January 2009

My First Encounter With Grown-Up Heartbreak

My first girlfriend at Crazy Go Nuts University liked my standing there: I was a popular writer and cartoonist at Golden Words, the humour paper run by the engineers, I was in a band and I also had a cushy job as a DJ at the engineering pub that entitled me to a lot of free beer. All this would be very small change here in the grown-up world, but in the genteel simulated poverty of campus life, it’s pretty high-rolling.

Unfortunately, I was a lazy student. My excess attention to extracurriculars took their toll and I was put on “Dean’s Vacation” for a year. As a non-student in a very tightly-knit student community with little apparent hope of re-enrollment, my standing and job had vanished and the girlfriend started looking for greener pastures. I caught her with a friend of mine in flagrante delicto, after which I got dumped for “not being very boyfriend-like”, in her words. I would later find out that her nickname for me was “The Bank of Joey”.

That’s when I knew that I’d entered the world of grown-up heartbreak. Rather than getting dumped for not liking her favourite music, I was now getting dumped over social standing and money. Once again, this was small-scale gold-digging since we were mere students, but it was gold-digging just the same.

Since then, I’ve been aware of money and its power to add a little alpha to your maleness. In some parts of the single urban guy’s world, showing that you’ve got money is the human equivalent to strutting with your peacock feathers in full bloom or showing off the many colours of your baboon butt. You can see this at places that cater exclusively to the banker/broker/financier/douchebag crowd like the club This is London, where the cover charge for men back in 2000 was $20. Women could enter for free.

DABAgirls

You’re probably asking “What’s a DABAgirl?”. I would’ve asked the same had I not seen the New York Times on the Dating A Banker Anonymous blog, a sort of online support group for DABAgirls. If you live in a city with a sizable financial district – Accordion City, the financial capital of Canada, is one such place – you’ve probably encountered the intended demographic for the blog: young, skimpily-dressed, skinny, pretty by The Hills standards and often the “arm ornament” of a banker, broker or similar finance type.

According to the blog’s “About” page, the stresses on bankers has proven to be a very stressful time for bankers and brokers. As a result, the relationships with the women they date have suffered. Not only are they distracted by the financial meltdown, but the perquisites of dating a high-roller – the pricey cocktails and meals at expensive restaurants, the lavish gifts, the jet-set vacations – have evaporated with the belt-tightening that a lot of people, even the “suits”, have been doing.

“Dating A Banker Anonymous (DABA),” says the text at the top of the blog’s main page, “is a safe place where women can come together – free from the scrutiny of feminists – and share their tearful tales of how the mortgage meltdown has affected their relationships.” Now while my seven-year stint as an undergrad has taught me that when someone starts a sentence with “Speaking as a feminist”, there’s a good chance that what they are about to say is pure nonsense, I also believe that the line “free from the scrutiny of feminists” is an indicator that some idiocy is going to follow.

The intro concludes with: ”So if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life, lighten your heart with laughter and email your stories to dabagirls@gmail.com.”

The blog was started by these two:

They’re Laney Crowell and Megan Petrus. One’s a lawyer and one’s a fashion editor, and both dated banker/broker/financier types. Their relationships went south around the same time as the economy did and after commiserating came to the conclusion that it wasn’t them, it was the recession.

“We felt our relationships were being victimized by the economy and there was nothing we could do to stop it,” they wrote. “Not knowing what else to do, we did what enraged yet articulate people have done since the beginning of time. We started a blog.”

The blog entries have that horrifying-yet-captivating quality that car accidents have. Here’s an excerpt from one titled Ain’t Messin’ With No Broke Banker:

Overnight, he went from unavailable to downright clingy.  He wants to have dinner every night.  By dinner I mean staying in and cooking as Megu is no longer in the budget.  AND, FYI DABA girls – chopping vegetables along side your man in a hot New York sized kitchen is NOTHING like the sexy kitchen scene between Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger in Nine and a Half Weeks.  Seriously.  It sucks.  Anyhow, he suggested I meet his parents over the holidays and he keeps commenting that half Asian babies are by far the cutest.  My take on his 180: having no steady source of income for the foreseeable future, he realized that his chances of securing another fashion industry type girl are pretty much zilch and so he is cleaving to me as the last vestige of his former high rolling lifestyle.

Thanks to the recession, I now have a completely devoted BF, which is exactly what I wanted.  So I should be happy, right?  Wrong.  I’m bored and can’t stop thinking about my perpetually unattainable Euro ex-boyfriend who is recession proof courtesy of an offshore trust account.  To be honest, I’m only with my BF because I just don’t have the heart to change my facebook status from “in a relationship” to “I ain’t saying I’m a gold digger, but I ain’t messin’ with no broke banker.”

In the entry Goodbye City Life!, the author writes about how her financier boyfriend asked her to make a list of all the expensive restaurants in New York that she wanted to try out. The reason: he wants to take her to them all before they move to a less stressful and more inexpensive life in the midwest, and she is having none of it:

It was like a bad episode of Green Acres.  Was I going to be plucked out of my beloved city?  I cast a mournful glance down at the Louis Vuittons encasing my feet.  Poor dears.  They wouldn’t last long in the suburbs.  Indeed the yard work and monotony of suburban life would wear down both of our soles.

The closest any of the entries gets to saying that money isn’t everything is through this snippet from an entry titled Relish the Recession, in which the author suggests to take on a Latin lover:

Next time you are stressing over some finance guy remember that he is just a math club nerd with cash and that there are some things money just can’t buy a woman, and a mind blowing orgasm is one of them.  So relax, as evidenced by the existence of this blog, none of your girlfriends are marrying rich banker types any time soon.  You are not going to be the last of your friends to marry well.  This recession just bought everyone an extra two years of the single life.  SAVOR IT.  Go, have a steamy affair with some Latin lover who spends his free time thinking up new bedroom positions instead of trading positions.  Relish that for the here and now you don’t have to be seen in public with a guy who wears black shiny shoes with jeans.  Carpe diem my loves.

It’s crap like this that makes me glad I never went into finance, in spite of some very tempting offers.

It Could All Be a Joke

There’s a good chance that this could all be fiction, in the same way that Belle de Jour, the name of both a blog and its author. She was purportedly of a high-class call girl in London and many people believe that her stories of soliciting were pure fiction and an exercise in creative writing. The author got a book deal out of it, and a television show loosely based on her blog has also been created.

(Less successful was Flatmate de Jour, a blog that was supposed to be a journal of a young woman who shared Belle de Jour’s apartment. It was a group effort of which I was part. I contributed only one entry, but I think it was pretty good – a one-liner that went: “Spaghetti puttanesca for dinner. Again.”)

Dating a Banker Anonymous could be pure fiction, written perhaps as a social experiment to see what kind of reaction its vapid characters would arouse. It might be a a way of landing a book deal. It could also be satire; you’d only have to exaggerate reality slightly to end up with the characters in the blog.

Unfortunately, the nightmare scenario is equally likely: that the entries in Dating a Banker Anonymous are true, even though embellished slightly. You meet lots of people who could’ve written those blog entries in big cities; New York certainly has no shortage of them.

Thanks to its exposure in the New York Times, the blog is already taking on comments from people who are calling out its authors on their shallowness. I doubt that’ll do any good. I think that if the DABAgirls from the blog entries are real, some of them may grow out of it, but that change will come about from some long journey of self-discovery and not from the finger-wagging of a blog commenter.

My advice: read the blog, enjoy the horror, and give those DABAgirls a wide berth.

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