Breaking up is not a perfect place. It’s gooey and sublime. If it’s a colour, it’s grey. There are still mistakes to be made after the rupture if you don’t take stock. My friends ask me if I’m happy. They’re trying to be helpful. But I’m not happy. I’m healing. There’s a difference, but it’s not as big as you might think.
Chapter 1
R and I met on Hinge.
My expectations going into our first date were low. A brief marriage in my twenties and a quick millennial divorce had given me grief and whiplash.
During this period, my father spoke to me about “a man in the mist”. It was his refurbished version of a folk tale that goes something like this: Don’t worry. You’re in pain now. But one day, when everything is getting dark, the clouds will part, the fog will lift, and there he’ll be: your man in the mist. And every time I went on a date, I found myself asking: is this my man in the mist?
Most men were, if not immediately, soon enough, no.
I had become a reluctant expert of wading through the dark waters of dating profiles of men that had little earrings. Men that wore cowboy hats, men that were exclusively shirtless, men that were inexplicably leading a prized pony through a field, or wearing a monkey on their shoulder, or plastering emojis over their friends’ faces. Men that listed their religion as Hyper Spiritual and their preference for a situationships, men that wanted you to guess – in poll form – which of three feats of strength they had supposedly accomplished, none of which impressive, men who were perpetually giving speeches at weddings or jumping off docks in Speedos or some perplexing combination of the two, men that found any reason to drop the word “Eton” into a prompt, men that had lost and found themselves at least twice in Bali, men who were a little too comfortable with selfies, men who wanted you to know how sincere they were about long-term partnership by listing the things they expected from you which was – simply – for you to ski, cook, “gym,” dance, hike, fill their emotional voids, nurture them like a mother and look like the Love Island cast.
Sometimes all it took was a bright and devastating “ick” (the man who invited me over for Thai and spent the meal licking his fingers one by one, smack, smack, smack, or the man who said Putin wasn’t all bad). Others were more subtle. A growing numbness to their touch, a not-small amount of effort to stay concentrated on the conversation, a dinner with a nice man who had, curiously, no curiosity about the world. But whatever the forensic report stated as the cause of death, they all had one thing in common: I couldn’t imagine a life with them. They didn’t feel like the father of my children. I couldn’t quite get there, even in my dreams.
And then there was R.
R had a 5-star profile. He was a cyclist, read: good calves. Roman jawline, read: generous in bed. Nice eyes, read: be careful. Funny answers, read: will fall hard for him. And when I met him a few weeks later in a dimly lit Hackney bar that served cocktails in cans, most of my underlying assumptions turned out to be true.
It was February. He was wearing a long black coat and three additional thermal layers. I could tell, even as we shared that first hug, that whatever he was hiding under his layers wasn’t physical. R was solid. R was sexy. R was fun, and funny. R lit my insides on fire. And within ten minutes, his Roman jawline had me in stitches.
Reader, R was a yes for me.
Chemistry is specific, and we had it. Dates with him felt like floating. Felt like flying. Felt like falling. He told me he loved me for the first time in Budapest. The kind of impromptu trip you take when suddenly everything in your life matters less than a ticket on RyanAir. He said it accidentally at a Mediterranean restaurant I’d found on Google. It spilled from his mouth, attached to another thread of conversation, and his eyes widened at the shock of it. The restaurant was loud. The appetisers were coming. I pretended like I didn’t hear it. I knew he was earnest, but it wasn’t the right moment.
The second time he said it, we had rented a house for Easter weekend in Dungeness. It was like spending two days at the end of the world: all flat land and apocalyptic views of the pebble-strewn sea. The room was quiet. Tracy Chapman’s “I’m Ready” was playing on the portable speaker.
“I love you.” he said. “I love you too,” I said back. And I did. It felt right. It felt simple.
That morning, I didn’t think too much about the messages I’d seen flicker on the screen of his phone from the woman at work he called his “best friend”, the night prior. I didn’t consider how odd it was for her to message him at midnight.
It was a foggy morning. The clouds hung like curtains over our world in which only the two of us existed. It was a dreary English Sunday, and I was happy. I was hopeful. I didn’t think twice. I was with my man in the mist.
Hope sucks.
Chapter 2
When I found out how deeply R lied to me, it knocked our world on a tilt. A party of three is a slippery structure on which to stand. There were one too many angles in our foundation. There were edges I did not account for. In the aftermath, it felt like we were trying to build a craftsman cottage in the Bermuda Triangle. “It’s nice here!” I said, manufacturing a smile. “I love the beams!” But there was an obvious leak. And the beams were kind of tacky. And secretly, I wished I had invested elsewhere.
I couldn’t be my “best self” when I couldn’t decipher what was real and what was fiction. I couldn’t find my centre of gravity; no matter how many downward dogs and spiritual healers and bundles of sage and morning meditations I threw at it. R asked me to be calm. R asked me to work with him. Reasonable requests, but eventually I had to face reality. And the reality was I was not calm; I was angry.
The details of the betrayal are and are no longer relevant. But here are a few.
A daily Gratitude Journal that did not list my name. A love letter asking her to wait for him while he sorted some things out. Things like me, things like our love. A little lie that grew with the successive days and the inventive ways it was retold. Broken promises and explanations that felt rehearsed. And through all of this, I maintained an embarrassing urge to please him. I convinced myself this was love, just the challenging kind. But it was hard to be his Manic Pixie Dream Girl when I had found his best friend’s thong in his wastebasket.
I played my own role. I knew it would be hard from the moment I found the journal. Dark. I went back anyway, again and again. I went back until I got brighter than the dark.
Chapter 3
Everyone tells you that you will learn a lesson from the ending of your relationship. I think these people are trying to be helpful. Like government officials. I think these people are, in a way, loving you. So, as much as it feels like a tax return, when I look back, I try to learn.
R was teaching me something about honesty that I had been avoiding. Something about the value of trust. The way betrayal erodes your vision. Our relationship forced me to confront the fact that I had been on both sides of the equation. I felt like the victim with R, but in a previous relationship, I had once been the villain. I was lied to (read: righteous), but I had once been a liar (read: emotionally immature). bell hooks wrote in “Communion” that people – men and women – cheat, lie, hide, to ease their pain. I can relate to this. I can acknowledge that, ultimately, R was easing his pain. And yet.
I’ve read about people overcoming infidelity of all shapes and sizes. It sounds evolved. Possible. I wanted to. And we tried, but the tilt his dishonesty forced our relationship into so early on was difficult to un-tilt. It took an otherworldly amount of effort. Like Superman stopping a comet with his bare hands, we made a few heroic efforts. One such effort was couple’s therapy.
We booked a virtual session with a therapist that had been recommended to me, and on a Saturday night while our friends were at the pub, we logged onto Zoom to meet our maker. Our therapist had a pleasant face. Like a flat-coated retriever. Much too pleasant for the edge-of-break-up hell and puny drama we were about to unleash on her.
R kicked the hour off by explaining that we were here because he “longed for” his best-friend-slash-co-worker-slash-lover at the beginning of our relationship. That the cheating was purely emotional. No big deal really. A blip. I said very little of the actual timeline and the facts that challenged this narrative, like the date of the letter. Like the overseas work trip they took the week before he met my parents.
I wanted to give his feelings air. And so, I said very little of my own longings. Like how I longed to turn back the clock so he could un-lie. Un-hide. Untether himself from his past. That I longed for us to live happily ever after in a Netflix-esque way. To be the mother of his unborn children with strong calves. To reverse engineer our relationship back to health. And if none of this was possible, then I simply longed to be myself again; alone. Longing has always been one of my favourite words. Longing is now an uppercut to the jaw.
The therapist called me the next day. The vibe of the call was company-wide redundancies. The tone of her voice was apologetic. “I’m sorry,” she said, “But I work mainly with parents who are having parenting issues. And I feel -” and here there was a long pause.
Unnerved. Unsettled. “Unqualified,” she eventually decided.
So, yes, even though R and I made each other feel electrically alive and knew what the other was thinking without saying a word – which we told her – our foundation was split and could not be professionally sutured. In the end, he let me down, and I let him know it. He made a mistake, and I did my best to make him feel the weight of it. I failed to see him, and he failed to see me, and we told one another frequently. And in between all of that, we touched tenderly, we loved, we reached. It was confusing. Ours was an upside-down world. And yet, I didn’t want to let go. I went in search of a sign.
Getting dumped by your couple’s therapist. How’s that for a sign?
Chapter 4
Who hasn’t tossed in the darkness and asked themselves: Is this love worth the risk?
How do you forgive someone for hurting you? How do you forgive yourself for letting them?
How do you put your pain down?
When did you start accepting bad behaviour as love?
What can you live with? And who will you allow yourself to become to accommodate it?
I had all the questions, but the only one that mattered was the one I was too afraid to ask: Why do you want to be with someone who doesn’t value you?
Chapter 5
There is something I’m still learning about loving and leaving. About choosing and being chosen. I am a person men, for some reason, have genuinely tried to love. They’ve expressed this love to me in physical ways and verbal ways and legal ways and occasionally through gift giving.
R once strode through my flat, flicking through a collection of signed David Sedaris novels, a handmade vase, a giant photo of a beach washed over by waves in South Africa and asked: “Is there anything in here that isn’t from an ex?” One such gift was a Hermès blanket. And when R’s dog ate a hole in the centre of it, I think he was a little happy to see it go. My past was also everywhere, and I don’t think it was any easier for him to live amongst it. A thing is just a thing unless it’s also a reminder.
He was the first person I had told I loved since my ex-husband. He was the first person I took home to meet my family in Canada. He was the first person I thought of in the morning, and the last person I thought of at night. But I was trying to make him – unconsciously or otherwise – fill the voids I’d left open in myself.
After we broke up, I flew to New York and went to dinner and a comedy show with a handsome, all-around-wonderful guy. The comedian did a bit about his girlfriend and him moving in together. He talked about watching the moving van pull away with his furniture and his girlfriend in the passenger seat. He said: “Hey wait! Everything I love is in that car.”
And I wanted to be present on this date. I wanted to be more than present. I wanted to be over R, and all in with this handsome, all-around-wonderful guy. But unfortunately, what I stupidly wanted – still – was to be everything R loved, even though all I ever felt with R was that I was both not enough, and way too much.
Time passed. In between crying at the pub and pretending to be productive at work, I read Dolly Alderton’s “Good Material”. It was the right book at a bad moment. The main character is going through a breakup, and to cope, he has to let go of the “subculture” he and his girlfriend had created together during their relationship.
R and I’s subculture was folk music and vinyl, Bruce Springsteen. Zach Bryan. Mt. Joy. Father John Misty. It was splitting a cinnamon bun at Fortitude and two cappuccinos. It was pints at a picnic table at the Lord John Russell. It was cuddling his dog and making the shape of a family. Skinny dipping in frozen lakes and husky sledding on NYE and driving through the mountains. It was menswear and oversized coats. It was sex. Sex in all its forms and freak-itudes. It was concerts, comedy, and laughter. It was finding new ways to touch each other in public to remind one another we were there. It was getting a little high and going to the moon. It was homemade porridge with sliced bananas. It was sharing face oil and books by the bedside and votive candles dripping wax onto the shelves. It was dreaming. All kinds of dreaming. Dreaming of houses with gardens and dreaming of road trips in camper vans and dreaming of an elusive period of calm that we never reached.
I grieve all this. But I grieve the dream of us most of all.
For a while, I could only listen exclusively to Adrianne Lenker’s “Sadness as a Gift” because of the lyric: “You showed me a place I’ll find even when I’m old,” and Noah Kahan’s “Your Needs, My Needs,” because I could never bridge the gap between R and I’s needs, and I liked hearing someone else scream about it.
There are days where I wonder where he is and what he’s doing. And then it’s suddenly, strangely sunny, and beautiful in London. Notting Hill is spilling over with pints and Norse Projects hats and UPPAbaby strollers and the warmth is flooding the patios in just the right way and I’m meeting a group of people I love for a roast. I’m reminded that there are other people in the world. That I will love again. And so will he. And it’s okay. It’s okay he’s not here. It’s not without its ache, but it’s okay.
R wrote me an email of the things he was grateful for after we broke up. Number 6 was “simply being you shocked me out of a lot of pain.” But what he didn’t recognise was that by using me – us – to get himself out of it, he pulled me into it. Their mess. His pain. If we’re speaking of truth, there is probably relief on both sides now. The truth is, R could never tell me the truth.
I sent him the other half of a Khruangbin album he left at my flat the other day. Because what’s the point in fighting for half of anything?