Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day through the week of Valentine’s Day.
My cousin told me Matt was married. Or maybe it was my aunt—some family member who still followed him on Instagram, even though I didn’t. (When we’d broken up, I unfollowed him and then removed him as a follower. A clean break for us both.)
“Oh,” I replied in between bites of a hot dog grilled minutes earlier by my dad. “Good for him.”
That night, as I lay in my childhood bedroom, I thought about searching his name. In the five years since we’d broken up, I’d had other boyfriends—but Matt (I’m using a pseudonym) was the last one who had been in here, this mausoleum to a past life with the lacrosse pinny in my closet and a broken strand of Brooks Brothers pearls on the dresser.
I rolled over and went to sleep instead.
I can’t tell you the exact moment we met. But I can tell you the one I remember: in the office of our college newspaper when, on a dull January day, I stepped in and saw him working on a photo layout.
The newspaper was the only thing I liked about the large East Coast college where I’d ended up. I’d made a mistake choosing to go there. But 18-year-old me had been scared to apply to the small liberal-arts schools that I now know would have suited me better. I was a preppy girl from Connecticut who popped her collar and put a pink Vineyard Vines whale sticker on her laptop, and I was afraid of sticking out. And while I knew I wanted to be a writer, I was also afraid that I wasn’t good enough. What if I got there and everyone was better than me? Instead, I picked a safe choice: a place with a Barbour-wearing student body, a football team, a respectable ranking from the US News World Report. So far, I hated it.
The newspaper, though, was the one bright spot. My assignments took me from museums to professors’ offices to the local police precinct. I’d do an interview, go to the library, and stay up half the night writing, often sleeping through my classes the next morning. I applied for an editor position. When I found out, alone in my dorm room, that I’d gotten it, I finally smiled.
Nothing happened that semester—I’d blow out my hair and put on a full face of makeup for our production nights, despite the fact that we often worked until 2 or 3 a.m. Nothing happened that summer, either, when I returned to Connecticut and he went back to Long Island. Yet, it always felt like we were drawn to each other. And one winter night, after I snuck into the local bar with my fake Maryland ID to meet him, we finally stuck.
He was a few years older than me and graduated that spring, yet we stayed together as I took over as opinions-page editor and he turned his lens on Boston itself. A photo he took during the 2012 marathon bombing inspired an essay on the website of a national magazine.
Boston, though, was never our plan. New York was. The summer before my senior year, I landed an internship at Vanity Fair. (I’d studied the magazine so intently that I found myself rambling on about William Langewiesche during my interview, but I guess it worked.) It felt like a seismic shift forward for both of us. Matt had enough professional connections at that point that finding a job in New York would be easy. Maybe we could both make it there?
On my first day at the magazine, I wore a too-short dress that I found myself constantly pulling down and brand-new patent-leather pumps that wouldn’t stop squeaking. Everyone stared as I walked by. (At the time, only the senior women wore heels. The rest of our roles required too much running for anything but flats, but I didn’t know that yet.) That night, Matt grabbed my hands and looked me straight in the eye: “You can do this.”
When my first article was published on the website, I babbled about it the entire ride out to his family’s home in Sag Harbor. Matt didn’t mind. He took me out to dinner to celebrate at one of the nicest restaurants in town. We shared a bowl of lobster rigatoni and drank rosé as the sun set over the water.
I remember being happy. Being in love. But I also remember not being the least bit content. I had so much work left to turn my small life into a big one.
A year and a college graduation later, I landed a full-time assistant job at Vanity Fair and moved into an apartment in New York City. Apartment was a generous term. I split a studio in the financial district with a friend also working in a low-paying creative field. She got the living room and a window. I got the home office and a door. Every day before heading into the office, I put baby powder inside my shoes so no one could hear me coming.
How gorgeous those grunt years were. I got coffee and answered phones for bosses who taught me everything in return: “Never use a 25-cent word when a 5-cent word will do.” “Shorter sentences.” “Fewer adverbs.” “Garner is a terrible word.” (They had a list of terrible words: chortled, glitz, plethora, opine, sleaze. I printed out a copy and hung it on the corkboard behind my desk.) I’d often get to work as early as 7 a.m. and leave 14 hours later. Sometimes, yes, I had work to do. Other times, I just didn’t want to leave.
Matt and I had settled into a routine: Regular movie nights. Dinner at the sushi restaurant near his Midtown apartment. Sleepovers two or three times a week. (Unlike me, he had a window.) Plus, everyone loved him. My ailing 98-year-old grandmother told me it was her dying wish to see us married.
But cracks had also started to show. He mentioned wanting to eventually move to the suburbs, but I felt like we’d just escaped them. He enjoyed the preppy lifestyle I was so desperate to ditch. But our biggest problem was that I was more in love with my future than with him. The stuff you need to do to maintain an adult relationship—drinks with the college roommate your partner loves but you find kind of annoying, the long dinners with parents, being a plus-one at their cousin’s wedding—it all felt like a burden. One day, he suggested we go to watch hockey at a nearby bar with his friends. “I have absolutely zero fucking interest in doing that,” I thought while reading my work email.
The partying didn’t help. Socializing was now part of my job. While the other 24-year-olds waited in line at East Village bars to drink watered-down vodka sodas, I sat wide-eyed in booths at Sunset Tower or Monkey Bar with Manhattans billed to checks that never came. The more I drank, the more mercurial I’d become. I’d sometimes wake up to the realization that I’d picked a vicious fight over the smallest of things the night before. I’d apologize profusely. He’d eventually accept. But at some point, if you draw enough blood, it won’t scab over.
Matt was having his own professional success. One of his pictures landed on the cover of a national magazine. However, just as he missed out on what was at the time his dream job, I got mine: a writing gig at Vogue. There’s a picture of me celebrating that night. I’m taking a jello shot on a rooftop bar in SoHo, eyes closed and head thrown back. Another Vanity Fair assistant is in the background, egging me on. Matt’s not there. Maybe he was traveling for an assignment. Or maybe I just didn’t invite him.
We clung to each other a little longer. It was hard to let go. There was such a beautiful kindness to Matt: He was one of those guys who somehow kept all their friends from childhood while amassing an infinite number of new ones. (One time I asked him how many groomsmen he’d have at his wedding. “Fourteen,” he answered back.) If he was late to dinner, it was because he was busy giving tourists directions or helping a neighbor carry a heavy package to their door. Then there was all the time invested: We were each other’s first big relationships, first big loves.
My lease was up soon. Despite all our issues, we’d discussed moving in together—an inevitable precursor to an engagement that friends and family already had started to whisper about. But secretly I was planning a rupture.
A classmate from high school had posted she was subletting her studio apartment in Yorkville. The next day I rode the Q train up to see it. Within hours, I’d drained my meager savings account, signed a stack of paperwork, and delivered it all to a landlord.
I dropped it casually—“I signed an apartment lease today!”—like I was talking about a visit to the dentist. He hid his surprise at first, which allowed me to pretend I didn’t just do something extremely shitty.
Yet it all came out a few nights later: “You signed a lease without telling me.” The hurt was so apparent in his eyes.
I don’t remember all the details, but I also know that I don’t want to remember them. I’d become someone who moved fast and broke people yet was too cowardly to let them go. Cognitive dissonance clouded my mind: The protagonist can’t be the villain.
But I was. Because one night when Matt was on vacation—hiking somewhere in South America—and we were technically on a mutually agreed-upon break, I breezed past the bouncer at Socialista wearing the shortest skirt in my closet. A table was waiting for me, and after enough tequila shots, I started dancing on it. The next morning I woke up to a man who wasn’t him.
We broke up for good when Matt returned. He uttered the final blow as we sat among unopened boxes in my new apartment. When he walked out the door, I went to lie on my couch. For hours, I waited for the tears to come.
Several months after our breakup, I was on a plane flying back from Las Vegas. I’d been there for 48 hours writing a story on couples getting quickie weddings on Valentine’s Day. I stayed up the entire night, scribbling in a notebook, observing everything I could. My mind was still swirling with it all, but exhaustion made me foggy. I turned on The Devil Wears Prada.
An hour and a half in, Andy Sachs was in Paris in head-to-toe designer clothes. She realizes that she’s done the work, that this life is hers now if she wants it. Yet on the steps of the Place de la Concorde, she throws her phone in the fountain and walks away. “Turn around,” I whispered. “Turn. Around.” Where was I telling her to go? I wasn’t sure.
