Meet Rick Marin, the toxic bachelor

David Usborne
Wednesday 05 March 2003 01:00 GMT
Comments

Your support helps us to tell the story

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

If you are male and are wondering why all those blockbuster books about the petty humiliations of dating – the rejections, the seamy conquests, the morning-after self- flagellations – always seem to come from the pens of women, now is the time to relax and enjoy. At last, a man has cast himself as the Brian Jones of the one-night-stand scene. And very likely, boys, your least edifying experiences will pale beside his.

You owe your thanks to Rick Marin, a journalist from New York, who entered a seven-year span of most undignified dating débâcles in 1991, the year that an ill-fated three-year marriage to a former receptionist at Harper's magazine in Washington DC, where he worked at the end of the 1980s, unceremoniously flew apart. He found himself – in New York by then – single and sex-starved. He not only made his own rake's progress in those post-marital years but – clever him, in his journalistic training – he took notes as he went along and kept them in a hanging manila binder in his apartment.

The resulting book – Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor – hit the shelves in the US a month ago and will become voyeuristic reading in Britain in the late spring. It has already eased the consciences of countless American men who discovered that they were not alone in having plumbed the abyss of mindless and self-destructive serial sex, and confirmed the worst fears of untold numbers of single American women. It has been hailed as the first of a new genre: lad-lit (as opposed to the British bloke-lit of Nick Hornby et al). The gender opposite of chick-lit.

This frequently distressing chronicle of hapless intercourse is a little different, however. Unlike those chick-lit triumphs – Bridget Jones's Diary or the Candace Bushnell column that spawned the series Sex and the City – this is the story of a real person, Marin. This invites two reactions. It is not as funny as it might be, because it is about actual victims – himself, and the scores of women he picks up and just as quickly discards. But, for the same reason, it holds a kind of sad poignancy. And there is an emotional arc to his tale, which ends, as it happens, with the death of his father and the discovery, finally, of real love.

Not everyone has embraced the book, published by Hyperion, since its release. The most pedantic reviewers found fault even in the title. How tasteful can it be, they ask, to write a book about an unfettered sexual safari of many years and then to put "toxic" in the title? Are we still not in the era of Aids? And for others, the stories of tragic mismatches and Marin's callousness – the definition of a "cad" in my dictionary is "a man with deliberate disregard for another's feelings" – proved too grim. "After reading Cad I felt like I need a shower," expostulated Katherine Pushkar in her review in the The Boston Globe, revealing some repulsion at the display, page after page, of "truly despicable sexual ethics".

For sure, Marin – who also uses the tome to trace his rather impressive ascent from journalistic penury to relative freelance success, writing eventually for Newsweek and The New York Times – has not bothered to tailor his tongue for those with politically correct sensibilities. He ponders as he breaks up with Kay 1 (she is quickly followed by a new amour, named Kay 2): "There are two kinds of women: the ones who get offended by the word chick and the ones who don't." Some readers may be offended also. Or by this other nugget of dubious dating wisdom: "One advantage of realising, or deciding, a chick is crazy: no guilt."

Most of his partners, whether of a few hours or maybe even months, at some point fail the crazy test. Like this one – Cynthia was her name – who joined him at a bar with an amply filled T-shirt bearing a slogan extolling the literary genius of Shakespeare. "She might as well have been wearing a Mensa baseball cap. I mean, we know Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language, don't we? Cynthia had been fine on the phone. Now I saw she was a geek blessed (or cursed) with the body of a centerfold. I can latch on to almost any common ground or opinion or quirk to justify my lust for desirable women. At the same time, the slightest misstep will send me into hypercritical frenzy."

This flaw – the ability to see a justifying quality and just as quickly to see a reason to ditch – is traceable to his professional pedigree. Marin's main money-making talent is doing interviews, a job that requires him to be a quick study. He rejects Kay 2, though not for several months, because she is just too normal and nice. (The real problem of Kay 1, by the way, is her doctor's bag of terrifying sex toys.) Chloe, his first one-night stand after the break-up with Elizabeth, his wife, barely survives until dawn after he sees that she was wearing a "pair of socks no man should be allowed to see".

A fling with Tiina (yes, two "i"s in the name), a Finnish restaurateur, was apparently doomed the minute she smuggled him into the toilets of her newly opened eatery to have her way with him against the white-tiled walls. She apparently ruined the magic by asking, mid-flagrante, what it was about her that appealed to him. "'You have great hair,' was all I could muster, and my eye wandered to the sign that said 'EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS'". Poor Tiina kept chasing him for weeks thereafter, but Marin was never able to get past the hand-washing vision and swiftly moved on to other quarry.

The book – already optioned for a film by Miramax – was surprisingly hard to locate in New York bookshops this week. Perhaps this is simply because it has been selling well. There is nothing more reassuring than discovering that the dating experiences of another have been even more tragic than your own. Alternatively, it may be that every woman who recognises herself in the book has rushed to the nearest Barnes & Noble and purchased it in bulk to ensure that no one can read it and possibly recognise them. Never mind that Marin gives false first names to all his past partners. The fact is that many of them came from the rather small and highly gossipy media universe of Gotham, and attaching real names to all of Marin's past customers has already become a highly amusing sport in the industry. "I was scanning for details that might identify pals and acquaintances," wrote Nina Burleigh in The New York Observer this week. "Woe to the women identified by first name only: most of them are real-life members of the New York media community and Mr Marin has carnal knowledge of all of them."

Thus this recent, very anonymous, observation from one of his past fancies. She had actually forgotten about her Marin tryst until the book came out. Imagine the shock, she explained, when "you find out that, while all this time you've been trying to repress the memory of your yucky, low-point-of-life misdirected affection, he has been revelling in the memories. Maybe not of you personally, but of other girls like you, girls who had sex too quickly... girls who thought that when he said he was interested in them he actually was. In fact, your old flame has been thinking of himself as quite the chick magnet, the rascal, the Casanova."

The more desperate among the single men in Manhattan may have been rushing for their copies in some hope of picking up dating tips. Marin admits at one moment that his strategy amounts to little more than "relentless scheming, plotting and premeditation", coupled with a good dose of what he calls "rehearsed spontaneity". This last trick is surely also gleaned from his work as a journalist. Any scribe who has done sufficient interviews knows how to look as if they are earnestly listening and absorbing every word when really they are quietly hatching their next question or move. And he offers this reassurance to those of us who discover that success does not come every night. "Dating is a salesman's game: one in 10 is a good month. Most of them, you feel like Willy Loman."

The boys will learn also that it always helps to have some line ready to reveal a special vulnerability in their own lives. For Marin, this meant dropping in a reference to his divorce – and, if really necessary, to the fact that his wife ran out on him to take up with another man named Drew – to seal the deal and keep her until breakfast. He calls it his "Rakish Swipe" manoeuvre. When the target follows up with a question about his failed marriage, he calculatedly swipes off his horn-rim glasses and utters: "I'd rather not talk about it." Then he does just that, giving her every detail of what he admits is the "only juicy detail of my emotional résumé". It doesn't always work. In one of many moments when Marin lightens the tone with self-deprecating humour, he recalls how he tried the move on one woman, whose only response was: "Why do you look like you just swallowed a rotten egg?"

Most readers will soon discern that Marin is not quite the cad the title suggests. Otherwise he would lose our sympathy and therefore our interest. It is in the hope of nurturing that sympathy that he harks back to the calamity of his short marriage throughout. He recalls its failure not with the glee of a newly librated man but with obvious sadness. And, unlike a bona fide cad, he has occasional moments of remorse at his lurid lifestyle. About 40 pages before the book's end he begins to admit to tiring of his new freedom and yearning for routine and stable love. "Maybe I wasn't literally on the way out, but every time a wedding or birth announcement darkened my mailbox, I died a little. My friends were snapping up lifemates right and left, popping out heirs. I, too, longed for the pitter-patter of little feet – and for once I didn't mean the 'Asian outcall' service on Channel 35."

The book finally turns when he meets and, after a few false starts, falls in love with a woman whose name has not been changed. She is Ilene Rosenzweig, an editor at the time for Allure magazine. At the time of their courtship, he finds himself sitting at the bedside of his father, who has fallen into a coma. His ensuing death and the certainty he feels that in Ilene he has at last found the right woman, rather than a right-now woman, causes Marin to shed both "cad" and "toxic". He and Rosenzweig are set to marry later this year.

'Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor' is published by Ebury Press on 5 June

'He never called me again': a British victim writes

In the 1990s, while I was living in New York, a friend introduced me to Rick Marin, the man who is now enjoying notoriety throughout the Western world as the author of Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor. Marin, who has now revealed himself to be a bounder on a grand scale, appeared when I met him as unlikely a candidate for Don Juanism as you could hope to find outside a plane- spotters' convention. On the sturdy side, with heavy, black-framed glasses, he was not obvious catnip to the ladies.

He was however, good company and – the Achilles heel of women everywhere – funny. Over the next year or two we became, I thought, friends. We went out to the movies, to dinner, to parties. We told each other about the people we were dating, and he said flattering things about my prose style. A recurrent theme in his conversation – one to which I should have paid more attention – was the craziness of Manhattan women, with the flattering implication that I was exempt from the general rule; he once congratulated me on being one of the three women in New York who wasn't in therapy.

One night, in the sort of accident that can happen after a night in a well-stocked bar, I thought, "What the hell? We're both grown-ups. What harm can it do?" and went to bed with him. The sex was the sort that is likely to result after 12 cocktails and two jugs of sangria, but I thought of it as if I was in a French comedy, where adults sleep together casually, almost as a form of exercise. I didn't think it meant anything; I didn't expect him to fall in love with me. But nor did I expect never to hear from him again – which is exactly what happened.

One "crazy lady" story he told me, and which now came back to me with dismaying clarity, was about a woman he knew who'd called him up and said, "We used to be friends, what happened?" "I slept with her once. That doesn't make us friends," was how he saw it. So now I was faced with the choice of persisting in trying to revive our "friendship" and being classified as another bunny-boiler, or giving up and facing the fact it had never existed. I had been set up: he'd probably never liked me, or my prose style. He had just been biding his time.

That he is now painting himself as a Lothario to make Warren Beatty weep and has parlayed his emotional inadequacy and weasel behaviour into a bestseller is, of course, galling beyond belief. For myself, I'm thinking of starting Rick Marin Anonymous: a support group for all the women foolish enough to have slept with this callous, cash-hungry Casanova.

'Anonymous'

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in