At a Leslie Jamison book event in late spring for her divorce memoir Splinters, I stood in line for the bathroom next to a woman in the early stages of a marital breakup. When I told her I’d split with my ex three years earlier, her eyes met mine. “Will it ever get better?” she asked. I promised her it would.
I met M two and a half years after my nine-year marriage ended. He was tall, handsome, and insufferable—exactly my type. “He looks famous,” a friend responded when I showed her a picture. “He is a musician,” I said, as if that explained it. Although he was French and very stylish, it was the way he moved that leapt out at me when we met. He wore his hair in tight, soft coils, part of an iconic silhouette I first spotted in my neighborhood. I’d gone out of my way to introduce myself.
We started dating in “wet January,” which is what I called it that year because I don’t participate in the post-holiday sobriety cleanse, and because I found him so physically attractive that I had an orgasm while dry humping his leg after our first date. The way he appreciated the finer things in life—art, jazz, literature, food, and subtle differences in fabric texture—reminded me of my ex-husband, and rather than a turnoff, this immediately put me at ease. Once a week, we’d go out to eat, talk, then have sex for hours.
Although we saw each other regularly, I noticed as the months passed that our relationship remained at a surface level. We’d originally been on the same page about keeping things casual and not rushing into anything. I liked that he didn’t demand too much of me. I had a day job and wrote books in my spare time, a pursuit that could feel all-consuming. And yet, I didn’t write at all while I was seeing him—I was too distracted.
It was on a ski trip in April that I noticed I wanted more. I looked out from under the covers of my bed at a blanket of snow and texted M a photo of me in my bathing suit from a nearby hot spring. I miss you a little, I wrote. I’d sent him pics before, but this one was different: I was posing, but not in a performative way. I wasn’t trying to be funny or sexy or cool, just me. Though he had immediately hearted it, I felt exposed. What was behind this vulnerable feeling? A kernel of hope that, after leaving a perfectly okay marriage to a beautiful man who was my best friend for over a decade, I might one day be loved again.
***
After the book event in May, where I’d reassured the other divorced woman, I headed to M’s apartment with butterflies in my stomach. I had planned to tell him that our loose arrangement was no longer working for me, that I was interested in something deeper. I’d grown attached.
As I sipped an Arnold Palmer made with Earl Grey tea, honey, and mezcal, I told him how I felt. Like always, he listened. We talked about our past experiences navigating relationships as divorced people without kids. He agreed to think about what he wanted. We had sex twice that night, then twice more in the morning. When I went to leave, I leaned in to kiss him, and he gave me a strange look. The yogurt and granola he’d fixed me for breakfast curdled in my stomach.
Waiting to hear from him that weekend, a knot grew in my stomach. I started bargaining with myself. Maybe I could be okay with a superficial situation-ship, if it meant holding on to the euphoria of my infatuation? On Monday, Memorial Day, he texted to see if I wanted to go out Wednesday. I don’t recall exactly what he said, only that I sent a screenshot to a friend and asked, “Is he planning to dump me?” I was uneasy, but his tone seemed to suggest otherwise. “Definitely not,” she said.
I put on makeup that night and met him at a restaurant in Manhattan. He bought me dinner at the bar. There was a mirror behind it, where he never met my gaze. He didn’t eat. When I finally asked what he had to say, he blurted it out: “I don’t want anything serious.” A hot sting of humiliation flooded over me. While waiting for a car back to Brooklyn, I made the mistake of asking if he had ever had any feelings for me. He cocked his head to one side, then said, “Define feelings.” I didn’t let myself cry until I got home.
***
The next morning, I woke up in shock. How had I been so blindsided? How could losing something that had never been that serious feel so terrible? I began googling to determine what could possibly be wrong with him. Narcissist? No. Sociopath? Not quite. Aging Fboy? Maybe. I made an urgent appointment with my therapist. “Interesting,” she said as I sobbed. “It didn’t seem like you were that invested in this. Maybe you’re just highly sensitive.”
Finally—I thought—a lead. If I were the problem, I reasoned, I could also be the solution. Self-help had never appealed to me; my preferred nonfiction genre was literary memoir. But I also realized that not even my therapist would want to dissect the failure of my short-term relationship as much as the voice actor narrating The Highly Sensitive Person’s Guide to Dealing with Toxic People.
So I listened to hours of positive self-talk, which helped me reframe the situation. I had not “lost” anything. I’d gained an opportunity for self-transformation, or so the books told me. It didn’t make me feel better right away, but it did temporarily suspend the heavy feeling of awfulness that found its way into my chest every time I remembered that M had never had any articulable feelings for me at all. I accepted the books might just be a coping mechanism—but unlike alcohol, they didn’t mess with my already depressed mood, and unlike sex, they didn’t risk starting a new cycle of unhelpful behavior.
They did, however, help me excavate my dysfunctional relationship patterns. I began to see a pattern: I would fall for someone, cling to them regardless of whether they were an appropriate match, get annoyed when they weren’t, break up with them, relapse because I feared being alone, break up with them again, then fall for someone new. My boundaries were apparently malfunctioning; I was supposed to be filtering out the duds sooner. Instead, I ended up with a series of unsatisfying, unhealthy, and sometimes emotionally abusive relationships. But I still had no idea how to fix the problem.
***
“I don’t remember ever seeing you cry over a boy before,” my sister said in June, when I went to visit her in Illinois. Dried-up cicada corpses were strewn about—the aftermath of an early summer orgy. “I know,” I said. My marriage ended during the pandemic, and I had spent a week sequestered at my parents’ house in California, crying in a robe and drinking Chardonnay. On many levels, this more recent breakup was so much easier—I wasn’t losing a life partner. But it also felt like a rebuke to the whole reason I got divorced in the first place: I thought I deserved someone who could connect with me deeply, on a physical, intellectual, and emotional level.
By “dry July,” I was starting to feel better. Voluntarily celibate, I’d put most of my wine budget into barre classes. My calves looked amazing, plus I was meditating. Finally, ready to delve deeper, I listened to a book aimed at divorced women, The Breakup Bible, which suggested I build a “love map” of my past relationships. I cobbled together pages I’d written for exercises from the other books and spread them out on my floor, pausing to fill in any gaps. Then, I scanned the map like a murder wall.
Nothing clicked, until a few days later when the photo I’d sent M from my ski trip popped up in my iPhone Memories, along with the original cringe feeling. It occurred to me that my whole life I’ve been looking to other people to confirm whether I was worthy of love, giving away something that belonged only to me. I had always found the term “self-worth” confusing, because in every area of my life outside of relationships, my self-esteem was fine. But now that I knew what my boundaries were supposed to be protecting—a space to nurture my tender sapling of self-worth—it made perfect sense.
I finished my self-help journey with a better understanding for how I might spot incompatibilities and red flags earlier (drinking and horniness are apparently unhelpful). On my love map, I’d noticed the same hot-and-cold dynamic repeated over and over, and remembered how one of the books suggested I might be reenacting an early attachment wound. I decided I had more healing to do, then wondered if that was what the self-help industrial complex wanted me to think. My life was getting back to normal, but I wasn’t ready to actively date, let alone pursue a long-term partner. I needed to spend more time alone. After my divorce, I had just been putting one foot in front of the other, waiting for things to get better. I always believed they would. And now that they had, I deserved the chance to enjoy it.