Welcome to Interviews With My Ex-Girlfriend, in which Autostraddle writers get back in touch with their ex-girlfriends to ask them Five Simple Questions:

1. How long did we date?
2. Why did we break up?
3. What did you learn from our relationship?
4. What do you miss most about me?
5. Would you invite me to your wedding (why/why not)?

---

In February of 2014, following about a year of Saturn return introspection and angst, I packed up everything I owned and moved from New York City to Los Angeles. Through my research for an article about Tinder, I ended up going on a couple of dates with a fashion designer I had very little in common with. This dysfunctional pairing kept me occupied for just a few weeks until I met a friend of hers who was visiting from New York. Mila was sharp, funny and distractingly attractive, a gifted writer who’d actually written a few pieces for this very website a few years ago. The way we ended up together was a little confusing, but by the time she flew back to Brooklyn a couple of weeks later, we were already completely besotted with each other.

Our relationship was long-distance, which neither of us had wanted, but we communicated constantly and fell disgustingly in love. None of it was easy; neither of us could afford to visit the other very often, and I was having an awfully rough time getting settled in LA. When I finally decided to pack up and head back east in October, Mila unceremoniously dumped me two weeks before I was due to arrive. She happened to be visiting a friend in Denver, so on my journey home, I drove all night from California to Colorado in an effort to win her back with my grand romantic gesture (we ended up screaming at each other and crying in the parking lot of a Jamba Juice). I spent the next six months trying unsuccessfully to convince her to give me another shot, then gave up and stopped talking to her for several months. At long last, we finally arrived at a place where we were ready to be friends. I may spend the rest of my life trying to convince her that our relationship probably could have worked if we’d actually tried it IRL, but in the meantime I have the most incredible, loyal, brilliant, badass friend a girl could ask for, always up for a glass of wine, always ready to recommend the perfect book. I guess it worked out pretty OK.

Mila’s currently crashing with her parents in Ohio, so she agreed to Skype with me about our [allegedly] great love affair.

Stef: Hi.

Mila: Hi.

Stef: How’s it goin’?

Mila: Like such. (takes a drink)

Stef: I think the way this works is I ask you questions, and you can ask me questions. Like, if you want me to answer them too, you can.

Mila: But how does that…

Stef: They want us to like, have a conversation. Can you have a conversation?

Stef: You’re a ridiculous person, you know this. OK so… How long did we date?

Mila: Um… okay…

Stef: I’m very curious to see if you can answer this question.

Mila: Four months….?

Stef: I’m not answering this question, you have to answer it yourself.

Mila: (counting on fingers) April to May, May to June, July, August! That’s four.

Stef: You broke up with me in October. Did you not remember any of that!?

Mila: Well I feel like when we broke up it was still warm out so I thought maybe it was August.

Stef: It was October 5^th, actually our five month anniversary.

Mila: So it was five months.. No! That would make it six, because of April.

Stef: Well it was the five-month anniversary of when I actually asked you to be my girlfriend. I mean, I feel like in April, we did a lot of “you live really far away, we’re not gonna do this, that would be stupid!” We met at the end of March.

Mila: Yeah, I remember that.. but in April, we talked all the time and I feel like that’s when it started unraveling.

Stef: Yeah, we were both just like, “Well, I live here, you live there, obviously we can’t do anything, what’s the point? You’re so far away, we can put this on hold, it’s fine.” Then it became very apparent that it was just not a thing that we could do. I think what actually happened was that you were drunk at a bar because you’d just finished your thesis and you texted me “such girlfriend, wow” and I called you to make it official.

Mila: Oh, yeah, so that was May 5^th! I know exactly when that was. If you just said “when did you finish your thesis?” This would have been way easier. I was in the bathroom! Now I remember.

Stef: I was on the street, around the corner from the grocery store. It was all very romantic.

Mila: That night was really intense… Did we talk on the phone? I was just like, “What do you need?!”

Stef: Okay, so… why did we break up?

Mila: Why isn’t that the last question?! Who wrote this thing?!

Stef: It’s not the last question.

Mila: It has to be. It’s really heavy. Here we are having a good time laughing and… OK, well you’re answering this one first. Why do you think we broke up? Because obviously it’s my fault, and you know my reasons – I’ve explained them 90,000 times.

Stef: Because I asked you 90,000 times, because I’ve pleaded with you to get back together 90,000 times… and you’ll have none of it!

Mila: (takes a drink)

Stef: Well, when we met, I was in the middle of a really deep depressive episode that took a lot of your energy in an unfair and shitty way.. We were also long distance, which was really stressful. And then… I mean, essentially I wore you out, I think. I wore you down. And then it was two weeks before I was gonna move back and you just freaked out. How do you feel about that assessment?

Mila: I think that’s a pretty good assessment. Honestly, it’s obviously not one person’s fault that it was just too much, too fast, too soon. I was going through a lot that I didn’t get to process because I was busy dealing with your shit, and I was doing it for a while without realizing that… we should have maybe done it a little differently. I let it go on for too long, and then I freaked out – and when I freak out, I hit the escape button.

Stef: It was a lot, the distance. I think you’d freak out a lot and try to break up with me like, once a month, and usually I could calm you down and talk you out of it.. This time I could just tell that there was no talking you out of it. I didn’t even really try. It was breakfast-time, too – I was making a tofu scramble, Liz Castle was coming over and we were gonna go to the Long Beach Aquarium. It was gonna be this really cool thing we were doing before I left LA. Liz showed up as I had just gotten you on the phone and I just handed her a spatula and was like, “Can you take care of this? My girlfriend’s dumping me right now.” So then I was in the bathroom crying for 45 minutes, I come back, breakfast is ruined.

Mila: You ruined breakfast?!?!?

Stef: No, I mean, she finished making breakfast but by then it was cold, and also my kitchen got really hot when you cooked in there so by the time I got back – Liz didn’t know what to do so she was just fucking shirtless and cleaning my kitchen from top to bottom.

Mila: I love that.

Stef: I come back all teary-eyed and puffy and she just looks up at me like… I mean, then I just went to the aquarium and cried at all of the animals.

Mila: Yeah, then I had to go downstairs at work and help children find books that were too expensive. I don’t know, I guess another thing, and obviously – this is why I keep telling you I’m not good for relationships and you’re like, “nonsense!” I mean, really – there is some of it that does get too real. I can’t picture my own future. I don’t know how to think about it, and when someone is very honest and they tell me that they see me in theirs, I want to just extract myself immediately, like “I’m probably gonna fuck this up somehow. I’m gonna ruin everything and break your heart somewhere down the line, so we’d better just get it out of the way now.” That’s true. Don’t cry!

Stef: I’m not! I’m not even close! I feel like the last time we talked about it (literally two days ago) it kind of clicked for me. I’m able to look at it and be like “alright, at least we can be friends.” I mean, you’ve told me about a thousand times, but I think it’s finally clicking for me. I’m glad I get to keep you in my life.

Mila: You say that now…

Stef: It’s weird, because I met you six weeks after I fucking moved to LA. I knew that move was a mistake within a month. Everyone kept saying, “It takes like a month to get used to LA! It takes six months! It takes two years!” and I was like, “I don’t want to try that hard, I hate this! I want to go home.” And then I met you and I was like, “well fuck THIS.”

Mila: So I wasn’t totally useless because I brought you home, didn’t I?

Stef: You told me I wasn’t supposed to move home for you! And I didn’t!

Mila: I know, but I sort of made you…What are you looking at?

Stef: (guiltily) Emails.

Mila: Really?! Really?!?!?!

Stef: …I love you.

Mila: ….

Stef: Anyway yeah, I mean, I thought.. (horn plays in background)…

Mila: I can’t believe this is your job. Anyway… here’s what I learned about relationships from dating you, and I realize this is something I was doing wrong a lot in relationships before to other people, and it wasn’t til you did it to me that I realized I needed to stop – totally no filter between partner and therapist. There’s a difference between listening and helping and being there and just… having the whole weight of it on you, just all of it. I used to do that to people I think, “well, if you don’t do x and y obviously you don’t care about me.” I mean, there’s plenty of reasons people don’t do x and y, it doesn’t mean they don’t care about you.

Stef: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think I’d really done that to that degree to anyone before like that. It was the first time that I felt very supported in a relationship. I put too much on you..

Mila: Yeah, I do have that supportive vibe, and then people forget I’m an emotionally unstable person.

Stef: You had no idea what you were fuckin’ walking into, did you?

Mila: I really did. I mean, you liked my best friend Lindsay. That was a huge red flag.

Stef: Did it turn out to be a red flag?!

Mila: It did.

Stef: How?!

Mila: Well… that you liked her and then immediately liked me right after even though we’re like night and day.

Stef: But I didn’t really like her that much! It was super weird because I met this really intense crazy person right when I got there who wanted to hang out with me all the time but didn’t know me. She took me out all the time, which I needed, but also she wasn’t super nice to me. That relationship was just me trying to see what my life in LA was going to be… and it wasn’t that, at all. That’s also how I met you, so it was worth it for that.

Mila: On the whole I think it made things better. You learned something?

Stef: Yeah.

Mila: Then it was not a waste of time.

Stef: The other crazy thing is that we had lived so close to each other in New York and we never met.

Mila: There’s a reason for that.

Stef: Is there?! During this whole period of time I was always late-night gchatting this friend who was in Israel, so she was always awake at batshit hours, and I told her the day that I met you that I’d met this really beautiful, intelligent, amazing girl, and why the hell didn’t we meet girls like this when we lived in Brooklyn? Were we just not trying that hard? You lived four blocks from my best friend! I remember asking you – where the fuck were you?! And you were just like, “I was right there.”

Mila: I was there! All the time, at Mercury Lounge, Library Bar, the other one, haunting it every other night! Where the F were you?!

Stef: I was there. Ugh, whatever, now I’m here and you’re in fucking Ohio.

Mila: Is that a sufficient answer to your question?

Stef: Yeah.

Mila: You don’t sound sure.

Stef: I mean, I know why we broke up. I need the readers to understand.

Mila: We broke up because it wasn’t gonna work.

Stef: I think it could have worked. I maintain that it could have worked, that it was an issue of timing. I do. I know you don’t agree with me.

Mila: Well I maintain it was an issue of personality and timing.

Stef: …Whatever.

Mila: Agree to disagree.

Stef: I think we’re gonna go back and forth about this forever.

Mila: You can’t tell me I’m wrong about my feelings! That’s insane.

Stef: Yes I can. Anyway. What did you learn from our relationship? What do you think will impact future relationships? Neither of us has really had an official relationship since we broke up.

Mila: Like I said, I learned to not use anyone as my emotional punching bag… and not to say shit too early! In fact, this might actually ruin my future relationships. I felt like such a dick when I broke up with you and you were like, “A month ago you were just in love with me!”

Stef: The night before, actually. The night before you dumped me, we had a whole conversation where you told me I was the best girlfriend you’d ever had, that I’d treated you better than anyone ever had, and that you loved me.

Mila: That’s still true!

Stef: I sent you a text overnight like, “I know this has been really hard but I’m gonna be home soon and I love you and it’s gonna be OK.” I woke up and you were like, “I can’t be your girlfriend,” and I… I was just blindsided.

Mila: I don’t think you ever really prepare for that sort of thing.

Stef: I did not think that was how that was going to go down. Um, anything positive you got out of our relationship? Or no?

Mila: Obviously whoever is the next official… whatever… They have some big shoes to fill. You took really good care of me and obviously cared about me. You don’t get me all the time, maybe nobody is going to get me all the time.

Stef: I’m gonna hate your next person so bad. I can’t wait. I’m gonna be such a dick to them.

Mila: You’re a dick to people who even look at me wrong.

Stef: Yup. Just wait.

Mila: You refused a cab home on my birthday in the snowy icy tundra.

Stef: Because you asked me to take it with you and the guy you were seeing… and you don’t even remember it! I took a bus, it was fine.

Mila: The bus isn’t real.

Stef: What do you miss about me?

Mila: Aw. Here, I wrote a list.

Stef: Did you?!

Mila: You know how I write things down in my notes when I’m drinking and I know I’ll forget something, I write it down. Hold on… Well, this might sound like an insult but I think it’s really cute how creepy you are. You just go and look for shit… Like, for example… you asked someone who the winner of Drag Race was so you could talk to me about it.

Stef: I did, didn’t I.

Mila: Um. Anyway, I miss… honestly like, just… talking to you, bullshitting with you. It’s the best bullshitting because we just make each other laugh all the time.

Stef: We didn’t lose that.

Mila: You’re still my first choice to do fun shit. My friends don’t really understand what music is.

Stef: But I mean, from being together? We live in the same city, we can do that now as friends. We didn’t get to do that when we were together.

Mila: We didn’t do anything! We just talked about our feelings.

Stef: I don’t know, I thought it was kind of sweet.

Mila: But it was exhausting! I mean, being in love is great, knowing someone is always thinking about you and caring about you, are you kidding? No one’s ever gonna love me that way ever again… I mean, I did that to myself.

Stef: Yeah ya did.

Mila: (extended glaring)… You done?

Stef: Yes.

Mila: Of course it came at a price.. You’re always going to think there was something wrong with you expressly because it didn’t work out. There are a lot of things I’m gonna miss… Who wrote these fucking questions?!

Stef: Riese, of course.

Mila: Oh GODDDD. Why not something more like…

Stef: What do you want me to ask you?

Mila: I don’t know, can you answer that question?

Stef: You took great care of me when we were together. You Seamlessed me a fucking pizza with hearts all over it. You sent me black roses, you sent me makeup, you sent me that perfume with that insanely sweet note in it that I still have…

Mila: You didn’t like that.

Stef: Well, the perfume wasn’t something I’d have chosen for myself because on me it has these patchouli notes…

Mila: You know you can exchange that, right?

Stef: Anyway as I was saying… You really went out of your way to make me feel loved. I was unemployed and depressed and had really nothing going for me and I was a little desperate and crazy and you’d congratulate me for the smallest things to make me feel like I was doing something. You were so supportive!

Mila: I mean, you were so down and you didn’t have any money… I thought the pizza was a nice thing to do!

Stef: It kind of freaked me out at first but I started to really love that we could do that for each other.. Like when you were hungover at work and I could send you a juice or whatever. It grew on me. I sent you cheesecake, bat-shaped marshmallows… We sent each other cute things. Long distance is hard… we were actually pretty good at it.

Mila: Yeah, people who read this can learn how to do long distance because we rocked that out… Just being together isn’t working.

Stef: You’ll never know, bitch. At this juncture, would you invite me to your wedding?

Mila: What kind of wedding?! Like as my plus one to someone else’s? Yeah.

Stef: No, like if you were getting married, would you invite me to your wedding? Hm, maybe not if I’m gonna be a huge dick to your person.

Mila: Like if I’m suddenly getting married right now? Or in the future at some point?!

Stef: I don’t know.

Mila: Well… If I were getting married right now it’d be very odd, and I feel like it’d maybe be rude? So… I don’t know. (laughs)

Stef: OK, so you’re not getting married right now. Let’s say down the line, you meet a person who’s awesome and you’re getting married. Are you inviting me?

Mila: You’re gonna poison them!

Stef: Yes, I am. But if you have an open bar, we’ll have a good time!

Mila: Oh GOD. I totally picture this Shakespearean thing where you put poison in their glass and then we do that like, wraparound toast thing where I drink out of their glass and it’s too late and I die and it’s a whole thing and you go to jail and you get to live out Orange Is The New Black but it’s not as cool, because that show embellishes. You’re gonna feel really bad that you poisoned my partner. Short answer, maybe. How about you?

Stef: Are you kidding? Of course I would. You’re good at a party.

Mila: I would fall into the cake.

Stef: You’d give a really good speech.

Mila: Yeah… You should probably tip me for the speech in advance… But then who do I get to bring as a +1 if you’re getting married?!

Stef: Ugh, I don’t know. You’re gonna have to find someone else.

Mila: So we’re maybe inviting each other to the wedding.

Stef: Do you want to talk about how we met?

Mila: No. (laughs)

Stef: Well, I kind of want to talk about how we first hooked up because it was hilarious in retrospect… I was really sad and we were at Lindsay’s and she passed out.. You and I were talking and we had just been drinking champagne and boxed wine all night anyway, we just kept going.. And then you were just like, “fuck this” and we left and went to Loaded. You bought me shots. Two guys were talking to us and you put your arm around me to get them to go away… which dudes never really pick up on ever. But you kept your arm there for a while and I was just like, wait, WHAT? That didn’t seem like a possible thing. We stayed there for a while and the bar closed and you were just furious because LA bars close at two.

Mila: It’s bullshit!

Stef: It IS bullshit. Everyone’s driving, the bars close early, I don’t know how anyone does anything. So we went back to Lindsay’s and we filled a water bottle with vodka —

Mila: It wasn’t vodka.

Stef: What was it?

Mila: Do you really want to know?

Stef: Yes.

Mila: ….It was cooking sherry.

Stef: These were dark times. The only thing that open was this shady little hookah bar on Hollywood Boulevard, and we went in there and I smoked hookah to impress you?! We brought cooking sherry?! Why did she have cooking sherry?! So we’re there, and I was wasted, you were wasted… You blew smoke into my mouth and I was terrified because I thought you were going to kiss me. Then I finally decided I was gonna do it.

Mila: So you kissed me. Then we came home… you tell this part.

Stef: So we come back and I keep being like, “No, we can’t! No, we mustn’t!” and then grabbing you again because I couldn’t not.

Mila: You were acting like you were in a bodice-ripper. I was like, “OK, then don’t,” and you were like, “BUT WAIT!” So then we’re in the kitchen and… here you are waffling about over whether or not you wanna fuck and I was like “Well, it looks like she does. She’s touching me like she does, so it looks like I’m just gonna have to go down on this sad girl.”

Stef: I think you are probably not the first person who’s thought that about me.

Mila: Apparently, this whole time Lindsay was watching from the hallway. She woke up to get her meds and was like, “Whoa! What do I do? This is really hot but I also need my meds.” She came out like “Oh hey guys, don’t mind me…” I was like, “LOL” but you were like, “OH JESUS.”

Stef: I called an Uber and took the fuck off.

Mila: And then I passed out on the couch covered in kale chips.

Stef: I went home and cried and felt crazy. Then we kept talking.. Then a few days later you texted me to meet you at Darkroom because you needed a Xanax.

Mila: I think that was just an excuse.

Stef: But the second you asked, I was out the door, getting on a bus to come meet you. The second you asked. That whole time was crazy. It took a while. I had to make sure I didn’t really like Lindsay and that all of that was behind me. I had to figure out what the fuck was happening. It was complicated and I didn’t want to use anyone or hurt anybody. I wanted to be sure.

Mila: What’s that thing they say, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions? I never got it out of my head that I was just a band-aid.

Stef: You never were.

Mila: Yeah, but I felt like that forever. I mean, at the time I felt like I was sort of conveniently there, and then… I mean I know you liked me for real but..

Stef: It was never that, honestly. When I decided, when I met you at Darkroom and then later when I saw you at the Abbey, I had decided. I was into you, I was going for it. There was nothing for Lindsay or for anybody else. It was just you… And it stayed that way. I wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t sure. It always made me feel weird that you thought it had anything to do with Lindsay, because that thing was such a distraction, just me trying to figure out what I was doing in LA. It was never going anywhere. Anyway, Lindsay and I stopped talking entirely a few months after that, and all I ever ended up getting outta her was cool friends.

Mila: And this is why Tinder is a life-ruiner.

Stef: It is.

Mila: You know what’s interesting, is that you ask what you miss about me… instead of what you’re definitely not gonna miss.

Stef: Do you wanna get into that?

Mila: (cackling) It’s your turn.

gal pals

Stef: Um… I don’t know if there is anything actually? Oh, you know what? Worrying like a crazy person about you, like you were my personal responsibility. I still worry about you but not the same way… Like when I didn’t hear from you for eight hours and then got a text that said “babe I’m in the hospital LOL.” I had a fucking heart attack. (Ed note: she was fine)

Mila: Well, I thought you should know! You were the first person I thought of. The LOL was so you’d know I was OK!

Stef: Great. Or after we’d broken up when we were in Brooklyn and you texted me at 3 in the morning asking where I lived, and I thought you were gonna come sleep over so I texted you my address, and then I didn’t hear from you for 20 minutes so I called and asked where you were. You’d fallen asleep on the train and you were like, “I don’t know, Far Rockaway?” And then your phone died. I thought you were kidding and then I realized you weren’t and I couldn’t get ahold of you. I was like, well, I have to trust she can figure out how to get home I guess…

Mila: I did. And then I got a bagel.

Stef: Ugh, good for you.