5 Things I Learned By Dating A Girl From The ‘Hood
By TB Rhine
1. You will constantly—Constantly—CONSTANTLY be shaken down for money.
I mean constantly. ‘Hood Girls are uncannily skilled at taking any and every conversational gambit you can think of and subtly using it as segue to a request for cash. Seriously, if these girls could put their talent for verbal panhandling to use in the ferreting out of state secrets, they’d have stellar careers waiting for them at the CIA.
2. There’s always some drama you’re just waiting to get caught up in.
They need a ride somewhere. They’re about to get arrested. Their psycho ex-boyfriend slashed their tires (which they now expect you to replace – see Item 1). Life in the ‘hood, it seems, is one long series of low-maintenance disasters. It’s always an emergency, and dire consequences will always, always result if something isn’t done about it right. This. Minute. Speaking of which…
3. She will ring your phone off the hook at all hours of the day.
No matter how hot she is or how deliciously she haunts your daydreams, trust me when I say that you will come to dread the sight of your Hood Girl’s number on your caller ID. ‘Cause you will see it there. Endlessly. Always as a prelude to some new tale of woe. When you try to get in touch with her, on the other hand, she will be harder to get a hold of than Neil Patrick Harris at a Vaseline convention.
4. You’re not the only guy she’s seeing.
This becomes increasingly clear the longer you hang out with her. You’ll find you’re always picking her up at some other guy’s house, or dropping her off there after the two of you have gone out. You’ll hear some dude grumbling in the background half the time you’re on the phone with her, as well. She’ll say these guys are “friends,” or maybe exes she’s known since they were kids and is still on friendly terms with, but after a while you won’t be able to miss the macho-dude-marking-his-territory Stink Eye they’re giving you every time you hand your girl off. What you don’t realize, of course, is that you’re in exactly the same position as these other guys, or will be soon.
5. Her living situation (and everything else about her) is always extremely unstable.
I knew my ex for three years or so. We were only “together,” off and on, for a portion of it, but in that time she must have had twelve different jobs and nearly as many guys she was living with. She’d be staying with one guy, then cheat on him with his friend and end up moving in with that guy for a month or two. She had family that lived in another state, and she was constantly going off to live with them, each time vowing never to return. Two months later she’d be back, crashing with some dude she’d been talking to on the Internet. And hanging out with me on the side, of course.