After yesterday’s post about repetition and therapy, it seems only natural to tackle one of the more obvious questions any reader of this site might ask, which is “Why are you so fucked up about your ex?” Some of the answers are already here, if you know where to look. As I previously wrote about the years I spent single:
[When] it came to love, I had a Sam Cooke problem. I suspected that when I fell in love, it would be forever — and that my first love would be my last. It was the sort of dangerous self-knowledge that, coupled with my inherently cautious nature, kept me locked within myself, where I was frequently miserable.
My ex knew that prior to our involvement, as did Crankenstein years later. There are other reasons as well, most of them elementary: I really, really loved her a lot. How and why things ended, and the decisions she made afterward, haunt me. It was breathtaking in its immaturity, impulsivity and self-destructiveness, far exceeding the bounds of what’s normal at the conclusion of a long-term relationship.* That undoubtedly sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not.
Some of it was foreshadowed throughout our relationship, especially its final months, but we never managed to have satisfactory conversations about it. She denied my concerns or insisted that I’d misinterpreted troubling things I hadn’t. There were times I failed to press issues hard enough and times I copped-out entirely, as when we drove around to recharge the car’s battery during a bitter cold snap on one of our final days together. Pulling into an empty, familiar parking lot, I planned to unbuckle my seatbelt, turn to her and ask “Am I losing you?” But I was afraid of the answer and expected to be dismissed regardless.
She maintained she was in love with me right up until the end, which I believed. Then I returned to bed one night from the bathroom and she flipped out about something seemingly trivial and ended our relationship. Refusing to make eye contact, she said “I stopped loving you when you were in the bathroom” with about as much conviction as if she’d just claimed to be Anastasia Romanov. (Why must bathrooms torment me? I doubt my lifelong IBD crossed her mind in that moment, and I think I’d been brushing my teeth, but it’s one of those things you don’t forget.)
Of all the strange and memorable quotes the night produced, the only to rival the one about the bathroom were “I’m rejecting you as a person” and a tearful “Why can’t you be happy for me?” That question was posed hours after savagely insulting virtually everything about me, including numerous critiques of my body and appearance, and revealing a plan to move 2,000 miles away, to a place she couldn’t afford and would likely find insufferable anyway. Nevertheless, I was willing to join her, or relocate to a closer, cheaper city if she needed an immediate change of scenery. She gave the idea visible thought; then her resolve again stiffened.
Other nonsensical things were said that night, like I’d been unwilling to visit her family. The opposite was true: for the duration of our relationship, I was bothered that she kept me away from her family. I believed she was ashamed of them, and a little ashamed of me, and both of those things upset me. When she finally decided to visit them years after we moved in together, I was thrilled to join her — until she heatedly swore she wouldn’t go if I tagged along. Not wanting to thwart a reunion, I agreed to stay home, welcoming her back with the infamous “Hi!” cake.**
Here we’ve wandered off-track, so I want to clarify that no one is completely cogent in the middle of a big breakup. (I certainly wasn’t.) And it was obvious to me then — which is why I suggested therapy — that her mental health, which hadn’t been great to begin with, was worse than ever.^ She grew insistent on blaming me, and geography, for her vast unhappiness, seemingly blind to her own contributions to the matter: the extensive personal issues she wasn’t ready to confront, and longstanding indecision over the direction of her life (and thus our life together).
It’s important to me that this not be egregiously one-sided. I made mistakes, like neglecting my health and buying a house for a dumb reason. I was physically miserable, unhappy professionally, and increasingly tired of my ex’s emotional immaturity and irresponsibility. There was no excuse for how she spoke to me that night or the physical outbursts in the months preceding it. Still, I didn’t see her as abusive so much as lost and misguided. We were navigating big things on our own that we should’ve faced together — we could’ve been sources of strength for each other if our communication hadn’t been in shambles (and if she’d been able to trust me more than she trusted her trauma).
Would our relationship have survived if we’d successfully done that? Probably not. But we could’ve seen it off with the maturity and dignity that years of love, commitment and mutual sacrifice deserved. I’m not going to be mealy-mouthed about this or both-sides it like I have other issues involving my ex: I deserved to be treated with considerably more kindness and respect than I was shown in our waning months together, and in the months after she left. She knows that and presumably regrets it, but admitting it would threaten other narratives and coping mechanisms.
Life went on in her absence, but I also felt an unrelenting grief. (You can spot C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed within easy reach in that 2021 New Year’s Eve photo.) For every negative thing I’ve shared about our relationship, there were positive things I kept to myself — enough that I sometimes wonder “How is this supposed to work? How can I make it through the rest of my life like this, missing such an enormous part of myself?” That’s why I once wrote at Cranky Lesbian about Ivy Compton-Burnett and the conversations she continued with her partner, Margaret Jourdain, long after Jourdain’s death.
“I wish you had met her, and so met more of me,” Compton-Burnett told a friend of her late companion. That’s how I feel about Crankenstein and my ex. Several months into our relationship, after a discussion about past loves, I wrote the following to my then-girlfriend, now-wife:
I worry I was less than articulate earlier about the demise of my last relationship. It probably sounded bitter and of course there’s some of that, but there was also a lot of happiness. I hope that was the case for your relationship as well. I loved [Ex] more than I’d ever loved anything. It was absolute and unconditional and as hokey as it sounds, it deepened every day, even when things between us were bad.
When her happiness became my happiness, and everything I had became ours instead of mine, life was suddenly rich with meaning and I was fulfilled, spiritually and otherwise, in ways I hadn’t known were possible. It made me a better person. As strange as it is to consider (for me, anyway), you probably would not love me now if she hadn’t loved me first.
That’s still true today. You might skim this and think “What a pathetic specimen, still mooning over her shitty ex.” But to me she was, in the words of Cole Porter, the Colosseum, the Louvre Museum, and the melody from a symphony by Strauss. She brought incredible joy to my life. My family — embarrassingly, even my mother’s cousins (the consensus was that broad) — believed me incapable of having a romantic relationship with anyone. My ex thought the same of herself. We fell in love anyway and stayed that way for quite some time. Why wouldn’t I still think about her? Why wouldn’t I mention her here?
It would be emotionally fraudulent to rewrite history, to pretend she was always an ogre or that we were a poor match just because things didn’t turn out the way we wanted. She was flawed but so was I, and I loved and accepted all of her, not just the good parts. I feel the same about Crankenstein, which is why I struggle with the future of our marriage.
Nine years ago, as I debated attempting anything beyond friendship with Crankenstein, I kept thinking of a book and a movie. The book was Enemies, A Love Story, by Isaac Bashevis Singer, later adapted into a film by Paul Mazursky. It’s about a lot of things, but what’s pertinent here is that its protagonist’s loyalties are divided between women who saved him in different ways. (I relate not to the hedonistic scoundrel Herman Broder, but to his predicament.) The movie was James Gray’s Two Lovers, from 2008, also very Jewish, about a suicidally depressed young man who unexpectedly finds himself torn between his head and his heart.
In the aftermath of the breakup with my ex, I cried in the shower nightly when I got home from work; I couldn’t tell you whether that continued for weeks or months. My favorite Platters song, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” was often in my head, which only made me sadder. A couple years later, when I saw Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years, in which it featured prominently, I was jolted — had I consigned myself to Tom Courtenay’s fate and Crankenstein to Charlotte Rampling’s? It was easy enough to determine the answer was “No,” but I felt uneasy even pausing to ask.
This probably hasn’t clarified anything for anyone and only muddled things further. I’ve explained little of our relationship, only a fraction of the breakup, and won’t share what came next for her. None of it’s endearing. Yet smoke still gets in my eyes, because the flame is like one of those trick birthday candles: it goes out and comes right back. I’ll love her immensely until my dying breath, even if my loyalties are the mark of a chump. There’s no conceivable scenario by which we’d reunite, even if Crankenstein and I divorced, but it changes none of her importance in my life.
The last thing I said to her during the shocking final moments we spent in each other’s physical company was “I hope you find what you’re looking for.” The last time we spoke, which wasn’t all that long ago, it was evident she hadn’t (and probably wouldn’t any time soon). If you ever read this, Miriam Aarons, I’m still pulling for you. I hope that one day you’re able to genuinely show yourself — and accept from others — all the love and respect you deserve.
* It was David Gray’s cover of Soft Cell’s “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye,” minus the bits about never knowing each other (and of course no scene could be played my way, which is why her departure had to be as harrowing as possible).
** “What would you do if you were lost in an airport?” I was also asked that night, a question I answered the way anyone would: I’d look for a directory or ask for help. She shook her head as if I were a hopeless idiot; my answer was more proof of our incompatibility. All these years later, I have no idea what she thinks you’re supposed to do when lost in an airport.
^ In retrospect, it’s clear she had BPD. There’s more I could say to qualify that assertion since it’s often one that’s made baselessly, but I don’t think it would be helpful. If you prefer to call it C-PTSD, as she does, knock yourself out; she certainly has that, too. Also, rather than create a fourth footnote, Miriam Aarons is a reference to The Women, and the joke name my ex selected for use on Cranky Lesbian almost 15 years ago; I don’t use real names here, even for my dog.