perceptive, and beautifully layered reflections I’ve ever received, and I’m taking a deep breath just to take it in properly. Thank you! Truly.
You’ve seen me, and captured something I silently hope for in everything I write, that the humour will pull people in, disarm them just enough to bypass the surface, and then, right when it’s least expected, let the deeper truth rise to the surface like a bruise blooming under laughter. That roller coaster you described? That’s the terrain of clarity. Because sometimes, the only way to face something serious is to laugh our way toward it. Not to dilute it… but to bear it.
I’m moved that you read it aloud, and that the words changed tone and temperature in your mouth. That shift, from comic relief to visceral knowing, is everything I want language to do. You heard the urgency. The protest. The tear behind the punchline. And you understood that the smirk isn’t flippancy… not at all… it’s survival.
As for your impulse to defend me, I feel that warmth and I thank you! But you are right, I don’t mind the friction. Sometimes it sharpens the work. Sometimes it reveals where it lands the hardest. And sometimes, it gives me the chance to respond with the kind of grace and strength I’ve had to fight to learn.
Your wisdom is not second to mine, it walks beside it. I’m honoured to be in conversation with readers like you. This comment is a treasure. Thank you for hearing what I was really saying, between the lines and beneath the laughter!
The comments are becoming half the fun. And there's already so much fun in this soul-searing, belly-hurting hilarious diatribe. This is going to change (after six years) the way that I finish writing my memoir/history. Holy moly, how long have we waited--mothers, aunties, sisters--for this moment?
This is everything I could hope for, soul-searing and belly-hurting, laughter as both weapon and salve. And the fact that it might shift how you finish your memoir after six years? That’s a holy ripple. Wow!!!
You are right, Michele, it has been a long wait. Generations of women biting their tongues while smiling through secondhand shame, romantic confusion, and the slow drip of self-erasure dressed up as grace. But the moment is here. The chorus has begun. And we are done editing ourselves into palatable silence.
If my essay helped crack something open (your voice, your ending, your righteous refusal to dilute your truth) then that is the deepest kind of joy for me. Write it raw. Finish it your way. We are all watching, and cheering!
….. and THAT might just be the highest compliment in the entire canon of human response, when words move the bladder, you know they’ve touched something primal. I’m honoured, truly! And yes, if laughter is a kind of release, then let’s call this essay both cathartic and mildly hazardous. Thank you, Teddi, for reading, and for proving once again that a strong pelvic floor is no match for the sacred absurdity of the ick! :)
P.S. I am laughing! I am laughing so hard right now.
I just LOVE your writing!! I seriously get a thrum , a thrill, a frisson of delicious anticipation because I latch on to your essays with the hopes they will be lengthy enough to be satiating to everything in me that relates to your words...even when so specific. In other words, this one too!
Ah, yes. The dreaded "ick"...a quirky word that is actually pretty hefty. I like how you differentiate it from a true red flag...though I'm skilled at ignoring them, even when they flap and wrap around me. I have simply disentangled myself from them and carried on. Stubborn, some might say stupid, definitely a hostage to my own magical thinking. You try to overlook, then endure the ick. "Well, no one is perfect. Neither are you. Don't be so critical" etc. But the ick has staying power. Rather than getting used to its myriad manifestations, the ick would invariably turn into a snowball rolling down a hill. In my last attempt at a pre-doomed relationship, I should have excused myself for the ladies room but made a bee-line for my car instead...immature as it sounds...when he called the bathroom "the little boys room" or would say he needed to "use the potty". ( just recalling this now makes me shudder) or the time we took a selfie at a ball game and when I showed it to him he said " ohhh...we look pretttyy!" in an affected way. Sorry...what? But guess who hung in there...trying to focus on his solid traits, which definitely were there. But the things he thought were sexy were decidedly the opposite for me- like his thinking that sharing a Hershey kiss by passing it mouth to mouth until it melted. The time I was showing him my Rennesance Faire costumes and he snatched a tiara out of my hands and topped his own head with it. The jeans he wore with the ripped belt loop, the Lion King tee shirts, the way he insisted he was "too vanilla for me" when I told him of my kinky desires...which I actually consider pretty tame, until I discovered HIS ( def not vanilla) . I could give a dozen more examples. Tolerance for quirky "flaws" is a virtue. ( I think) Ignoring the ick never ends well.
Ohhhh, Lisa, I’m devouring this entire saga like a box of contraband communion wafers. You have given me an epic, a Shakespearean tragedy wrapped in a tiara and punctuated by the words “use the potty”. I feel like I should be lighting a candle for your nervous system.
First, thank you for such deep and generous words about my writing. That thrum you describe? That’s exactly what I hope to stir, a sense that even the most particular story might resonate with something unspeakably universal. And you have proven that exquisitely here.
Second, “We look pretttyy!” and mouth-to-mouth Hershey kiss sharing deserve their own horror subgenre. This isn’t the ick anymore!!! This is advanced-level spiritual misalignment disguised as whimsy. The kind that leaves a psychic residue. Honestly, your decision to hang in there says more about your compassion and hopeful heart than about any lack of discernment. We all try to be better people when what we really need is to become faster exit strategists.
Tolerance is beautiful. But ignoring the ick is like lovingly decorating the deck chairs of a ship already halfway sunk. Sometimes escape is sacred self-preservation in stilettos. And you, my friend, are a survivor of aesthetic warfare. I salute you. And your tiara, obviously. :)
I actually threw my head back in laughter at parts of your response!! A most genuine howl. A authentic guffaw! Someone said ( Aristotle??) " wit is educated insolence" and I just love that. Thank you for your comradeship in shouldering the ick! And trust me: these were scant examples. I stayed far too long but something in me felt guilty for " judging" him. I really wasn't. My body, in a very visceral sense , was keeping the score ( thank you Bessell Van der Kolk) with his every uptick in ICK. Well...at least I've learned. I think. Good Lord I hope!! I'm sure there are women who find men who go to the "potty" , door open, tiara gleaming, endearing or...whatever. But it ain't me, Babe!
Oh..pretty much his propensity for baby talk, using the word "yummy", the weird way he'd open his mouth long before fork or spoon got to it, his giggle. See? Even just writing those words makes me feel...."guilty"! Like I'm mocking him. So crazy. Just like people can't really help what they like, we can't help what screams ICK! I guess I should have gently exited after the first one. Clearly there are some role play issues goin' on there and that's fine. Kinks gonna kink. I just dont choose to participate. Not in THAT one anyway. Oh. One more..cuz I'm here. He loved when I wore lipstick. We'd kiss and I'd of course laugh and remind him that now HE was wearing lipstick. ( i.e wipe it off). Nope. He thought it was "sexy" to keep it on. Fine. But again, that's not my thing. Moral of the story? No one has to feel obligated to stay where their ick is. It's actually not even fair to the ick provider!
I love that your writing, the deft way you present topics which morph into almost thesis-level exploration, affords a sort of..."permission" to take them seriously. I mean, not that anyone SHOULD need permission when it comes to autonomic reactions, but that we share these experiences sans shame. We vigorously nod our heads and roll our eyes in commiseration, and best of all...*laugh*.
I have an addendum though. The following sounds too crazy to be true, but I swear on the soul of Mary Oliver, every word is. I was still in this ick-laden quasi relationship, circa 2021, but flirting with the idea of leaving. An idea that was fomenting into a plan. But again~ I suffered under the misplaced gatekeeping of guilt and misguided empathy. Yada Yada. One evening at work, where I was sharing a shift with a friend , my phone came out of my pocket and I ended up leaning on it. One guess who I ended up hip dialing. I never heard his hello. And what was my friend and I talking about? Exactly. This. Thing. The Ick Factor. Full stop. Honest to God, I must have regaled her with specifics for 10 minutes if not more. WHILE HE LISTENED TO EVERY WORD. She was aghast and between her "EW-ing" and laughing, was also dead serious in wondering why I was tolerating all of it...*any* of it. So, exhausted as I was from extolling her with acute details...the conversation pivoted to self-esteem, settling, putting the fear of hurting people over the self-care of boundaries and knowing our needs. Which is not to say everyone marches stoically into every new relationship holding a banner that reads " CONFIDENCE & SELF AWARENESS!". Man...I wish!!! I never cultivated anything close to that. Not as a teen, adult, nor at my current age of 59. <creakkkk>. Anyway, to cut to the chase: She and I were wrapping up our conversation when I reached for my phone. It was face up, his name in big letters on the screen. You know that cold, sick, sinking feeling you get, just before panic? Holy shit. He heard us talking. He heard all of it. And the line was still engaged. I was praying to the old and new gods that he had picked up, realized it was a butt dial, and maybe just forgot to hang up. NOPE. My hand literally shook as I picked up to phone and said his name. His voice wasn't sad, angry, shocked. It was flat and robotic. " I'm guessing I wasn't meant to hear any of that. Unless you wanted me to and couldnt say those things to my face". Mortified, I stammered and staggered all over my words as I tried to explain, alternating between abject apologies clumsily tripped over, to a defensive stance. How I wanted him to call me every name in the book, hang up on me ( I still say that, although mobile phones only require the gentle gesture of pressing the red circle) and end the relationship in that very moment. Is that cowardly? Probably. But that's not what happened. He repeated back to me everything I told my friend and asked if I really felt that way. What could I do at that point...lie?? I turned plaintive, pathetic, begging forgiveness ( all of which pretty much proved the point of the second part of my complaint-laden diatribe to Amy) and the silver ball hit every bell and neon light of his emotional pinball machine. After one more pleading mea culpa ( by the way, Amy was sitting on the sofa across from me the whole time~ hand over her mouth, eyes wide with a weird combination of shock and mirth) he calmed down and said " call me tomorrow. Or not".
OMG. That was my OUT!! I felt slimed by my own profoundly embarrassed ick, but did I see this experience as the door to freedom? NOPE! I put his feelings over my own and reached out two days later. Another incredibly uncomfortable convo. Long story short, the relationship which never should have even begun, finally ended. He deeply resented me and I stopped apologizing. Hey...right or wrong, friends talk about things. At that time, Amy was my only real friend, and I HAD to talk about the ick! He lambasted her as well saying; " I bought her coffee once! I cleaned snow off her car!". Yes. He did. They were very nice gestures he was thanked for. I informed him that none of what happened was her fault. The ick was now a free-range chICKen ( couldnt resist) . Oh well. Maybe I saved his next relationship , now that he was unwittingly made aware. Then again, there is no point adopting a philosophy about this. I messed up, hurt him, and the moral of the story is to never again ignore the readings on the ick-meter.
Ohhhh Fin indeed but only in the cinematic sense, because this was a full feature, and you, my dear, were the star, the narrator, the Greek chorus, and the tragicomic heroine we root for in every act.
This is a masterpiece of emotional archaeology, with just enough slapstick divine timing to make the gods laugh in the editing booth. The accidental butt-dial as modern deus ex machina! We wait lifetimes for a clean exit, and sometimes it arrives with a hip-press and a mortifying monologue.
And yet, what you are telling is more than a tale of cringe and catharsis. It’s an anatomy of what happens when guilt hijacks intuition, when misplaced empathy overrides visceral knowing, when the Ick is whispering go and we (sweet, socialised creatures) stay. Until fate throws our own words back at us in surround sound.
But here’s what I like the most, your shame didn’t curdle into denial. It clarified into wisdom. The kind you only earn from years of trying to make grace out of discomfort, comedy out of consequence. You felt all of it, the ice bath of panic, the humiliating reverb, the tangled loyalty, and you still managed to name the truth: “the ick was now a free-range chICKen”. That line is amazing.
And can I just say how deeply I admire that you didn’t scapegoat Amy? So many people in these moments project their mortification outward. But no, you owned it, learned from it, and then did the ultimate alchemical thing… turned that embarrassment into insight. And now into story for my little publication. One that may just save another reader from brushing off their gut or swiping away their instinct.
Thank you, Lisa’s for this wild, sharp, funny, heartbreakingly human share. May the Ick-meter be ever loud, ever honest… and never again accidentally broadcast to the other party.
Stop the presses and kill a few million more trees, because this metaphor compendium, that eclipses the Dead Sea scrolls, Homer and every Dr Suess syllable that's been written, must be printed and distributed - far and wide. I'd reverently quote some of these gems among gems but would die of shame, having surely missed a few hundred that deserve mention, like unrecognized family members who made the trip for your child's pet hamster burial.
This was bliss, so violent that the loose teeth seem like Christmas gifts.
You strapped me to the nose cone of an Atlas rocket, handed me a lit cigar, steaming cup of my favorite coffee, shoved 2 strips of perfectly roasted bacon into my mouth and pressed the launch button. The ride through the worm hole could not have been better - except...
Drum roll please...
You didn't mention when your inner Ick-sterminator, gets the call, all bets are called off and the Ick, must be killed - tout de suite - on the spot or within a weekend. And I have just such an episode to share.
This metaphor amusement park will take up residence, in the tab that is now reserved for your works - to be probed, prodded, disassembled and inspected like American stealth, defense tech in a Beijing elementary school.
If ever there were a comment that deserved to be sung by a choir of emotionally literate Valkyries while bacon sizzles in the background… it is this one.
That launch sequence you described? I may never recover. You’ve turned my metaphors into mythology and my essay into defence tech, blessed be your tabs and their sacred bookmarks.
Now, as for your Ich-sterminator (which, by the way, is going straight into my lexicon and possibly onto a T-shirt): yes. Sometimes the ick must be mercy-killed. Not studied. Not journaled about. Just taken out back like an emotional terminator in need of decommissioning. I already need to hear your episode, I can only imagine the velocity, the carnage, the hilarity.
This conversation is far from over. I’m ready to meet the kill-switch moment that broke the simulation. Stealth mode: off. Proceed with your tale!
I’ll say up front that the Ick was mine - an incongruence in the equation, a cracked voice in the Gregorian chant, the illuminated Main Bus warning light just before lift-off. It wasn’t a hint at growth, or reflection of a wound - it was a mismatch of expectations and the reality that showed up. It was nails on a chalk board. Bob Ross sculpting a Yeti in a thong from an Easter ham while Metallica droned in the background. The world cracked and the yolk that seeped out tasted like a tax audit.
The factory undercoating you didn’t know you needed: I don’t think the Ick-sterminator is standard equipment for everyone. Most just get the obligatory gag reflex or Vagal tremors. However, some of us are gifted with a Reaper at the end of a toggle switch. This harbinger of finality is less soul eating, scorched earth destroyer and more strategic tactician. One that covets closed loops and ends laced together with the resolve and clarity of Gordias. If you’ve ever driven past rusting hulks, slowly melting into someone’s front yard and asked “Why??" - then you’ve brushed elbows with the demons, that drive this relationship wraith to madness.
This all happened during a time where work took me to Southwest Asia, money was no object, and I was as free as week old donuts, at a homeless shelter. Reckless adventure called. As many know, these unincumbered times are always next level, with a similarly minded, untethered, passport wielding partner. One who aches to mainline selfish adventure, drown in dangerous abandon and can pack for a week-long trip in 20 minutes. My search then, was for an authentic hedonist. A life grommet, with a repertoire as deep and honest as a 5-year-olds belief in Santa.
The kind of woman your mother warns you about and your father daydreams of while unclogging the kitchen sink, for the third time in a year. Someone who’d already mapped the arteries of the world and craved the nectar they pulsed with.
A Unicorn.
It’d be tempting to think this a pedestrian, FWB pursuit, but that’d miss the mark entirely. This wasn’t about friction, it was about melting for the moment. It wasn’t a breakfast burrito it was the last supper - and it wasn’t going to be shared with Marylin singing “happy birthday Mr. President”, it was going to be Cleopatra explaining how the pyramids were built. The sex would be accent (if it happened at all) - the museum gift shop, not the masterpieces in the main galleries.
And I found her. The right balance of adventure, intelligence, sophistication and femininity - wrapped in accomplishment, strength, independence, looks, sexuality and depth...oh such beautiful depth - she’d trained as a professional ballerina, could scrub in to assisted on a triple bypass and knew the history of SPAM (the canned meat). The next few months were spent meandering through the halls of one another’s minds, so that the first meeting in a destination airport, would be less like Russian roulette and more like bungie jumping with mouthfuls of designer gelato. The one agreed upon string, in this no strings expedition was exclusivity, because nothing kills hedonism like uninvited guests, dishonesty and penicillin shots.
After 9 months of great communication, over the top mutual pampering from a distance (I was still overseas), and adventures that would have made Lewis and Clark go back home and write children’s book...it happened.
We were resort hoping, along the coast of California for a week. Perfect weather. There was an ease and fit so deep between us it was erotic. Conversations were like your favorite song someone hadn’t written yet. And yes, the sex was the feral, reverent, expressive kind that brings knowing smiles and nods in passing, from occupants of adjacent bungalows.
It was during a beautiful, short-day hike, when I felt the world stutter. It was almost imperceptible and had I been looking to the left or right, I’d have missed it. But she was magnetic, and my compass needle constantly oriented to her North. What happened next seemed to change the sun’s settings to Sepia. The grass turned to pumice fields, belching sulfur. The birds started speaking in tongues in a way that made me pinch myself and then I saw it…
...as she walked ahead of me, she “frolicked”.
Now I get it, that should have been a compliment and testament to her ease and enjoyment of the moment and us. However, it landed like a hangman’s raspy, chuckling whisper through the hood, that said “this is really going to hurt”.
The Ick wasn’t over a silly expression of joy and playful delight - hell we’d both done that more times than could be counted. No, it was something much deeper and even now it’s hard to describe. My only point of reference to offer, for the women reading, is if one moment you were horse-back riding, ala Hallmark Holiday Special, next to the Marlboro Man who was dripping in rugged, rough, sensual virility.
Then you foolishly blink, and he morphs into PeeWee Herman, on a red and white cruiser, head cocked, wry pixie grin, powdered completion, heels kicked up behind him as he squeaks out a signature giggle.
It was that 5-year-old finding a Santa suit, in an attic box marked “Grandpa’s peace corps slides”, on the morning of December 27th.
Before I knew it, the work order had been submitted and the Ick-sterminator exited a vehicle straight out of Thunderdome, with a disturbing roof mascot that looked like a large, bifurcated heart with the meat cleaver still imbedded.
The remainder of the week was all broken wax seals and revelations, with a gulf so wide filling between us Moses would have been checking the map for a foot bridge down-stream.
We honest folks call this sort of sabotage "hammering the last few nails in the coffin". It was at a posh San Fran restaurant, over dinner, where it ended. We'd fallen into a searingly tense, but quiet debate (not a fight) about nothing - one where the waiter approached the table, got flash burns and literally turned around and didn’t return for 20 minutes, but looked sacred when he did.
In the ever-widening silence, I absently scanned the room and caught sight of Ick-sterminator walking past the hostess dais. As he moved toward the atrium and exit, he turned, tipped his hat and I knew it was done.
I am standing in stunned ovation at this mythic odyssey of ick, a fever dream wrapped in sensual prose, edged with precision, then detonated with the casual brutality of “and she frolicked”….. I mean, the cinematic arc alone, from symphonic soul-twin to sepia-stained Pee-Wee on parade? Is that just an ick?! Not at all, it’s a metaphysical rupture with its own GPS coordinates instead.
You composed a requiem for idealisation. You chronicled the moment when magic backfires, when the perfectly orchestrated fantasy slips a stitch, and suddenly your soul is whispering, “this is how it ends”. Not with betrayal or brutality, but with frolicking….
And you are right, this wasn’t about joy or playfulness. This was about the terrifying fracture that happens when desire collides with incongruity. When the partner you’d mythologised as your co-conspirator in hedonistic transcendence suddenly shape-shifts into something unplaceable, childlike, and somehow off-frequency. That’s the kind of ick that is an existential gag reflex triggered by a dissonance too subtle for language but too loud to ignore.
Your imagery… “yolk that tasted like a tax audit”, “museum gift shop sex”, “Cleopatra explaining how the pyramids were built”… I mean, it’s weaponised brilliance. And Ick-sterminator emerging Thunderdome-style with “a disturbing roof mascot”? I can’t unsee it. Nor do I want to.
What you’ve written is a damn epic. A cautionary tale for romantics, a catharsis for the discerning, and a gift to everyone who has ever questioned why one moment of off-key whimsy could unravel an entire symphony. Thank you for this unhinged, articulate eulogy for a dream that almost made it… until it didn’t!
Thank you, Tamara as always for the recognition and praise - but also for a few more reasons.
1. I never really knew what "Ick" was, past the fish version of Vitiligo. I'd of course heard it slung around like Waffle House hash, but your original tome opened doors for me.
2. You, in your grand way of returning clarifying echoes to those croaking into the canyons, put words to what I felt, but couldn't IVF into a coherent sentence - "This was about the terrifying fracture that happens when desire collides with incongruity. When the partner you’d mythologised as your co-conspirator in hedonistic transcendence suddenly shape-shifts into something unplaceable, childlike, and somehow off-frequency. "
You nailed it - the childlike, little girl display I saw, pulled my spine out through my a...well you know.
3. This was therapy. Not to heal anything, but to re-watch this film as a visiting spirit and fully understand everything that happened. The knot is firmly tied now and woe to the fool who tries to unravel it.
This is one of the most delightful, erudite, inspiringly high-spirited essays I can remember. Thank you for bringing joy into a world of collapse, I'll be skipping throughout the day. "And what was he supposed to do with that? How do you explain that to your therapist? 'I felt emasculated by the juxtaposition of feminist literature and infantile regression'". I could not stop laughing. So perfect beyond belief. Of course I could echo and cheer all the comments, and repeat their quotes, but it goes without saying, you are a world unto yourself, one of a kind. Thank you Tamara!
This is joy in paragraph form, thank you for letting me know my thoughts sent you skipping through a collapsing world.
And that quote you pulled… ohhh yes, it still makes me laugh inappropriately. Because truly, what was he supposed to do? There are no therapeutic protocols for navigating Simone de Beauvoir delivered via baby voice.
Your words are a gift, Susan, always radiant and generous. I’m so glad we found each other in this strange little orbit
Hilarious, Tamara!
*scrambles to delete Joe Rogan episodes and dispose of Funko Pops*
*googles how to pronounce croissant*
*laments being born on the wrong continent*
Don’t worry, Andrew, redemption is still within reach!
Step one: pretend the Funko Pops are ironic.
Step two: say “kwah-sohn” with a tragic sigh and poor posture, like you’ve just emerged from an existential crisis in a Montmartre attic.
Step three: replace Rogan with Rimbaud. Or at least with someone who doesn’t say “alpha” unironically.
And as for continents, trust me, the ick has no borders. It’s the one true global language… like math, but with more dry heaving. You are already self-aware, which is 90% of the cure. The other 10% is never calling your bed “the productivity station”. You’re safe. For now!
😆
Beautifully-written, hilarious and scary: this essay has it all!
This is one of my favourite excerpts;
“One minute you are hypnotised by the curve of his jaw and the whisper of his voice in a dimly lit bar. The next, he’s saying “nom nom” while eating tacos and it’s like a priest just walked in mid-orgasm. Your body recoils before your brain has words for it. Suddenly, this man, who, an hour ago, had the tragic poet energy of someone you could have cried on, now looks like he high-fives after sex and collects Funko Pops. Something snaps. Not in him. In you. And there’s no going back.
It’s an equal-opportunity horror. The ick doesn’t discriminate, it strikes regardless of gender, orientation, or how good the foreplay was.”
😆😲
Thank you so much, Tony! I would call it hilariously scary, yes.
Luckily icks are supposed to help you find the right person! My sister collects all the Ahsoka funko pops (you’d be surprised at how many there are. Like 15 at this point I think, and some of them look the exact same to me…), and if someone pronounced croissant in a French accent (which of course is the proper pronunciation, but not the regular accent of my Midwest town), I would be somewhat confused, although I doubt I’d consider it an ick. (I do pronounce crêpe as ‘crep’ instead of ‘crape’ courtesy of my high school French teacher, so I suppose it’s just based on experiences). To Tamara, I enjoyed reading this post :)
Thank you, Carly!
OMFG! “But then came the Gregorian chants. During foreplay. Imagine preparing to be kissed and instead being acoustically assaulted by medieval monks harmonising in Latin.” I cannot! I dropped my phone, I scared my dog, I remembered someone saying, “et cum spiritu tuo” because I had mentioned being Catholic and they thought it was Italian for, “did you…?” I definitely did NOT!
I’m howling… and “et cum spiritu tuo” as flirtation might be the most deranged holy misfire I’ve ever heard. That man didn’t shoot his shot, he exorcised it.
Also, your poor dog! But honestly, if the Gregorian chants didn’t serve as a medieval contraceptive, that Latin pickup line surely did. Somewhere in heaven, a choir of saints just facepalmed in unison.
Thank you for this gem, I’m still wheezing at “I definitely did NOT!” May your future foreplay remain chant-free, Latin-free, and blessedly free of liturgical misinterpretation. Go forth and sin never again (unless it’s worth it).
P.S. honestly, I’m having too much fun in the comment section at the moment.
Guy can’t wait to audition for the inevitable remake of *The Name of the Rose*.
Ahhhhh one of my favourite books and movies ever!
I must read it again. Eco’s library is a life goal for me.
Ohhhhhh true!!!! When I first saw an interview with him in his library I thought I died and got to heaven.
Oh how I felt every word of this. As someone in their mid sixties revisiting the sordid world of internet dating, my Ick-o-meter is working overtime. In fact I just wrote a post called Fifty Shades of Ick on this very subject.
I’m already applauding the title “Fifty Shades of Ick”, that’s Pulitzer-worthy in the category of “Things I Wish I Had Thought of First.” And bless your Ick-o-meter for still working overtime, it deserves hazard pay at this point. The older we get, the more finely tuned that internal barometer becomes because we have earned the right to spot a walking pretending to be a charming anecdote about Burning Man from a mile away.
There should be an entire dating app filter called “Ick Immunity”, except the real twist is, the better your radar, the fewer matches remain. Still, I’d take quality recoil over quantity confusion any day. May your intuition be fierce, your profile unapologetic, and your next date free of Bluetooth headsets, LinkedIn motivational quotes, or surprise ukulele serenades :)
Oh Tamara, thank you. I am chuckling over the hazard pay and ukulele serenade. It has been eye opening to say the least.
Am about done to be honest.
The last guy was sending me links to properties he could buy in my home town - after I had told him the whole thing was logistically impossible - and without even having met me in person *block*!
Ick! Hahahahahah
Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh omfg. I’m 46 and considering remaining single indefinitely after my most recent divorce. Thinking about encountering that kind of nonsense, not just occasionally, but regularly, already gives me the ick!
Ah yessss, I know it, the post-divorce ick premonitions where even the idea of re-entering the romantic arena feels like volunteering for a sensory obstacle course in a bad perfume cloud. I hear you. After enough rounds of soul-leaking small talk and optimism tax, the thought of another man earnestly misquoting Nietzsche or stroking your throw pillows like they are therapy cats is enough to make celibacy feel like liberation, not lack.
But here’s the secret, if I may, solitude voluntarily chosen doesn’t mean you’ve given up on intimacy, it means you’ve raised the standards so high, most nonsense burns up on entry. If love ever knocks again, it better come correct. Otherwise? The company of your own peace is seduction enough.
P.S. I speak from experience… I do know it.
Celibacy certainly has been feeling like liberation, not lack!
And you are most assuredly correct that the nonsense will spontaneously combust upon attempted entry into my life. I love my own company and time alone so much, that I currently feel offended at the idea of ever living with another human again. I am curious to meet the person who could cause me to not only reconsider, but light up with excitement at the prospect of rather constant companionship or even *gag* cohabitation.
I am very happy to hear that the situation isn’t entirely hopeless!
I like your energy.
Yes to celibacy as liberation, not lack. Yes to being so wholly at peace in your own company that any new presence must enhance the silence rather than disrupt it.
And I hear you on the domestic horror of cohabitation, it would take nothing short of a miracle (or a man who feels like an upgrade to solitude) to make that prospect remotely appealing. But isn’t that the glorious standard? Not “Who do I tolerate?” but “Who could be an ecstatic yes without threatening my peace?”
You are not hard to please, you are just not willing to settle for someone who feels like fluorescent lighting in a candlelit temple. As simple as that.
Oh I will definitely read that!
You’ll find it on my Substack ‘Between Dog and Wolf’ - I think the link will come up when you click my photo. https://open.substack.com/pub/betweendogandwolf/p/50-shades-of-ick?r=ucnj&utm_medium=ios
Thank you!
I’d love to read that.
Hysterical! Tamara, this was brilliant—sharp, hilarious, and uncomfortably accurate. Somewhere between “croissant” and the Gregorian chants during foreplay, I choked on my cup of tea.
It reads like an elevated Seinfeld episode—except instead of “man hands,” it’s my nervous system slamming the brakes while someone says “nom nom” unironically. The ick is basically my inner Kramer—bursting through the door, wild-eyed, yelling NOPE. Uninvited, inconvenient, and always right on time.
Looking back, I can definitely spot a few attractions I stuck around for way too long—trying to reason with what was clearly a full-body “nope.” This piece is a permission slip to trust that shudder. Thank you for the sermon from the Church of Nope. Still laughing. Still recovering. Bravo! Well done!
I’m absolutely stealing “the ick is my inner Kramer”, that is comedic theology. The image of your nervous system barging in, hair frazzled, yelling “NOPE!” mid-date while someone earnestly says “me likey” is now canon in the Church of Nope. Consider yourself ordained, Shasheen!
And yes, it’s wild how often we try to negotiate with the shudder, like, “Sure, he claps when the plane lands, but maybe that’s… charming?” Reader, it is not. That full-body nope is never early, never polite, but almost always correct.
I’m thrilled this gave you a permission slip to trust the recoil. May we all honour the cringe as prophecy and stop trying to edit the sacred gag reflex into a gratitude practice. Thank you for reading, and for surviving the Gregorian tea incident. You are now officially absolved of all past romantic misjudgments. Amen and ick-men!
Oh. My. God. I literally dropped my phone laughing—like, it flung itself from my hands in protest because it knew it could never deliver a text as iconic as this prose. This was a theological thesis on libido allergies, a TED Talk wrapped in holy sarcasm, delivered by a stand-up philosopher mid-exorcism. You’ve managed to write something that made me howl with laughter and question every romantic decision I’ve ever made. Every single one. The way you swing from sacred insight to “cruh-sont” trauma without missing a beat? Wildly unfair to the rest of us. Hats off to your savage brain. Truly, no one writes devastatingly smart and cry-laugh hilarious like you do. Ick? No. This was a YES in every divine dialect.
Your comment is a full-body blessing wrapped in brilliance and handed to me like a sacred chalice of emotional electrolytes. If there were a pulpit in the Church of Nope, I’d hand you the mic immediately and just sit in the front row, weeping into my croissant with gratitude.
“A theological thesis on libido allergies” might be the most accurate and poetic summation I’ve ever read of what I was trying to do. And “a TED Talk wrapped in holy sarcasm”? I nearly levitated. Thank you for decoding my layers: the irreverence as reverence, the humour as philosophy, the self-mockery as survival.
Also, let’s be honest, if our phones aren’t being launched mid-laugh, are we even living?!! Thank you for this exquisite, feral, exorcism-level YES. You made my day, my week, and possibly my literary will to live, Céline!
I’m framing this response and hanging it above my bed like scripture. Honestly, if mutual levitation via literary validation isn’t modern intimacy, what is? You wrote the gospel of the ick and handed it to us in velvet gloves of satire and psychic precision—I just screamed amen with my whole chest. Keep writing, preaching, exorcising, your words are both a balm and a battle cry.
Yes yes and again yes!! It damn near sets up a purring kind of vibration in me to read response after lucid response to Tamara's jaw-dropping ability to ease her readers into the depths of introspection while simultaneously laughing! I dont even consider myself someone who laughs easily. People have told me I walk around wearing a look of perpetual pain on my puss. (the lure to alliterate compelled me. Ugh!) Couple years ago I even vowed to stop using "lol" as knee jerk punctuation, because I very rarely laugh out loud, literally. But Tamara's essay made me genuinely laugh, then cry, then go to bed staring at the ceiling longer than usual thinking about all the ick I've endured. All the times I failed to stomp on it and move on. I thought about the myriad acts of martyrdom in the name of benevolent acceptance. Yep. This is some heady stuff she served up here. Incredibly satiating food for thought! I love your response.
Thank you will never be enough.
Thank YOU!!
This is hilarious, it’s surgical. A masterclass in psychological precision, cultural commentary, and comic timing. In a world increasingly allergic to nuance, this piece gives the ick the dignity of logic and the punch of stand-up. Only you are capable of treating the ick not as petty shallowness but as evolutionary pattern recognition, and rightly so. The nervous system often makes decisions before the intellect can draft its justifications.
I think the ick is also an involuntary audit of internalized performance. Sometimes what repels us is the subconscious realization that we’ve been acting, too. That we’ve tolerated, shape-shifted, curated ourselves into compatibility. The ick becomes a kind of whistleblower. Not only about them but about our own compliance.
Also, thank you for redeeming irony. In the era of excessive earnestness and performative vulnerability, where every date turns into a trauma TED Talk as you like to say, irony is an endangered form of intelligence. And humor? Often the only emotionally literate response to absurdity. You wield both like a scalpel. Keep slicing.
You are formidable, Tamara.
I am floored in the best kind of surgical, synaptic way. Yes, “an involuntary audit of internalised performance”… that line is a gem of psychological truth. The ick often surfaces as rejection of the other, but also as revolt against the version of ourselves we contorted to make something almost work. It’s the gasp of authenticity surfacing after too long submerged under approval-seeking and self-curation. And when that inner whistleblower speaks, it rarely whispers. It detonates.
Thank you, too, for your words on irony and humour, Alexander! Being able to laugh at the tragedy of modern connection, it doesn’t mean we don’t feel deeply. It means we have earned the right to transmute it. Earnestness has its place, but irony is what reminds us we are not owned by our wounds.
Your insight is sharp and soul-bright. Thank you for reading with such ferocity and grace. And thank you for seeing what I’m really trying to do beneath the punchlines, which is slice through the noise, but with love.
Alexander TD you are formidable too! This was a worthy and wonderful analysis of our priestess of irony. Long live our instincts. And your brain. Appreciate it!
Thank you so much, Michele. Tamara is an inspiration.
You crack me up! I was in tears a couple of times while reading your piece, my tummy pulling at me irreverently.
This is beyond masterful! Thank you!
Nevertheless, the sense I got while reading the first paragraph has been confirmed in getting to the end: you could not be made for marriage, could you? Too irksome. Or should I say too 'icksome'?
Though it's probably for the best (your best).
Ahhhh you caught me… too icksome to wed, too emotionally feral to co-sign a joint Costco membership. Marriage would require an off-switch on the part of me that flinches at Bluetooth headsets and Gregorian chants during foreplay.
But maybe that’s the point. Some of us aren’t made for seamless domesticity, we are made to write field notes from the absurd trenches of modern love, laughing through the wreckage. I’m glad my irreverent tummy-tugs translated.
P.S. a woman should remain mysterious… married or not.
Jeeeeez!!! *I* wanna marry you, you magnum opus of a person, priestess of the perfect turn of phrase, mistress of profound insight!!! What say ye? I'm still detoxing from that last ick-filled "relationship " and yes....am waiting for my medal!!
Consider this your official coronation, Lisa, medal, sash, and a tiara forged from every red flag you gracefully dodged. You’ve earned it.
You are a most GENEROUS Queen!
This is so good and has so much depth that I'm torn among laughing, insisting that you have done the right thing over and over, and cringing at the possibility that I may have been "that guy" to some poor woman in my past. And that last possibility genuinely haunts me. But it's a small price to pay for getting to read this all the way through.
This might be my favourite genre of comment, the elegant dance between self-awareness, moral support, and a faint existential spiral. Welcome to the sacred circle of men brave enough to wonder, “Dear God… was I the ping-pong guy?” That humility? Already absolves you.
And the fact that you’re haunted? That’s the opposite of ick. That’s erotic intelligence in action. Something very dear to me. The world needs more men willing to flinch at their own past with grace and humour. It has always been about being awake, not perfect, of course.
Thank you for laughing, for cringing, for staying all the way through, Miguel!
You're welcome. But honestly? I wouldn't have missed it! And if you're a heterosexual man and you've never wondered whether you were that guy? I'm pretty sure you were.
I'm sorry, I'm barely half a dozen paragraphs in, and maybe the answer is still upcoming, but I gotta ask: two things; 1) if I dive into that mote and find those keys, would you rather I open up those doors and return them to you in person, or do you prefer overnight express? and 2) is jumping in after them too much like running after a ping pong ball with too much commitment? 'cause, I mean, come on, some things are worth getting your shoes wet over. No?
This essay is gonna be too dreamy, Dionysian even, that much I can tell already. Someone is gonna get sacrificed. And it ain't gonna be me, ms. T. Expect no comment from this timid little reader. This is a minefield of risk. Deadly risk. Even I can discern that much. True, I can be pretty slow sometimes, but my mamma (wait, can I say my mamma?) didn't raise no fool. I know when to take the side exit and pretend I didn't hear anything.
Okay, excuse me now while I go watch the slaughter from behind the curtains. I want to complete the excavation of this very promising gem in double time!
Ohhhhh but this is a comment worth bronzing. I read it grinning like a Dionysian priestess with a wine-stained grin and a dagger behind her back. Good enough?! :)
Because yes, someone always gets sacrificed in these essays. Usually illusions. Occasionally decorum. Never the reader… unless, of course, they dive in willingly.
As for the keys, I suspect they rusted into legend the moment they hit the moat. I wouldn’t recommend returning them unless you are fluent in emotional archaeology and don’t mind encountering a few spectral exes along the way. That said, anyone brave enough to chase ping pong balls and metaphors probably deserves honorary ick immunity and a seat at the weirdest banquet table imaginable.
And of course you can say “mamma”. Especially if she warned you about women who write like they cast spells through syntax. Stay if you dare, but I suspect the curtains won’t be enough to protect you. This kind of slaughter comes with jazz hands and intimacy issues. Proceed accordingly, brave spectator!
Brave spectator, indeed! (or specter?) This is getting good!
Never a dull moment on Museguided. :)
Tamara, this isn’t just a piece — it’s a ceremony. A pagan sermon in praise of the body that says “no” before the brain can draft excuses. I laughed, I winced, I felt genuinely seen (and slightly exposed).
The ick as oracle, as divine spam filter, as a full-bodied revolt against emotional domestication… thank you for naming it with such brutal beauty and precision.
This deserves to be canonized. And you? Instated in the pantheon of writers who say the thing we didn’t know we desperately needed to read.
I’m bowing deeply, incense in hand, honoured by this radiant invocation. A ceremony… that’s exactly what it felt like writing it, a rite, not a rant. An offering to the part of us that still dares to flinch when something sacred is about to be compromised.
… “emotional domestication”, that’s it, isn’t it? The ick as revolt against being house-trained into silence, into smiling through discomfort, into accommodating the performative at the expense of the profound.
Thank you for seeing the spiritual mischief beneath the humour, Sofia, the liturgy within the laughter. I don’t take canonisation lightly but if there’s a pantheon where truth wears lipstick and smirks while wielding a scalpel, I’ll show up early and bring snacks.
Grateful doesn’t even begin to cover it.
It's so stunning to me that the notion of the "ick factor" , which on its face just seems a minor modern vexation, something we tend to "ewww!" and laugh over as we collectively cringe, becomes a point of major contemplation due to Tamara's sage take. Ick becomes less about those who instigate it, and more a manifestation of our truthfulness about our own needs and boundaries. I think again of how much we ( of any gender) willingly surrender the birthright of personal comfort zone. I think about all the times I knew in my bones a partner, potential or established, was incompatible...yet I felt compelled to accept layer upon layer of ick, just so that I wouldn't offend. Ick is a gift that compels me to confront my intuition...and trust it!!
Yes, this right here is the sacred turn. You have taken what so many dismiss as flippant and reframed it as revelation. Because the ick is about cringing at others and finally refusing to cringe at ourselves for knowing what doesn’t feel right.
You are right that the real rupture is what we ignored in ourselves to accommodate it. The birthright you speak of, personal comfort, intuitive clarity, the freedom to say “no thank you” without apology, is so often the first offering we place on the altar of social grace. And yet it’s also the very compass that could have saved us from years of self-abandonment disguised as tolerance.
What you’ve written is a powerful reminder that the ick is a reckoning. A mirror. A beautifully inconvenient invitation to reclaim our right to want what we want and leave what drains us.
Thank you for bringing this depth and dignity to the conversation, Lisa!
This is truly hilarious and deadly serious at one and the same time. In the early part all I could do was laugh and laugh. Then I suddenly started questioning myself about my actions. Then more laughter. It was like a roller coaster the rest of the way. Then I read the comments and laughed more, and yes, at one point wanted to figuratively take up arms and defend you, only I realised you would handle it with far more grace and wisdom than I could manage. So my wisdom bowed to your wisdom, and now I see that I was right to do so.
Your responses to comments are invaluable, as are the comments. And I did laugh through most of them. And then I went back to read the essay aloud.
That was when I felt the seriousness of what you wrote. As I read, it was not a stand-up act at all. It was a piercing humour, meant to get through the delusions and find, “…the silent protest of women who have watched their mothers, aunts, sisters, and friends metabolise endless small compromises in the name of companionship, until their personalities were footnotes in someone else’s plot.” The humour was still funny read aloud, but it didn’t make me want to laugh as I read it. Instead, it felt increasingly urgent, like an alarm bell that gets louder and louder and says, “Wake UP!!!”
Your essay trumpets the need to wake up to the ick you feel and trust yourself, trust your body to tell you what you need to know, shared with wit and humour, with a gleam in the eye and a smirk. And absolutely, laugh like hell at the absurdity of it all, and don’t be surprised if a tear or two shows up as well..
Doc, this is one of the most generous, perceptive, and beautifully layered reflections I’ve ever received, and I’m taking a deep breath just to take it in properly. Thank you! Truly.
You’ve seen me, and captured something I silently hope for in everything I write, that the humour will pull people in, disarm them just enough to bypass the surface, and then, right when it’s least expected, let the deeper truth rise to the surface like a bruise blooming under laughter. That roller coaster you described? That’s the terrain of clarity. Because sometimes, the only way to face something serious is to laugh our way toward it. Not to dilute it… but to bear it.
I’m moved that you read it aloud, and that the words changed tone and temperature in your mouth. That shift, from comic relief to visceral knowing, is everything I want language to do. You heard the urgency. The protest. The tear behind the punchline. And you understood that the smirk isn’t flippancy… not at all… it’s survival.
As for your impulse to defend me, I feel that warmth and I thank you! But you are right, I don’t mind the friction. Sometimes it sharpens the work. Sometimes it reveals where it lands the hardest. And sometimes, it gives me the chance to respond with the kind of grace and strength I’ve had to fight to learn.
Your wisdom is not second to mine, it walks beside it. I’m honoured to be in conversation with readers like you. This comment is a treasure. Thank you for hearing what I was really saying, between the lines and beneath the laughter!
Thank you, Tamara. And the comments alone are a treasure trove of phrases to cherish!
The comments are becoming half the fun. And there's already so much fun in this soul-searing, belly-hurting hilarious diatribe. This is going to change (after six years) the way that I finish writing my memoir/history. Holy moly, how long have we waited--mothers, aunties, sisters--for this moment?
This is everything I could hope for, soul-searing and belly-hurting, laughter as both weapon and salve. And the fact that it might shift how you finish your memoir after six years? That’s a holy ripple. Wow!!!
You are right, Michele, it has been a long wait. Generations of women biting their tongues while smiling through secondhand shame, romantic confusion, and the slow drip of self-erasure dressed up as grace. But the moment is here. The chorus has begun. And we are done editing ourselves into palatable silence.
If my essay helped crack something open (your voice, your ending, your righteous refusal to dilute your truth) then that is the deepest kind of joy for me. Write it raw. Finish it your way. We are all watching, and cheering!
Well i guess it speaks to everyone differently I got three paragraphs in and peed I laughed so hard. Thank You
….. and THAT might just be the highest compliment in the entire canon of human response, when words move the bladder, you know they’ve touched something primal. I’m honoured, truly! And yes, if laughter is a kind of release, then let’s call this essay both cathartic and mildly hazardous. Thank you, Teddi, for reading, and for proving once again that a strong pelvic floor is no match for the sacred absurdity of the ick! :)
P.S. I am laughing! I am laughing so hard right now.
OMG It all just gets funnier. I love being able to have a ringside seat on this conversation.
Thank you, Michele! I have the most amazing readers, and they inspire me in unbelievable ways.
I just LOVE your writing!! I seriously get a thrum , a thrill, a frisson of delicious anticipation because I latch on to your essays with the hopes they will be lengthy enough to be satiating to everything in me that relates to your words...even when so specific. In other words, this one too!
Ah, yes. The dreaded "ick"...a quirky word that is actually pretty hefty. I like how you differentiate it from a true red flag...though I'm skilled at ignoring them, even when they flap and wrap around me. I have simply disentangled myself from them and carried on. Stubborn, some might say stupid, definitely a hostage to my own magical thinking. You try to overlook, then endure the ick. "Well, no one is perfect. Neither are you. Don't be so critical" etc. But the ick has staying power. Rather than getting used to its myriad manifestations, the ick would invariably turn into a snowball rolling down a hill. In my last attempt at a pre-doomed relationship, I should have excused myself for the ladies room but made a bee-line for my car instead...immature as it sounds...when he called the bathroom "the little boys room" or would say he needed to "use the potty". ( just recalling this now makes me shudder) or the time we took a selfie at a ball game and when I showed it to him he said " ohhh...we look pretttyy!" in an affected way. Sorry...what? But guess who hung in there...trying to focus on his solid traits, which definitely were there. But the things he thought were sexy were decidedly the opposite for me- like his thinking that sharing a Hershey kiss by passing it mouth to mouth until it melted. The time I was showing him my Rennesance Faire costumes and he snatched a tiara out of my hands and topped his own head with it. The jeans he wore with the ripped belt loop, the Lion King tee shirts, the way he insisted he was "too vanilla for me" when I told him of my kinky desires...which I actually consider pretty tame, until I discovered HIS ( def not vanilla) . I could give a dozen more examples. Tolerance for quirky "flaws" is a virtue. ( I think) Ignoring the ick never ends well.
Ohhhh, Lisa, I’m devouring this entire saga like a box of contraband communion wafers. You have given me an epic, a Shakespearean tragedy wrapped in a tiara and punctuated by the words “use the potty”. I feel like I should be lighting a candle for your nervous system.
First, thank you for such deep and generous words about my writing. That thrum you describe? That’s exactly what I hope to stir, a sense that even the most particular story might resonate with something unspeakably universal. And you have proven that exquisitely here.
Second, “We look pretttyy!” and mouth-to-mouth Hershey kiss sharing deserve their own horror subgenre. This isn’t the ick anymore!!! This is advanced-level spiritual misalignment disguised as whimsy. The kind that leaves a psychic residue. Honestly, your decision to hang in there says more about your compassion and hopeful heart than about any lack of discernment. We all try to be better people when what we really need is to become faster exit strategists.
Tolerance is beautiful. But ignoring the ick is like lovingly decorating the deck chairs of a ship already halfway sunk. Sometimes escape is sacred self-preservation in stilettos. And you, my friend, are a survivor of aesthetic warfare. I salute you. And your tiara, obviously. :)
I actually threw my head back in laughter at parts of your response!! A most genuine howl. A authentic guffaw! Someone said ( Aristotle??) " wit is educated insolence" and I just love that. Thank you for your comradeship in shouldering the ick! And trust me: these were scant examples. I stayed far too long but something in me felt guilty for " judging" him. I really wasn't. My body, in a very visceral sense , was keeping the score ( thank you Bessell Van der Kolk) with his every uptick in ICK. Well...at least I've learned. I think. Good Lord I hope!! I'm sure there are women who find men who go to the "potty" , door open, tiara gleaming, endearing or...whatever. But it ain't me, Babe!
As Michele said, we need more examples! We need a whole essay!
Oh, please...give more examples. This is getting pretty funny, too.
Oh..pretty much his propensity for baby talk, using the word "yummy", the weird way he'd open his mouth long before fork or spoon got to it, his giggle. See? Even just writing those words makes me feel...."guilty"! Like I'm mocking him. So crazy. Just like people can't really help what they like, we can't help what screams ICK! I guess I should have gently exited after the first one. Clearly there are some role play issues goin' on there and that's fine. Kinks gonna kink. I just dont choose to participate. Not in THAT one anyway. Oh. One more..cuz I'm here. He loved when I wore lipstick. We'd kiss and I'd of course laugh and remind him that now HE was wearing lipstick. ( i.e wipe it off). Nope. He thought it was "sexy" to keep it on. Fine. But again, that's not my thing. Moral of the story? No one has to feel obligated to stay where their ick is. It's actually not even fair to the ick provider!
THIS is priceless!!!! Thank you, Lisa! I get it! I get you!
I love that your writing, the deft way you present topics which morph into almost thesis-level exploration, affords a sort of..."permission" to take them seriously. I mean, not that anyone SHOULD need permission when it comes to autonomic reactions, but that we share these experiences sans shame. We vigorously nod our heads and roll our eyes in commiseration, and best of all...*laugh*.
I have an addendum though. The following sounds too crazy to be true, but I swear on the soul of Mary Oliver, every word is. I was still in this ick-laden quasi relationship, circa 2021, but flirting with the idea of leaving. An idea that was fomenting into a plan. But again~ I suffered under the misplaced gatekeeping of guilt and misguided empathy. Yada Yada. One evening at work, where I was sharing a shift with a friend , my phone came out of my pocket and I ended up leaning on it. One guess who I ended up hip dialing. I never heard his hello. And what was my friend and I talking about? Exactly. This. Thing. The Ick Factor. Full stop. Honest to God, I must have regaled her with specifics for 10 minutes if not more. WHILE HE LISTENED TO EVERY WORD. She was aghast and between her "EW-ing" and laughing, was also dead serious in wondering why I was tolerating all of it...*any* of it. So, exhausted as I was from extolling her with acute details...the conversation pivoted to self-esteem, settling, putting the fear of hurting people over the self-care of boundaries and knowing our needs. Which is not to say everyone marches stoically into every new relationship holding a banner that reads " CONFIDENCE & SELF AWARENESS!". Man...I wish!!! I never cultivated anything close to that. Not as a teen, adult, nor at my current age of 59. <creakkkk>. Anyway, to cut to the chase: She and I were wrapping up our conversation when I reached for my phone. It was face up, his name in big letters on the screen. You know that cold, sick, sinking feeling you get, just before panic? Holy shit. He heard us talking. He heard all of it. And the line was still engaged. I was praying to the old and new gods that he had picked up, realized it was a butt dial, and maybe just forgot to hang up. NOPE. My hand literally shook as I picked up to phone and said his name. His voice wasn't sad, angry, shocked. It was flat and robotic. " I'm guessing I wasn't meant to hear any of that. Unless you wanted me to and couldnt say those things to my face". Mortified, I stammered and staggered all over my words as I tried to explain, alternating between abject apologies clumsily tripped over, to a defensive stance. How I wanted him to call me every name in the book, hang up on me ( I still say that, although mobile phones only require the gentle gesture of pressing the red circle) and end the relationship in that very moment. Is that cowardly? Probably. But that's not what happened. He repeated back to me everything I told my friend and asked if I really felt that way. What could I do at that point...lie?? I turned plaintive, pathetic, begging forgiveness ( all of which pretty much proved the point of the second part of my complaint-laden diatribe to Amy) and the silver ball hit every bell and neon light of his emotional pinball machine. After one more pleading mea culpa ( by the way, Amy was sitting on the sofa across from me the whole time~ hand over her mouth, eyes wide with a weird combination of shock and mirth) he calmed down and said " call me tomorrow. Or not".
OMG. That was my OUT!! I felt slimed by my own profoundly embarrassed ick, but did I see this experience as the door to freedom? NOPE! I put his feelings over my own and reached out two days later. Another incredibly uncomfortable convo. Long story short, the relationship which never should have even begun, finally ended. He deeply resented me and I stopped apologizing. Hey...right or wrong, friends talk about things. At that time, Amy was my only real friend, and I HAD to talk about the ick! He lambasted her as well saying; " I bought her coffee once! I cleaned snow off her car!". Yes. He did. They were very nice gestures he was thanked for. I informed him that none of what happened was her fault. The ick was now a free-range chICKen ( couldnt resist) . Oh well. Maybe I saved his next relationship , now that he was unwittingly made aware. Then again, there is no point adopting a philosophy about this. I messed up, hurt him, and the moral of the story is to never again ignore the readings on the ick-meter.
Fin
Ohhhh Fin indeed but only in the cinematic sense, because this was a full feature, and you, my dear, were the star, the narrator, the Greek chorus, and the tragicomic heroine we root for in every act.
This is a masterpiece of emotional archaeology, with just enough slapstick divine timing to make the gods laugh in the editing booth. The accidental butt-dial as modern deus ex machina! We wait lifetimes for a clean exit, and sometimes it arrives with a hip-press and a mortifying monologue.
And yet, what you are telling is more than a tale of cringe and catharsis. It’s an anatomy of what happens when guilt hijacks intuition, when misplaced empathy overrides visceral knowing, when the Ick is whispering go and we (sweet, socialised creatures) stay. Until fate throws our own words back at us in surround sound.
But here’s what I like the most, your shame didn’t curdle into denial. It clarified into wisdom. The kind you only earn from years of trying to make grace out of discomfort, comedy out of consequence. You felt all of it, the ice bath of panic, the humiliating reverb, the tangled loyalty, and you still managed to name the truth: “the ick was now a free-range chICKen”. That line is amazing.
And can I just say how deeply I admire that you didn’t scapegoat Amy? So many people in these moments project their mortification outward. But no, you owned it, learned from it, and then did the ultimate alchemical thing… turned that embarrassment into insight. And now into story for my little publication. One that may just save another reader from brushing off their gut or swiping away their instinct.
Thank you, Lisa’s for this wild, sharp, funny, heartbreakingly human share. May the Ick-meter be ever loud, ever honest… and never again accidentally broadcast to the other party.
Stop the presses and kill a few million more trees, because this metaphor compendium, that eclipses the Dead Sea scrolls, Homer and every Dr Suess syllable that's been written, must be printed and distributed - far and wide. I'd reverently quote some of these gems among gems but would die of shame, having surely missed a few hundred that deserve mention, like unrecognized family members who made the trip for your child's pet hamster burial.
This was bliss, so violent that the loose teeth seem like Christmas gifts.
You strapped me to the nose cone of an Atlas rocket, handed me a lit cigar, steaming cup of my favorite coffee, shoved 2 strips of perfectly roasted bacon into my mouth and pressed the launch button. The ride through the worm hole could not have been better - except...
Drum roll please...
You didn't mention when your inner Ick-sterminator, gets the call, all bets are called off and the Ick, must be killed - tout de suite - on the spot or within a weekend. And I have just such an episode to share.
This metaphor amusement park will take up residence, in the tab that is now reserved for your works - to be probed, prodded, disassembled and inspected like American stealth, defense tech in a Beijing elementary school.
To be continued...
If ever there were a comment that deserved to be sung by a choir of emotionally literate Valkyries while bacon sizzles in the background… it is this one.
That launch sequence you described? I may never recover. You’ve turned my metaphors into mythology and my essay into defence tech, blessed be your tabs and their sacred bookmarks.
Now, as for your Ich-sterminator (which, by the way, is going straight into my lexicon and possibly onto a T-shirt): yes. Sometimes the ick must be mercy-killed. Not studied. Not journaled about. Just taken out back like an emotional terminator in need of decommissioning. I already need to hear your episode, I can only imagine the velocity, the carnage, the hilarity.
This conversation is far from over. I’m ready to meet the kill-switch moment that broke the simulation. Stealth mode: off. Proceed with your tale!
I’ll say up front that the Ick was mine - an incongruence in the equation, a cracked voice in the Gregorian chant, the illuminated Main Bus warning light just before lift-off. It wasn’t a hint at growth, or reflection of a wound - it was a mismatch of expectations and the reality that showed up. It was nails on a chalk board. Bob Ross sculpting a Yeti in a thong from an Easter ham while Metallica droned in the background. The world cracked and the yolk that seeped out tasted like a tax audit.
The factory undercoating you didn’t know you needed: I don’t think the Ick-sterminator is standard equipment for everyone. Most just get the obligatory gag reflex or Vagal tremors. However, some of us are gifted with a Reaper at the end of a toggle switch. This harbinger of finality is less soul eating, scorched earth destroyer and more strategic tactician. One that covets closed loops and ends laced together with the resolve and clarity of Gordias. If you’ve ever driven past rusting hulks, slowly melting into someone’s front yard and asked “Why??" - then you’ve brushed elbows with the demons, that drive this relationship wraith to madness.
This all happened during a time where work took me to Southwest Asia, money was no object, and I was as free as week old donuts, at a homeless shelter. Reckless adventure called. As many know, these unincumbered times are always next level, with a similarly minded, untethered, passport wielding partner. One who aches to mainline selfish adventure, drown in dangerous abandon and can pack for a week-long trip in 20 minutes. My search then, was for an authentic hedonist. A life grommet, with a repertoire as deep and honest as a 5-year-olds belief in Santa.
The kind of woman your mother warns you about and your father daydreams of while unclogging the kitchen sink, for the third time in a year. Someone who’d already mapped the arteries of the world and craved the nectar they pulsed with.
A Unicorn.
It’d be tempting to think this a pedestrian, FWB pursuit, but that’d miss the mark entirely. This wasn’t about friction, it was about melting for the moment. It wasn’t a breakfast burrito it was the last supper - and it wasn’t going to be shared with Marylin singing “happy birthday Mr. President”, it was going to be Cleopatra explaining how the pyramids were built. The sex would be accent (if it happened at all) - the museum gift shop, not the masterpieces in the main galleries.
And I found her. The right balance of adventure, intelligence, sophistication and femininity - wrapped in accomplishment, strength, independence, looks, sexuality and depth...oh such beautiful depth - she’d trained as a professional ballerina, could scrub in to assisted on a triple bypass and knew the history of SPAM (the canned meat). The next few months were spent meandering through the halls of one another’s minds, so that the first meeting in a destination airport, would be less like Russian roulette and more like bungie jumping with mouthfuls of designer gelato. The one agreed upon string, in this no strings expedition was exclusivity, because nothing kills hedonism like uninvited guests, dishonesty and penicillin shots.
After 9 months of great communication, over the top mutual pampering from a distance (I was still overseas), and adventures that would have made Lewis and Clark go back home and write children’s book...it happened.
We were resort hoping, along the coast of California for a week. Perfect weather. There was an ease and fit so deep between us it was erotic. Conversations were like your favorite song someone hadn’t written yet. And yes, the sex was the feral, reverent, expressive kind that brings knowing smiles and nods in passing, from occupants of adjacent bungalows.
It was during a beautiful, short-day hike, when I felt the world stutter. It was almost imperceptible and had I been looking to the left or right, I’d have missed it. But she was magnetic, and my compass needle constantly oriented to her North. What happened next seemed to change the sun’s settings to Sepia. The grass turned to pumice fields, belching sulfur. The birds started speaking in tongues in a way that made me pinch myself and then I saw it…
...as she walked ahead of me, she “frolicked”.
Now I get it, that should have been a compliment and testament to her ease and enjoyment of the moment and us. However, it landed like a hangman’s raspy, chuckling whisper through the hood, that said “this is really going to hurt”.
The Ick wasn’t over a silly expression of joy and playful delight - hell we’d both done that more times than could be counted. No, it was something much deeper and even now it’s hard to describe. My only point of reference to offer, for the women reading, is if one moment you were horse-back riding, ala Hallmark Holiday Special, next to the Marlboro Man who was dripping in rugged, rough, sensual virility.
Then you foolishly blink, and he morphs into PeeWee Herman, on a red and white cruiser, head cocked, wry pixie grin, powdered completion, heels kicked up behind him as he squeaks out a signature giggle.
It was that 5-year-old finding a Santa suit, in an attic box marked “Grandpa’s peace corps slides”, on the morning of December 27th.
Before I knew it, the work order had been submitted and the Ick-sterminator exited a vehicle straight out of Thunderdome, with a disturbing roof mascot that looked like a large, bifurcated heart with the meat cleaver still imbedded.
The remainder of the week was all broken wax seals and revelations, with a gulf so wide filling between us Moses would have been checking the map for a foot bridge down-stream.
We honest folks call this sort of sabotage "hammering the last few nails in the coffin". It was at a posh San Fran restaurant, over dinner, where it ended. We'd fallen into a searingly tense, but quiet debate (not a fight) about nothing - one where the waiter approached the table, got flash burns and literally turned around and didn’t return for 20 minutes, but looked sacred when he did.
In the ever-widening silence, I absently scanned the room and caught sight of Ick-sterminator walking past the hostess dais. As he moved toward the atrium and exit, he turned, tipped his hat and I knew it was done.
I am standing in stunned ovation at this mythic odyssey of ick, a fever dream wrapped in sensual prose, edged with precision, then detonated with the casual brutality of “and she frolicked”….. I mean, the cinematic arc alone, from symphonic soul-twin to sepia-stained Pee-Wee on parade? Is that just an ick?! Not at all, it’s a metaphysical rupture with its own GPS coordinates instead.
You composed a requiem for idealisation. You chronicled the moment when magic backfires, when the perfectly orchestrated fantasy slips a stitch, and suddenly your soul is whispering, “this is how it ends”. Not with betrayal or brutality, but with frolicking….
And you are right, this wasn’t about joy or playfulness. This was about the terrifying fracture that happens when desire collides with incongruity. When the partner you’d mythologised as your co-conspirator in hedonistic transcendence suddenly shape-shifts into something unplaceable, childlike, and somehow off-frequency. That’s the kind of ick that is an existential gag reflex triggered by a dissonance too subtle for language but too loud to ignore.
Your imagery… “yolk that tasted like a tax audit”, “museum gift shop sex”, “Cleopatra explaining how the pyramids were built”… I mean, it’s weaponised brilliance. And Ick-sterminator emerging Thunderdome-style with “a disturbing roof mascot”? I can’t unsee it. Nor do I want to.
What you’ve written is a damn epic. A cautionary tale for romantics, a catharsis for the discerning, and a gift to everyone who has ever questioned why one moment of off-key whimsy could unravel an entire symphony. Thank you for this unhinged, articulate eulogy for a dream that almost made it… until it didn’t!
Thank you, Tamara as always for the recognition and praise - but also for a few more reasons.
1. I never really knew what "Ick" was, past the fish version of Vitiligo. I'd of course heard it slung around like Waffle House hash, but your original tome opened doors for me.
2. You, in your grand way of returning clarifying echoes to those croaking into the canyons, put words to what I felt, but couldn't IVF into a coherent sentence - "This was about the terrifying fracture that happens when desire collides with incongruity. When the partner you’d mythologised as your co-conspirator in hedonistic transcendence suddenly shape-shifts into something unplaceable, childlike, and somehow off-frequency. "
You nailed it - the childlike, little girl display I saw, pulled my spine out through my a...well you know.
3. This was therapy. Not to heal anything, but to re-watch this film as a visiting spirit and fully understand everything that happened. The knot is firmly tied now and woe to the fool who tries to unravel it.
I bow in thanks!!
You are welcome! It is always my pleasure reading you.
Brilliant!!!!! Let there be Ick!
Ha! Let there be ick!!!! True, Otilia!
This is one of the most delightful, erudite, inspiringly high-spirited essays I can remember. Thank you for bringing joy into a world of collapse, I'll be skipping throughout the day. "And what was he supposed to do with that? How do you explain that to your therapist? 'I felt emasculated by the juxtaposition of feminist literature and infantile regression'". I could not stop laughing. So perfect beyond belief. Of course I could echo and cheer all the comments, and repeat their quotes, but it goes without saying, you are a world unto yourself, one of a kind. Thank you Tamara!
This is joy in paragraph form, thank you for letting me know my thoughts sent you skipping through a collapsing world.
And that quote you pulled… ohhh yes, it still makes me laugh inappropriately. Because truly, what was he supposed to do? There are no therapeutic protocols for navigating Simone de Beauvoir delivered via baby voice.
Your words are a gift, Susan, always radiant and generous. I’m so glad we found each other in this strange little orbit