It's a little embarrassing, but it happens. You can’t seem to find your underwear after a tryst. You call your beau and ask if he knows what happened to them, and with a grin you can see through the phone, he goes into detail on how he hi-jacked your panties into his pant pocket after removing them from you. No big deal, so you think, since you will be seeing your man again soon. The problem arises when your guy acts like a confused a-hole, and you realize you shouldn’t ever date a younger guy and you won’t be seeing this person again—ever.
This is when you start to feel a little bit of a panty withdrawal amongst other pangs of hurt. Thoughts run wild through your brain to disguise your frustration with the guy’s actions: “Those were my favorite pair! Geez, it is so hard to find underwear with no seams that can go under clothes so nicely like that pair.” Anger starts to build since one, you actually were into the guy and had no idea he would end up behaving like a confused kid in college; and two, you hate the fact that your favorite pair of underwear are now a souvenir, and may be thrown out shortly.
I must admit having such a hostage situation takes the steam out of feeling depressed by the true issue at hand of being poorly treated. So, you decide to take a stand for yourself and coolly call up your ex-lover and request the panties back since why have a perfectly good pair of hard to find panties be thrown out along with the budding relationship?
The only thing is that you make that call without realizing the repercussions. The minute you start talking to the guy you realize that maybe you ventured into getting your underwear as a ploy to see him again to maybe jolt some sense into him and “win him over.” Or you start feeling yourself have this anger over ever meeting him. Or both.
Basically, you can get your underwear back all you want, but it certainly won’t be the victory you thought it would be. In fact, it is the exact opposite. You don’t even want to wear the underwear anymore because it reminds you of the confused guy and being tripped up by him. You think you need to re-train your association with the underwear and wear them to special events and on new dates to shake that man out of your panties so to speak, but to no avail.
It is far better to let the guy keep your underwear. What’s done is done. Trying to jump-start a dialogue with someone who is confused about his life and actions is like trying to do sign language with a blind person. And really the best “repercussion” is for him to come across them again, and take it from there.
Originally published in In the Scene Magazine
