This Is How You Lose Her

“The Cheater’s Guide to Love” is organized by years: zero through five. Yunior is now a tenured Ivy League professor. His fiancé reads his old emails and discovers he cheated on her with fifty women over the span of six years. Yunior says, “Maybe if you’d been engaged to a super open-minded blanquita you could have survived it—but you’re not engaged to a super open-minded blanquita. Your girl is a bad-ass salcedeña who doesn’t believe in open anything” (175). In this context, “blanquita” refers to a light-skinned woman.

Yunior takes her on vacation, but she just walks on the beach alone. Eventually, she cuts ties and Yunior moves to Boston, where he hates it. Yunior has a number of racial confrontations with Whites in Boston, explaining, “Three times a week, drunk white dudes try to pick fights with you in different parts of the city” (178).

He tries to combat his depression by running and finding a new girl, but nothing works out. A young law student uses him to take care of her while she’s pregnant by lying and saying the child is his, then revealing the child is not his when it’s born. Yunior says, “Only a bitch of color comes to Harvard to get pregnant. [...] Why go to all the trouble to get into Harvard just to get knocked up? You could have stayed on the block and done that shit” (198).

Yunior then travels to the Dominican Republic with his friend Elvis. Elvis is excited that he has a toddler son, kept secret from his family. But at Yunior’s insistence, a paternity test reveals the boy is not his child. Yunior finally reads the book his ex mailed to him five years earlier. In the book, Yunior is confronted with his deceit and feels ashamed. This helps him process, and he starts writing more. He says, “In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace—and because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get” (213).