Avoiding the Manholes

Women, over and over again, date the same bad-for-them guy. Why don't we see the warning signs? 

By Anna David

For some of us, dating can be like Groundhog Day -- and I'm not talking about the holiday where the groundhog emerges and either does or doesn't see his shadow; I mean the Bill Murray movie where the exact same thing happens day after day.

We meet a guy, he's wonderful and we're head over heels. Sure, he's a musician/unemployed/riddled-with-tattoos (fill in the blank for whatever it is that hasn't worked out for you in the past). Our friends warn us that this all sounds eerily familiar; our families sigh. We wonder why they always have to be such naysayers and marvel at the fact that they can't see that this time it's different. He's different.

Except, of course, that he's not. He leaves us curled up in the same fetal position that the last two or 17 unemployed tattooed musicians did. How could we be so blind to the red flags? How could this happen, again?

Wendy Merrill, the author of the best-selling Falling Into Manholes: The Memoir of a Bad/Good Girl, decided it was high time she examined the issue (among many others: Merrill openly discusses being in recovery from alcoholism and bulimia as well). The result is as hilarious as it is moving but, according to Merrill, it isn't only women who relate.

"The most unusual response was from a man who came to my first reading and inscribed my book back to me so that I could read his many annotations and fully appreciate how much the book meant to him," Merrill reports. "Another man waited in line to talk to me because his 16-year-old daughter was in the early stages of recovery from an eating disorder and he wondered if I would talk to her."

That doesn't mean, of course, that women haven't been approaching her in droves. "Women relate on many different levels," Merrill says. "Losing themselves in relationships, falling for the wrong guy over and over, or trying to fill that void inside with food, alcohol, or men, and how it's never enough."

While it's impossible not to admire Merrill's courage (she got her book deal, by the way, by pitching her idea in front of the Jay Leno "Pitch to America" cameras at the Maui Writers Conference, where she was graphic enough that she had to be bleeped), I definitely wondered whether the project has had an adverse impact on her dating life.

"For some reason, that didn't even occur to me while I was writing," Merrill says. "After all, how much worse could it get?" But there have definitely been comments from the male population, including the time Merrill went on a first date with a guy who'd brought along his copy of the book (with certain passages highlighted) and asked, after she took her first bite of sushi, "So is it true that you were bulimic?"

As it turns out, the book has actually brought an array of new men into Merrill's life. But some of them may well fit into the Groundhog Day formula. "There was a guy at one of my readings," Merrill confides, "who pulled me aside and asked, 'Aren't you tired of being a good girl?'"