In my single days, I once went home with a man only to find every flat surface of his apartment absolutely crawling with crickets. I don’t mean one or two antennae poking out from behind the toaster—I mean that at first I thought they were a part of a very busy pattern on the tile.
To his credit, he didn’t ignore this. He couldn’t, really—his countertops were moving. Instead, he went to great pains to point out that these were crickets and not roaches (as if that were some enormous difference when they’re in your hair), and that this was not his fault but his landlord’s. Though I could tell from one glance at his kitchen sink that the bug issue was likely being caused by one of those “war of attrition” dish situations with his roommate. The dirty pans pretty much touched the ceiling.
Did I leave then? No. In fact, it wasn’t until the next morning that this man really turned me off. It was when we ate together.
Picture table manners so bad that they make having your underwear carried off by a horde of trash grasshoppers seem manageable by comparison. He not only talked with his mouth full, but I don’t know that his mouth ever fully closed the entire time he ate. He was like the digestive version of one of those washing machines where you can watch everything go swishing around and foaming up through the window—only the window was his face.
And the noise. My God, the noise. And this wasn’t the first or the last time this happened to me, with men and their horrible mouth noises.
It really brought me back, recently, when Linda Evangelista announced that she was single because she didn’t want to “hear somebody breathing.” And I am clearly not alone, because it sparked almost viral assent among single women on social media, who seemed to agree that it was worth braving loneliness and celibacy to avoid the epidemic of noise that other people seem to make, unbidden and unashamed. Breathing, sure, but also all manner of honking, shooing, chomping, and chewing.
Linda’s words sound at first like hyperbole—that she’s so done she doesn’t want evidence of another person existing in the same room—but I think we can also take them at face value. The dating scene is littered with people who seem never to have considered the cacophony that comes out of their bodies, or that those noises merit controlling when we are around other people, especially ones we want to touch and kiss and have sex with.
Crickets man was hardly an exceptional case. I have gone out with men who mouth-breathed so loudly at the movies that I couldn’t hear the explosions, who casually shoved fingers deep into their noses before we were anywhere approaching the “it’s finally cool to relax and be human around each other” phase. And many, many, many men who never so much as glanced at their napkin, let alone put it in their lap. Men in their 30s and even 40s who seemed to see silverware as a curiosity, like big, hairy Ariels, opting to snatch up rogue pieces of pasta or even an entire salad with their fingers.
Needless to say, if you don’t like someone, or even if you’re waffling, watching them try to swallow crostini the size of surfboards without chewing, or hearing them breathing like an old pug, makes it pretty easy to decide whether or not you want to see them again.
The trouble happens when you do like them. Because if you’ve dated at all recently, you know that the odds of finding someone whose company you can tolerate, let alone enjoy, feel astronomically small. Then factor in the feeling that a huge percentage of available adult men seem to have been raised by that Viggo Mortensen character who home-schooled his six children in the woods and had them eat raw rabbit with their hands … Well, the range of what you can put up with, annoying habit–wise, tends to expand considerably.
This is not to say I am without flaws in this department. I don’t think anyone is. I happen to snore profusely, and I have this strange thing where I can’t burp, so any trapped air just kind of rattles around my esophagus, making haunted-house sounds. But the thing is, I do try. I try to make it comfortable to be around me, or I’m at least aware of the sounds that my body is making. Maybe women are raised with more shame, or maybe we’re just more tasked with being attractive. And when it comes to the things we can’t change, especially about people we like, I believe that it’s worth buying earplugs.
I think we all probably understand where Linda is coming from, at least as it relates to long-term, live-in partnership. I am lucky to be with someone who doesn’t have a lot of bad habits and who makes an effort to be charming, or at least not openly disgusting. We have been together a longish time and have endured the twin scourges of parenting and a pandemic—there is not much we haven’t had a chance to wince at yet. Early in our relationship, I instituted a “no farting when one of us is still actively eating their dinner” rule, and he only occasionally breaks it. But I have to admit—God forbid I am ever single again—I don’t picture sitting through much of the chewing and breathing that I used to tolerate in the service of having someone to make out with. I’m getting to be a certain age, and I think once women get older we feel less inclined to make compromises for romantic companionship.
I am not sad for Linda. Rather, I enjoy imagining her waking up each day, alone in her home: she pulls on a noise-muffling cashmere turtleneck, then enjoys her ex-supermodel breakfast in monastic quiet as she wordlessly does the Wordle, her phone in permanent do-not-disturb mode, sipping soundlessly and generally enjoying the silence. She’s earned it.
Julieanne Smolinski is a Los Angeles–based TV writer
