The Story of a Relationship

A Confessional

I had a relationship a few years ago that broke me forever.

I had just moved to a new country, decided to see what was on the apps, and soon connected with someone. He was cute and the conversation flowed well. He asked me if I was free the next evening, and we set up a date.

What if I told you I had butterflies in my stomach from the moment I saw him, and that I ignored the red flags on our first date? What if I told you I texted a friend afterwards to ask if they thought it would be stupid of me to continue seeing this guy I liked when I suspected he was kind of an alt-right weirdo? What if I told you I specifically picked my most weirdo-tolerant leftist friend to help me feel justified in continuing to talk to him?

It was at the end of our second date — one that was ridiculously romantic and filled with tension, think “it’s freezing cold and past midnight but neither of us wants to call it a night so we keep walking and stopping at cafés on the way to warm up” — that he let me know he was “gender critical”. I had made it very clear on my dating app profile that I identified as transmasc non-binary at the time. My first response was shock, and then I asked him, “what do you mean by that?”, and he responded, “I believe there are only two genders.” I nodded and hmm’ed. In my head, I thought, well, he didn’t say he doesn’t believe in binary trans genders, so that must mean he just doesn't agree with the non-binary part of my identity. That’s not such a big deal. He told me he understood if I didn’t want to talk to him anymore. I said I needed to think.

I remember going home that night and crying myself to sleep. I remember waking up at 5am and texting him that I wanted to keep seeing him, that the thought of not talking to him made me sadder than his political views did. I remember him responding that he was glad.

Our texting those days, and throughout the next two years, was constant. It was one or two days later that he sent his first more explicitly romantic message, a screenshot of a heart from a game he was playing. On our third date, he got drunk and came over and we put on a Studio Ghibli film and he cried and told me about his mother who had died when he was 17. I held him. He kissed me. We went to bed. In the middle of the night, we both found each other’s mouths again in the dark. He told me he loved me. I said it back, my voice muffled against his lips.

When we kissed in the middle of the night, we were like old lovers who had lost each other for twenty years. We kissed like we might never kiss again. There was a note of mutual desperation, of hunger, that left me breathless. This happened frequently throughout our relationship, and he usually wouldn’t remember it the next day. His subconscious need for me was something that fuelled my very conscious and open need for him.

There’s no words to describe the ecstasy of those early days. I don’t know what it was about that man, that strange 21-year-old boy, that wormed its way so deeply under my skin, burrowed itself into my organs, flowed through my veins like blood. I would have still been interested in him if he hadn’t been so ideologically incompatible with me, if he hadn’t made me feel insecure about a part of my identity that I was still struggling with, but I realise that those aspects of our relationship made whatever spell I was under more potent. There’s nothing quite like securing the affections of someone who doesn’t make it easy.

The following weeks were some of the happiest of my life. Happiness, to me, was never something steady, calm, safe — it was exhiliration. I had jumped off a plane and was flying, and the ground I was hurtling towards kept flickering and changing before my eyes, sometimes an infinite, safe bed of clouds and other times an unforgiving terrain of jagged rocks that were sure to kill me. I knew in the back of my mind that there were conflicts we were avoiding, and my nights alone were often sleepless because of it.

He shared with me his greatest insecurities, the traumas that haunted him, the films and music that made him feel whole. He told me about his previous relationships and how, after the heartbreak he had experienced, he was scared to commit to another. The sex was the best I’d ever had. I’d stand in line at the grocery store and remember something we did a few nights earlier and my knees would buckle. Best of all, it was all shared. We were both high on each other. We texted 24/7 and he came to see me whenever he could. His romantic professions fed some infinite hunger within me that I didn’t know I had. i love you and all my internal organs are shouting it and i have no way of quieting them. am i going insane? he would text me in his native language. i deeply felt your absence today, especially the absence of the feeling of your skin. two days later it feels like a fever dream. His love felt like something that could sustain me alone, so it was no wonder I was so quick to sacrifice everything else that mattered to me.

After about 3 weeks of dating, constant “I love you”s, pouring our hearts into each other, I decided to ask him formally to be my boyfriend. I even had the perfect ring to give him, to make the gesture extra sweet. And so, one morning, I sat on his lap, facing him, and told him I had something to ask him. He said, “oh no, I hope it isn’t a difficult question,” and I laughed and told him I hoped it wasn’t.

I revealed the ring from behind my back and asked, “Will you be my boyfriend?”

“Oh. That is a difficult question.”

A moment’s shock. I slid off his lap and sat next to him, not able to make eye contact suddenly. “What do you mean?”

He explained that he really liked what we had but he didn’t want it go any further. I didn’t know what to say.

We had plans for the day, so we got up and went out. I acted normal. He acted normal. Inside, I was a mess. How was I going to fix this?

This wasn’t my first relationship — but it was my first complicated one. Previously, things had been so simple. I liked a person, they liked me back. We held hands, then kissed. We decided to be a couple. At some point, we would say “I love you”. The messiness and the tears wouldn’t come until later. Everything was backwards now and my brain was scrambling to make sense of it. It’s okay, my brain told me, he just has commitment issues because of his previous relationship trauma. He told you, remember? You just need to make him feel safe.

The next morning, he explained to me that he was taking “this” seriously and he didn’t want to move too fast. He was worried about our political incompatibilities. I felt sick. “I haven’t really told you that much about my political views,” he confessed. I nodded, dumbly. I told him I didn’t really care about politics, I just wanted to be with him. I’m not sure which of us was being more stupid and cruel.

In the following weeks, I learnt just how easy it is to justify and explain away anything you don’t want to accept. He told me he self-identified as a fascist. I saw his Twitter, saw him harass trans people, black people, leftists. I saw all of that, and yet, in my head, I denied it. He’s just a messed up kid, I told myself. I knew all his traumas, his difficult past. It wasn’t hard to make connections between the things he said and the things he had been through, the environment he lived in, the anger and shame and self-hate that festered within him.

Then came the day he told me he couldn’t be in a relationship with me because I identified as trans. He said it was a delusion and a mental illness. I cried and begged him to understand me. We talked, for hours, for weeks, fruitlessly. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I had gone from being myself, a person with strong convictions and beliefs, to someone who would do anything to receive love and acceptance from a person who was against everything I considered good and true in this world.

I’m sorry to say this dynamic continued for months. We met each other’s friends and families. We continued doing everything together. The sex was still transcendent. We said “I love you” less, and we both knew that was his attempt at maintaining some control over this relationship he was trying to contain within a boundary he could handle. We found ourselves in a cycle of damage and repair. Things would be fine for a few weeks, we would get closer and closer, and then maybe he would slip and say “I love you”, maybe he would get drunk and confess how strongly he felt for me, maybe we would get caught up fantasising about a future together. And then he would pull away. He would tell me we could never be in a relationship. I had decided to stop caring about my gender and let him think of me as a girl, so he found new reasons to push me away that I couldn’t do anything about. Our cultural differences, class differences were too great. I would have given up all my money and my whiteness if I could have, if I had thought that would finally make him love me the way I needed.

I would cry, I would beg, he would leave, I would text him, and soon we would be back to normal. are we still meeting my mum tomorrow? I would ask, hours after a fall-out. yeah, of course. Crying myself to sleep became the norm.

I tried to understand what was happening to me. I read about relationships and psychology and became obsessed with learning about attachment theory. I was also desperate to understand how to fix him. I read about his avoidant attachment as much as I did about my own anxious attachment. I stayed up reading about what to do when a loved one had been sucked into alt-right spaces online. I stalked him on social media in the hopes of finding some clue, something I didn’t already know about him — or even just a hint that he loved me as much as I knew he did. I just needed him to feel safe enough to express it. Then we could truly be together and our love would give him the strength to heal all of his trauma and anger.

Our first breakup was boring and messy at the same time and I didn’t know how to deal with my feelings so I immediately found someone new to fall in love with. That didn’t last long, and when I came home crying after that breakup, my ex was the first person I texted. He was still my best friend — we had never stopped talking after the breakup, although we talked less and without any romance.

As you can probably predict, he asked me for a second chance soon after I told him what had happened. The time apart had helped him realise the depth of his feelings for me, and a conversation we once had about attachment theory after our breakup had helped him understand why he used to treat me the way he did.

Even more predictably, I agreed to meet him just one week later. He then officially asked to be my boyfriend. He offered me everything I had been begging for throughout the previous ten months, and part of me was elated, but another part of me felt strangely empty. My heart had been so thoroughly wrung out that I didn’t really know what to do other than go along with what he asked for. It was what I had wanted all along, right? His political views had changed, and so had his readiness for a committed relationship. I was victorious. I had secured my happily ever after.

And yet, something felt off. I still loved him, and a significant part of me was really happy that we were together. We talked about him moving in with me, and a couple of months later, he did. The relationship became something I was able to understand, and my patterns within it became more familiar to me. I still cried all the time, but this time for reasons that felt “normal” to me. I realised maybe I wasn’t normal. That maybe the relationship I had been fighting for wasn’t actually one I was even capable of being in myself.

The off-ness I was feeling eventually translated into me losing desire for sex, a trauma response I believe I developed in the aftermath of a previous relationship, and that eventually led to a final breakup. The pain I felt when he left me was the ecstasy I felt when he first told me he loved me inversed. I went back to therapy because I feared I would kill myself. He wanted to stay friends and I wasn’t able to stop talking to him, as our connection felt like the only thing that was keeping me anchored to this world. I blamed myself for the way things had ended and swore to myself I would do everything I could to fix my own issues that had led to me losing the one thing I wanted most in life. I never wanted to repeat the same mistakes again.

My next relationship ended because he was an addict. That story held its own unique tragedy, but the shape of the constant highs and lows was the same. At least I was strong enough to walk away myself, this time.

Now here I am, four years after that first date, back in the city it all happened in. We stopped texting more than a year ago. I still check his Twitter sometimes; more often since my last breakup. I know he’s fallen into a spiral of substance abuse since we broke up, and he’s not doing well. I also know he’s planning to move to Germany this year and he’s writing a book. He’s a devout Marxist now, and dedicated to defending trans rights.

As for me, I moved to France, partly to get away from him. I spent eight months recovering from our relationship, then fell into a new one just as quickly and deeply. For a while, I didn’t think of him much, even thought I was over him. I’m stronger and wiser than I was back then and trust that I would protect myself from getting hurt by him again if he ever tried to come back into my life, but on an emotional level, I often feel as lost as I did during that first year with him. Something tethers me to him still, and I know he feels it too. I know, because he message requested me on Twitter a few weeks ago. I’ve read those messages a dozen times, but never responded to his request or gave him any indication that I’d seen them. Whatever contact we’ve had with each other has been silent, hidden, one-sided. Maybe there’s a future where that will change, but I know better than to pin my hopes on that.

When people talk about the intimacy of never talking again, is this what they mean? Do they also return to the scene of the crime and find themselves barraged with fantasies of imagined conversations and redemption arcs that never happen? Are they also learning to accept that they’ve been permanently altered by the wounds they received in a pointless battle they thought was love? Do they also live with the knowledge that, in their heart of hearts, they will always yearn for that specific happy ending? Will they continue to repeat those patterns with other people in the hopes of reaching a different outcome?

I don’t know who I would be if we had never met. Maybe I would have transitioned — though my current gender expression feels right to me now, I still feel a bit pathetic when I remember I basically detransitioned for a guy. Maybe I would have never developed such full-blown attachment issues, but more likely they would have still been latent within me, waiting for the right person to fully trigger them.

Who I am is now permanently laced with the effects and outcomes of that relationship. I was destroyed, and I am still building myself back up again. A light was shone on parts of me I barely knew were there before, and now I get to do the unforgiving job of looking at them everyday, poking and prodding and trying to figure out how they work.

This year, I’ve decided to take a break from romantic relationships. The first step to breaking a pattern is sometimes a step away. I’m also stepping toward something else — myself, and art, and fear; a purpose that doesn’t involve immersing myself in somebody else’s psyche in order to avoid my own.

Four years ago I tried to lose myself in order to find something better, only to end up finding myself again. May all our tragedies end in such beauty.