You Need Help: How Do I Learn To Trust Again After My Two-Month Situationship Ended Abruptly?
Q:
I’m a cis queer woman in my mid-twenties, and I’m mourning yet another 2-3 month-long relationship that ended unexpectedly, and this time it’s messing with me in the way the others haven’t.
To keep the background of it all short, before this I’d been single for about 4.5 years. Around the start of COVID, I realized I really needed to work on my relationship with relationships, so I committed to therapy and eventually started SSRIs. All of this has been super helpful, and about a year after moving to a new city, I decided to start dating again, but nothing stuck until this most recent person. We went on a first date, but a few days afterward, she reached out to tell me she had a lot going on and didn’t have the capacity for a relationship. I was initially upset but wanted to be friends, because we got along well, and we spent a few months developing a friendship I was really happy with. Then she confessed feelings, and I did the same, and we decided to try dating out to see where things went.
For two months, we’d started doing the stereotypical couply things: When we were visiting our homes for the holidays, we were always in contact, and she told me she couldn’t stop talking to her family about me. When I got back, we ordered a sex toy together (which we’d talked about doing a few weeks prior and I’d never done with a partner before). Then all of a sudden, after we got back to my place after a date night, she told me she has too much going on in her life and doesn’t have the capacity to be in a relationship with me.
I was and still am very confused by everything. I know we hadn’t formally defined the relationship yet, but she knew from the jump where I stood re:situationships, and I genuinely didn’t think she’d break things off so suddenly.
It’s been almost eight weeks and I’m doing better than I ever have after a breakup thanks to the work I’ve done on myself, but I’m honestly still fucked up about how I go forward once I’m ready to put myself out there again. I opened up to her in a way I never had with anyone and really put in work to be honest about my anxieties so they didn’t backfire on me like before. Now I’m not sure how I can trust anyone else to not break things off super suddenly when it happened with someone who made me feel genuinely safe and secure. I’ve never been in a healthy long-term relationship and thought things with her were going in that direction, and now I’m not really sure what to do. Some magic words of wisdom would be SUPER appreciated, it’s tough out here!
Thanks for listening!
Baffled & Bummed Out
A:
Dear baffled and bummed out,
I’m baffled and bummed out for you, too! It seems like things were going so well, which makes the sudden breakup even more confusing. You’re definitely not alone in feeling torn up about a short situationship. Most of the time, the 2-3 month relationships I have are more difficult for me to work through than long-term full blown relationships. I think a big part of that has to do with closure. In a typical monogamous long-term relationship, there’s often a sense of if/when things might come to an end. You’ve known that person long enough to identify behaviors that may suggest changing feelings. In a short dating stint, it could be harder to read the signs or feel comfortable sharing uncomfortable feelings. Regardless, it sounds like you and this person were very close and shared many intimate moments, so you’re completely valid in feeling upset about this.
I don’t have any concrete answers for you, but I can offer another perspective. Sometimes people just can’t handle saying goodbye. Some people can’t even handle strong feelings. This could be your ex-situationship’s case. Often, relationship changes that feel sudden aren’t exactly impulsive for the person making the changes. She might’ve been grappling with many complex issues either within or outside of the relationship and didn’t have the tools to handle it and/or didn’t know how to communicate it. She might’ve been afraid to face her strong feelings and thought goodbye was easiest done in a quick, non-emotional kind of way. It’s also interesting that she stated her intentions/boundaries at the very beginning of the friendship, changed them via her behaviors in becoming more involved with you, and then broke up with you for those same reasons. She knew what she wanted (or didn’t want), developed feelings for you and pursued those (defying her own boundaries), and then realized one day that this dynamic isn’t what she wanted and hurt you in the process. This is why sticking to your intentions and continuously communicating is so important!! It seems like you were pretty clear throughout the relationship, and maybe she just wasn’t super honest with herself, and therefore not honest with you.
I feel for you in grieving this whirlwind relationship, but I’m proud of you for working on yourself! It sounds like you’ve set aside an ample amount of time to process your emotions and figure out who you are. Not many people take time to do this, especially before or after dating, so I want to commend you for your hard work on yourself. Trust in other people will take time, which is the most annoying answer to hear. Continue to trust yourself and tell people what you’re looking for. Ask for their expectations and intentions in return. Vet future dates based on these intentions and values and stick to them. You deserve a love that won’t leave you, including love for yourself. Have patience (even though it’s truly rough out here) and let yourself grieve.
Wishing you lots of love!
You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.
You Need Help: I Was in a Relationship With Someone Who Didn’t Like Me
feature image photo by Mixmike via Getty Images
Q:
Have you ever been in a relationship with someone who doesn’t like you? I think I was in a relationship with someone who didn’t really like me. I think they found me annoying or maybe they changed their mind and held things in…I don’t know, it went on much longer than it should have and I get these like flashes of memories of things she’s said or done and it still really hurts. She broke up with me in 2020 at the start of the lockdown and I still get these flashes of painful memories.
After the breakup, we each took some space but eventually tried friendship but I felt miserable and like a doormat when we were “friends” so I’ve asked for no contact. That was 2021.
Last week, I went ice-skating and saw her at the rink and I still feel so emotional. Does anybody have experience feeling angry with a person after the break up and the anger kind of growing? With a therapist and through journaling I keep finding new things to be upset about and now I’m in a place where I’m like wow I really let her off easy and I’m angry about that. Does anyone relate to taking forever to get over a person?
I really feel like she didn’t like me and I don’t feel like my friends understand because she’s so nice to them but it was different in our relationship. Idk. I feel like an idiot for trying to be friends and I hate how angry I feel when I see her, especially when I see her having a good time. I feel pathetic! I’m hoping other people can share similar experiences and what’s helped them.
A:
I’ve been where you are right now, and I’ve also been where (it seems like) your ex is. First things first: FEEL YOUR FEELINGS, and don’t feel bad about them. And don’t feel bad about not feeling bad about them. It sounds like you’re almost feeling guilty about being angry. As a person who was culturally raised to feel shame around anger, I totally get this. It can take me years before I realize I was wronged or something somewhat traumatic or unjust happened to me. I’m still processing a relationship from 2019! According to the many therapists I’ve held over the course of the past five years, we can only begin to process the deeper, more painful feelings once our bodies feel safe. It makes a lot of sense that you’re still mulling over the relationship. You’re finally in a place where you can take a step back from being in the intensity of the relationship.
The fact that you’re even processing in the first place tells me you’re not being pathetic have a right to be upset. You’re saying you felt hurt by them and that many moments of the relationship felt painful. You can’t blame yourself for staying in something you couldn’t see at the moment. When you tried to hold onto something you felt such real feelings for, you “felt like a doormat.” That’s not okay! That alone is something you should be mad about! Even though it’s felt like an eternity since the relationship, you’re only just now seeing the whole picture for what it was at the time. You’re learning new information you didn’t have access to before. Healing and grieving never have a timeline. It’s taken me one week to get over relationships, while it’s taken me almost a decade to get over someone I never even dated. The healing process is unique because all our wounds and vulnerabilities are all so different. If I were in your position right now, I would definitely feel upset by the resurgence of so not-so-fun feelings after I thought I gained closure with it.
Eventually, most people breaking off relationships end up with some hostility or resentment. Right now, you’re feeling a bit of that toward them. What’s more confusing for you is that they possibly didn’t like you while in the relationship, even before things started to turn sour. I can really only take guesses as to why this might be.
I’m ashamed to admit I’ve been this person in the relationship, and more than once. It was never something I was cognizant of at the moment, but months or years later, I reflect back and think about how I really didn’t like this person. I amount a lot of this to codependency and trauma-bonding. My very first girlfriend literally provided me housing and food in return for my emotional stability. We had many other toxic quid-pro-quo dynamics, but eventually I grew to resent her, because I felt like I was responsible for her emotional wellbeing. Part of it, at least for me, was also the idealization of the person that only falls flat when the honeymoon phase passes. It’s not uncommon to see relationships where one person puts the other on a pedestal or wears rose colored glasses. Only time reveals the truth of complicated dynamics and incompatibility. When this begins to happen, infatuation can switch to restatement quickly. It’s like that saying about how the line between love and hate is thin. I’m not saying it’s any excuse, but rather another perspective.
I can’t tell you why your ex may or may not have liked you. You might not even be able to discern that. You two started dating for some reason, and it ended for a reason as well. Maybe this person needed something from you at the time? Maybe they were looking for one type of relationship and ended up in another? Maybe they were still figuring themselves out and dragged you along for the ride? Maybe they were really into you and pulled away out of fear and insecurity? Maybe they were drawn to a thing in you that they hate in themselves? Relationships and attachments are messy, and until we learn to heal ourselves, we sometimes end up trying to get involved with someone who we think could heal us instead.
I don’t know the reason they may have disliked you, and it sounds like you might not even know the reason. What I would encourage you to do now is reflect on the reason this is important to you. More broadly, what would you need to find closure? Some people can get that simply by doing the internal work, while others need to hash it out with the person they were entangled with. Only you will have a better idea of what you need. Just know that moving forward you’re completely valid in your post-breakup feelings, no matter how long ago it was.
You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.
We Asked a Bunch of Queer People To Share Their Go-To Breakup Coping Mechanisms
feature image photo by We Are via Getty Images
I am no stranger to breakup coping mechanisms that might be classified as “unhealthy” at best and “unhinged” at worst. In fact, I once wrote about 30 unhinged post-breakup activities I partook in during the aftermath of my last major breakup. These included a “72-hour bender of playing the Sims” as well as watching “so much goddamn reality television that the seams of reality start to unravel.”
So, it is with ABSOLUTELY ZERO JUDGMENT that I present the following 72 go-to breakup coping mechanisms sent in to Autostraddle’s Instagram. Gays really do love three things: 1. Their friends 2. Sad music and 3. Therapy.
Queer People Share Their Go-To Breakup Coping Mechanisms
1. Re-downloading Tinder and reminding myself I’m hot
2. Briefly installing Tinder to just uninstall 5min later
3. Tinder and bad decisions
4. Re-downloading Grindr
5. Being a bisexual menace in the dating pool
6. Hookups
7. Watching Juno three times in one afternoon and shaving my head
8. Writing an email that I’ll never send
9. Writing down the things I would’ve texted or talked to them about. Delete when ready
10. Listening to Be Steadwell’s breakup album on loop
11. BDSM
12. Haircutting, playlist making, country leaving
13. Bangs!
14. Leaving the country for a while
15. A lil edible, a lot of trash tv, and buying too many things for my cat who won’t reject my love
16. Applying to jobs in Antarctica. Not joking.
17. Getting good head
18. Skipping rocks
19. Therapy
20. Therapy
21. Going to therapy
22. More therapy
23. Enrolling in therapy immediately
24. Meditating and therapy
25. Going no contact immediately
26. Block, block, block
27. Checking her “Recently played artists” on Spotify to see if she’s thinking of me
28. Texting a different ex
29. Rewatching Grey’s Anatomy
30. Rewatching The L Word
31. Rewatching the Willow and Tara seasons of Buffy
32. Watching The Thing
33. Studio Ghibli movie marathon
34. Getting very invested in a time-consuming new hobby
35. Making Sapphic art
36. Alternating between my erratic playlist and my crying playlist and then going to every queer bar event
37. Quitting my social media for a year
38. Pretending I wasn’t even that into her + ice cream
39. Eating Neapolitan ice cream and listening to jazz
40. The X-Files and Crossfit
41. Drinks and casual sex
42. A new relationship
43. Getting a classic DIY haircut and dye job
44. Moving to a different country worked like a charm
45. Moving two towns over
46. Running while listening to the saddest songs ever
47. Sad music
48. So much sad music
49. Singing in the shower
50. Crying and/or headbanging to queer breakup music
51. Writing songs
52. Writing songs to get the mad out and then writing songs to get the sad out
53. Buying a new throw blanket from Ikea
54. Friends
55. Calling my friends
56. Hanging out with friends
57. Kissing my friends
58. Crying to friend who will give me advice they defs don’t follow that I probably gave them
59. Flying home and crying on my best friend’s couch
60. Tacos! Lots of tacos!
61. Finding a new piece of queer media to obsess over so I can feel my feelings
62. Music. Friends. Dance. Sex.
63. One night standssssssssssss
64. Rooooooad triiiiiiiiip
65. Getting with the ex of my ex
66. Going OUT AND ABOUT to all the gay bars and events
67. Mainlining queer fanfic
68. Crying while driving on the Blue Ridge Parkway
69. Journaling in the library and volunteering
70. Joining a queer rec league (thanks soccer!!!)
71. Reading every article in the breakup section of Autostraddle
72. I don’t know please help me
You Need Help: I’m Not Sure I Want To Be Friends With My Ex
Q:
Hi there,
I’ve been feeling pretty guilty, because I know us queer people pride ourselves on becoming friends with our exes…but I’m not sure I’m interested in this specific relationship without the intimacy of dating.
So I started dating this person last summer, and we had a pretty great time with it. I felt like we were moving not too fast, not too slow. But also, we were having a lot of sex; not to often, but enough that it shaped the relationship. I liked getting to know them but I have to admit that the physical intimacy (it’s been pretty rare in my life) was a good part of it, and there were a lot of great convos around sex.
Over a month ago, they came to me and said they didn’t want to have sex anymore, and to sum it up, wanted to start being friends (we were never really friends in the first place). It was not necessarily easy for me, but I wanted to respect their decision and give friendship a shot, so we kept spending a lot of time together, sleeping (actually sleeping) together and doing all sorts of activities. The problem is that recently I’ve realised it wasn’t working out for me. I still feel that I want something romantic with them, and I can’t seem to be satisfied with being friends. Also I’ve realized this person seems to mostly show their vulnerability during sex and is very hard to access emotionally outside of it. I feel disconnected from them and mostly sad, sometimes frustrated. I’ve tried to talk to them about it but they kept saying that they didn’t think about it, and everything felt fine.
I don’t know if this a good idea to keep trying, or is it okay to recognize that we worked as lovers but not as friends…or should I just take some distance and see how things change?
A:
Queer culture all around us tells us we can be friends with our exes. For some people, this transition from whatever it was (romantic, sexual, etc.) to friends is pretty simple. That has never been the case for me, and I’m here to assure you that you don’t need to be friends with your ex. I’m not friends with a single one of my exes. While I admit that sometimes I’m jealous of folks who can stay platonically close to people they’ve dated, I look back on how all my relationships ended and can rest in knowing that person is out of my life for a reason. I realize my opinion is in the minority, but I’ll always stand behind folks who want to end relationships for good.
It’s particularly difficult to maintain a friendship with someone you have feelings for or someone whose intentions are mismatched from yours. From how you’re describing the nature of your relationship, it sounds like you had a great sexual connection. You found someone you had natural chemistry with and could talk to about any sex questions. I might be off base here, but I get the sense that these sexual feelings translated into romantic feelings for you…which is totally fine! What I’m noticing here is that this may not have happened for your partner. While I certainly can’t speak for this other person, the way you’re framing their reason for wanting to be friends makes me think that they consider your relationship mostly sexual. Many people enter into various types of dating/sex/situationships for different reasons, and it can be tricky when you and the person you’re in it with want different things. Even if you just enjoyed the sex and wanted it to stay slightly sexual/slightly romantic, this person wants sex or friends, nothing in between. Just like some people can be friends with exes, some people can have relationship dynamics that are just friends who have sex occasionally.
You mentioned your ex/friend mostly shows their vulnerability during sex “and is very hard to access emotionally outside of it.” They sound somewhat emotionally unavailable, especially since their response to you wanting to talk is “everything is fine.” Everything is not fine for you, and a friend with good intentions would respect your relationship enough to enter into this dialogue. Maybe they’re not ready to do this, and that’s okay, too. If they aren’t ready to even enter into an intimate platonic conversation, it makes me question if you’ll ever feel satisfied in any type of relationship with them.
You’re asking all the right questions; Should I keep trying? Should I accept closure? Should I wait it out and see how things change? I’m not going to tell you what to do. Only you will know what feels good in your body. Maybe get curious about how this is all making you feel. How is your body responding to to being just friends? Do you feel any sense of relief when you think about ending things for good? Do you feel like you want to gift them your patience while they figure things out? Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to lean into your gut feeling. As someone who puts off making decisions so much that the decision is often made for me, I can assure you that even if you wait for something to happen, that is a decision as well. Mull over how each of these options affect you and remember you deserve the love and time you’re willing to give to others.
You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.
Untethered: Ghosts of Friendships Past
“Wait…are you going to be around for Christmas?”
My ears perk up when my friend who lives up the street says this. We’re drinking peppermint hot cocoa in my kitchen after a volunteer meeting.
“Yeah, I am!” Does she want to do something?
“Can you watch the kitties?”
“Of course! I’d love to.” I don’t miss a beat. That would’ve been embarrassing.
There’s something that stings, that tastes a little metallic, about going through a grocery checkout line with a 12-pack of Diet Faygo Cola and a single microwave meal while contemplating the fact that the woman who once fired you along with an entire theater staff — for doing insubordinate-y things like pushing back against white supremacy culture internally — has a show premiering in January. While I text the aforementioned friend about wondering whether I should show up to the green room party like some kind of off-brand Maleficent, I also tell her about the crushing weight a recent friend hang left lodged in my stomach.
“I found a pack of cigarettes from last winter in my coat when I put it back on the other day. I never check my pockets before retiring a coat for the winter. I’m not sure many people do. The discovery sent me back through time like a stone off a slingshot.
It was a different time, a different brand, a moment where I was distinctly miserable. Still, I had a ring on my finger, and I had someone to spend my winter nights with. It feels like I have an infestation of shadows, now, like they’re spreading around the house like mold.”
It’s funny, the kind of symbolic weight someone can hold in the course of events in our lives without ever knowing it. F (and the little dog) were the last two people my ex and I saw together as a couple. In fact, it was the fight after leaving F’s place that ultimately led to the breakup, to my finally calling it. Seeing F again was a kind of closing of the loop, and also, a way of moving past her feeling so defined in my mind by that moment in time.
So, it naturally came up pretty early on in the conversation that we hadn’t seen each other since the breakup. Without much prompting, she shared, with emphasis, she had heard “allll about the breakup.”
“All about it?” I was a wee bit taken aback. I think I looked it, too. She went on to explain, again, that she wasn’t taking sides, that she valued her friendship with me, that she knew breakups were hard on both ends, including the end of the person who initiated the split. She also went on to explain all of the ways my ex had been a good friend to her, which I was aware of. If I’m interpreting what she meant by that, it was to note for me why she’d been willing to listen, maybe also to signal to me that she understood perfectly well that there are two sides to everything.
Deep down, I knew my ex probably wouldn’t hold back when it came to sharing whatever she wanted to with mutual friends. Having confirmation of this suspicion was something completely different. Of course, I expected her to talk to her close friends, the ones she’d known for years who’d been her friends since before I knew her, to her therapist — I was talking to my sister and my therapist, after all — but to hear F had been the recipient of enough detail that she would hold her hands up and shake her head, that was a knife finding its way into the meat between my ribs. Like scurvy, it reopened old wounds I thought were scarred over. Since that hang, I’ve had the sensation of being a doll whose limbs are becoming unsewn, a dissociation from my body, from my sense of self.
The hang was good, honest, fun, deep, but the revelation hung over me the whole time. I confessed to F that she was the only mutual friend who’d been “more” of a friend of my ex who’d maintained any kind of contact with me, that it meant a lot. She asked me outright if I’d been feeling isolated. I cried at the table, over our winter spiced beers, but then recovered as best I could. The little dog sat in my lap.
And then, to my absolute horror, I listened to the door open and shut, complete with bells jangling. My jacket stayed on. I grabbed a weapon and looked around the corner. Nothing looked amiss. I checked the door. It was locked. I checked the rest of the house. No one was there.
With my heart beating in my throat, I texted a friend. Play “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” for Bill, the Boomer man ghost who lives with me, they said. I did, and the doowop playlist that ensued made for some slapstick music to be haunted to.
We both loved horror, and we both were talking about, discussing horror from a queer perspective in the early 2010s when every new movie we unearthed and absorbed into our intra-relationship discourse felt like the revelation that it was. I received House of Psychotic Women as a gift and appeared in an interview in the written portion of my ex’s MFA thesis. The holidays were no exception. One year, while living in the Bay Area, I took us to go see The Winchester House, but on Christmas Eve, lit up with Victorian-style Christmas trees. At one point, the electric system got overloaded, and the tour was plunged into darkness. Someone screamed.
I got called a twonk recently (complimentary). It reminded me of two twonks who were once couple friends of my ex and I. One of them was obsessed with Black Christmas, the 1974 version where the lesbian stuff is subtext. But that was what we had! We had subtext, and we watched it to mark the season. When this pair of couple friends with the same name, we’ll call them C&C, didn’t speak to me ever again, not once, after the breakup despite being friends for seven years, despite my being friends with C1 prior to my being in the relationship I was in, I was devastated. But I should have anticipated it. My ex had laid a lot of groundwork prior to our breakup, talking about me in so many ways I didn’t realize — because what kind of person in a relationship would badmouth their partner to mutual friends? I also shouldn’t have been that surprised because C1 and I did once have a temporary friendship breakup that was precipitated by a heated disagreement over our interpretations of The Bad Seed. I should have probably seen it coming, but it still hurt, nonetheless.
C1 hailed Black Christmas as the first American slasher, but there’s actually one before it, and it’s a made for TV movie starring Jessica Walter.
I watched Home for the Holidays (1972) for the first time last year after hearing about it on a podcast. You can currently find it on YouTube. It’s the right amount of twisty and contains very little actual gore, but is also the kind of deep, sonorous voices that actresses carried in a certain era. Four women, sisters, return home to their ailing father who’s convinced his much younger (new-ish) wife is poisoning him. Everyone is catty, dad included. And then, instead of being some kind of murder mystery, we just…get all slasher-y! It’s a missing link in the chain, a precursor to both Black Christmas and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and also a little reminder for me that we really don’t ever know the whole story of something, of what was actually “first,” or of what led to something happening, not usually. It’s also a reminder, if we’re on our Being Grumpy About Old Enemies Shit, that sometimes shitty people, like C1, are wrong and stubborn and more interested in validating whatever they’re interested in preserving in their worldview than any kind of truth. And then there are people like F who know that things are always complicated, and that you can value people as individuals, even if their relationship doesn’t work out.
I’ve got plans tonight to watch either Black Christmas or Home for the Holidays with a friend. It’s a toss up. But, either way, it’ll be a new little memory, something that I hope eases the soreness a little bit.
The Unexpected Loneliness of Getting Divorced
This isn’t the first time I’ve found myself sitting in Arthur’s office. He probably doesn’t remember me, but I came to see him a few years ago when my mom got divorced. She’d given me her wedding ring from her ex-husband and told me, “I don’t care what you do with it. I just never want to see it again, and don’t tell me what happened to it.”
I picked this particular jewelry buyer, not because they give better prices than other shops in New York City’s diamond district, but because they actually have an office. An office with a receptionist with whom I can make an appointment, and where I can sit in a comfortable, air-conditioned waiting room while I wait for Arthur to reduce the value of my marriage to the total carat weight of the items I’ve brought to sell him today.
I’m a 31-year-old Black, queer woman, quasi-single mom, and I’m getting divorced.
Where I was once surrounded on all sides by leagues of support, I suddenly found myself standing in the sand alone. The people who were once part of my support system were suddenly standing in judgment of me, comparing notes and making assumptions in group chats I wasn’t invited to join.
One of my favorite podcasters, Dan Savage, likes to give a piece of advice that fits perfectly with this scenario: “You’re going to tell them one thing about you, and the way they respond will tell you everything you need to know about them.”
For my married friends, watching my marriage fall apart was like catching a glimpse of themselves in the hall mirror and wincing at what they saw reflected back to them. It hit too close to home: a professional queer couple of color, a two-mom family with an adorable toddler, trying and failing to patch the cracks in their relationship.
Instead of leaning in to offer support, they dissected my approach, vultures circling overhead as a lion takes down its prey.
“Well, what did you do wrong?”
“How are you going to fix it?”
“You can’t just leave things like this; I need to know what you’re going to do. I need to know how this is going to end.”
That brazen sense of entitlement to a neat and tidy end to my marital problems was somehow both comforting and insulting. In their own twisted way, these once-friends of mine were trying to provide a vote of confidence. As a highly educated and well-heeled group of professional lesbians, they were used to getting their way. If they wanted something, they made it happen. If they didn’t want to deal with something, they threw money at it, and the problem disappeared.
You can do it, they were trying to say. Just work harder, complain less, and fix it.
I didn’t know how to tell them that I was just as disappointed as they were that a stiff upper lip and a strong cocktail weren’t going to fix my marriage.
They didn’t want to hear about the hours I spent begging my ex-wife to talk to me, to tell me that we were still in this together. They weren’t interested in how volatile things were at home, how hard it was to leave the house and put on a brave face while living through the painful, slow, inexorable death of a decade-long relationship.
Deep down, I wonder if they were afraid that the honesty it takes to face the fact that a relationship needs to end might be contagious. If they stood too close to me, they might realize they wanted to take a closer look in that mirror too, but they didn’t have the guts to deal with what they might see.
The months of painful cohabitation and strained co-parenting interactions I endured with my ex, while waiting for our lawyers to disentangle the strands of our now-to-be separate lives, made the judgment and rejection I experienced at the hands of my married ex-friends look like a cake walk. Little did I know, the courage it took to ask for what I needed was nothing compared to the courage it would take to withstand what was to come.
If you’ve spent any time in the city, you know that New Yorkers are infamous for their ability to ignore each other on the subway. So, while I frantically searched for tissues – and on one notable occasion, a panty liner – to stem the flow of blood gushing out of my nose and attempted to salvage my outfit with a Tide to-go pen, everyone around me went on with their lives like they didn’t notice me, my distress, or the biohazard I was working very hard to keep from impacting those around me.
In some ways, the loneliness of my divorce was a lot like these nosebleeds – it caught me completely off guard, and I suddenly felt like there was a spotlight on me, relentlessly highlighting something I was desperately trying to clean up before it got out of hand.
With this newfound bravery, I used the harshness of that spotlight to look at myself and my choices through a different lens. It wasn’t always pleasant, but it was necessary. I took a hard look at the life we’d built together. I had become so used to pouring all of myself into my marriage and our little family, that I had almost forgotten who I was before I took on the roles of wife and mother.
It was painful to see the ways I traded my own happiness for the stability of married life. Without realizing it, I had started to conflate the two: if my marriage was stable, then I must be happy. Unfortunately, that stability curdled into stagnation, and the sense of comfort I used to derive from that stability started to feel more and more like quicksand. If I wasn’t careful, it would swallow me whole.
When I talk to my mom about my divorce, she tells me how proud she is of me. “I’ve been married three times,” she told me, “and it’s taken me over 65 years and three divorces to figure out what makes me happy. It is so wonderful to see you asking what makes you happy in your 30s. Don’t wait until you’re my age to figure it out.”
After spending so much of her life pouring into others, my mom is finally pouring into herself. For the first time, she has built a life that prioritizes her happiness over the happiness of others. Those decisions haven’t always been the most popular or well-received, but the joy I see in her face and hear in her voice makes it clear that they were the right ones.
On hard days, I remember the happiness my mom has cultivated for herself, despite the criticism of others. She didn’t let the stability or routine comforts of relationships she’d outgrown keep her stuck in a pattern at the expense of her own well-being. She took a risk, and put herself first. She was brave.
Some days, it’s hard for me to be brave. Getting divorced is exhausting, time-consuming, and expensive. Dear god, it is so expensive. Holding space for myself and my daughter as I navigate this process takes a level of strength that I didn’t know I had, right up until I needed it. In those moments, when I’m not sure I can hold anything else the world throws at me, I remember that I didn’t just make this decision for me. I made this decision for my daughter. I want to show her what it looks like to choose yourself, even if it means disappointing others, even if it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. I want her to know that she is brave, too.
Every time I open it, I find something new to help me think about and process my divorce.
When she talks about her decision to finally tell Craig she wants a divorce, Glennon says, “I don’t owe Craig the rest of my life, but I do owe him my honesty. It’ll be hard, but it’ll finally be the right kind of hard.”
Being the one to say my marriage needed to end was the hardest, loneliest decision I’ve ever made. Every day, it is hard to wake up and navigate this new, messy, world I live in, doing my best to make sense of my life in this new context.
But for the first time in a long time, it’s the right kind of hard.
You Need Help: How Do I Get Over the First Woman I Slept With?
feature image photo by Maskot via Getty Images
Q:
I’ve had short relationships here and there with girls but when I met this one we fit almost perfectly it seemed. She was unique and liked her own things different from me, but we also shared interests and had great sexual compatibility — and she was the first and only person I’ve slept with. Even then, we only slept together twice because of circumstances before she called things off. It felt like a sudden uprooting and I felt like a new door was just opened up and then slammed as soon as it opened.
I should’ve known better because she had just gotten out of a bad relationship with a biphobic and mentally abusive ex (she’s bi herself) and she said she wasn’t sure she wanted anything — especially since she’d be going to another state for six months. Despite all of that I got feelings for her and it seemed like she returned those feelings — talked about me visiting her, things we should buy for sex, everything. Then one day I think she got overwhelmed because I sent too many memes on Instagram — I scroll through it to pass the dead time at work and send things that remind me of my friends to them.
We lasted as “friends” for a little less than a month — her level of communication greatly decreased while mine stayed the same. Eventually she stopped responding all together and when I asked if we were good she said to send less stuff, so I did. But I didn’t realize she meant send nothing at all. Eventually I asked if anything changed and she said I wasn’t matching her energy at all, but I had kept the same energy we always had. I asked her a week or two later if I could fix things so we could still be friends and she saw my message and never responded, then removed me as a follower and unfriended me on everything. I was at a bar partying with some friends when I noticed and I followed her again because my drunk self thought maybe I accidentally unfollowed her, and the next morning she blocked me.
It’s been 4 months now, but I still feel the same as I did day one. A month ago she blocked me on Spotify (I still listened to our mixed playlist, but I don’t know how she’d know I did), and then last week she friended me on tiktok (I already followed her long ago, she followed me back last week) and then blocked me. It feels like she hates me, and hates me as much as the first day she blocked me since she keeps dragging it on. I’ve not tried to reach out, but I constantly think about how when she’s back to our state I want to reach out and text her asking what’s up, I guess in some vain hope that the time and distance may have given time for things to settle down. I think these feelings are made all the more worse because she was the first person I’ve slept with, and it feels like a harsh case of right place, wrong time.
Would it be wrong to reach out? If/when that happens, or even if I don’t do that, how do I get over her? It felt like we fit perfectly like puzzle pieces until I suffocated her.
A:
I’ll start by saying I don’t think you should reach out. I just really don’t think it’ll give you what you want, and I think the only way to truly get over this person is to create a lot of space and distance — space and distance she seemingly wants as well.
I have a lot of empathy for you in this situation but also for her. I don’t think she’s been super direct in her communication, and some of her actions have technically been confusing or contradictory, like blocking you on some platforms only to then follow you on TikTok…and then block you again. But I think you have to accept that blocking you on a platform in the first place is a pretty direct sign she doesn’t want to speak with you. It doesn’t necessarily mean you did something wrong or she has super negative feelings about the relationship you had. I think sometimes people just cope with their emotions by taking extreme actions. Now, she probably was frustrated by you following her back after she soft-blocked you, but I also understand why one might do that accidentally. Being soft-blocked is not a super direct form of communication and can be more ambiguous than a full block. But I’ve been soft-blocked by folks before, and sure, it can hurt. But I ultimately have to just accept it as a boundary someone is setting.
Her telling you you weren’t matching her energy is similarly a somewhat indirect way of communicating. She asked you to send less things, when really what she meant was send nothing. She should have been clear about that, but I also think it’s possible she wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted or didn’t want to hurt you. Ironically though, it’s more hurtful to not be direct and then to lash out at the other person for not honoring a boundary you didn’t really know was set in the first place. While I wish she’d been a bit more direct, I do think that her decrease in communication was the first signal to maybe pull back a little. I do think sometimes with early relationships, in casual dating situations, or even in friendships it can be important to pay attention to communication cues, especially because we all are at different places of how well we communicate our needs/wants.
I think she wants time and space, and while I don’t think her ways of communicating that have been perfect, I do think they’ve ultimately been clear. You don’t block someone who you want to continue a friendship with. If I’m being honest, I doubt sending her too many memes was the original turning point for her when it came to your relationship and dynamic. It sounds like something else may have been going on there, which is especially hard for you to know given the combination of 1. not a ton of direct communication and 2. long distance.
Whatever her reasons are for not wanting to pursue a relationship with you, I think she has shown repeatedly now that she doesn’t want to talk. Unfortunately, closure can be elusive in situations like this. Do I think she owes a bit of communication to you, especially since you were friends before? I do. But I at the same time think it’s acceptable for her to set boundaries with you if she isn’t ready to talk or if she’s dealing with complicated emotions she’s still working through. I think it’s complicated and nuanced. And I really just think you have to let her come to you next instead of trying to talk to her. Which means you also have to accept that she might never reach out. You can also feel free to set your own boundaries though! If her following you after blocking you makes you feel weird/bad, you can ask her not to. You get to have a say if she tries to come back into your life and it gets confusing or feels fraught. It never feels good when it feels like someone is merely keeping us on the backburner.
For now, I think you need to focus on yourself and not on her. She might not give your closure, but you can seek closure on your own. Send the memes you would have sent to her to your friends. Try to minimize speculation about why she’s making her choices and focus on your own choices. Sometimes, the fit can feel perfect but it isn’t, especially when a relationship is cut short at the beginning, when New Relationship Energy is at its strongest. I don’t think you need to blame yourself for “suffocating her.” Again, I doubt that’s the main reason she started pulling away in the first place. Blaming yourself for the dissolution of the relationship isn’t going to get you anywhere. But neither will repeated attempts at contacting her, which at a certain point becomes you ignoring her boundaries. I know this relationship didn’t last very long, but I think you should take the time to grieve it like a proper breakup. Focusing your energy on moving on and healing rather than trying to reconnect is the best path forward — and not just for you, but for her, too.
I think you can hold and honor the incredible experience you had with her and how meaningful it was for you to sleep with her without needing to continue to pursue communication. What’s happening now doesn’t have to take away from how special that was for you. Hold onto your truth and remember the good parts instead of focusing so much on the aftermath. Just because it ended doesn’t mean it wasn’t a meaningful thing, one you can carry with you into the future as you work toward moving forward instead of only looking back in frustration and confusion.
You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.
Untethered: On Miss Havisham-Style Decision-Making
Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
I’ve been sleeping in my office, right next to the shelves where I keep Autostraddle Plus perks and shipping supplies, since mid-June. The first night I rolled out my camping mat onto the old pine floor, I tried to self-soothe by watching more of The Ultimatum (the queer one). This is, in fact, not comfort TV. My ex and I worked out a separation agreement over the course of those months and signed it in August. Just this past Saturday, she moved out, and I slept in my bed again for the first time in almost three months.
She left whatever she didn’t want, discards from our life together and from her life before we knew each other. There’s a motorcycle helmet in a box. We’ve never ridden a motorcycle together — that’s a different ex. I have to go through each room, throw away and donate things, take debris from our interrupted home reno to the dump, re-sort and rearrange whatever’s left. I need more lamps.
At least this room has an overhead light, I think to myself while turning a light on to take a look. The fixture sparks, and the light goes out with a plink. This room also has no outlets. Now I don’t know how long it will be dark in there. Until I can get to it, I guess. What I really need is an electrician.
Deciding to stay in the house I’ve lived in since 2019 came from a series of factors: a chance encounter with someone at a gathering who said she had hoped to buy a house here but now can’t afford it, knowing people who are only able to buy houses because they’re getting foreclosures and gutting them themselves, living in shells they painstakingly re-build. My house is, while relatively affordable and in need of work, not a gut job. Then there was this column, and the challenges I set for myself, to put myself out there, to go to events, to make new friends and try new activities. (Like, guys, update: I think I might really like kickboxing?) As my therapist said, “Pittsburgh is really autistic and queer.” And Pittsburgh is so full of cool people trying their best that, in spite of its hellish infrastructure and systemic problems, it’s also my home of eight years. In unusual-to-Pittsburgh circumstances, both of my longest-term exes have also left the city and the state, so even though I might see mutual friends or acquaintances, I’ll never run into them. When I’m crossing a steel bridge or re-reading familiar graffiti in a bathroom, it’s comforting to know when out and about, in terms of my exes, at most, I’m only going to encounter ghosts.
And now the house is quiet, except for its ghosts. I woke up this morning to the bells I have hung on the front door jangling. No one was at the door, nor could anyone have walked through. Correction: I woke up from an hour nap I managed to squeeze in after breakfast and before work because, for the past two nights, I’ve only been able to sleep for about three hours.
A lot of what I’m remembering is Mya, my dog, who died just over a year ago in July 2022, in my arms, on the kitchen floor. It was 7 a.m., and she had given me one last wag, one last faint flick of her paws before she went. I held her while she got stiff and cold, and then my ex and I got her cleaned up and brushed, lit a candle in her dog bowl, and held space for her. I could not call the vet until 9 a.m. When I called, the vet told us they could cremate her, but that we would need to bring her in. We would have to bring an 80 pound [dead] dog down over 20 front steps and load her in the back of my old Subaru. My ex and I wrapped Mya in a blanket. I tucked one of her favorite stuffed toys (which she was gentle with and so kept forever) in between her paws. Then, we carried her down the front steps, concealed in the blanket.
It looked, friends, like two queers were disposing of an 80 pound body. I know this because someone waiting at the bus stop saw us come down the stairs with a body wrapped in a blanket, promptly turned on her heel, looked the other way, and minded her business with her back completely away from us, tucked as far around the corner as she could go without missing her bus. I still laugh about that.
I’m not used to staying in one living space for this long. I know it’s something people do, that they walk past — in some cases — a space where someone died or a cabinet that got chipped when two kids who are now grown were wrestling or their grandmother’s favorite sitting spot for decades after these events. It’s not a practice I’ve had to keep. Now, it seems like it might be. Right now, it feels like I’ve chosen to shroud myself in all of my recent past, to wear the scraps of my past relationship around me like Miss Havisham wears her wedding dress.
I know the worst of this initial wave will pass. These thoughts have only seeped in through the cracks because the newness of the quiet let them in. The hum of the refrigerator and the squeak of the breaks of the city bus on its route are not enough to keep them out right now, but in time, I think I’ll fill the space with more of the current, living, breathing me.
Part of this unease is rooted in the fact that I’ve never lived alone. I’ve always had roommates or a partner, people to please and consider and work around. But I made this choice because I knew I needed the space. I have old patterns of letting myself get smaller in a living space, of trying to please other people and then wondering why I don’t feel comfortable even hanging a picture up.
Now, no one can hear me talk to myself (except Bill the Actual Ghost, I guess), and no one cares if I want to pace around endlessly. The other day, after an informal kickboxing lesson in a friend’s garage, I cleared the kitchen floor so I could practice. No one needed the kitchen for anything else. Once in a while, I remember to relax my shoulders. I can work from different rooms, now, and I don’t wake up in the same room I work in. It doesn’t matter if I need to turn the light on at 3 am. and read. I’m not bothering anyone but myself. If I get a shred of a minute, I think I’m going to start putting together a pinterest page so that I can think about slowly decorating the place, over time. Right now, it’s all books on the floor and upturned boxes and empty echoing walls with outlets that don’t work and studs that need to be crow-barred off and cracks that need to be patched, but I’m dreaming of dark themes and whimsical touches, maybe finding some furniture on garbage days and at estate sales, and figuring out how I want to organize my bookshelves. I’ll also have to find a spot for this painting of Mya (by Riese’s girlfriend Gretchen).
Painting by Gretchen
You Need Help: How Do I Overcome the Feeling I’ll Never Find Someone After a Breakup?
feature image photo by Kathrin Ziegler via Getty Images
Q:
I was broken up with recently. It was sudden and unbelievably heartbreaking. Especially because from my end it seemed like it didn’t need to happen (common in these situations I’m sure). All that said it was relatively amicable and there’s no hard feelings on either side (I hope anyway). As painful as it is I respect their decision.
Among all the complicated things I’m feeling right now one that looms over the rest is a deep sense that I will never be as happy with another person as I was with them. I know this is ridiculously common after a break up but I can’t emphasize how real and mildly terrifying it feels at this moment. I know no relationship is perfect but you’ll have to believe me when I say it was a really wonderful relationship. I would hope they felt the same at least for some time.
I think a big reason for this is my very first queer relationship was deeply dysfunctional and I was often mistreated. I didn’t realize how bad it was until after it ended, and when it did end I was cast aside like I was nothing. I guess when you don’t have a reference for what’s healthy anything within the realm of “normal” is going to feel like paradise.
When I think of dating: all I have in my head is this belief that most people are just various shades of the worst aspect of my original ex or that most people don’t want the same things in life that I do or the people I do vibe with I wont be attracted to or [insert any other petty BS here].
I feel That my recent ex was a rare exception. I look at the list of things I loved about the relationship and things I know I need and it feels like an incredibly long checklist no one could hope to fulfill. And I can’t bring myself to accept anything less.
Even though I know statistically it’s possible I question if such a person exists or to have any chance maybe I’ll have to move to another city.
I have no issues being single right now but I worry even when I feel better and choose to date again I’m going to take this negative mentality with me and make the whole experience miserable. Not only that but if there is any chance of us being friends (I would like to but I don’t know how they feel right now) then this is something I’m going to have to deal with.
How do I approach dating in a healthier way? How can I deal with this particular mindset right now whilst I’m in the midst of post break up despair?
A:
I know this is frustrating advice to receive when you’re still very much living in it, in those perilous swamps of immediately after a breakup, but this is one of those things that will feel less acute with time. Especially because the breakup was sudden, I understand why you’re clinging to the good parts of it and then extrapolating from that that you’ll never find someone who is as good of a fit again. This also especially makes sense given the context of your previous bad relationship. I do think time is going to help a lot with the healing process and with getting your mentality in a more positive and open place for dating again, but I think in the meantime, there’s still some intentional work you can do to shift some of your thinking and framing.
For starters, this is something I push a lot in these advice columns: I think we all need to shift away from the idea that the sole definition of a successful relationship is one that lasts forever. This relationship that ended did not fail. The fact that you felt so comfortable and cared for in this most relationship means it was a good relationship. It hasn’t ruined your ability to find someone else. And you’re not doomed to never find someone who makes you feel similarly. Mourn and grieve the relationship, yes. But also don’t view it as a failure or anything holding you back now. I think it’s actually a great thing that you’re so sure of what you want and need in a relationship in the wake of this one. That’s really important growth and self-knowledge that you’ve developed. And it should actually make it easier to start dating (eventually — whenever you’re ready!) again, not harder.
I know you write that you feel like your relationship checklist is too long for anyone to fulfill, but let’s shut that down as well. First, it’s technically true that it’s hard to find one person who can be every single thing we want in a relationship, but that’s true across the board for everyone — not just for you. It’s why friendships are so important when we talk about relationships; partners often can’t provide everything all the time that we need in terms of care, intimacy, etc. Second, I think it’s time to actually put this list to paper, if you haven’t already. And I think using a tiered system would be best. What are your relationship dealbreakers? What are the things that feel non-negotiable? Next, what are the things that are important to you that feel high priority that you would want a potential partner to fulfill at least 75% of? Next, what are the other priorities and desires you have for a relationship that matter but aren’t necessarily dealbreakers or that you can see yourself compromising on? By actually formalizing the list, you might see that, actually, it’s all pretty reasonable stuff to expect in a relationship.
When you do decide to date, it’s not like you’re going to present this list to a potential partner, but I think it’ll be good for you to have it in the back of your head. You can rule out people who don’t meet your dealbreaker needs. You can ask others what they look for in a relationship and see if that’s compatible with not only what you want but what you can provide. Be open to the possibility that some people might surprise you or not fulfill all your needs but satisfy the most important ones and go from there. Having “data” on yourself when it comes to dating is so helpful. And again, I think that’s another good thing you can take out of this last relationship even though it ended. You saw that you could find a loving, healthy relationship after a dysfunctional one. It was possible then, and it’s possible again. Knowing a lot about what you want in a relationship doesn’t make you high maintenance; it just makes you self-assured, actually. I think you can transform this lack of confidence about dating in general into confidence moving forward.
Again, I do think this will take time. You’re still healing from the breakup, and it’s indeed natural to feel this feeling of despair that you might never find happiness again. It is indeed a common post-breakup sentiment, but that doesn’t make the pain of it any less real or urgent. You were happy, and you miss that happiness. You wonder if you can get there again. I strongly believe you can. It’s not your long list of needs or your fear of replicating your previous bad relationship that are holding you back; it’s your seeing those things as impenetrable obstacles that is. It’s okay to bring a lot of expectations to the dating process, so long as you’re focusing on the things that are genuinely most important to you and not just self-sabotaging or turning your most recent ex into an impossible standard for others to meet.
Because you said it yourself: It’s possible you were romanticizing aspects of this most recent relationship because anything “normal” would seem like paradise after your previous one. I don’t think it would do you any good to focus on anything negative in your last relationship, but I think it’s important to remember all relationships have their compromises, their moments of tension, their things to work out over time, especially because we all change over time. Your needs or desires in a relationship can shift. Your recent ex was the right person for you until that was no longer true (because even if the breakup was initiated by your ex, that still means the relationship fit was no longer working, because you don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with you — or at least, you shouldn’t).
Give it time, but also put some real effort toward reframing and taking pen to paper to write what it is you really want in a relationship. Then step away from that and give it more time. I’m rooting for you to find that happiness again, and I feel strongly that you will. Listen to yourself. Don’t shut down your own needs before you even have a chance to see if they can be met.
You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.
Untethered: In Pittsburgh Everyone Knows Everyone and I’m Sure I Do Too
Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
I hold the puppy in my arms while strangers mill around outside of a taco truck. I’d run into my friend at a gallery crawl / art walk type of thing that takes place every first Friday of the month. This 2.5 lb creature, who is only supposed to grow to be five lbs and is covered in silky black fur, snuggles in my arms and sniffs me with his teeny nose. His mom had handed him to me as soon as I told her about the breakup.
“Here, you need to hold him,” she told me.
He rests his head on my forearm for a time before fidgeting for a return to his mom’s arms. The puppy’s mom is another of the many mutual friends of my ex and me. Pittsburgh is often called “The Biggest Small Town” because it is actually a difficult task to meet someone you aren’t connected to in some way via just a few hop skips or jumps. You are almost always going to run into more people than you think you will when going out to any event. So, naturally, I’ve been running into connection after tenuous connection that is difficult to navigate.
Then, there’s the fact that I almost didn’t recognize my friend because she’d donned a long straight-haired wig over her usual curls, completely changing her profile. To make it even more difficult, she was wearing a new pair of glasses with a Completely Different Shape. Friends, I have to tell you, I am mostly recognizing you via a combination of context, hair, gait, voice and style. The part of my brain that clicks and tells me who someone is just by seeing them has always hovered at around 25% or so of what would be optimum functionality. It’s called face blindness. And yes, this has led to a bevy, a list I could write but won’t, of embarrassing incidents and unintended social faux pas. It makes it so that every social situation has the potential to devolve into a bizarre puzzle game where the cost of losing is potentially hurting someone else’s feelings. Still, I do my best out here, as we all must.
Before I held the puppy in my arms, I’d actually come from the gallery my ex-husband-who-is-not-my-most-recent-breakup-but-here-we-are-mentioning-him used to manage. He’s long since left town, and it has a new manager who I don’t know. But who did I run into, but a person who I fully believe was my ex husband’s old boss! But I’m still not sure that’s who it was! This is someone who went to our wedding, who I’d attended fundraisers with, who I had met on multiple occasions. And still, I was standing there like: “according to context this person is surely X and he definitely has his head shaved like X always did but like, I don’t remember this middle aged white man having this face”!! If I had to draw him, I would have drawn a completely different looking person! I left hoping it was who I thought it was. I didn’t call him by name because, well, you never know.
Back to the Taco Truck with the adorable puppy and company! I feel the need to explain to you that this couple is kind of split, that my ex knows the puppy’s dad, the musician of the pair, and I’ve helped the arts leader (puppy mom) of the pair and her team with fundraising over the years. They’re older, parental figures to us. We’ve eaten with them on countless occasions, attended each others’ events, and know a network of the same people. I helped her write the letter she posted on social media that eventually helped her get a new kidney. Unlike some people who were squarely friends with one or the other of us, I felt like, here, I could at least claim that we all had our own relationships to each other. I can see in my friend’s wide eyes that she’s shocked by the news of the breakup. We were the kind of stable-seeming couple that people thought would be together forever. I mean, I thought that at one point. Now, I’m navigating each of these social connections, testing the waters, seeing who might still want to be a part of my life and have me in theirs. “Seriously. Don’t be a stranger,” she tells me, her eyes locking right on mine, for emphasis. I believe she means it, and I start to wrap my head around a world where at least some of our mutual friends may still want to know me.
Oddly, then, maybe emboldened, maybe just somehow intoxicated by a couple of tacos, I move onto a gallery owned and run by a mutual friend. I approached and, at first, in the dark, and I think — especially — as I was alone and not in what he would have recognized as my paired form, the owner doesn’t know it’s me right away. Relatable.
He starts to give a spiel, “This is an adults-only exhibit — oh…” he catches who I am while I’m smiling at him, laughing a little, because, of course, he knows I’m game for whatever indie video game art he’s curated. He smiles huge, and I’m highly amused to watch someone else go through the same steps of recognition I always have to. I step aside while he shouts the full extent of his exhibit’s forewarning at newcomers behind me. We catch up for a moment, and I can’t tell if he’s heard the news. This time, though, I don’t share. If it’s already spread through all my ex’s friends, then he’ll know either now or later.
I go in. And friend, listen, I like weird art, gross art, confrontational art, and I am beyond fucking delighted by the first thing I see — a video game done up in what I can only describe as the hyper-realistic, “gritty” skin of so many contemporary video games, usually ones that involve fighting and shooting. One gallery goer is manning the controls while a group of people watch the display projected on the gallery wall and shout and cackle whenever something new happens. It looks to me like this game takes place entirely in a rather crusty men’s restroom. When I came in, the POV player was peeing in a urinal, just a stream of yellow splashing down that went on for way too long. It was more urine than any person can actually produce at one time, a fact which has the people collectively gathered in the gallery ABSOLUTELY CACKLING. The player moves on to explore the restroom and then a character, a man in a white collared shirt and beige slacks with big clear glasses and a thin mustache enters the restroom and stands at the urinal. The player approaches and the man unzips his pants to reveal a gun. What follows is an incomprehensible mini game where the player has to disarm the gun by licking it up and down. The tongue that appears on screen is heinous and red. I think I clapped. I definitely took a video of it and proceeded to show it to anyone who wanted to see it for, like, my entire weekend.
After a quick goodbye to my friend, I head back to my car. But along the way, I come across a lemonade stand run by SWOP Pittsburgh (mutual aid situation for sex workers if you’re interested). The sign reads “Lemonade, $4. Spit, $2.” I donate to get a lemonade and am, if we’re being completely honest, incredibly tempted to ask for spit in it. As I’m mulling over my options here, one of the tablers asks if they know me from somewhere. I look at their face, panic because I’m already hyper aware I am batting…I don’t understand baseball, but something really bad…with recognizing people tonight and say “Maybe! I’m definitely around? Maybe a dance night???” I try because this person looks queer, and maybe I saw them at Jellyfest. I also have to always wonder if, though it rarely happens, whoever is asking this is an Autostraddle reader, but I never lead with that because saying Autostraddle out loud is a thing in and of itself. I then wonder…could it be? A man walks up and disrupts the chat and my awkward descent into a cavern of anxiety, so I thank them, tell the man the lemonade is indeed good and worth buying because I want him to give them money, and then head out. I ponder this as I drive to what is, yes, another dance night. (I really like dancing, okay?) While I tap my fingers on the ol’ Subaru’s steering wheel, I acknowledge the feeling that I might actually know this person, but then — despite Pittsburgh being Pittsburgh — I say something to myself like “what’re the chances?”
The next morning, I woke up to a text asking me if I was at the gallery crawl the night before. It’s a queer person I met online and have been talking to, but barely. This was the exact same person I’d bought lemonade from. I make some coffee before I text back, hand on my forehead, dying inside, that I thought it might be them but clearly just psyched myself out of saying anything because I didn’t think it was likely. They absolutely do not care, a thing which is incredibly refreshing, and we agree to get coffee on Thursday so we can talk about nerdy shit.
I’ve been doing a lot of coffee-should-we-be-queer-buds meets. These are cool! Meet someone, connect somehow, see if they wanna grab a matcha or something. At one such meet with someone who happened to have grown up in Pittsburgh and never left, I mention I seemed to be (KNOCK ON WOOD) having good luck with making new friends. I did say this before my dizzying and harrowing Friday night of Not Recognizing Anyone. And this is, of course, entirely contingent on continuing to put myself out there. People in Pittsburgh, especially those who grew up here, tend to be cliquey. And to be honest, this was maybe the only person I have met in recent times who was from-from Pittsburgh. Usually, I’m meeting and making friends with other transplants. The other person laughs. I laugh, too. We talk about how I don’t want to come across as full of myself, but like, as with anything, effort can in fact produce results.
And because this is now the third installment of writing this column and it’s been six weeks since I was dry-heaving with anxiety when I was trying to go out dancing, I thought I’d list some progress I’ve made in terms of battling social anxiety and living life as a single person trying to build and participate in community:
- I’ve gotten used to the ritual of pulling out Instagram after having a fun conversation with someone so we don’t lose touch. My Instagram DMs are just as active as my text messages.
- I’ve stopped being afraid of texting people to see if they want to hang. As it turns out, it might be a nice thing to receive a text from someone who wants to sit around and write together or grab a coffee or go for a hike.
- I have indeed realized that if you keep going to the same places you will see the same people and your connections with those people will deepen. You’ll notice I keep going back to the same dance nights! I’m not like some kind of Italo-Disco fiend (although not gonna lie, it is great to dance to), but the fact of the matter is that I run into people I know at these things. Fun people who I like! Then we catch up, throw down some moves together, and say we really need to hang out as we leave but, like, in a sincere way, not in a “let’s do lunch sometime way.”
- There is something nebulous here about the fact that I do believe tapping into a scene of queer people in their thirties and forties with a decent amount of extroverts, especially ones who will organize an event and invite people, who will smash their friends together like dolls and insist they get to know each other, is of immense value. I feel like we do a lot of introvert appreciation on this site, but did you know that if you’re quiet or an introvert or highly anxious that you can find extroverts and via some kind of Outgoing Person Magic, it’s like you kind of pick up some of their social superpowers by being in their orbit? Hot tip from me to you!
- I haven’t dry-heaved with anxiety lately! Goals!
I guess that, sometimes, working on yourself can feel like playing whack-a-mole. If I’m not dry-heaving alone in my car and have moved onto not wanting to lock myself in a tight dark closet when faced with the prospect of meeting new people, then what pops up but the old chestnut of not recognizing human faces — a thing no one expects and which comes with vast and varied opportunities for offending new friends and potential friends and further offending enemies, even! But if I hadn’t started trying to make new friends, I wouldn’t have had to deal with this. Welcome to the wild and wonderful world of the Self-Work Whack-a-Mole!
And for the folks following along for Redwall Summer, stay tuned for updates in the next volume.
Untethered: After a Breakup, Spinning Out of Control (Literally)
Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
For the first few days of the breakup, I was in shock. I hadn’t expected it, had watched myself from outside myself. Still, it was done.
As the shock seeped down through the strata of my body and my mind and settled into something like the first few stages of grief, I was filled with the urge to move my body. This urge did not manifest in craving the ways I ordinarily moved, but in a longing for new, faster, (more furious?) modes.
So, being one to give into what are surely harmless impulses, I immediately engaged in the following, in chronological order:
Roller-Skating at a Rink for the First Time Since I Was a Child
The weekend following the breakup, I got in my Subaru and drove up to Western New York, sometimes crying ON THE HIGHWAY while going 70 mph. Sure, those Fast and the Furious guys can Tokyo Drift, but have they ever attempted to drive while crying so hard they can’t see? I imagine, actually, maybe, tenderly, yes. Still, it’s not shown. I stopped at my favorite queer-friendly Hot Dog joint in Erie, PA (Lucky Louie’s, if you’re ever in town — also this commercial starring a drag queen is tops), and arrived at my sister’s where she let me crash on her couch. The very next day, the two of us were seized with a desire to do something, anything, and we settled on roller skating.
We wanted old-fashioned, four wheels-per-foot roller-skating, with blacklight and disco balls and Day-Glo murals. We found a rink and cemented our plans. On the way, we stopped at our dad’s, and while we sat out back with his wife, he recounted a story from his high school days. He went to a roller rink with a date, got in a fight with another boy, and had his date come to his defense, yelling “Leave him alone! He can’t even skate!” as he struggled to get up off the floor.
My sister and I drove out of town to the rink, in an area made up of old housing stock and a dive bar. When looking around for someone to rent skates from, we caught sight of several teens with staff shirts doing tricks in the center of the rink. Eventually, one of them noticed us, zoomed over, and provided us with skates in our size. We sat down in a plastic booth and pulled the worn leather weighed down by heavy wheels onto our feet. And I guess I really am my father’s son, because as soon as the skates were strapped on, my sister and I locked eyes, only in that moment understanding the true extent to which we were screwed.
It was a wall-clinging, hand-holding, grimacing time getting acclimated to the fact that we had strapped wheels to our feet. We soon realized we’d paid to humiliate ourselves for the evening, but then comforted ourselves with the fact that we weren’t the only ones struggling, or the only adults struggling for that matter. It was a no-judgment zone, except for the occasional eight-year-old asking us if there was anything they could do to help. We both only fell once, my sister on her butt, and myself into a vogue-style split situation that only bruised my ass a little.
Still, when I got the rhythm together and was zooming around the rink, even making turns, all while a bunch of teens skirted the edge of death on one leg or jumped every time they passed my sister, it scratched that itch I had, the one that said I needed to physically feel like I was flying. And hey, someone complimented my Gay Chaos socks, which do indeed glow under blacklight. I left sore but satisfied — and with a plan to return to the same roller rink with my sister next time I was in town, which I will be by the time you’re reading this.
Spinning and Sliding and Falling and Chafing on a Slippery Pole for Some Reason
So, it had never occurred to me that this might be the case, but you know how sliding down a metal slide in shorts can hurt the heck out of your legs? That’s what a pole-dancing pole felt like on my legs whenever I tried to grip it with some very sensitive patches of skin!
For some impulsive reason, I paid about $12 to go to a pole-dancing class. It looked fun! Instead of the wheels on a skate spinning, you are the thing spinning! My brain had been screaming at me to GO FAST, and it refused to be silenced by the reality that I am in my thirties and not always that capable of going that fast — or of picking up new physical skills right away!
It was harrowing. Even though my spins were SNAIL-PACED and executed with the grace of a fish out of water, it still felt, to me, like I was careening out of control. I thudded to the ground more times than I can count. Still, the more experienced dancers in the class were warm, supportive, encouraging. There was a culture of clapping for someone when they nailed a trick that caught me off guard for just a moment before it utterly charmed me. When I managed an elbow stand and to grab the pole with my ankles, and the class applauded me, for that singular upside-down moment, everything became warm and fuzzy, no matter how anxious spinning around made me. I’ll probably be back, if only because I’m stubborn and enjoy cheering on people who’re trying to do a hard thing.
Normal Dancing but With a Queer DJ Playing Italo-Disco and Also Spaghetti
I love going dancing. This is a fact. Imagine my surprise when I almost dry-heaved with nerves while I parked my car up the block from the venue. I considered turning around, giving up, not going in. But I’d already promised a friend I’d meet her, and I didn’t want to flake. So, I made my way past the boys smoking outside and into the venue. Wearing a mask still makes me feel like an outsider, but I made it work, enjoying the dichotomy of a crop top + an N-95. I found my friends, found a can of something, and found the dance floor where another friend and queer, awesome-as-all-get-out DJ was spinning Italo-disco for a small but ever-growing crowd of people dancing; some solo, some in couples or groups, and each with a range of enthusiasm from rocking side to side to full on throwing themselves around like they’d just invented some kind of disco-mosh.
When I managed to communicate “break up” over the roar of disco by miming breaking something with my hands to my friend, she assured me with her voice that somehow carried: Breakups happen for a reason. She proceeded to note that people have told her she’s a great friend to be distracted with while flipping her blonde curls back and batting her eyes in a way that communicated she fully embraced her party-girl status. I laugh because it’s true, but also not a bad thing. It’s a neutral thing, and maybe even a good thing when you need it.
The whole dance situation is called Spaghetti Disco because at midnight, the kitchen staff brings out trays of free spaghetti. When the spaghetti happened (the spaghetti-ing?), I was trapped off to the side of the stage by a series of ultra-passionate dancers but became aware of the spaghetti when people brought it onto the dance floor to drop forkfuls of pasta into their open mouths while swaying their hips and spinning. Despite being marinated in a combination of sweat and the smell of marinara, I left the disco feeling cleansed.
Maybe next time, I’ll try the spaghetti.
You Need Help: Should I Go No Contact With My Ex?
Q:
Is there ever a time when it’s not necessary to go “no contact” with an ex right after things end? I spent a few years living with my now-recent-ex (also my first queer relationship! I came out concurrently with beginning to date them) and they broke up with me, namely because they felt we were in different places in life and that our avoidant/anxiously-attached dynamic needed too much repair to be viable as a couple, but they have insisted up and down that they can’t imagine me as “not being a part of their life”. We’ve texted and dm’d due to them initiating every day since the breakup, their things are still in our apartment that I’ve stayed with (they moved back in with relatives a month ago even before figuring out that they wanted us to break up), and they’ve expressed anxiety about my hating them forever and that maybe I just want to be left alone to heal. The thing is: I don’t hate them, I’m just heartbroken and confused because they’ve said a few times since ending it that they miss me and are handling things erratically even though I accepted their ask to split up the second they shared it. By their own admission they’re having a quarter life crisis that needs addressing as a single person even though they still love me and maybe see it for us in the future? And by my own admission I still love them but I can see where they aren’t ready and where we couldn’t have continued on as a couple in the same old pattern, and that if they don’t feel up to working on changing it together then splitting up was necessary.
I can’t tell if I want to be left alone either! I’m not even sure if that would help me heal. It sucks waking up most days waiting to see if that day is the day they finally drop off from hitting me up, but things feel a bit one-sided–they’ll share anecdotes with me about their life now, and I’ll respond without trying to get too involved or overly nosy, but I won’t really share about my life because its been upended and I don’t want to feel their pity about causing that or make it their problem? I don’t know what shape a friendship could take but I want it still I think, it’s just hard to tell what’s doable and what might be delusional–I don’t want to have to miss her any more than I already do.
One of my big hang-ups is having come out later in life and feeling like (outside of my exes friends who will now I’m sure remain her friends only!) I don’t have a big queer community of my own…I don’t really *get* the lesbian gfs to exes that are besties pipeline and I wish I did. My ex and I were friends for years prior to getting together and I’d hate to throw that friendship away even if this relationship broke down in such a brutal, slow-motion fashion. I’m still contending with it all–I think she expected the breakup desire to be mutual but I would’ve been open to working on us in a way she didn’t have energy for. I can’t entirely tell if this push towards friendship and communication from her (now that we’re not partners) is about hoping to be absolved from guilt and if so does that water down the potential for not becoming strangers?
My friends are kind of an even split. Some think my ex just doesn’t want to be the bad guy in this but that they’re being inconsiderate and I should cut them off from access to me (with the exception of the logistics for the impending move). Others sympathize a bit more with why I’m conflicted about just shutting them out but even they’re insistent she and I can’t process our breakup together, which is something I definitely agree on.
What do you think?
A:
I’m an adamant believer that exes don’t HAVE to be friends but also don’t HAVE to be enemies. There are so many different shapes relationships with exes can take; don’t let dominant lesbian discourse trick you! There is no “right” way to do a breakup or to renegotiate what a relationship looks like with an ex! I have never become besties with an ex, but I do have people in my life who have something like that, and good for them. But it all boils down to what you want, what your ex wants, how the breakup went down, and how you’re communicating now. I think there are a lot of layers to your situation with your ex, but I also feel rather strongly that trying to force a friendship right now is not the move.
Now, that can look like “no contact” for a period of time where you actually agree upon a time in the future to reevaluate the “no contact” rule. Or it can look like extremely minimal contact, less than what you currently have. For slightly more ambiguous breakups like yours, I’d definitely encourage a boundary that’s firm without being unmovable. “No contact” doesn’t have to be this big scary thing. But it does sound to me just based on your letter that less contact could be the move if you do want to be able to renegotiate a friendship.
It’s significant to me that you’re not the one to reach out to your ex but always wait for them to reach out first. It also feels like it could ultimately be a really painful pattern for you. I know you care a lot about them, but what are you really getting out of these conversations? It honestly doesn’t sound like the most meaningful connection right now and instead just prolongs your feelings of hurt about the breakup.
Again, no contact doesn’t have to be forever! And it also doesn’t have to be AS extreme as it sounds. But right now, the boundaries between you and your ex feel murky, and I think firming them up will help. For the record, it sounds like you actually have pretty good boundaries! I think you’re making the right move by not sharing too much about yourself right now and also not prying into your ex’s life. I have some concerns, meanwhile, that your ex is bringing up their anxiety about you hating them forever. That isn’t fair to you. And even if you were to choose to not be in contact for a bit or significantly reduce contact or establish that you’d actually like it to only happen on your terms instead of your ex being the first to text, that doesn’t mean you hate them! It just means you need time and space, which most breakups require. It does sound like there could be certain power dynamics at play here, since this was also your first queer relationship. Was it your ex’s? It sounds like she maybe has some guilt around ending things with you when it was your first queer relationship, but again, that’s not your burden to bear. She should be giving you space to heal from your first queer breakup, a famously difficult thing to heal from even when things don’t end super badly!
If you’re feeling heartbroken and confused, that’s a good signal to yourself that you need to step back from them in a real way. It is okay for you to miss them and for them to miss you. But it becomes difficult when you both try to process that together while also still being on very different pages (you were willing to work through things that they were not). Your ex should be talking to her own support system about missing you, not you. You can’t hold that space for them, because you’re also heartbroken. I’m not saying this is what your ex is doing, because they’re not the one writing in, but I do know that sometimes people keep exes on a “backburner.” If your ex is saying they’re going through a quarter life crisis, then it’s possible they’re hoping you’ll still be waiting for them on the other side of that, and that, of course, is not fair to you or even to them.
I do think it’s possible to work toward friendship with your ex — just maybe not right now. Maybe not until their stuff is out of your place and there are some clearer boundaries. Maybe not until after there has been just a little bit of “no contact” so you can figure out what your life looks like without their text check-ins. Then, I think it’ll be easier to work them back into your life after you’ve had that intentional time apart. Friendship won’t happen overnight. I think you both have to understand that even if you were friends before you dated, any friendship you pursue now will look different; that’s just how it works. And while you can take time to grieve the friendship of before as well as the relationship, it doesn’t have to be a totally sad thing. I think if you both want it and it feels good, then you can definitely figure out how to be in each other’s lives again in a new and mutually beneficial way. Right now, it just sounds like they need to figure out what it is they want and what’s causing this quarter life crisis, and you need to heal and take space. Again, it doesn’t have to be an ocean of space. It doesn’t have to be forever. But things sound way too entwined right now, and stepping back doesn’t mean you hate your ex or see them as the villain. In fact, it means you’re actually setting yourself up to have a better path forward for friendship. Take the time to miss her and then see how she fits back into your life.
You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.
You Need Help: How Can I Plan for a Bad Breakup?
Q:
I’m in my most volatile long term relationship to date. Things are frequently and currently great, but she is a troubled creature who isn’t willing to look inwards. This has led to some horrible situations, and surely will again. For my own sake, I always keep one eye on the door, but I’m in uncharted territory here. My inquiry in case it becomes necessary to break up: I would like advice/stories about how to disentangle oneself logistically from a long term relationship that ends badly (which it absolutely would, if it goes there). We don’t live together, but I keep a lot of my stuff at her house and we have a ton of plans months in advance. How have other people navigated bad breakups with logistical hurdles?
A:
This is one of those instances where I think there’s a lot of blanket advice out there and it’s important to understand that your situation is uniquely yours and there are a lot of nuances to consider. Sometimes people respond to questions about fractured or toxic relationships with the blanket advice: BREAK UP. Even though you’re couching some of the language by saying things like “if it goes there,” it does sound to me like you’ve already reached the conclusion that you should break up but just naturally have some doubts and reservations. If you’re indeed having doubts, I would definitely nudge you in that direction based on the minimal but telling details you’ve provided. If you’re thinking this hard about breaking up and mentally planning for the fallout, I think you should break up.
But the question isn’t really should I break up? but rather how can I break up? And that’s where things get tricky!
“Planned breakups” aren’t always a good thing. Sometimes they’re a result of someone just being too scared to break up even when they know it’s what they want to do. It’s unfair to the other person to be harboring these feelings instead of just communicating and ending the relationship and can often lead to resentment, cheating, etc. To me though, that’s not what’s happening here. Some breakups do have to have some advanced planning because they involve tricky logistics or toxic or abusive situations where leaving isn’t as easy as just having a conversation and walking out the door. Again, there aren’t a ton of details in your letter, but I’ll take you at your word when you say the relationship is volatile and there have been “horrible situations” with this other person (though I do want to push back on the words “troubled creature” a bit just because it sort of takes away her humanity a bit, and I think moving through this breakup with empathy will be important for your overall sense of well being! I promise I have YOU in mind with this gentle pushback). Since I don’t have all the details as to your relationship and any harm that has been done, I am going to give advice that kind of assumes near-worst case scenarios, so feel free to take or leave aspects of this!
Don’t worry too much about the plans you have months from now. If they’re things like trips or vacations, it’s possible after the breakup that you’ll be able to get refunds or travel credits, take the trips with someone else, or possibly lose some money that has already been spent. It sounds like your financial and living situations are not tied together, so that’s at least two major things you don’t have to worry about as much. Have you spoken at all with a therapist? Therapists can be really helpful in constructing a plan to breakup and helping you figure out what to say and do. If therapy is not accessible to you, have you opened up to any friends about this? I would of course stick to friends who primarily or exclusively have a relationship with you and not your girlfriend, which I know can be hard in a long term relationship, but hopefully you have folks who are squarely in your corner.
In fact, I would make a plan to stay with one of those friends in the immediate aftermath of the breakup, if you can. Again, it helps that you don’t live together, but if situations tend to get volatile, it might be best if you have somewhere to stay for a bit that she doesn’t have access to. Protect yourself digitally too; if you have each other’s locations, make sure to turn that off and change any passwords she might have access to. Gradually move some of the items that are at her house that are most important to you back to your place, but you might also have to accept that you will have to lose some things in the breakup. Try to get the things you value most out of there.
Maybe this is just because I’m a writer, but I find it helpful to journal through the process of a breakup. It’ll keep you grounded, remind you you’re doing the right thing, and be like a record of what you actually feel in case your ex attempts to gaslight or emotionally manipulate you down the road.
I know you said you’d also like to hear stories, so I’ll leave you with some personal anecdotes about how my last breakup unfolded on a logistics level as well as things I wish I’d done differently. We lived together for about four years, and toward the end of that, we were no longer together, so the first mistake I made was not immediately moving out after the breakup. I ended up losing some money to the breakup, too, as there were pieces of my furniture I couldn’t logistically move on the timeframe my ex wanted me to, so I had to pay to have them disposed of. I also lost a cat in this breakup because I foolishly made assumptions instead of getting any arrangements in writing pertaining to who would get the cat, and the cat was then used against me for emotional manipulation (at least from my perspective) and I ended up having to just make the choice to let her take the cat instead of trying to fight. To be honest, by then, I was tired of fighting. I was ready to move on, even if she wasn’t. At a certain point, you do have to realize that the breakup is a huge loss, and sometimes that doesn’t even just mean losing a person but other parts of your life, too. There isn’t really an easy or clean-cut way to disentangle two lives after a long term relationship, especially when it ends badly (as mine did as well). I’ve almost never heard of a breakup that didn’t come with some sort of literal financial cost in addition to all the emotional costs. Do everything you can to protect yourself and keep the things you care about but also know you might have to give some things up.
Ask! For! Help! Breakups can be so isolating, but it is important to surround yourself with people who are going to support you in this decision and be there for you. Ending a long term relationship often means losing the person you relied on the most (even in bad relationships), so make sure you’re leaning on other people instead of falling back into old patterns.
You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.
Let It All Out: The Technique Helping Me Get Through My First Queer Breakup
feature image photo by CSA Images via Getty Images
I am writing to you from the neon orange boat raft that’s thrown from the ship to save you from drowning. I am one month post-breakup. My first queer breakup. Floating in the abyss of mutual no contact.
According to sapphic literature, lyric, and word on the street, it’s natural for your breakup to feel like a nightmare escape room where your heart crumbs were scattered around Mars, and the keys to Mars are lost in the Indian Ocean. There’s a squeeze of comfort in that alone together camaraderie.
Jump in the sad girl ocean with me? The water’s cold, but I’ve got extra floating devices.
Over the past four weeks, I’ve inhaled five self-help books and over a dozen podcasts on the topics of love, heartache, letting go, impermanence, attachment styles, and healing. I’ve journaled my sensitive Cancer heart out, fleetingly fallen to the dark side of breakup tarot TikTok, and logged a gazillion steps by way of heart-to-hearts with dear friends near and far.
Yet, of all the heartbreak remedies, there’s one method that truly soothes: Grief Bursts. I learned of it from the new Apple TV hit Shrinking, where Jason Segel plays a therapist who’s one year into existing after his wife’s sudden death.
In the show’s third episode, Fifteen Minutes, seasoned therapist Paul (Harrison Ford) advises both his coworker Jimmy (Segel) and Jimmy’s daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell), to let it all out.
“Pick a piece of music. Something sad as hell. Just feel your feelings,” Paul says, “Take about 15 minutes.”
Alice’s compartmentalized grieving looks like wailing to “I Know The End” by Phoebe Bridgers. They poke fun at it a bit, her alarm sounding off, instantly cutting off her cry. Jimmy sees her doing this and tries to the same song while riding his bike. He pedals and he weeps.
It worked for Alice and Jimmy, and it’s working for me.
Whether we’re talking about capital ‘G’ Grief,’ which I personally use to talk about grieving a death, or lowercase ‘g’ grief for losing someone who is still here, this method seems to have the power to work for all categories of heartache. Equal opportunity.
Grief Bursts seem to be most accessible and effective once you’ve organically moved through the fully unbounded emotions phase (which has no defined timeline). In my case, it started to serve me when I entered the semi-controlled phase about two weeks after the breakup, with relative space from the how did we get here shock, my appetite nearly normalized, and the desire to be more available to the life in front of me.
I often find myself doing morning or bedtime bursts. I’ll organically feel a nudge of the sadness. Of the missing. Of the why. Then I’ll be like, okay, let’s release that from my body so I can keep going with the day. Or sleep more peacefully. To fully enter into the feeling and push past that initial human resistance to cut off the cry, I use catalysts. Reread an old card or our goodbye letters. Listen to an emo song or one that makes me think of us. Occasionally, look at photos.
You know how kids need to run out their energy in the backyard so they don’t destroy the house? The release I get from crying feels a little like that.
Be open to each day looking different from the last. You don’t need to set an alarm like Alice. Sometimes it’s a single song, others, an EP. It’s what you need it to be. And it will taper off with time. But it’s a cool tool if you’re at that part of your grieving process where you have operator keys to the rollercoaster. You cry — and then you keep walking forward.
The science folks out there appear to have consensus that crying releases endorphins. It’s the literal exiting of stress hormones. Why would you want to stop that?
I find that the catharsis opens up the aperture for being present the rest of the day. It’s a crack for the light to sneak in.
There’s also a sense of affirmation that comes from knowing you aren’t numbing. You’re moving through it, letting your heart, mind, and body sync up and process.
Exactly one month after our official breakup weekend, I hadn’t done my morning burst. And while I was walking the streets of San Francisco, I saw her. She was in her car, and I’m not sure if she saw me. I know this city is 7×7 small, but oh Universe, you’ve got a solid sense of humor. Apparently, if you skip out on your feelings, they will find you (be warned!).
Part of this process is about giving your love and missing the respect and care it deserves. And we all know that has a trickle down effect on the people we date in the future, too.
Take heart that your shared memories are yours. Like how you peed her bed that one time and y’all giggled about it for weeks. No other adult woman will have that with her, rest assured. Let those memories be an invisible string between you that fades and softens with time, but never disappears. Take heart that they are forever a part of your story, of your growing into yourself — and you theirs. Take heart that you keep moving.
Mae Martin’s Netflix comedy special SAP gets at how we’re all just showing each other our different snow globes, the little spheres that compose our identity. Eager to be seen and loved. If you think about it just right, in one of those gorgeous moments where you can access perspective, you’d see how this breakup will add to your snow globe collection, making it all the more beautiful when someone says to you, yes, these are the shelves of globes I want to waltz into the sunset with, and you feel the same way.
Even as you’re seeing the daylight on your future joy, tapping into hope, you’re still mourning big. Your sense of home. Your best friend. Your lover. Your snuggle person. Your future together. The person you were in their presence. It’s layered and messy and human and honestly very sensible to feel like absolute garbage about this new reality sometimes.
Let it all out, babes.
Thank You, Ex: For the Baseball Jersey I Wore Constantly as a Baby Gay
Thank You, Ex is a series of essays about the good things we were gifted by exes and kept.
Not everyone was surprised when I came out as a lesbian, but a few people were. Most notably: my boyfriend at the time. People — him, myself, everyone around us — were definitely surprised and confused that my coming out as a lesbian did not immediately lead to a breakup. We stayed together for a few months, and I even somewhat accidentally ended up living with him in his mother’s townhouse in Houston for three weeks, which was originally only supposed to be a few-nights stay on my way out to Los Angeles where I planned to start my post-college life.
He didn’t technically buy the baseball jersey for me; his mom did. The three of us went to an Astros baseball game, and she saw me eyeing it in the men’s section of the gift store. It’s just a standard baseball jersey: gray, buttoned down the middle, HOUSTON embroidered across the chest. She didn’t look at the price tag when she insisted on buying it for me (but I did, and nearly $100 on a jersey for someone who doesn’t really follow baseball seems absurd). She didn’t question my desire to get it a couple sizes up.
She didn’t, of course, know I was gay. I was still a little hazy on that detail myself, too — hence my inability to end my relationship with her son. But when our relationship did end a few months after that baseball game, I finally let myself act on all the desires I’d been silencing for so long. I leaned into lesbianism hard. I spent hours every day swiping on Tinder for women around Los Angeles and then, when LA didn’t work out, in Chicago where I moved in with two friends. I quite literally brought a photo of Kristen Stewart to the hair salon and asked for her undercut. I rewatched The L Word (because, yes, I had already seen it all when doing a very bad job at being in the closet). I had no idea how to be a lesbian, so I clung to cliches. I went to gay bars. I started writing for Autostraddle. I said “I’m gay” as often and as loudly as possible.
Even though femme lesbians were really the only representations of queer women in the media I consumed then, femmeness felt out of reach then. I thought that in order to be seen as gay, I had to shirk femininity, even moreso than I already had been doing rather deliberately for a few years prior. I associated femininity with the heterosexual costume I was wearing before. I wanted a new costume, so I constructed one: black leather-look leggings, a sports bra or tank top and, as the pièce de résistance, the Houston Astros baseball jersey, unbuttoned.
I took mirror selfies in this new costume and posted them on tumblr, on Tinder, on the short-lived Chicago-specific dyke dating app called, I kid you not, Scissr. I wore it to improv shows, while biking, to Musical Mondays at Sidetrack. The look wasn’t all the way butch, existed somewhere in a futch realm. I wore black or dark blue lipstick and floral Doc Martens. Sometimes I wore a single dangly earring in my left ear. I acquired more sports jerseys, including a bunch of long-sleeved Real Madrid soccer jerseys that I wore over mock turtlenecks. I was not and have never been a jock. The only sport I’ve consistently followed in life is tennis. But this futch jock fuckboy image I constructed was my entry point into queerness.
It was easily just as much of a performance as when I was playing the role of girlfriend to a nice boy from Texas. Even though I was more authentically expressing myself as a lesbian by trying to date women, there was so much artifice and contrivance to the way I dressed. I undeniably felt hot, even if I didn’t feel entirely like myself — perhaps…especially because I didn’t feel entirely like myself. I clung to that baseball jersey, ironically a remnant of my recent heterosexual past, as a way to prove my own queerness to myself, reconstructing my image to match the way I felt unmade and made new by coming out.
Does anyone come out of the closet knowing exactly who they are? How they want to be seen?
I tend to drastically change the way I dress during moments of upheaval, and if I’m being honest, coming out sometimes did feel like an upheaval even as it did liberate aspects of my self. It was hard moving through the world as a queer person. It was easy to change the way I dressed.
I returned to a version of futchness after during my drawn-out and painful breakup with the girlfriend who followed the boyfriend. The baseball jersey briefly reemerged. I loaded up on oversized t-shirts and preppy long-sleeved striped tees and polo shirts at thrift stores, wore chains, cut my hair dramatically again (this time, cribbing the cut from Timothée Chalamet). I borrowed and never returned a pair of my friend’s Adidas track pants. These, along with a white Uniqlo men’s t-shirt my guy friend accidentally left behind after staying with me for a weekend, became the new go-to costume. It’s fitting that the look I cultivated that year hinged on things I took from other people. I wanted to feel like anyone other than myself.
It’s all documented on Instagram, this folding back into a previous self. It’s strange to look at the photos — not unpleasant, but strange. This, apparently, is what I do when I feel lost. I put on a futch costume. But I always come back to my femme self eventually. I think she’s the most authentic version of myself, but it took me a while to get there.
I know I’m supposed to be writing about something an ex gave me; I know I’m cheating by writing about something his mother gave me. There are, I suppose, some intangible things I’ve held onto from him. My fondness for the subgenre of indie rock I call “sad white boy music.” The fact that I can’t look at tuna without thinking of the “Too Much Tuna” sketch from The Kroll Show.
But the jersey is the only physical thing I’ve held onto from that relationship, and even though it doesn’t at all match my high femme gender expression these days, I can’t get rid of it. The soccer jerseys have all been given away. I have only been to Houston the one time. I can’t remember the last time I even wore the baseball jersey. But it’s hanging in my closet as I write this. It has moved with me from LA to Chicago to Brooklyn to Las Vegas to Miami to Orlando. It’s long enough to wear as a mini dress, and perhaps that’s how I could style it to fit my new look. It’s the only object that’s tethered to two distinct past versions of myself: to my straight girl era and to my baby gay futch era. It’s unique, almost sacred in this paradoxical alchemy.
Thank You, Ex: For the Practice of Making Monthly Playlists
Thank You, Ex is a series of essays about the good things we were gifted by exes and kept.
I don’t know how to relate to someone without first asking, “Hey, what kind of music do you like to listen to?” It flows naturally in most courses of conversation — first dates, pillow talk, the text you send to keep the conversation going. Into your pillow, sighing the lyrics of a song that suddenly has new meaning. It matters significantly less now that I’m an adult, but as a teen, the music that my friends and girls I liked (not always mutually exclusive) listened to mattered a lot.
Just because you’re Julie.
Just because I finished my earth science homework early.
Just because I love you.
Just because these songs are life changing and you should hear them too.
Four of these CDs are from my ex. Three of them previously had their track listings yanked out and ripped up. The lone survivor with its paper still intact lists 15 tracks with a simple “juj (3)” as the title. I either got too tired and sad on my post-breakup rampage or it slipped to the bottom of the pile and I forgot about it. I think it’s okay that I left this one untouched. The CD is metallic purple and the date written is June 2015. My favorite song on the CD is Björk’s “Big Time Sensuality.” It’s part of a succession of CDs my ex burned for me in the early stages of our relationship. There are many missing from this collection, but I think that’s okay as well. It’s sweet that at one point, these songs reminded her of me.
The just because of these specific CDs is the fleeting nature of unconditional love.
P’s best friend was my ex. I’d always admired the love they had between them. There was a deep understanding. A love tender, even in the ebbs and flows of hormonal teenhood. Before I even knew anyone was queer at my school, I had seen the clever nicknames they had for one another and wanted that for myself. On Free Dress Fridays — this is a Catholic school thing apparently — the cool girls would wear sparkling jelly platform shoes and a mix of American Apparel and things they found at the thrift stores.
That year was the first I’d heard of Spotify, having spent my hours after school downloading songs from YouTube to mp3. It was the answer to my growing desire to relate to others via music. P and I would message each other songs on Spotify’s now nonexistent inbox feature, sharing playlists and new finds. My ex and I were just friends back then, but I distinctly remember her creating these monthly playlists of music she was listening to. It was a great way to share what had been found and memorialize it in time.
Step One: You must unfollow her on Spotify to ensure that you cannot see what she’s listening to anymore.
Step Two: Convince yourself you don’t need her monthly playlists to find new music, you did it by yourself before and you can certainly go it alone again.
Step Three: Sob relentlessly to any song that remotely reminds you of her.
Step Four: Take a year. Take a breath. You’ll be creating monthly playlists again in no time.
Step Five: Be bitter. Notice a nostalgic fondness and roll your eyes at your sentimentality. Date around and share songs with other people.
Step Six: Find stability and passion. She’s hot too.
Step Seven: Live through a global pandemic and start creating monthly playlists again for pleasure.
Step Eight: Write it down.
Thank You, Ex: For Teaching Me To Save for Retirement
Thank You, Ex is a series of essays about the good things we were gifted by exes and kept.
I don’t think I’ve ever written something so practical and unsexy about a relationship, but I’m here to say that I am forever grateful to my ex who taught me what a Roth IRA is, convinced me to open one, and encouraged me to start putting away money toward my retirement fund ASAP. We did not last as a romantic connection, but her straightforward life advice helped me in both a materially beneficial way and also in a “okay I can pinpoint this moment as one where I’m growing up and learning a thing” kind of way.
When I was 25, I started dating a babe who was about eight years older than me. She had her shit together in a lot of ways that I did not. When we met, I was living on a lesbian commune in a tent (lol) and she was the tech director at a big company based out of California. I was going through a romantic breakup, multiple friend breakups, and a general crisis of confidence in queer community, and she had grown up in Portland, lived her entire life there, had strong ties to community and an equally strong acceptance of the conflict that can arise amongst people who love each other. I was questioning if polyamory was right for me and she’d been wrestling with that question for more than a decade. And, most relevantly for this particular essay, I was very into spending money I had in the moment and not worrying about the future whereas she had been saving for retirement for years.
Or I should say, I was not thinking about my finances for the future until one specific conversation I had with my ex and her best friend. They were both the same age, and they both had impressive full-time jobs. Meanwhile, I was nannying part time and trying to figure out how to freelance successfully. My dad had always encouraged me to open a retirement savings account, but I’d rolled my eyes. Getting older felt far away. I was literally paid in cash every week by my nanny families. My rent was cheap, and I felt like I had More Than Enough.
The three of us, my ex, her best friend, and me, decided to take a road trip in late August, and found ourselves next to a fucking gorgeous lake in Glacier National Park one afternoon when the two of them started comparing their contributions to their Roth IRAs. I had nothing to contribute to the conversation; I was clueless.
A Roth IRA is an Individual Retirement Account to which you contribute after-tax dollars. While there are no current-year tax benefits, your contributions and earnings can grow tax-free, and you can withdraw them tax-free and penalty free after age 59½ and once the account has been open for five years. (Yes I did take that directly from the Charles Schwab website.) I feel embarrassed to share this now, but I was genuinely so shocked to learn they each had accounts like this. I remember thinking — I thought we didn’t believe in big banking! I thought we wanted to say fuck you to The Man! I always thought of my ex as more radical than I was — why was she investing her money in a Roth IRA?
Bless my ex, and her bestie, because they both patiently explained why actually, there’s nothing punk rock about not taking care of your future self if you have the means to. They’d both grown up with significantly less financial privilege than I had, and I think they were both a little unimpressed with my ignorance. And that’s fair. When you’ve never worried about having enough money growing up, it might not occur to you to save for the future, and it’s a huge privilege to have that mindset. They helped me realize that and unpack it, and they also helped me with the practical next step: I opened up my own Roth IRA and started making tiny contributions.
You can contribute $6000 total to a Roth IRA over the course of a tax year, which breaks down to $500/month if you want to max it out. I couldn’t imagine ever having that much extra income to invest when they taught me about this specific retirement savings account, and frankly, almost ten years later, I still can’t. I just don’t make enough money for that to be realistic. But they encouraged me to put away whatever I could, and I started out with $50/month and a few years later bumped it up to $100/month. That’s where I’m still at, though I do try to put extra money in at the end of every tax year. Every little bit counts, and like my ex taught me, saving to take care of my future self is both an act of self love and community care. The more okay I am in the future, the more I’ll be able to use my resources to help others. I do feel dumb that it took me 25 years on this planet to learn that, but we don’t know what we don’t know. Thanks to my ex, I learned.
Thank You, Ex: For (1) Set of Ghost Hands
Thank You, Ex is a series of essays about the good things we were gifted by exes and kept.
Author’s Note: This essay contains mentions of self-harm, sexual abuse, alcoholism
Thank you, ex, for your (1) set of ghost hands.
Before I went to spend a few days with my ex, I was forced to really sit down with the fact that all the ways I’d been sexually touched, or close to it, had been nonconsensual up until I met her. Logically, I knew this, but when you’re trying to survive them, you’re not tallying up the violences your body is carrying. Even though we’re not together anymore, the hands I’ve, blessedly, kept since we’ve broken up are no longer my ex-manager’s, my family members’ (living and dead), ex-coworkers’, and past customers’ anymore. They are hers.
It goes like this.
Before her, for the past decade, the hands that have held fast to me have been my ex-manager. He was tall, an ex-Marine, known for shooting squirrels and at one point, holding a box cutter to my throat asking if I wanted him to end it all for me, when I went to the back freezer to get oatmeal for a customer’s breakfast. He kissed me in front of my coworkers, customers, and God, and nothing changed. I was serving a customer behind the counter where we hand you your food, and he was standing behind me, his hand in my pocket massaging my thigh and creeping closer to in between my legs, and I stood shocked because there were the coworkers. There were the customers. There was God. All watching and nothing changed.
Those are not the only violent hands my body has carried, but up until her, they were the hands I’d felt the longest.
Before her hands even touched me there was this:
I love the idea that after seven months, the skin that the person has touched is no longer there, but I can never feel it. Trauma feels in my bones, you know? When I was in outpatient, my psychiatrist said, you know it hurts because we’re fixing it, right? We are pulling back something that healed wrong and we’re digging the stuff out of the bone and we’re making sure we heal it right this time. That’s why it hurts.
I could never get to my bone with my blades, and I knew I shouldn’t try, but that was the closest I could get to that seven months new skin feeling. Outside of my body, few people believed me. Here, in the places where I tried to heal myself from the hands and the other body parts that made me wrong, here, where I had to carry what those people had done to me, with a blade I chose, my body could try to be mine again. Violence was done to me, and so I thought, at least let me choose the violence that can be in retaliation to it.
When I met my ex, even after months of her telling me she liked me and me telling her I liked her back, I just assumed it was a bit we were doing. In high school, we did this all the time. That’s my wife. Are you coming to our wedding? Leave my wife alone. I knew they didn’t mean it back then, and I was just confused as to why they pretended. I assumed, that’s also how it is outside of the school. It was safer to assume that.
What convinced me that this wasn’t a bit we were doing was her hands. One of our friends was moving toward me, because, quite honestly, it is more often than not, funny to see me try to navigate being flirted with in real time — and her hand gently but firmly stopped her from moving too close. That’s when things finally clicked.
Most of what I remember from her hands, in the beginning, are holding mine at the con, gripping her fingertips before we were about to meet Javicia Leslie, and she was going to take my pictures for me, brushing against mine as she said “Let’s go through the pictures we took” while we waited for our friends outside a meet and greet, pulling my arm around her when we sat on the couch. Her hands locked behind my neck when she hugged me goodbye.
In between this and the next part is when I started to panic. When I sat up in panic attacks remembering that sure, virginity is a construct, but I wish mine and anything even close to the losing of it had been consensual. How all I had to look back on before losing my virginity consensually was violence and violence I never asked for, violence plenty of people would never believe me about, violences I couldn’t even name without reaching for a drink, a pill, a blade — anything to make the knowledge of it disappear. For two or three or five weeks, all I could see was my lack, and the fear that being found out would only give more room for pain and humiliation to move in.
When I was down there, what I remember are: her hands behind my neck when she hugged me meeting me at my hotel, us walking close but not too close when we walked around the park and how all I could think about were her hands (I loved her smile, but I couldn’t look at her too long without wanting to do something about it) and how I wanted to reach for them but I wasn’t sure if she was okay with that, if it was safe to do in a place where I could leave and she could not. Her hands reaching for mine in the back of the Uber, her head on my shoulder. Her hands grabbing for my dufflebag on our date, hands intertwined with mine as she led me from each exhibit in the aquarium, gripping my hand when we were seated too close to the dolphins and we got soaked. Her hands running through the buzz of my fade during our first kiss and after. After, when her hands circled the spot above my left hip that I haven’t been able to cut him out of. After, when her hands grabbed my butt, where that coworker pushed her pelvis in. After, when her hands interlocked with mine, and she kissed my knuckles, my finger tips. Her hands still holding mine, steady, even when I was far from it.
I don’t like to think about the endings, which is probably why I’m always haunted, always clinging to things that return even when I should pretend I do not see them (My mom told me, “When you see a ghost, do not talk to it.” I don’t talk, but they think my body does, especially when I glance at it.) But out of every ghost that pushes itself past a whisper into something more solid, something that hugs me from behind in the broad daylight of my room, something that sits on the edge of the bed and tells me, “[deadname], I raised you better than that”, these are the ghosts I want the most, that, at one point, wanted me too. How do you let go of a love like that?
Note: To be clear, my ex and I are over, and I know this. I just want to thank her for giving me something good, something other than bloody blades and boxcutters and hands too big for my too small too quiet too crazy to be believed. For teaching me that I am deserving of good, and that is what I should be moving toward.
Thank You, Ex: For the Ring Dish That Reminds Me I’m Hot
Thank You, Ex is a series of essays about the good things we were gifted by exes and kept.
On my half-broken IKEA dresser sits a delicate cream-colored tea dish with a pink rose in the center and a gold rim around the edge. When I first acquired it in a little thrift store in Headingly (Leeds, England), it made me feel pretentious and fantastical. Now, it’s tarnished, the colors have faded, and there are a few permanent wax stains from the time I burnt a handmade candle in the shape of a naked body.
Over five years ago, when my ex bought it for me because it made her think of me, I clung to the little dish through all our arguments, and eventually, a nasty breakup which ended with me moving back to the States and her staying in England. Throughout the course of our relationship, I got used to waking up to see a growing collection of tea dishes on her nightstand holding various objects: rings, tiny pieces of jewelry, keys. Until I met her, I had never seen someone use these little teatime essentials for such a utilitarian purpose. I guess everyone I ever slept with either left their things around in disorganized chaos or didn’t have a nightstand. I found the whole ritual endearing, so when she gifted me this little £5 plate, I used it to hold my own rings.
I was never much of a ring-wearer until I came out. Up until my gay awakening, rings only held two purposes: marriage and chastity. I begged my parents to buy me a purity ring when I was 14. Super religious and influenced by the Jonas Brothers, I took pride in my choice to show the world I was off limits until the man of my dreams came around to swap out cheap metal for elaborate diamonds. It took me until my early twenties to rid myself of this chastity ring once and for all in a very gay and dramatic burning ceremony I describe in this essay I wrote about rings. Around the same time, I noticed all my gay crushes had one thing in common: atypically placed rings. My very first in-person real-life girl crush I acted on wore colorful minimalist pieces around both thumbs, pointer fingers, and middle fingers. Every time I spoke to her, I noticed these shiny distractions catching the sun and making their presence known in my reproductive organs. Every time she touched me, I felt the rigid pressure against my soft skin and yearned for more. I saw these rings and fantasized about what the fingers inside them could do. Maybe it’s not as clear as bandanas or carabiners, but rings can be an excellent entry point into the “is she queer?” discourse running through your head at the Trader Joes checkout counter.
When I eventually met my ex at a queer coffee shop in downtown Leeds, I instantly noticed the thin silver ring adorning her middle finger. I knew she was queer, of course, because we met on Tinder, but something about this ring made her extra enticing. It didn’t take long for me to learn about her stash of rings, stacked in a messy pile on her nightstand tea dishes. It certainly didn’t take long for me to figure out where those rings had been. The more she switched out her rings, the more I equated them to badges of honor — gold and silver medals to flash for all the queer world to see. Those fingers made her hot, because they were mine.
Just as I carried the ring dish with me from one relationship into the next, so too did I carry my ring theory. As I passed people in the grocery store or on a walk, I noticed a well placed ring always lured me in. To put it bluntly, a middle finger ring, on anyone of any gender, could instantly take a 4/10 to an 8/10. As I started to crush on people solely based on their ring placement, I collected rings here and there so that I, too, could award my own fingers. If I thought ring people were hot, maybe I could be hot too? Maybe what my ex had given me was a resting place for my own sexuality. I made concerted efforts to take the rings from my rose tea dish and place them strategically on my fingers before going to a coffee shop or night out. People needed to know the feats I’ve accomplished with those fingers. The dish reminds me that someone once thought I was hot, and someone will think I’m hot once more.
What used to be an inanimate ode to my ex quickly became the temple for well-earned phalange awards I bestowed on myself over years of dating and hooking up with other queer folks. I’ve lived in five different states and countries over the past five years, and this dish has made it with me through the eight-hour flight where I sobbed my water weight in tears, the four-day cross country drive from California to Florida, and my couch-surfing days in Los Angeles. My intentions in carrying it with me, at first, were sentimental; I kept it because it reminded me of her. After healing from the breakup, the dish morphed from a space of desperate longing to an opportunity to remind myself of my sexual power. I can wear rings. I can be hot.
You Need Help: I Can’t Get My Exes Out of My Head
Q:
I’ve been in a nearly 7-year relationship with the same woman. I love her (sometimes I don’t totally know why, but I do). Still, there are a few people from my past that I just can’t ever get out of my head… like my ex (who was horrible for me and sort of a “rebellion-based” partner) who tried to come between me and my current GF in the early stages. My ex didn’t want me, but didn’t want anyone else to have me either. I still somehow have desires to be “friendly” towards most exes, though I don’t necessarily want or need them. The other person is an ex-best friend. I was completely in love with this person (before my actual coming out process) and in her own way, I know she loved me too, but because I knew it wasn’t the same type of love, I pushed her away. I wasn’t the only one… apparently her dad straight up asked if we were lesbians one time because I hadn’t come over in a couple of days. We were that close. Eventually, I was the one who helped get her together with her now-husband. Since I’m older now and it’s been nearly a decade, I have the hindsight and reason to see why she cut me off (codependency and unfailing erratic BS to avoid my real unshared feelings), but it just hurts my heart and causes me guilt that I lost someone so important due to immaturity of my emotions. Has anyone else struggled with this before? How do we let go of past rejections and past mistakes when we cannot talk to the other person involved???
A:
Hello, friend.
[sits carefully on the gay green couch and invitingly, platonically pats the seat next to me]
You are a person who loves deeply. And I have a feeling we have something in common. I have a feeling that you, like me, give a lot to your partners in your closest relationships, with friends and with lovers, and don’t ask for a lot in return. And thus, when that relationship ends or fades, there is a significant chunk of you, your time and energy and heart, missing and gone with that person. But I promise you, you are still whole. All the extra space and time and energy you created for these missing persons may be gone and it makes sense to grieve it, but they can’t take your wholeness with them. What you do for others is a gift and unfortunately, you sometimes have to let it go with them.
It’s totally normal to still hold feelings for people you have loved and lost touch with. Frankly, there is no magic ritual to make that feeling of longing for them disappear. The only slow, uneasy balm is the passing of time and gaining some distance and perspective as you get older, which is where it sounds like you are now. You have every logical reason to not reach back out to either of these people: the ex-partner who was unhealthy and manipulative and the ex-friend who cut you off for being “too much.”
The ex-partner sounds like someone it’s just not healthy to have in your life anymore. I wonder if this “rebellion-based partner” is appealing to a younger, more idealistic and seemingly exciting version of yourself you want to reconnect with more than the actual ex. It sounds like it was one of those fast and hot relationships, with drama to keep it interesting. I imagine that 7 years into a relationship you may not feel that same heat with your current partner anymore, which is something you really should explore if it’s true. Most long-term relationships change over time and it’s not uncommon for a sexy and spontaneous beginning to eventually smooth out to something more like comfort and familiarity. Maybe there’s something even more to your current relationship in that it’s not meeting your needs anymore. Something implied in the phrase “sometimes I don’t totally know why, but I do” in your question says there is something you need to tease out there, maybe with your partner, maybe with a therapist.
Beyond that, it’s fantastically normal to still wonder about and think about exes. Just because they’re not in your life doesn’t mean they didn’t play a large role in your life. They’re a part of your life story as much as you are theirs.
However, we don’t need to be friends with our exes. One more time for emphasis. We don’t need to be friends with our exes. It’s extremely rare that it’s a sustainable and healthy thing to do. It sounds like it already ended badly the last time that you tried to be friends. Exes are exes for a reason and despite overwhelming lesbian stereotypes about everyone being everyone else’s ex a la “The Chart,” my real life experience is that, more often than not, exes part ways fairly permanently. Maybe amicably — maybe an occasional social media comment and maybe a quick chat when you run into each other at Pride. That’s a best case scenario. Many just never talk again and that’s that. The exes-to-BFFs thing is just extremely rare and oversold in lesbian media, in my unscientific opinion. For most people, it’s healthy to separate from someone whom you have a harmful experience with and, even in the most tame and gentle break-ups, there’s much heartbreak that needs time and space to heal.
In short, no, it’s not strange that you wonder about this person and hold some love in your heart for them and for what they used to mean to you. That’s entirely normal. But it’s unlikely you’ll find yourself having more closure even if you do get back in touch. And I’d think about why they hold so much space in your head. Is it about them? Or who you were when you were with them? Or about the contrast with your current relationship and current partner? Many of us have people in our lives who feel like “the one who got away,” but that doesn’t sound like the situation with your ex by how you’re describing it. It sounds more like you don’t feel you got closure and you feel you’re spending too much time thinking about this person now. Examine why that is. What is making you think about them and the way you were together, now?
Speaking of ones who got away, let’s talk about the friend…
Twice in my adolescence, I had very close best friends who abruptly cut me off. At the time, I didn’t understand why and it hurt, as much as — no, more than — any of my teenage romantic breakups. I went over and over in my mind, both times, why they didn’t care about me, what I could have done wrong to offend them, how I messed it up. As these friend breakups happened within years of each other, I also wondered if there was something wrong with me, as a human person, something undesirable about me that, twice, my closest friends shut the door on our relationship without reason.
In both cases, these friends came back years later as adults to disclose to me that they’re queer and that being near me back then, as I was coming out as bisexual, made them panic and need to shut me out. I was probably in love with one of them, looking back. The other one was in love with me, definitely. None of us dealt with it well at the time.
I say this not to give you a false sense of hope about your friend coming back to you or whether they may have reciprocated the feelings you had for them. I literally have no idea what your friend’s thoughts and feelings are or were. I share it to emphasize that, most likely, whatever happened with your friend had to do with them and not with you. It sounds like they were giving you mixed messages about wanting to be close to the point that their family members suspected you were dating and then coming back and saying you were too codependent. That doesn’t sound like a “you” issue to me. It sounds like you were both trying to figure out your own shit in a world that makes it extremely hard to figure out your shit if it doesn’t comply with a heteronormative, cisnormative, binary identity.
I want to fully absolve you of feeling like you did something wrong or that the end of the friendship was because of your immaturity. Maybe some of it was, sure, but regardless, it doesn’t sound like you could have done anything differently at the time, and it doesn’t sound like she communicated well with you, either. I imagine you were both acting in ways that were ridiculous, that you can see now with more clarity and time. Also, finally, it doesn’t mean that the friendship wasn’t as meaningful to her as it was to you. Obviously, you were very close. It’s highly, highly, almost certainly likely that she thinks of you, too, and remembers that time as a significant time in her life, too. I believe this is true with my whole heart. I hope it brings you comfort.
And still, with all this history and all this unresolved relationships trailing behind you, you move forward. You may never hear from either of these people again and you may always carry a bit of an ache for them, because they were special to you, because you loved them. Love them? And frankly, part of the whole “growing up and having hindsight” deal is realizing that life isn’t a movie with a beginning-middle-end and a clever little morality lesson to learn in closing. Life is full of relationships and moments left unfinished, full of beginnings and conflicts and climax points and unpredictability and very short on neatly wrapped-up resolutions. As frustrating as it can be, that is part of the grand ache of a life well lived. And within all that mess, we have the capacity to curate our own stories and that’s how we move forward without knowing exactly how it all ends. We are collectors of our own stories, many unfinished and many more not yet begun.
I recently viewed a piece in a surrealist museum exhibit, a 30-foot long exquisite corpse drawing title “Long Distance” and started and curated by Tom Joans, a Black surrealist artist and jazz poet. An exquisite corpse is an art piece that is made by many people, with one person starting the drawing from where the last person left off. Joans started the piece in 1976 and it ended in 2005, with 132 participants, and two years after his death. There can be beauty in unfinished endings and to letting people be a part of our life, making a permanent mark on us, for a time, and also believing your story will keep going.
You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.