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SUNDAY, OCT 6, 2013 06:00 PM MDT
My bunny ruined my sex life
After I took in an adorable stray, I learned a hard lesson in masculinity: Men can't like rabbits
BY DAVE GOOD
Last summer, while jogging the trail around an urban lake near my home, I found a bunny, obviously someone’s pet that had gotten loose: white, fuzzy, with spots. It looked naive and hungry, gnawing ditch weeds while fully exposed to whatever carnivore might pass by. And so I caught the rabbit, which took little in the way of effort since it was quite friendly. For the next two months, I tried in vain to find its owner. Apparently, whoever lost it didn’t want it back.
Next, I looked to the local humane society to take the thing. No dice there — they were flooded with bunnies. Bunnies both found and relinquished. In the end, it boiled down to two choices: Take it back to the lake, or keep it. I chose the latter.
And why not? The rabbit was a quiet little guy who lived on salad, used a litter box, and slept under the bed. The bunny’s room and board was covered from the proceeds of a magazine article I published about just exactly how hard it is to get rid of a rabbit, the third most populous animal at the nation’s shelters. An alt-weekly put me and the rabbit on their cover, and they posted an interview with me and the bunny on YouTube (645 views to date). Women across the country commented. It turned them on, they wrote, to see a (single) man with a bunny.
Really? The bunny as a chick magnet? No. In fact, my dating life went down a rabbit hole soon after the bunny moved in. The bunny was a game changer, and it took me the rest of a year loaded with hard rejection to figure out why.
Every woman I knew or met had something to say about the rabbit roommate, even a woman I’ll call Samantha. Samantha is perpetually single and every man’s back-up plan: You can ring her out of the blue after months of no contact whatsoever, and still get action. But even Sam finally had enough. At the conclusion of what was to be our last outing together she said, “The rabbit is …†and then she let that one unfinished sentence swing in the air like a carcass on meat hooks. She stopped returning my calls and emails.
Next came a long-haired beauty with a puppy, a dog, three tortoises, turtles, numerous tats and a Harley. I’ll call her Lisa. She told me over the phone that I was perfect for her because I liked animals. But after she visited the House of Rabbit, she never returned another phone call.
There’s more. Another woman messaged me that, while we could be great friends, it would never work out if I had something else in mind. Of course I had something else in mind. Shit. Had I told her about the rabbit over dinner? Same with the next woman. After she met the rabbit at a pool party at my house the return calls dropped to zero. Last week, a blind date I’d never even met canceled a barbecue get-together. Had she seen the bunny video on YouTube?
Even my own mother was put off. One evening, after dinner, she looked up at me with grief in her eyes. Her son, the bunny sympathizer. “Is there anything left of your house?†she yelled, unaware she was yelling due to the fact that she’s hard of hearing. “Take it back to the lake. Let it go.â€
The truth I learned is this: Men cannot like rabbits.
My bunny ruined my sex life
After I took in an adorable stray, I learned a hard lesson in masculinity: Men can't like rabbits
BY DAVE GOOD
Last summer, while jogging the trail around an urban lake near my home, I found a bunny, obviously someone’s pet that had gotten loose: white, fuzzy, with spots. It looked naive and hungry, gnawing ditch weeds while fully exposed to whatever carnivore might pass by. And so I caught the rabbit, which took little in the way of effort since it was quite friendly. For the next two months, I tried in vain to find its owner. Apparently, whoever lost it didn’t want it back.
Next, I looked to the local humane society to take the thing. No dice there — they were flooded with bunnies. Bunnies both found and relinquished. In the end, it boiled down to two choices: Take it back to the lake, or keep it. I chose the latter.
And why not? The rabbit was a quiet little guy who lived on salad, used a litter box, and slept under the bed. The bunny’s room and board was covered from the proceeds of a magazine article I published about just exactly how hard it is to get rid of a rabbit, the third most populous animal at the nation’s shelters. An alt-weekly put me and the rabbit on their cover, and they posted an interview with me and the bunny on YouTube (645 views to date). Women across the country commented. It turned them on, they wrote, to see a (single) man with a bunny.
Really? The bunny as a chick magnet? No. In fact, my dating life went down a rabbit hole soon after the bunny moved in. The bunny was a game changer, and it took me the rest of a year loaded with hard rejection to figure out why.
Every woman I knew or met had something to say about the rabbit roommate, even a woman I’ll call Samantha. Samantha is perpetually single and every man’s back-up plan: You can ring her out of the blue after months of no contact whatsoever, and still get action. But even Sam finally had enough. At the conclusion of what was to be our last outing together she said, “The rabbit is …†and then she let that one unfinished sentence swing in the air like a carcass on meat hooks. She stopped returning my calls and emails.
Next came a long-haired beauty with a puppy, a dog, three tortoises, turtles, numerous tats and a Harley. I’ll call her Lisa. She told me over the phone that I was perfect for her because I liked animals. But after she visited the House of Rabbit, she never returned another phone call.
There’s more. Another woman messaged me that, while we could be great friends, it would never work out if I had something else in mind. Of course I had something else in mind. Shit. Had I told her about the rabbit over dinner? Same with the next woman. After she met the rabbit at a pool party at my house the return calls dropped to zero. Last week, a blind date I’d never even met canceled a barbecue get-together. Had she seen the bunny video on YouTube?
Even my own mother was put off. One evening, after dinner, she looked up at me with grief in her eyes. Her son, the bunny sympathizer. “Is there anything left of your house?†she yelled, unaware she was yelling due to the fact that she’s hard of hearing. “Take it back to the lake. Let it go.â€
The truth I learned is this: Men cannot like rabbits.
Salon
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