Bruce Hard

Hey guys, it's Jen. This is… Unfortunately, this turned into a multi-parter about a guy named Bruce. This is part one of… A Guy Named Bruce. [THE BRILOGY]

Bruce and I met on Tinder, where I had a very wordy and sex-forward profile. And by wordy, I mean that I took screenshots of the notes app and put them up on my photos. Because whatever the characters were, it wasn't enough. I don't remember exactly how far away I was from graduating, but it was within a month; It was during the time that we dated that I graduated. We'll get to that. But in that time, I decided that I was available to fuck around and apparently, find out, man.

My profile said that I was busy but submissive, and just looking for a guy to do stuff to me when we both had time. Something about Bruce's profile was menacing, and it was hot. Which is so fucked up. But I'm gonna be honest, my man kind of has a menacing vibe sometimes even though he's a fucking angel sweetie baby face. So I just I just— I guess I have that thing, I have that miswire. Anyway, explains why I went through this.

When we initially matched, he made a date with me for a Saturday. And when I was trying to choose a place that was kind of in between thinking of downtown, I realized that it was anime con. And I said, Oh, gosh, we shouldn't go downtown because it's just going to be full of anime people. And it really adds a lot of waiting to everything you need to do in the area when that's occurring; It is just horrible, a whole new city. The day comes and I don't hear from him. So I messaged him to confirm and he says, Oh, I'm sick.
You wouldn't have told me if I had just gone to the place? Like, you would have stood me up, is that what I'm getting out of this conversation? Why wouldn't you say in advance that you are sick? And you may have to cancel or reschedule? Why would you wait until I reached out?
I know that people would like to argue, well, this person is sick. They obviously will have other things on their mind. But the things that are on your mind are all the things that you're supposed to get done, including me, motherfucker. So don't tell me that a person isn't thinking about the plans that they have for the evening when they decide that they're too sick to do it.

On Tuesday or so, Bruce reached out. I honestly forgot about our initial scheduled date until I found this old pile of screenshots. I think at the time I saved them to document the phases of our relationship and the comedy of our text conversations. Bruce lived basically across the county from me, so I decided I would like to travel to his town for our first date. And we went to this specific burger place that I loved but never had a chance to go to anymore.
Because it was gosh, I think July? I was wearing a tank top. The burger place was cold. So when I walked in, I walked around slowly feeling for the flow of the air conditioners, and chose a table that seemed to have the least air on it.
About midway through the date, Bruce goes, I feel like you were very specific in choosing this table. And he kind of said it in a negging way. I don't know what kind of negative reason there could be for choosing a table. But the thing is, at the time that I was pacing the restaurant, I did feel like I was being watched. And I bet he was watching from somewhere probably from his car, but because I didn't know what his car looked like…

I can't remember if it was that same date or the next one, where my sandal broke while we were walking around downtown, eating ice cream, and he bought me a replacement pair of shoes. It was nothing fancy, a pair of Chucks from one of those $20 outlet-style, fell off a truck, athletic shoe stores. I don't know the deal with those but they're pretty great when you need some shoes.
At the time, Bruce was handsy in a pleasant way. He had strong arms and he liked to wrap them around my waist and rest his hand on my hip. Sometimes he grabbed me and then apologize as though I minded. As though this wasn't exactly the kind of stuff I wanted to happen.
The next time Bruce took me out it was kind of a surprise excursion, I didn't know where we were going. On the way there, he asked me if I would be interested in… I think he said doing a sex magic thing with him? And I was kind of like, Okay, what is that about? I'm up for anything but it sounds kind of lame? I don't know. But I didn't say that though, you know. I just said what does that entail?
I was kind of distracted at the time because I had a very unique form of bubblegut that I have not had since. And I feel like it was the world's way of trying to get me to stay home from that date. Instead, the surprise was to a witchcraft bookstore, where I proceeded to completely blow out the broom closet of a bathroom in this place that was like so fucking quiet. Like, not even Enya was playing or anything like that. There was absolutely no cover for the fact that my ass was sneezing. Do with that imagery what you will. I asked him to cut the date short and take me home. And somehow that didn't ruin his interest in me.

Within a day or two, I invited him over after some work meeting he had in my neighborhood. Things got physical for the first time, although not fully penetrative. I had invented a scenario that I wanted to enact and he was fully game for it. So game that he came. Hey! And then he fell asleep on my bed for like an hour. I didn't mind. I figured he must have been tired after all that work. He must have needed the rest because he was so disoriented when he woke up. I know that he slept so hard.

But after that happened, I started getting pushback from Bruce. He once tried to reason with me that if it were the 1950’s, we wouldn't be able to text each other, so we shouldn't necessarily be in regular texting contact now… But it's not, it's not the 50’s anymore. As far as otherwise being available by text, we agreed on this code where I would just text him a period if I was thinking of him, and occasionally we would communicate with emoji. I remember one of the ones he liked to use was an owl, which I feel like he kind of attributed some occult value of some kind. I think that he was still leaning in the spooky mysticism direction with how he was analyzing me.
[car squeals] Oh my god.
When it came to defining the relationship, he liked to equivocate on the definition of the word relationship, postulating that we were all in some kind of relationship with each other. But not in a poly way, just in a way that made our relationship any more special than any others. I thought that maybe he didn't want to be in a relationship with somebody because he was in fact, recently separated from his second wife, mother of two of his four children.

He always seemed to be searching for a problem with our relationship. Once I took him to my friend's band's concert, and he thought that he wouldn't fit in because he was wearing khaki shorts.
One time, Bruce took me out to play pool and he began to get so frustrated: The guys at the table next to us were trying to show off to him and get his attention in a sexual manner. So I suggested that we leave because he was so distracted by these men, supposedly, I don't know what they were doing. But it looked to me like they were just playing pool. When we got to the car, he was annoyed that I didn't sympathize with him more. As a woman who gets harassed daily, like, you gotta fucking nut up a little bit, dude.

He once asked me, in all seriousness, what if this doesn't work out? And I said, Well, then it doesn't work out. I don't really know what else to say to that. It just doesn'twork out. Then we part ways and move on. It seemed like such a big concern to him that I totally didn't understand. I was like, okay, I am not concerned about this, and I don't know why you are. It's very clear that you know how relationships end occasionally.
I know that sometimes people would be like, Oh, come on, Jen. Obviously, Bruce was scared and just hurt because the dissolution of his last marriage was so new. And I just don't buy it. Oh, although I did just recall that he used to tell me that he changed so much for his ex wife; Now he wants to be himself again. Or something like that, insinuating that he didn't have a lot of say in how he dressed or cooked. Things like that, which I don't think that men should have a lot of say in that kind of thing in a relationship. So I was like, Okay, well, what did you dress like before that she had to clean you up? What was wrong that she had to fix? And I don't think that he expected that response.
He once asked me what if his mom doesn't like me and I said, What the fuck do I care? She's across the country. If she has any kind of weight in your relationships, then this isn't going to work out. So he changed his tack.
It's difficult to explain how, aside from all of these little things, our dates were hilarious. We had an excellent rapport. Our phone calls, I could listen to him talk for hours. He once had me guffawing into a delirium by saying this, this thing about Morg—[laughter] Every time he elicited a real laugh from me, he was surprised, and also a little bit miffed and disappointed.

Sometime after the whole relationship conversation happened, I had a graduation party during happy hour time, and he… didn't come. He no-call-no-showed. And I wouldn't have really noticed except that every time a new person showed up, they would say, Hey, where's Bruce? Where's this Bruce guy?
And I'd be like, I don't fucking know. I don't know. Which I expressed to him later was embarrassing because I'd hyped him up. And if I had known he wasn't going to come because his meeting or whatever was so stressful— Oh, he yelled at me that I called him so much during and after a stressful business meeting, and I shouldn't have done that. But I was kind of like, well, all these people keep asking about you, so… I am curious too, which I feel, personally is reasonable, as somebody with whom you just discussed and negotiated that you are in fact in a relationship with.
From that, I just decided that I wasn't going to bother him on days that I knew he had an important project. He always followed up the next day, and it seemed to work out just fine when I did that.

One night, I went to an 80’s dance party and he came out to meet me. I was so looking forward to being on a date night, to a dance party. I have never had that as an adult. (I never had that as a kid either.)
But a little bit after he showed up, he started complaining about this girl in the crowd, who he said was mocking him, trying to get his attention. And I said, How is she doing that?
And he said, Well, she's dancing like an idiot and shaking her ass.
Okay, like, what am I— Okay, so she's doing that. If it bothers you so much, avert your gaze or something. I said, Do you want to go talk to her?
He said, No. I said, Okay. And he couldn't let it go. He just kept looking over my shoulder. And I said, Well, why don't we just leave? This is getting pretty frustrating. Like you can't even focus. And so we did, and he stormed out so angry. And he was like, Why wouldn't you distract me?
If it's bothering you so much, we should leave. I shouldn't have to distract you from a situation that's making you uncomfortable. Although I don't really see any reason why it would be making you uncomfortable.
At that point, I assumed that it was somebody else he was dating at the time, and he just recognized her and wanted to get me out of there. I think? I have no idea. I still don't really know. Part of me just thinks he was manufacturing the idea that other people were interested in him, so that I would be jealous. And I wasn't.

The reason I wasn't worried is because we spent a lot of time together and we were on the phone a lot. And he told me that I was his dream girl. That's right, ladies and gentlemen. One night we were sitting in his car outside my house, and he was talking about how he always struggled with liking a certain kind of girl, that he felt societal pressure to not be interested in the kind of woman he was interested in.
And I said, Yeah, I get that a lot. Looking the way I do as an adult, I get a lot of men who finally feel confident enough to like what they like. Or at least they've moved away from all their college frat friends, so they don't think that they'll be judged for getting on the moped.

Bruce was my aggressively handsy date to my friend Gianna's graduation party. One thing that I thought was really cute about Bruce is that he always seemed really nervous when we were out together in public. Because of the other things that he'd said, I just assumed that he had some kind of insecurity, being unattractive because you like anime and things like that. And so I just thought that he was nervous about making a good impression.
But sometimes it seemed like he was worried about being seen. I mean, at one point, we went to dinner in a specific suburb, and he told me that he had an agreement with his ex wife that he wouldn't go into a certain area, which honestly made me think that he had a restraining order. But I was willing to ride it out and see where it went. However, it could have also just been that he didn't want to be seen out on a date with another woman. That actually didn't occur to me until much later. I really thought he was a criminal. What a fucking idiot, Jen.
At Gianna's birthday, she was like, so are you guys having really hot sex or what? Which is a completely normal conversation for women. Like, trust me, we're going to talk about every fucking thing. All of my friends know exactly what everybody's dick looks like. Except for my current man PS, PS, PS.
And so I had to tell her, like, no, we're waiting, which honestly almost killed her. I almost killed her at her graduation party. But the reason that we were waiting—and I knew she would understand this— is that he had sexual trauma.

Back to the night where he told me I was his dream girl, he also didn't want to come inside and come upstairs and screw around, even though he had an erection and the head was poking out of the waistband of his pants. I think he did it that way on purpose? I'm unclear, but I could see it. I just pretended I couldn't, even though I wanted to [gargle noise] But I didn't!
That night, he said he couldn't come upstairs because he had sexual trauma. And he was molested by his aunt. Plural, aunts plural? I can't really remember now, I know it was at least one older family member. Right before he told me that, he told me not to say if I'd heard it before. But I had. I mean, who among us hasn't been molested, first of all. But second of all, I actually did have another boyfriend who was molested by an elder family member. It's not that rare. That doesn't really have anything to do with this story, I guess.
We had incredible physical chemistry even without the sex. I mean, it was really something. We sparkled everywhere we went together. It was something I have only experienced twice before. Unlike now, where people don't see my man, or I, however they feel about whatever type of person, they are somehow fucking myopically blind to the fact that we are in a relationship with each other. I'll get to that some other day. Piss me off.
Anyway, unlike my current relationship, people almost parted like the Red Sea when we came through. It was like [x2] camera bulbs flashed, it was crazy. We both felt it, and I know that he delighted in the vibe that we had together.

For my graduation present, my mother gifted me the cash for an expensive hotel room that had a bathtub. I had been saving a CBD bath bomb from another Tinder date… And I wanted to take a fucking bath.
Initially, I wanted to do this just at the hotel around the corner from me where I like the bar food. So I figured I would have a nice night at the bar, and then take a good bath and hopefully not have a Whitney, and then I would just walk home the next morning.
As I started planning, I realized that it was going to be during the Perseid meteor shower, and I thought, okay, fuck it. I'll go out to Palm Springs and get a nice hotel room and take a bath out there, after spending some time in the desert looking at the stars.
Since Bruce was my boyfriend, he was invited to come with me. And it helped that he had a car. I was so excited. How romantic! I was being driven out to the desert, to Palm Springs! For a nice bath night with my new boyfriend! And I just achieved a big milestone in my career. I was fucking ecstatic.
And honestly, also, I definitely thought this was going to be the next step with me and Bruce's relationship. I for sure thought we were gonna fuck. This was a romantic vacation. Are you kidding me? Unless one of us gets food poisoning, it's on.

Speaking of food… At one point, after I take my bath, and I ask him to take all these photos of me, which now I'm worried about, I guess. Because I probably also looked terrible. I realized that so many times— This is why I model, is because so many times people do not know how to take a fucking picture of me. They capture the most ghoulish part of my personality. But somewhere out there, there might be horrid pictures of me inna creamy green colored bathtub. But yeah, so Bruce took all these pictures of me. Oh my god!
After I get out of the bath, well, since I'm naked, we start screwing around. He has me face down, ass up, bent over the bed, and I can feel the heat of his hard dick.
And then he says, Do you want to get some food?
And I was like, yeah, that [singing] di-i-i-i-ick. But no, I, I was like, Oh, I mean, I guess so. We haven't eaten. Okay.
We got Jack in the Box, because you can get so many different things a JIB. And yeah, neither of us got food poisoning. So hurray for that.
But when we got back to the room, and we started watching TV, Bruce made it really clear that he was just interested in going to sleep. I mean, I think he even said, Well, you chose food earlier, and now I don't have the energy.

This is not the first time I posted this story on the internet, in pieces. The first time was actually on TikTok and I got a few comments. So I'm going to address kind of the angle, I think of some of the more common responses to this kind of thing, responses that he used later also. Like, the man is allowed to be too tired to fuck. It was the way that he treated me. He began treating me with disdain for even wanting to be sexual with him. The way that he blamed me for choosing food, which was his proposition in the first place. He told me that I should have chosen to have sex and then go get food. But also if we had had sex and then gotten food… Either way, it didn't seem like we couldn't have done all three in one order or another.

I woke up in the middle of the night and he seemed to be playing with himself. The bed was shaking. And I rolled over and I was like, Hey. I reached around and I grabbed his hard dick. He pulled away from me, and turned his body all the way facing away from me, and looked over his shoulder at me with such a dirty look, such a— I almost felt like he wanted me to yell at him, right— Like he wanted me to be like what the fuck? right there.
But instead I went to the bathroom and cried. I'm not too loud. I didn't hold anything back. I'm pretty sure the walls within. He probably heard me. And he probably enjoyed that a little bit. I'll get to that later.
Sitting on the floor in the bathroom— I don't know why I didn't go sit on the toilet—but, sitting on the floor in the bathroom, I decided that I didn't want to do this. I didn't want to feel so rejected by the guy who just became my boyfriend, on what is supposed to be a romantic weekend.
And I was going to talk to him about it in the morning, but I was just going to probably just break up with him. And then I went to bed pretty easy after that.

The next morning, when we were getting ready to leave, I brought up the night before. And I was like, Look, I tried to initiate with you last night. And you seemed hard because I grabbed your dick. And then you gave me the most disgusted look. And it hurt me so bad. And I told him all of that. I don't think this is going to work out. Like, I want to be with somebody who wants to have sex with me. And we argued about the timing of the food versus sex thing from last night. Like, I laid out all the reasons why I felt like we weren't going to have — or why we hadn't so far had a sexually satisfactory relationship. And they were indisputable. One would think even that he did them on purpose.
When I went to open the door to the room, I discovered that it was not locked. It was just slightly ajar. And I was like, Dude, you won't fuck me and you can't lock a fucking door. Like I don't feel safe with you either. I don't feel hot, and I don't feel safe. Like fucking come on.
I’s just like, take me home. Completely willing, honestly, to take the train back into the city. But we start driving. It's bitter silent. And at a certain point, he just says, you know, could you stay another day?

Part two of a guy named Bruce coming soon.