Renee is the sweetest person - she’s 100% USDA certified organic cane sugar sweet. She looks like a girl in an Urban Outfitters catalog, too. Neither of these reasons is exactly why we no longer talk. In fact, I don’t really know exactly why, except that we haven’t in so long that to do so again would be out of the ordinary. There’d be too much catching up to do, and someone would have to explain the lapse.I met Renee at this Harlem charter school where I used to work. We were both new teachers at the school with only one year of experience under our belts. In the early days of classroom arrangement and teacher orientation, it seemed like we’d be great friends. We liked the same music and shared the same views. The only difference was that Renee was hip in that easy, Cat Power-listening, “I feel so much more centered when I’m vegan,” lush long-haired kind of way. Meanwhile, I had stringy bobbed hair and a hankering for Taco Bell.We worked together for a year, drifting closer or farther in the tide of chaos, field trips, and paperwork. When she broke up with her live-in boyfriend, I was the first person she called. I was in my own floundering relationship at the time. We’d bonded before about guys - how funny and difficult they are, how we worried about our tendency to give them such central places in our lives. I hoped the experience meant we’d be closer friends, but everything pretty much remained the same.Post-breakup Renee was different, though. She said she wanted to go back to school to become a dance therapist. She started dating a hipster with sexual dysfunction. Every conversation was predicated on the fact that her life and goals were nebulous and unfulfilled. Though unintended, the message I took from them was: I am tragically hipper than thou.I quit teaching after that year, desperate to use my brain more than my vocal cords. Renee got a job at a school in her Lower East Side neighborhood. I broke up with my boyfriend after vacillating about it for months. Renee and I talked at least once a week. When we hung out, though, I was always distinctly aware that she was on a schedule and had plans following whatever we did. Some guy friend who had an awkward crush on her had asked her to a movie. Her sister was coming in for a concert. I felt like I was a pitstop on the way to a much cooler destination.The last time we were supposed to hang out, there was a sudden torrential downpour. I didn’t feel like schlepping around in galoshes, but before I could cancel, Renee bailed on me. She said her sister was in town and that they were going to hang out instead. This might be understandable if her sister was unexpectedly visiting from far away. But she lived in New Jersey and visited a few times a month! Why not also invite me, since we already had plans? This wasn’t the first time she’d done something like this, but it was the last.Renee’s voicemail said we should make plans for another time. I never called her back, and she didn’t call me back either. She was the Lower East Side; I was the Upper West. Perhaps we both knew it

Bethany. I met her at a bar shortly after my wife and I separated, at a meat-market bar whilst I was totally on the rebound. I should have seen it coming. She picked me up by using some not-so subtle lines that I should have listened more closely to. Then, when she decided to tag along with some friends and I later that night, became increasing more confused and less coherent as the night went on. Sadly after not being able to lose her the whole night, she ended up passed out in my bed. The next day I couldn't get rid of her either, but was lonely, so eventually just decided to go along with it. Six months later, she had sucked every dime out of me, as well as my will to live. Any attempts to break up resulted in a breakdown and a revelation with some kind of too dramatic to be true story of pain and suffering. She would CONSTANTLY talk about her recently estranged husband - would even mention him during sex (though any mention of him was in a negative light) - and would just genuinely suck the warmth and light out of any room she entered. She went through several jobs during this time, never staying for very long for being fired for "political reasons". The rest of the time I had to support myself AND her, including her rent, utilities - right down to cat food for her poor cat she never saw since Bethany was always at MY place. I should never have been such a pushover: but after 6 mos, $3000 in loans, a laptop, a trip to Mexico, and more meals than I can count, I finally got rid of her. Until it was time to do her taxes. And again to send me pictures of the fabulous trip to Australia her new boyfriend had taken her on. Sure could use that $3000 dollars right now, you hunchbacked, snaggle-toothed leech!!

Her name was Maryanne. We met at an open mic night at a crappy bar where we both were playing. She was short, had dreads, and looked a bit like a troll-version of Tracy Chapman. She played a Beach Boys song and we bonded over our mutual love of said group. We would occasionally bump into each other at various dive bars and parties and became casual acquaintances. She had a sketchy look about her and would grit her teeth and make strange facial expressions as she spoke. Eventually she moved into an apartment building across the street from me with her girlfriend. I eventually found out that she was bisexual and a recovering crackhead, and was infamous for crashing parties uninvited, looking for crack. One day she showed up at my house when I wasn't home, visibly intoxicated, and asked my roommate for a pen and paper so she could leave me a "pen message". When I later read it, it was just scribbled gibberish. She then showed up at a mutual friend's place and started acting crazy. After refusing repeated requests to leave, my friend called the police, at which point she pulled out a large kitchen knife and cut the phone cord. My friend managed to escape with her in hot pursuit, and ran to the nearest phone booth and called the police. My friend managed to hold her off until the cops showed up, at which point she refused to drop the knife and was pepper-sprayed. This had no effect and the police were forced to tackle her into submission. I haven't seen her since and I have no idea where she is or what happened to her.

I met Andrew on my first day of university and we were great friends for seven years. He's a man of firm convictions and strong intellect, and we enjoyed arguing with each other about politics. One of the amazing things about Andrew is that he's only ever mad at one person at a time, but he focuses all his energy on that apathy until someone else makes him mad, then all is well. It's the key to the man, the fact that, once discovered, makes his foul moods bearable: Weather the storm, and he will one day again be your friend. Twice over the years I fell into his dog house, both times when I caught him lying about women he claimed to have been intimate with. Twice we buried the hatchet. Eight months ago Andrew got a real girlfriend, a true and nice and wonderful girl, and I was so happy for him. Then he told me I was too immature to meet her --that I could not be trusted and I would only embarrass him-- and I was devastated. Every one of our conversations after that became an argument, but he no longer respected my views or what I had to say. I kept waiting for his anger to move on to the next person, but it never did. He would go on and on about how I had no friends, when, in fact, he was the one who was drifting out of our social circle. One day, out of the blue, he sent me an e-mail that I couldn't finish reading. It was the ravings of a man insane. I wouldn't send a letter that brutal to anyone. I forwarded it to a couple of our mutual friends, just to show that I wasn't being overly sensitive when I said I'll never speak to him again. Turns out he had spent the last four days bad-mouthing me to my sister over facebook before he worked up the nerve to send his e-mail to me. I thought he'd be an uncle to my children. I thought we'd know each other when we became old and grey. I haven't forwarded that e-mail to his girlfriend. My friends tell me to. My sister tells me to. My mother tells me to. I won't. It's not the mature thing to do. That e-mail is the last words we will ever exchange, and they make him look like an animal. That should be enough for me, but instead it just makes me sad. Goodbye, Andrew.

My own personal experience with a fucktard is as follows:

My last husband, Mike. He lived in the house I owned for over a year while I supported him. I found out after the fact that on our wedding trip to Vegas he paid a dominatrix to tie him up and whip him while I was back at the hotel, wondering why in the hell my soon-to-be groom didn't want to spend any time with me. Seventeen days after the wedding, he left me and moved in with his ex-girlfriend. A few months after that he moved to Mississippi to be with the father who abandoned him as a young child. I used to blame the dad for abandoned him; now I understand completely. Losing him was the best thing that ever happened to me.

I knew this girl Kaylie in high school who showed me a picture of the girl she gave birth to WHEN SHE WAS 12. And since the father was only 11, his parents adopted the baby. Anyway, we were friends for awhile. Years later I was in college and looking for a roomate so I could afford to live off campus. Although she was not in college, she had been in touch with me and needed a roomate too. I soon found out she smoked 2 packs a day and had a lot of strange habits. The worst was her sex addiction. She had more than 30 sex partners in the 3 months we lived together. Yes! That included our apartment manager, the schizophrenic man downstairs who was on state disability funding, two brothers in the same night (aged 14 and 16), one of my professors, a few of my friends, and yes, my own boyfriend. All unprotected sex as she told these men she wasn't menstruating and therefore it meant she was unable to get pregnant.(!) Later, a lot of my 'friends' had complained to me that they got crab lice from her. Although I wasn't sleeping around, we lived in a small studio apartment, and I got crab lice too. Sometimes she would bring somebody in and have sex just a few feet away from where I was trying to sleep. She never did pay any rent, but I was just as happy to get the hell out of there and never look back. She wasn't even that pretty.

It was T.D.’s 19th birthday party. We were drunk virgins and I was sick of waiting for him to make the first move. I wanted him to be “the one” more than anything at the time. I knew that he was uncircumcised so I asked him to show me what it looked like. He waved the “let’s go” flag, grabbed me and we locked ourselves in the bedroom. He proceeded to show me the business. I looked at him, he looked at me… I went to make my move when he pushed me away and said “We’re just friends, right?” So I was trying to work through being rejected (and staring at my first penis) and went to tell him that I really liked him when he started crying about how much he loved his mom. The bawling was so loud that our mutual friend had to come in and console T.D. with “it’s okay, man. Your mom's great.” With his raging-semi shlong hanging part way out of his jeans. Last I heard he "had his heart broken by a stripper" and spent some time in jail. He may have just delivered your pizza.