Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day until Valentine’s Day.
I had a game I would play with myself to test whether I was truthfully over my ex. The game was this: I would force myself to imagine that he came back to me, asking me to be with him, to forget everything sad and difficult which had taken place between us. Would I say yes, would I be with him again? Would I instantly swallow my pride which had been so eviscerated during our time together? Would I accept whatever thing he said to mitigate his preference for other women—not only accept it but accept it with joy, relief, wild welcome?
For months the answer kept on being “Yes,” and then the months turned into years. I can tell you exactly how long it took for the answer to honestly be “No”: it was five years. Five years during which I would never have admitted this to anyone, not anywhere except in the deep recesses of myself in certain stark moments. Five years to metabolize a relationship that was never officially a relationship, which lasted barely nine scrappy months but changed the course of my life forever.
E and I met on Halloween night when I was 24. I was dressed as a Manson girl and still lived with my boyfriend, from whom I had become steadily alienated in recent months. For two weeks until I worked up the courage to break up fully and move out, I behaved and felt like a wayward teenager, fully delirious and engorged on my crush like a bug fattening up on blood. We went for a fancy dinner in the seaside town he was from, both of us young and shabby and broke enough that such things still seemed like a funny shared joke. Afterward we climbed around slippery rocks and crouched among them near the spittle of the waves to share a flask of Jameson and make out furiously.
Soon enough—straight away, really—I was in love in a way I had never been before and will never be again, which is both sad and completely necessary and welcome. Sometimes I wonder what it was that made this love the singular one for me, the one that obliterated me and made me scrap myself and have to start from zero, invent a new person to be. Was it who he was, or who I was? Was it just a particular time and place? If it wasn’t him, would it have been someone else who came along and burst my life open, filling it with new, unfamiliar pain and endless unimagined possibilities?
E is an artist and bristled with energy and ambition, which was incredibly attractive and invigorating. I was then an administrative assistant in a medical institution, most of my ambition having been flattened in the five years since I had dropped out of college and struggled to survive, both materially and mentally. There had been a time so unspeakably abject for me that being physically well, having a salaried job, and a relationship—even if the relationship made me unhappy—seemed the absolute most I could ever expect from life. This is what I had accepted for myself before I fell in love with him. I wasn’t miserable when we met, but I was keeping the wildest most essential parts of myself at bay, and meeting him forced me to question why. He forced me to question why. He told me I was a writer and to identify that way. He encouraged me to think outside of my immediate circles, to be aware of art in the broader world, to believe I could be a part of it.
Sometimes I think the reason I can never be in love with that level of demented singularity again is that the power dynamics could never be replicated. Now, in my thirties, even when I am frustrated or angry with myself, I have a baseline sense of who I am and what I am worth, a sense which is not much subject to the whims and judgements of those I encounter. When I met E, I very much did not have such a sense. I remained in that fertile but dangerous period of life where every interesting person or experience was capable of reshaping my self-perception in a moment. He, on the other hand, appeared to me fully formed. Only a few years older, but firmly settled into his identity as an artist, I felt toward his practice and his way of being in the world a violent devotion, which understandably did not serve our relationship well. There’s nothing more repellent to somebody like him who respects self definition, something I feel myself now and probably understood intuitively even then, but I could not restrain myself from obsession and worship.
We were never officially together, but for nine months he was my best friend and my every passing thought. He made me laugh like nobody else. He went to an artist retreat and came back talking about non-monogamy and radical honesty, which is when I knew things were over, but I pretended they weren’t. I got my heart broken, of course. I pretended to be able to deal with such things. I hosted a dinner party he brought another woman to. I lay in bed listening to him edit an audio file of him interviewing a new lover that he was using in an artwork. One night, in a rage after he left himself logged into my computer and messages kept appearing from somebody he was dating, I deleted our entire message history, not wanting him to have any access to all the care and desire I had offered to him.
For a long time after the ending I was furious with him, acidic and bristling with it, unable to stop decrying him to myself and others. Now I know that despite the particulars, I was angry with him only for not loving me back. This is often the way, isn’t it? I think about the way a boyfriend once reacted when I broke up with him in my bedroom: “You’re really going to do this here?” as though there could be any location which would not have made him angry. It was the same for me and E—he did treat me carelessly, but with the benefit of hindsight I know my deep offense was not taken from those actions but from the absence of his love, which he could not help and I should never have resented him for. This is one of the hardest and strangest parts of romance. It is completely unfair to position someone as cruel for not loving you, and at the same time someone not loving you is vastly more painful and insulting than most things a person can intentionally do to you.
In the years since I have been able to honestly say no, I wouldn’t be with him now, not even if he said all the things I dreamed of him saying to me at the time. I feel no animosity towards him. I feel some embarrassment for the extremity of my responses—but not too much. Who could regret a love like that, even when it drives you mad? Mostly what I feel now is tremendous gratitude toward E, because he changed the direction of my life. He was the one who told me to quit my day job, to take my writing seriously, to move away, to start again. Not because of any great faith in myself but because I was so in love, because I wished to impress him, I blindly said, yes, I will, this is the person I will be now. Even though such decisions were taken for the wrong reason, they were taken nonetheless, and eventually their impact meant that I did become the autonomous, basically confident and self-contained person I am today, doing the only job I ever wanted. It’s perfectly possible I would have got there without his encouragement, but as it happens it was he who pointed the way. When I published my first book, I thanked him for this. It feels good to play the game now and answer, no I wouldn’t want to be with him, but am I glad I met him? Yes, yes, yes.