Cal Turner & Gemma Sack

I have this pair of cursed pants. I bought them from an ex-friend a few years ago, who designed them, but the ex-friend has since been thoroughly cancelled. I don’t ever want to wear the pants, which are covered with original artwork and designs. What should I do with them? I’m torn between selling them on Depop (which feels super public, but I wouldn’t feel bad making a profit off this friend, who was plenty terrible to me too, but they’re not even an actual brand) or just giving them to Goodwill or just letting them fester in my closet as they have been for the past few months.

— Jean Blues

Your question, Jean Blues, leaves some ambiguity as to where the curse of these pants really comes from, or what exactly they’re cursing. Maybe they curse you to other people’s assumptions of a connection between you and your ex-friend; maybe they serve for you as an unwelcome reminder of this person. I would guess the curse comes from some combination of these factors. In any case, Jean, I’d like to start by exhorting you not to let these pants fester in your closet, emitting magically bad vibes, any longer. It can be very hard to decide what to do with a symbolic object of this kind, even—and maybe especially—when the value it holds is more negative than sentimental. But I can guarantee you’ll feel more in control of the pants situation at least, and possibly the lingering situation with your ex-friend in general, if you take some form of action.

Whether the pants are cool should be a non-negligible factor in what you decide to do with them. If they aren’t—that is, if your ex-friend was as bad at art as they seem to have been at treating people decently—I wouldn’t recommend giving them to Goodwill, where there are already plenty of discarded pants that aren’t festooned with mediocre student work. As for Depop, I’ll defer to a co-columnist with more experience than I have, who tells me that the experience of selling on Depop is a constant stressful reminder of what you’re selling and for how much, a surprisingly heavy emotional burden. Not to mention that, as far as other people associating you with these pants and thus with their designer goes, selling them on Depop would roughly equate to wearing them.

Another solution would be to remove these pants from their context. Separating art from artist is a lot easier when the artist in question is 22 and has fewer than 300 Instagram followers, so—assuming that the art is recognizable as your ex-friend’s and that this is a factor in the pants’ cursed status—giving these pants to someone far away from Providence, or wherever you and this ex-friend are located, would probably neutralize the curse.

But I’m also struck, Jean, by an option you didn’t deem fit to consider, or at least to list: disassembling or otherwise transforming the pants. I understand that substantially altering an object with some particular use or artistic value is a very charged thing, and that this is even truer when the object in question has (even, and maybe especially, upsetting) symbolic value for you. But the flipside is also true: transforming these pants into something you personally can use might be a cathartic process. You can keep the object in your life after stripping it of the symbolic meaning that has kept it gathering dust

Indy

in your closet. Some possibilities to keep in mind: making one of those horrible pants handbags middle schoolers with sewing machines seem biologically compelled to produce, convening a Siblinghood of the Traveling Pants to invest them with new significance, and cutting them up to use them as kitchen rags designated for wiping up especially gross spills (this serves the dual purpose of vengeance). You can try your hand at deflating the curse yourself, and you don’t necessarily have to contribute to the mountains of textile waste occupying landfills. In all seriousness, I think this may be the best option. You get back the space these pants have been taking up, you get newish stuff, and, hopefully, you get closure.

- CT

I went on the most fantastic date last week. Being single during the pandemic is hard. He was charming, the date lasted 3 hours. Naturally I accepted his invitation for a second date. The thing is, when I arrived on the second date (indoors, unmasked) we sat down in the living room, chatted but then he did something really weird. He asked if I would read him a book out loud. The book was An Outrageous Proposal by April Kihlstrom. I indulged him for a few minutes before saying it really wasn’t satisfying. The book was very cringey and addressed “finding a woman to marry,” etc. The first date was so good, the second was so bad. Can we come back from this horrible reading-date? I really need advice. I want to be with him but his ideas for a good second date (and his taste in books) are so bad.

— Anti-Romance Romance Club

My first impulse, ARRC, is to say that this must have been a joke. Of course, I wasn’t there, and I can’t infer from your letter how earnest he seemed in the moment. But I have to imagine that his fondness for An Outrageous Proposal is in some way humorous.

People often do jarring or weird things around the second date, which is certainly amplified by pandemic dating, since your best option to see someone indoors is to enter their home rather than a bar or a restaurant. Everyone has domestic peculiarities which are typically reserved for roommates, families, and very familiar partners. But COVID courtship forces these peculiarities into the open much more quickly in a budding relationship, which can be both a blessing and a curse. It’s much harder to put a mysterious crush on a pedestal if you’ve looked through their bathroom cabinet, literally and metaphorically.

It also may be worth noting that people have very different relationships to the act of reading aloud. In most scenarios, I would probably find it off-putting to be asked to read aloud on a second date, but (for lack of better phrasing) if the vibes were right, I could be into it. One of my co-columnists would, after a three hour date, thoroughly enjoy both reading out loud and being read to. It might not be your first idea of a romantic activity, but I’m sure you could grow to appreciate it with the right person. It can be very intimate for someone to gaze at you longingly while listening to your sultry voice, after all. Or, in this case, perhaps he thought you would find the book funny and you two could bond over its silliness.

My guess is that he picked the book up on a whim from the box of free romance novels that often sits on the stoop of Madeira Liquors and thinks it’s a funny conversation starter. I am, arguably, biased in favor of this scenario, as my roommates and I display on our living room bookshelf a romance novel we found in that very box, In Love With The Boss by Doreen Roberts (a novel about Sadie Milligan, a “primand-proper secretary” who “found herself putting in some very wifely overtime.”) I hope that any guest to whom we have shown this book does not think we are cringey, trad, or culturally illiterate.

ARRC, you can come back from this if you’re willing to (forgive me) reparatively read the date, and give him the benefit of the doubt that the reading was humorously intended. If you can’t do that, you probably don’t have very compatible senses of humor, and I don’t think this relationship can go on any further. And if I am wrong, and it wasn’t a joke at all, I don’t think you’re going to be able to come back from this. I’m sensing from what you say in the last line—that you “want to be with him”—that there’s a lot riding on this relationship going well from the get-go since pandemic dating is particularly burdensome and stressful. Still, neither the pandemic itself nor your will to make a relationship work are reasons to settle down with someone either whose humor you don’t find funny or is, at best, corny, and at worst, sexist. Perhaps this romance novel collector could be your Mr. Darcy. Perhaps he’s more of a Mr. Collins. Either way, ARRC, summer is just around the corner.

- GS