Ex Girlfriend Project

Wow, just spent an entire afternoon reading this blog – http://exgfproject.blogspot.com. It started out as an exercise to write his memoirs about his love life, but it’s such a well written and intriguing memoir that I won’t be surprised that it becomes a paperback best-seller.

The blog writer expressed surprise that he still got 10000 hits a month after not writing his blog for a few months. He shouldn’t be that surprised – after all it’s one of the most fascinating blogs that I’ve seen in a while. I actually first read it 4-5 years ago, having stumbled upon it by chance.

Perhaps it’s different, perhaps it’s one of those grey areas that’s more private than a published memoir, but more public than somebody sitting next to you and whispering secrets in your ear. Even when you don’t see the guy, even when you don’t know anything about him other than that he comes from the South, you can plainly tell that he’s writing from the heart. There’s a writer who said that everybody has at least 1 good novel in him, and I think that this must be his.

It’s not hard to see why he has a few good friends around him. He seems like a likeable guy and says so matter of factly. He’s telling the story, so he may have been economical about many details, but he’s believable. And he calls himself ex-boyfriend. Well he’s as serial a boyfriend as Hugh Grant. For some people, love is a big part of their lives and it definitely is for his.

I like the way that he narrated his stories with colours. He gave 1 different colour for a different ex-girlfriend. There were also some funny asides about who did or did not qualify for colours, with reasons given. For me his strongest relations were with Kara and Roxanne. I don’t know if it was because those were the ones which took place during his hallowed teenage years, but those were the ones he got the most emotional about, and the ones that he never forgot. It turned out that Kara was the villain of the piece, the one that he just could not stay away from, and who ended up hurting him the most.

Some scenes look like they came right out of a Hollywood movie: a good friend’s younger sister is the one you had the hots for when you were a teenager, but she was too young. Then years later, when you just lost a girlfriend, she turns up at your doorstep and after that you spend the next few hours necking wildly. A commenter called it “movie love” and that everybody deserves 1 night of movie love. I’m not surprised that this guy says that he’s a film maker in real life.

You have to be envious of this guy. I never found myself in a position where I had to fend off female advances (but I also never found myself in a position where I noticed female advances either.) He gets all the hot chicks. No wonder his brain is so scrambled all of the time. It’s a brutal fact of life but the ugly ones are incapable of screwing your brains.

He didn’t get through all of the cast. All the ladies were described as physically attractive. But some of them, you cared for, the others you just wanted to hiss at. Most of the relationships were emotionally compelling. Especially when you were in your early 20s. I did have one relationship which was full of drama in my early 20s, and I always thought that I would have another, but there were reasons why it didn’t happen. (One of them was that I got tired of the drama the first time around.) Tragically, Bobby Robson did tell Paul Gascoigne, after he was knocked out by the Germans in 1990, “you’re still young, you will get another chance.” There was another tournament where Gascoigne inspired England to another semi-finals, where they were knocked out on penalties to Germany (again). But for the most part life after that for him was a tragic decline, and he never played in another World Cup.

So sometimes, you’re young, and you have some mind-blowing experiences. I did think that I would get another when I’m older, but I’m still waiting.

All the same, I’m pretty envious of this guy. At how the hot chicks always want to take their clothes off for him. I know that he’s just 1 right person away from a lifetime of joy and fulfillment. He’s fouled up a few times along the way while trying to look for the perfect love. He gets too emotionally involved and I can see how that scares away the girls. He doesn’t always “get it” that women are emotionally manipulating him. But he’s got great gifts – you just felt that he needs a nudge in the right direction to get him going.