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.