I Joined Tinder to Find Hot Mom Friends

From ELLE

Read ELLE.com's exclusive excerpt from Jenny Mollen's new book, Live Fast Die Hot.

Until two years ago, Jenny's life was exciting, sexy, a little eccentric, and one hundred percent impulsive. She had a husband who embraced her crazy. Then they had their son, Sid, and overnight, Jenny was forced to grow up: to be responsible, to brush her hair, to listen to her voicemail. Find out what happened next here.

"I kind of want to have a girl go down on me while I blow you." I batted my eyes at Jason across the table, trying to spice up an overly planned date night. A skinny hipster in suspenders placed two menus in front of us and disappeared into the bustling bistro without a second glance.

Jason picked up his menu and studied it like he was reading the Torah. "If we do the lottery for Washington Market, it still doesn't guarantee we'll even get an application. Don't you have any mom friends you can ask? What do they say about Avenues?"

Before I had time to throw an artisanal breadstick at his head, the waiter reappeared to take our drink orders. Jason looked at me, then at the waiter.

"Can you tell your bartender to make me a fun mocktail? Something fizzy?"

I stared at the waiter, who was at least a decade younger than me. It bothered me that people that young were old enough to join the workforce, and that girls born in 1997 were eighteen now, and that the guy who first introduced me to cocaine only drank mocktails.

It wasn't Jason's sobriety that annoyed me, it's what it represented. The party was over. It was time to be responsible-to start brushing my hair before I left the house, to take vitamins, to use dental floss, to listen to my voicemail, to write thank you notes, to make holiday cards, to develop crow's-feet, and to stop having sex with other people.

"Baby. What the fuck? I just said I wanted to have another threesome. Aren't sober guys supposed to turn into sex addicts? Don't you at least want to fuck my head through a wall?"

The truth was a threesome sounded exhausting. But at the very least it was something exciting to talk about. It's important in long-term relationships to have common interests that aren't just pedicures and documentaries on farm-to-table cooking.

"Sure, yes, I wanna fuck you through a wall." Jason yawned, sipping his Safe Sex on the Beach. "But I also wanna get Sid into the best nursery school. You need moms in your life that can give us these answers."

"Jason, I've never had a mom in my life with answers."

"Well, start looking."

In concept, I understood that there were cool moms in the world just waiting to be discovered, but for some reason I couldn't seem to attract any. Every time I tried to put myself out there at a Mommy and Me, confessing to the cutest-dressed girl in the room that I hated the other fifteen women sitting around us, she would inevitably turn on me and, when I left her side, would tell the rest of the group all the horrible things I was saying about them. When it came to the mom world, I feared I'd always be a fish out of water, and Jason a fish out of vodka.

I needed to find a mom like me who loved her child but also found time to work, work out, and post cute pics of her­ self on the Internet. I wanted someone who hated authority, who loved books (preferably mine), who didn't use the "praise God" hands emoji, and who understood that the movie Clue was one of the greatest films of American cinema. She should be about two years older than me, slightly less cute, ideally ten pounds heavier. She should wear a size-eight shoe, have exquisite taste in clothes, live and work in my neighborhood, have an office with a printer that I could use, be able to take long lunch breaks, and know how to do makeup.

Why was this woman so hard to find?

*

That night, Jason and I did what all couples do once their kids are in bed: we stopped speaking and stared at our iPads. After a half hour of silence, I made an announcement.

"Well, I just joined Tinder."

Jason turned to look at me, at last noticing that I'd camouflaged my acne in a thick coat of Sid's diaper-rash cream.

"Jenny, I'm not having a threesome with some weirdo off Tinder." He paused for a minute trying to make sense of my DIY Kabuki makeup. "Unless she's hot."

"I'm over the threesome idea," I said, applying more cream. "How do you always get over the threesome idea before I even get a chance to act on it?" he whined. "It's not fair." "Because, Jason, I'm a mother now. I'm too tired for threesomes. Unless it's me with two people that aren't you."

Jason gasped with mock horror, then went back to his iPad. We'd been together long enough that it was no longer offensive to joke about the downsides of monogamy.

"Besides, I'm not joining Tinder to find hot chicks," I clarified. "I'm joining to find hot moms."

"Wow. That's sad." Jason raised his leg above his head like a dancer and farted as loudly as his body would allow. The noise reverberated off the sheets and sent Gina flying across the room like she was escaping an air strike in Baghdad. Jason smiled at me, waiting for my reaction. Knowing it would give him far too much satisfaction, I ignored him.

"I might have just pooped," he said, still hoping to get a rise out of me.

"'Super-queer cuddle switch with a strong tendency toward big spoon,'" I read aloud. I held up a picture of a large butch black woman in a neon crop top. "But what's a cuddle switch?"

Jason shrugged and swiped to the next picture.

For the next two hours we fell into a Tinder K-hole.

"What about Connie? She seems normal? She's a wanderer, a reader, and a runner," I said.

"Okay. Swipe right."

"Diane could be fun. But her profile picture is just a close-up of one eye."

"That means she's fat," Jason explained.

Before we could continue, a notification popped up on the screen. We'd swiped too many profiles and were being suspended from "playing" for the next six hours.

"Boo!" Jason flopped back down on his side of the bed. "Should I start an account?"

"No!" I said.

"Why not? I should get to if you are." Though Jason often found himself playing the Desi to my Lucy, the truth was that he preferred being an Ethel. Yes, he was a rule dork, the type of guy who if he saw a line would immediately get in it, the type of know-it-all who would have gotten stabbed at my high school for not letting anyone cheat off his midterm. But there was another side to him, the freewheeling lunatic. The kind of guy who, if encouraged, would ask a Costa Rican cabbie for weed, eat street meat in Shanghai, or pay money to bungee jump off a rusty crane in Tijuana. He was impulsive and adventurous in all the ways I wasn't. (Mainly the ways that lead to hospitalization and/or concussions.) He got a thrill out of life in the fast lane, so long as I made a convincing argument for why we needed to carpool illegally. In our early years, my harebrained ideas coupled with his joie de vivre had led to ill-advised tattoos, third-world urgent­ care centers, and our almost going to prison in Turkey. But now we were parents, and we couldn't afford to take the same kinds of risks. One of us had to be the designated driver-at least until Sid was old enough to see over the dashboard.

"Besides," he continued, ''I'm much better with women than you are." Shopping for girlfriends was precisely the type of shenanigan that Jason loved. Not only did it give him an excuse to perform, but it also allowed him to compete with me. Aside from when it came to Sid, or our dogs, our therapist, our couples friends, or our dry cleaner Nick, I avoided competing with Jason, because it only made me frustrated when he won. And annoyingly, he nearly always won. He was faster, stronger, and able to answer almost any Jeopardy! question, or at least the ones they put in the backs of New York City cabs.

I'm therapized enough to admit that my need to outdo Jason (and every man I've ever met) is the direct result of having been raised by my first husband, otherwise known as my dad, who encouraged me to do great things, but mainly so they'd reflect well on him. He allowed me victories, money, and attention, just so long as he always had more. When you grow up waiting in the wings, watching your dad-husband soak in a particular kind of spotlight, it's hard not to resent a legitimately famous person.

When I first met Jason, I instantly rooted for his demise.

Not because I didn't like him; I didn't even know him. What I didn't like was that he was successful and famous and I wasn't. It triggered me. Before meeting him for the first time, a producer friend (who was trying to get in good with me so he could fuck my sister) had sent me a password so I could watch all the audition footage for a movie I was up for. I was only supposed to watch the tapes that pertained to my role, but after spending two hours trying to decide who would win in a fight between Lauren German's face and Lake Bell's boobs, I stumbled upon the two guys they were looking at for the lead. One was Joe Schmostein and one was Jason Biggs.

"Fuck Jason Biggs," I said to the producer, having never met him or seen any of his films.

"Really?" he replied. "Did you see his audition?"

"I don't need to. I already think the other guy is better." I had to root for the underdog, I was the underdog. And in a weird, Freudian way, Jason Biggs was my dad. (Please forget you ever read that.)

Eventually, my friend asked me to watch Jason's tape, and to my surprise, he was outstanding. He literally blew me away. And somehow, through my desktop Dell, he made me fall in love with him. I told my friend as much, and within several days we were set up on a blind date. The rest is history-and by history, I mean in my first book.

Even though I love my husband and consider him the greatest thing to ever happen to me before Sid and after Teets, it still irks me when I am brushed to the side as people clamor to talk to him. It's not that I'm not proud of him or grateful for his success. It's that the last thing I need in my life is to feel eclipsed by another fucking man. Sure, I'm partly to blame for being attracted to successful people, but there is no denying that being around them tends to ignite a certain unhealthy resentment in me.

This is why I didn't want Jason making a Tinder profile.

Because I knew if he did, he'd probably have more mom friends than me. And that could not happen. Unlike my goal of dying with more Twitter followers than Jason, having more mom friends was something within my reach. It was something I knew I could do quickly, without great effort, and without showing my vagina. Or so I thought.

"Why am I not getting any matches? Do you think I need to show my vagina?" I said. I took Jason's phone out of his hand and hid it on my side of the bed. "Baby, I'm the mom. We're focused on me right now."

Jason looked at my profile picture, a publicity shot of David Bowie juggling three crystal orbs from the movie Labyrinth.

"Jareth the Goblin King?"

"What? Bowie is awesome," I said, defensive.

"Doesn't he steal children?"

"I-" I didn't have a great response, so I deflected by bursting into song. "Dance magic dance!"

Jason could see how desperate I was, and so, like a true gentleman (who knows he is secretly better than you), he allowed Tinder to be strictly my thing.

From the book:

LIVE FAST DIE HOT by Jenny Mollen

Copyright (c) 2016 by Jenny Mollen

Published by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC